Final Thoughts on the Finals ('10-'11)

NBA FINALS

Before I delve too deeply into the issues that everyone has been obsessing over since the end of the NBA finals last Sunday, I must give credit where credit is due.

I offer my sincere congratulations to owner Mark Cuban, head coach Rick Carlisle, and team and finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki. I counted the Mavericks out several times and believed what I read when some analysts picked Portland as the team most likely to beat a higher seeded team in the first round. Even after that, I wasn’t sure that they’d be able to beat the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers. After that, I wasn’t sure how they’d be able to handle a team with two budding stars that could jump out of the gym and over the geriatric crows wearing Mavs uniforms. After that, I was sure that they would not be able to hang with a group of three young stars (I’m not going to distinguish between “stars” and “superstars”) who seemed to be playing their best basketball and were peaking at the right time.

What happened? 4-2, 4-0, 4-1, 4-2.

Don’t I look stupid?

So how did they do it? The easy answer is that they scored more points than the Heat in 4 of their 6 games but that’s not really anything new. As long as Dirk has been playing for the Mavericks, they have been one of the most efficient offensive teams in the league. The problem was always at the defensive end and this year they changed all of that. The additions of Brendan Haywood and Tyson Chandler are probably the reason that they hoisted the trophy over the weekend because now, Dirk doesn’t have to play the five. He can play the four where he is taller and longer than just about anyone he’ll match up with. At the five, he had to match up against Shaquille O’Neal. At times in the Finals, he was matched up against Dwayne Wade.

No offense intended but if you’re Nowitzki and it’s the fourth quarter of an important game of the NBA finals, which match-up would you rather have? D-Wade is a great player and if he was guarding Dirk, it was because of a switch but it still illustrates my point. Dirk has never been the bang down low, grab 15 rebounds and control the paint kind of guy. He’s much better roaming the perimeter and sometimes going into the post to take advantage of a mismatch and the additions of Haywood and Chandler allowed him to do that.

So the Mavericks were better offensively and they were better defensively. Another aspect which is ever more important than either of those is that the Mavericks were better mentally. Why should a 15 point deficit late in game 2 (already trailing one game to none) faze them when they faced similar circumstances against the Thunder? Why should that bother them when everyone… and I mean everyone… wrote them off after coughing up a 24 point lead late to Portland in a win for the Trailblazers that tied the series.

Interestingly, I would normally say that there are two ways to handle adversity; wilt under the added pressure or stare it down and resolve not to go down without a fight. However, I’m adding a third category that is a subset of the second and this is where the Mavericks incredible run falls; they didn’t change a thing.

I’m sure there were minor tweaks here and there by Rick Carlisle (who might finally get his appreciation amongst fans) and some guys shot better or made better decisions but they were the same team that made it this far. They never tried to reinvent the wheel. They knew that Portland overcoming a 24 point lead was an aberration and if they played their game they would prevail (they did). They knew that the Thunder having a big lead late didn’t matter because Dirk was already in the zone of a lifetime and all they had to do was feed him the ball and they’d prevail (they did). They knew that Miami’s cockiness was on display after D-Wade’s potential series changing three pointer gave the Heat a 15 point lead late in game 2 and they knew that the Heat would expect the Mavs to clench up the rest of the way. They knew they just had to do the same thing they always had and the shots would start to fall and they would prevail (they did).

What I’m really going for here is the difference between confidence and cockiness. The Heat were cocky; the Mavericks were confident. If you need any more evidence, look at Nowitzki’s game 6. He finished the game 9-27 from the field but if you just saw that, you would miss a lot of key information. He was 1-13 in the first half from the field (1-13!!!) and in the second half he shot a much more Dirk-like 8-14. What changed at halftime (or the end of the third quarter when he was still just 4-20) that made him superhuman once again in the fourth quarter? In my opinion, nothing changed. Many of his shots were in-and-out type misses and he knew eventually those would start falling and sure enough, they did and the Mavericks prevailed once again.

The difference is that when athletes are put under pressure, some believe that it will require a superhuman effort to get passed the obstacle in front of them and that is the clenching that I saw from the Miami Heat (with the exception of LeBron who I will get to later). What the Mavericks taught us this postseason is they knew they were capable of getting past anything; all they had to do was keep going, keep grinding and they would eventually prevail…

…and they did.


LEBRON

So much has been said about LeBron James in the few days since the season ended that to repeat them here would be nothing short of ludicrous. Basically, what all the talk has boiled down to is this:

LeBron James is not better than Michael Jordan.

All that I wonder about that statement is what took us so long to figure it out? For the past 13 seasons the media has obsessing combed over college basketball as well as the NBA looking at tomorrow’s bright young players and whenever they’ve found one sufficiently dazzling, they have asked the question…

Is the next Michael Jordan?

First it was Allen Iverson, or “The Answer” (presumably to the question I just posed) and then when we realized that he was going to struggle to shoot even 45% from the floor (which he did twice in 14 seasons while Jordan shot better than 45% all 12 of his full time seasons in Chicago) we moved on to Kobe Bryant. Here we might have found a decent player to compare to Michael Jordan. In a lot of ways, their career arcs are very similar from enormously physically gifted 2 guard to more of a jump shooter as their career took a toll on their legs.

Now, we’re onto LeBron James.

Yes, I’m sure there have been others that have borne the mantle of the “Next Michael Jordan” but frankly, I don’t care because I’m here to say this. Nobody has ever put the entire package of physical skill, basketball skill, and a downright ridiculous will to win in the same body the way Jordan has. Nobody. To claim that anyone has achieved a truly Jordan-esque level is unfair to that player as well as to Jordan himself. Many people have had the first one or the second one or even both of the first two and James belongs in that category. But nobody has ever matched that skill with the will to win the way Jordan did and the only others that might be able to say they had that will to win were not as basketball blessed as Jordan was. To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying that Jordan didn’t have to do one day of work and was just that good to begin with. I feel very comfortable saying that nobody worked harder on those Chicago teams than Jordan did and everyone else worked that hard because they saw their superstar working that hard.

So if LeBron James is not the next Michael Jordan, where does he fit in the pantheon of greatness? For the answer to this, I’m going to defer to Charles Barkley, a guy I always loved to watch play and never liked to watch comment on a basketball game. I don’t know why, he’s always grated on me. Anyways, Barkley said that a better comparison for James would be Magic Johnson and he hit the nail so precisely on the head, it’s scary.

When Magic was drafted number one overall following the 1978-1979 season, he went to a team that had gone 47-35 the year before and had a young(er) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who still had 787 games and 16,246 points left on his tires. The onus was not on Magic to save that franchise. On top of that, two years later the Lakers would draft James Worthy (#1 overall after a 57-25 season and their second title in three years) and the three of them would form the core of that run which included 9 Finals appearances in 12 years.

When Larry Bird was drafted, the Celtics were not nearly so well off. However, two years after the Celtics drafted Bird, they drafted another future Hall of Famer in Kevin McHale and then acquired a 26 year old Robert Parish from Golden State and a 29 year old Dennis Johnson from Phoenix. There you have the core of a team that played in the Finals five times and won three.

The seven players drafted since LeBron James have COMBINED for 7,045 points and 2,560 rebounds in 940 games. For comparison’s sake, James has played in 627 games and has 17,362 points and 4,451 rebounds.

I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for James; not one bit. All I’m saying is this; if James had been drafted to a good team with several good players and there had been other scoring options, I think he would have preferred to play the role of more of a point forward as opposed to the primary scoring option. When he kept deferring to Wade and Bosh in the Finals, I don’t think his only fault was being overwhelmed by the moment. I think part of it is he doesn’t want to carry the scoring burden and I think that might have been part of the reason he went to Miami; he would be playing alongside two legitimate scorers who could carry the load while he did what he always wanted to do; distribute.

Do I think this is a character flaw? Not at all. On the court, James is a very unselfish player and asserted himself in the playoffs more out of necessity (due to Wade’s struggles and Bosh’s inconsistency) than out of a will to take over. The problem is that people saw the scoring he was doing in Cleveland and immediately put him up in the realm of Jordan and they never really thought about whether or not he wants to be remembered as a scorer or a passer.

Do I consider the Heat’s season a failure? No, I don’t. It’s not a success either but this group of guys hadn’t experienced adversity together yet (now they have) and didn’t know how to react. I foresee a far more relaxed and comfortable group next year and I don’t see anyone stopping them.





That’s all for now but soon I’ll be writing something that has been stewing since November… open arrogance amongst the best athletes of today and how my respect for them would grow if their open arrogance did too…

Do You Have to Win a Ring to be Considered the Best Ever?

The recent playoff performance put forth by Dirk Nowitzki has reignited this topic amongst sports enthusiasts everywhere and I have decided to put in my two cents.

The main problem with this question is that it is asked universally across sports and in some contexts it is a valid question while in others, it doesn’t hold water. In the NBA, this question has some merit and in the NFL, it has merit as long as we’re only talking about one position (more on both of those later). However, one place where this question doesn’t belong at all is baseball.

Quick! How many World Series titles did Babe Ruth win?

Barry Bonds?

Ty Cobb?

Willie Mays?

Hank Aaron?

There is little debate that four of those five players (with the obvious exception being Bonds) are among the best position players in the history of baseball. Anyone who doesn’t at least include them in the conversation is out of their minds and you should tell them so. My goal here is not to say who the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) is, I’m simply saying that if you were having that discussion, these names would be a part of it.

So, back to the question, how many World Series titles do each of those guys have? The easiest is Bonds since he has played recently and the answer for him is 0.

Willie Mays – 1 (1954)
Hank Aaron – 1 (1957)
Ty Cobb – 0
Babe Ruth – 7 (1915, 1916, 1918, 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932)

Here’s the thing though; when you think of the G.O.A.T. in baseball, you don’t think of the number of World Series titles won or the number of World Series MVP’s they won, you think of numbers like 4,189 hits, 714 (or 755) home runs, 511 wins, 5,714 strikeouts, and so on and so forth. The regular season in baseball is such a huge sample size compared to the postseason that players are defined to a much greater extent by their regular season numbers than whether or not they performed well in the postseason.

Ty Cobb is one of the best hitters that has ever picked up a bat. His career .366 batting average is the best all time and his record of 4,189 hits stood for 62 years (from 1923 when he broke Cap Anson’s record to 1985 when Pete Rose broke his). However, for all those of you who say that championships are the measure of a player, it might interest you to know that the Georgia Peach became downright pedestrian in his three World Series appearances (all losses) with an OPS of .668 compared to the league average of .611 for those three years. While he was above average, when you compare that mark of .668 to his career OPS of .945, it looks significantly worse.

The biggest reason that this question doesn’t apply to baseball is just the nature of the sport. While a starting pitcher has the ball in his hands at the beginning of every play, on average, 15-20 outs are recorded without the pitcher being involved. As for a position player, they are cursed to somewhere between 8.6% and 14.3% of the total plate appearance for their team. In the field, they might be in on half of the defensive outs recorded but that still leaves 8-10 outs that the rest of the team must account for.

To use one of my favorite metrics, Wins Above Replacement (WAR), consider this; the best season (since 1900) by a position player is 14.7, by Babe Ruth in 1923. His line that year was nothing short of preposterous as he hit .393/.545/.764 with 41 home runs and 131 RBI (and 13 triples). Arguably more amazing is that his 1.309 OPS was only the third best of his career… but I divulge. That year he was worth (essentially) 15 more wins than a replacement player. If your team was made up of replacement players and one 1923 vintage Babe Ruth, you would still be a terrible team. If memory serves, most WAR calculations use a 40-win level when they talk about replacement players. If your entire team was made up of replacement players, your record would be 40-122 (NOTE: I can’t remember the exact numbers so please don’t hammer me on that one).

So even with the best season by a position player in the past 112 seasons, your team’s record would be 55-107. That is why baseball players are judged by individual statistics far more than team results.

But the next question that needs to be asked is whether or not it is fair for players in other sports to be judged by the performance of their teams? When it comes to football, the only position that gets this kind of pressure is the quarterback position and let’s consider this example.

Completions-Attempts-Yards-TD-INT
Players A/B/C
4491-8252-55664-313-312

Player D
4967-8358-61361-420-252

We’ll call Players A, B, and C Group A… they played 291 NFL games and had a completion percentage of 54.4% and a combined quarterback rating of 72.4. Group B (which is made up of only Player D) completed 59.4% of his passes over the course of his career and put forth a quarterback rating of 86.4. If you have any knowledge of the career record book for quarterbacks, you know the guy that I’m talking about in Group B but let’s play along.

When you look at these numbers, it is obvious that the three quarterbacks in Group A are nowhere near the caliber of Player D. So why am I making such a big deal about this? Because Trent Dilfer, Jim McMahon, and Doug Williams (Players A, B, and C) all have a Super Bowl ring and Dan Marino (Player D) does not. Of those three, only Dilfer managed to pass for as many as 20,000 yards (20,518) and he finished his career with more interceptions than touchdowns (113 TD vs. 129 INT). To say that a player is better than another because they have won a championship is ludicrous. Throughout professional sports, it is said that the playoffs are an entirely different animal than the regular season and given that, how can we judge players on their postseason performance without at least acknowledging that their regular season performance means something?

Here is another example from the NBA. I firmly believe that this question is more legitimate in the NBA than any other sport because I believe that a single player has the ability to affect more change in the NBA by themselves than in any other sport. A quarterback has the ball every play but does not play defense or special teams. A pitcher is involved in the beginning of every play but when the ball is put in play, there is roughly a 5% chance that the pitcher will be involved in the play (based on 2010 numbers across baseball). A single player in the NBA can touch the ball on every offensive possession and can guard the man with the ball on every single defensive possession. In that sense, they can affect a game more than any other single player in another sport.

I would consider these four guys some of the best power forwards in NBA history but the obvious question that I’m teeing up is which one is the best?

First of all, a look at the numbers:

FG% = Field Goal Percentage
3PT% = 3 Point Field Goal Percentage
FT% = Free Throw Percentage
PPG = Points Per Game
RPG = Rebounds Per Game
APG = Assists Per Game
BPG = Blocks Per Game
SPG = Steals Per Game

FG%/3PT%/FT%/PPG/RPG/APG/BPG/SPG

Player A – 50.8/18.2/68.8/20.6/11.4/3.1/2.3/0.7
Player B – 49.8/28.2/78.8/19.5/10.7/4.1/1.5/1.3
Player C – 54.1/26.6/73.5/22.1/11.7/3.9/0.8/1.5
Player D – 51.6/27.4/74.2/25.0/10.1/3.6/0.8/1.4

As you can see, their numbers are remarkably similar. Their shooting percentages are all high (disregarding the 3 point shooting since they are power forwards) with a little variance in the free throw shooting. Still, 68.8% free throw shooting from a 6-10 guy who gives you 20 and 11 every night is good.

Their scoring is similar with one exception and their rebounding and assist numbers are very comparable. It does look like the first two might be slightly more defensively inclined (at least when it comes to the counting stats) but it’s not by a lot when you factor in steals as well as blocks. So to separate these guys, let’s take a look at how they performed when the most was on the line; in the playoffs.

Player A – 50.2/16.7/67.8/22.7/12.4/3.4/2.6/0.7
Player B – 47.2/29.8/78.2/19.6/11.1/3.8/1.4/1.3
Player C – 51.3/25.5/71.7/23.0/12.9/3.9/0.9/1.6
Player D – 46.3/16.2/73.6/24.7/10.7/3.2/0.7/1.3

If you put all this together, it paints a picture of four players that have very similar numbers, both in the regular season and in the playoffs. Would it help the discussion at all if I told you that Player A has four championship rings, Player B has one, and neither Player C nor Player D have one?

For me, it wouldn’t really change the way I rank these four players.

Karl Malone (Player D)
Tim Duncan (Player A)
Kevin Garnett (Player B)
Charles Barkley (Player C)

Bill Wennington and Kurt Rambis combined to play 1,600 games in the NBA and scored 7,904 total points (4.9 points per game). Patrick Ewing scored 24,815 points in 1,183 games over his illustrious career. Which of those three was the best center? Ewing never won a championship while Wennington won two with the Bulls and Rambis won four with the Lakers.

I know that I am cherry-picking the most extreme examples but I’m trying to make a point. I want the people who write about and follow the NBA and the NFL to take a lesson from Major League Baseball; championships define teams, and they should not (completely) define players. Would Bill Russell have been a different player if he had won two rings instead of 11? Would Wilt Chamberlain be considered the best center ever if he had never won a championship?


All of this circles around to the comments that Scottie Pippen made about LeBron James having the potential to be considered the best player in NBA history… yes, even better than Michael Jordan. There has never been a better scorer than Jordan in the league’s history and despite the fact that it’s not the best measure of a scorer, all you have to look at is the fact that he is one of only two players to average better than 30 points per game for an entire career and he managed to stay ahead of Chamberlain (30.12-30.07). However, LeBron James does things that Jordan does not. He is much more of a pass first type of player than Jordan and this is a huge reason why the Miami Heat have done so well. He is perfectly happy being a facilitator and while some of Jordan’s most famous plays were assists in tough spots where he did not take the final shot, he is much better known for the shots he took and made than any passes he made. LeBron’s legacy might be closer to that of Magic Johnson, taking big shots when he had to but also making numerous highlight reel assists.

Will LeBron end up being better than Mike? I have no idea. Is it possible? Absolutely.

If you look at the counting stats and project LeBron having five productive seasons from this point on, that would put him at 28,161 points (against Jordan’s 32,292), 7,220 rebounds (6,672 for Jordan), and 7,078 assists (vs. 5,633 for Jordan). Again, Jordan was the better scorer but James does other things that Jordan doesn’t.

All in all, it is way too soon to even be having this discussion but it is one that we won’t be able to escape from until LeBron wins a title and then again until he starts approaching counting stats that nobody in the history of the league has gotten close to. After all, only three players in NBA history have accumulated 20,000 points, 6,000 rebounds, and 6,000 assists over their careers. Magic isn’t one of them and neither is Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. Those three are John Havilchek (26,395-8,007-6,114), Clyde Drexler (22,195-6,677-6,125), and the guy who doesn’t quite get enough credit for all the things he did, Oscar Robertson (26,710-7,804-9,887).

Depending on how long he plays and how healthy he stays, LeBron James has the chance to surpass them all…



Who knows, he might even win 7 rings…