21st century peaks Ep 14 | Rankings & Lessons from the series

[Music] Thinking basketball podcast, my name is Ben. Welcome back to the series finale. Our final episode of the top peaks of the 21st century. It's the best player seasons of the 21st century where we've gone through for the last. Who knows how many months digging into all kinds of stuff. And Cody, as excited as I am to wrap this up and get our house keeping an order and finish this project. Where I wanted to start today is the reality that I pretty much at this point hate ranking players. What? Okay, so let me ask you something about that. Do you hate ranking players because of the reaction you get or do you hate it because internally you just don't feel like that's an actual way to think about basketball? And to think about basketball players. It's a little bit of the internal thing in the sense that for me I can no longer just think about a player either just in an order. Like one number one, number two, number three, two is clearly above three. And then if something bad happened to two, two has to go below three. I can't think like that anymore. And the other thing is that intuitively for me just thinking about those like top end and bottom end ranges has become so organic. Because of the tension because of my internal tension of like I don't know there's some good things about this player. There's some things that I'm nervous about this player that I can't resolve. But yeah, man, I mean, I think it's mostly the ranking culture in basketball and people's reactions is just. Yeah, it's not enjoyable. I'm thinking about what the actual list would look like. Like if you were to release the true thing that's honestly a representation of what we've been doing here. I feel like you would actually be like a hundred lists with like a percentage next to each name as to like how confident you'd be that they'd be in that list. And it's just like every iteration. You're like, I don't know. This set of lists is probably the most accurate to it all. But like the singular list and boiling it down and being like, I don't know, I'll re-short this player's number seven versus number eight. Probably not. But in most iterations, maybe it is number seven over number eight. But I think that's what it looks like. It has to be like hundreds of lists with lots of percentages to throw next to all of them. I've been thinking about releasing a visual, like a graphic that shows the range of each player. So you can just see who I'm comfortable with being in like the top 10 and who I'm comfortable with being like 15 to 30 or something like that. And then you can see the sloping overlap and how many players overlap. And I think that's a key thing that we'll come back to at the end when we end the episode and try to finalize the rankings. Is like how close so many of these players are. Before we actually get into any of this conversation, I need to shout out our audience right now, the people that are participating in the live conversation. And the two players that have been brought up right now as participants in this conversation are Danny Green and Drew Holiday. And Ben, I kid you not. I have a question ready for some point today that includes both Danny Green and Drew Holiday. So this is such a great fan base who's here for the ride. And I appreciate the priming of some of the conversation points we're going to hit today. Man, you get that true holiday reference out of the way early today. You can just kick your feet back up and relax and take it easy. But no, I say all this Cody about sort of the bitterness about actually ranking players and all these topics that come up on the internet about ranking players. Because for me, for us, I will say the ranking is the gateway to the concepts. It's the gateway to be able to like have the rubber meet the road and say, what, how valuable is passing? Let's look at these great players that do it. How valuable is shooting? How valuable is gravity? We've talked about the geometry of the floor. We've talked about ball dominance. We've talked about suppressing turnovers and, you know, rerouting decision making through certain players and taking on that task. There's so many concepts that we've talked about. So today, I'd love to, at some point, go through some of the sort of the learnings and the reflections and the takeaways we've had from this series. But first, the place to start for me is just the big kind of attempt that we've taken on through the course of this series to get way away from the box score, get way away from individual stats, and really talk about things and think about things like pressure points, geometrically, where are you attacking? Where are your strengths and weaknesses showing up with different lineups when it comes to these large sample, what happens when you're on the court versus what happens when you're off the court? As far as I can tell Cody, it seems like the only way to measure things like gravity. How else would you measure that? Besides trying to look at it from this team holistic top down perspective, it allows us to understand certain changes within players themselves that are really opaque when we just look at the box score. Because some players, 15 straight years, they're like a rookie. They're like 25 points, five assists or something. And in their 18 season, they're 25 points and five assists. And yet, somewhere in between their second season and their 18 season, they were much, much better in the heart of their prime with similar numbers. I don't know any other way to tease that out. And I think maybe the biggest thing as an example, we've referenced a ton of numbers in this series. But these things help us understand interactions, they help us understand fit. And it's the reason why I love a stat like looking at the change in just your teammates, true shooting percentage when you're on the court. Because it tells us so much that we just have no hope of understanding if we only look at the box score. And I think like this really captures the complexity of basketball. And this is obviously not a conversation or listeners like need to hear they know basketball is complex. But the reason we come back to these kinds of series and we're like, hey, we're kind of testing out this new number. We're testing out these new metrics. We're taking it for a ride, Ben. We're going to see how it works. And that's just because like there are so many of these undefined abstract aspects of basketball. Where it's like here's the Steph Curry gravity. Here's the KG like psychic rotations, right? Here's the yogic's just knowing where everyone is on the court. Like there has to be some way to mathematically measure it. And just the box score doesn't do it. Like assists don't do it points per game. Don't do it. And I'm not even saying that like what we've talked about the changes in true shooting percentage. The changes in rim attempts per 100 possessions. I'm not even saying like those are doing it either, but like we're trying to approximate and get closer to define something scientifically that like we see on screen. And we're like, I don't know. Like this is something that's going on and we're just going to like kind of play in the tool shed until we can figure something out. So you know, I really think that's the value of trying to roll out some of these stats and being like, at the seams to measure what we're going for better than anything else that we've really looked at before. Okay. So based on that, are there any players that you're higher on or lower on after going through this exercise? And of course, I'll include the honorable mentions and heck, I'll even I'll even extend the olive branch all the way out to players who we didn't really get into an honorable mentions, but have showed up in some of these other lists and stats and concepts that we've talked about in different episodes. I actually have a pretty clear answer for this. Just some of the head and shoulders above everyone is this in terms of going on or going down going way up. Going way up. I have a couple up and a couple down. Okay. Well, I'll think about the down to my shout out. Here's Jason kid. I don't until I went back to the film really thought about the concept of passing players open getting played getting your teammates to the free throw line, seeing the way that he he audaciously passes these guys open in every opportunity. I never really understood the value of it, especially like you watched the highlights. And it's like kind of this weird looking jump shot and he's not like a high flying score. And he's, you know, not doing like these sexy flashy like reverse Michael Jordan layups, but like the relentlessness of the passing game combined with just how incredible he was defensively. I kind of think like he's the skeleton key that unlocked the entire like it wasn't for our conversation about Jason kid. I don't know if I would have been able to bring as much to the table for everyone else. And I think like that aspect of it is, I don't know, that's my biggest takeaway and something that's even like informed how I've watched the preseason, which we'll talk about some other time, but I'm watching for a lot of these things now. I'm like, man, Jason kid who done that Jason, you know, it kind of unlocks that sort of thing. So my definitive answer for rising higher is Jason kid. Well, this gets back to what I just said. How else are we to measure historically? How valuable all those damn layup passes are. This is a question I think I proposed when I first started blogging about basketball over 15 years ago. The one that always sort of stuck out to me was Larry bird used to take these in-mounds passes. So the other team would make a shot in live play and bird would get the ball right out of the net and turn around and throw an 80 foot baseball pass down the court for a layup. And I'm just like, all right, mathematically that has to be just this massive driver when you're creating easy offense literally out of thin air for your teammate once or twice a game. Plus a couple of other little things at the rim like that those are kind of the version to me of basketballs home runs and when you talk about kid passing players open at the rim, there's an element of those home runs there kid is also a really really interesting example to me of sort of this question of like. Well, how much can he help better teammates with just the pass? We get so fixated on the fact that he's not a great shooter, he's not a super efficient score, and even on those New Jersey teams, you'll see this very important footprint of his teammates' true shooting goes up a lot because of his passing. And then when you add in kids shots, he drags it back down just a little bit. But I feel like as a basketball culture, we have that inverted where we look at the shooting and we're like, ah, you must not be very good. And then we do some mental curving back up for the passing. And it's like, no, no, no, the passing is four players. He's four players. And it's this interactive system. Basketball is such an interactive system, as I think we'll talk about more today. But kid is such a poster child for thinking about, we talked about Dremon Green, and we called Kid Pocket Dremon. And for me, I don't know where you land. I think kid is sort of another level up offensively from Dremon with how he plays in his ball handling and so is his shooting and his pressure on the basket, and the pace he plays with, and the fact that he's even better passer than Dremon. And it's like, okay, here's what, here's where it gets really, really fascinating and probably too complex to dive into in this episode. You've got kid and his own scoring and Alan Iverson's scoring, and Dean Oliver had this idea of scoring curves. And how do you know what a player's efficiency and volume is gonna change based on his teammates? Kevin Durant, when he has no shooters, okay, his efficiency's way down here. And then he gets like the optimal environment and he's like a 70% true shooter. Those, there's some rigidity or flexibility in a player's own scoring. But man, when you are that good at passing in basketball, aren't you just always taking whatever you're playing with as teammates and just lifting them up wherever they start? Right? So if you're a 35% three point shooter and you play with Jason Kid, get ready to be a 40% three point shooter. If you're pretty good at finishing at the basket, if you're a Marys Dottomire and Sean Marion, get ready to get layups all the time and you know, kid did this with Kenyan Martin as well and Richard Jefferson and you take the skill that the teammate has and you just optimize it. If you're a slasher, get ready to be the best slasher. If you're a play finisher, if you're an outside shooter, get ready to be the best outside shooter. And that, like I said, there's a whole world under there that we don't have time to get into. But man, that's really fascinating. And kid is yet again, another poster child for this. And I think it's through a different way. Like Steph Curry isn't elevating the offense purely through like Jason Kid's Raymond level passing. Like I'd say those two are significantly better pastors than Curry and that's not knocking on Curry at all. Like we're just talking about just incredible. Like Jason Kid in terms of like what we've talked about is like a top 10 all time sort of passer, right? So we're talking like the cream of the crop for sure. - He's top four or five for me, just for the record. Yeah, he's in my finalist for all time grade passers. - I think I was gonna say something bold but I'm like, I don't know if we have enough time to really hash this one out. So I'll let the people figure out who the other three or four are in that conversation. But I think something that people take away sometimes when you talk about like, oh you're gonna pass them open and get a layup. You're like, all right. But like if you're a good finisher, does that really help you that much? Because like you're already gonna get to the basket and score super efficiently. But I think Steph Curry and Kevin Durant are actually a really good illustration of this. We're Kevin Durant, we talked about like, I don't remember from what years like 2011 onward, like shoots like 70% at the rim like every year. But then you get to the Warriors years. And all of a sudden this already like 70% finish like shoots up. Like it goes up another level. So even when you take somebody that has incredible skills that can do this like quote unquote on their own, they still benefit dramatically from these other teammates that just make life a lot easier. And I feel like even kid and pushing the pace, getting people open, being able to like find those pressure points is kind of like the Pacers this last year or sort of the embodiment of that. Like I don't think Haliburton is quite like to that level. Like he's really not like a top 10 passer of all time. But he has the same kinds of ideas with passing people over open making sure you're kicking the head, making sure you're like, oh, the defense isn't ready. I'm gonna get it up there. Andrew Nempard does that kind of thing. Siakum's always leaking out to try and get those easy opportunities. So I almost feel like the Pacers for what we saw last year kind of a manifested version of Jason Kid's abilities. For me, Dwayne Wade also higher getting to deep dive and go back and really get into a ton of 2009 film. And for some of the same reasons, because the biggest thing that jumped out is just how incredible Wade was that we talked about during his episode, how incredible Wade was at not just downhill pressure himself, but then that downhill passing that, I love your quadrants of passing that you laid out, outside to outside, outside to inside. And Wade is good outside to inside. He's very good outside to inside. And he's just great inside to inside once he gets into the teeth of the defense. So he was another one for me. Chris Paul, because of the defense, I had always wanted to do a Chris Paul deep dive defensively on some of his clippers years. We were able to do that. And it did not disappoint. And I think the last one in terms of moving up in appreciation was 2017 Kawaii Leonard. There's this idea that like 2019 Kawaii Leonard, I think because he won a title, the winning bias there kicked in. And everyone was comparing him to Michael Jordan. And thought he was inevitable and things like that. And it's like, there were some issues with his game that I discussed during that season that were not received very well at the time, just for the record. But you get to go back and rewatch 2017 when he's a little healthier, he's a little quicker, he's a little better defensively still. And for me, I understand why people got so excited. About the run in 2019, because I think they were not only thinking of how great he was when he was younger defensively in giving him that credit. But the 2017 Kawaii was really impressive for me. So those are the players that were clear and provers in the series. Well, let me ask. Let me pick on Kawaii for a second. Because Dwayne Wade, in the context of what we've been talking about today, makes a lot of sense. The downhill pressure inside, inside passing, whatever else. Chris Paul, of course, we know is the point, God, you add in the defense and obviously, you get like the Jason kid interaction where it's like, you have the offense of the defense at boom, you have a really, really good player. Kawaii we talked about is being really not a high level passer, right? He's not something to this bringing a ton of value through that. So what this time around, do you think elevated Kawaii Leonard in your mind versus what you remember from the past? Well, I don't know if it's remembering something from the past. I never really got to do a ton on the 2017 Kawaii season. And so I'm comparing it to other Kawaii seasons in 2019. Now to your question, there is some hesitancy about the value of that style. And that is the biggest thing with Shagel's Alexander for me that I'm looking for going forward. I think maybe some people had the impression after our episode on Shay that it was specifically a playoff specific thing, right? Like, OK, C's playoff offense wasn't that good. Does that mean that Shay didn't play as well? Certainly his efficiency dropped in the playoffs. I don't know how much I want to react to that or overreact to that or get worried about it. But this thing that Kawaii has that Shay maybe has going on, that Demard de Rosen is the poster child for. Like when you just kind of live and occupy in the middle of the court in a very specific offensive alignment, Yannis has this a little bit, right? Like I wonder how much you can actually puncture the highest area on the court. And then does it make you to use a baseball metaphor? You go from a three or four pitch pitcher to like a one or two pitch pitcher where you just collapse the paint. You try to keep them relatively off their sweet spots and you live with some of the spray out. Three's and that's certainly what the OKC offense felt like in the playoffs at times. Just like, yeah, we're spraying it out. And we're going to Alex Caruso is going to shoot some more three's. That's what's going to happen. So there's a little of that in terms of keeping Kawaii out of the upper echelon for me, but just the totality of 2017 Kawaii and some of the movement that he has Cody, some of the fact that I think he's picking up some value with some of the gravity and some of the being more active off ball in that movement shooting, that's what I like. So that's the other key is like what other things can you do off ball instead of just like the on ball scoring, which I think actually another player, not quite as much of a rise as Jason Kitten, my book, but Kobe Bryant going back and like you're the one that that turned me on to it. He's like, hey, just watch Kobe off ball. Like he gets all the shine for the tough shot making. And we know that he's a gifted passer and stuff like that. But like, look how relentlessly he's moving around and fighting position and cutting and things like that. Like, great, he's not a Ray Allen shooter. He's not coming off pin downs and getting like Steph Curry gravity assists, but he's moving around the paint and the defense is reacting because they're terrified of him. So I think like even adding like that spatial awareness. And I think why kind of has that a little bit too, not quite as good as Kobe Bryant, but why is quite a gifted off ball player, but seeing that sort of thing be like, wow, it's really valuable to be able to, oh, I don't have the ball. What if I go here and the defense has to react and all of a sudden this teammate over here is good. So Kobe Bryant's another one, just a minor uptick in my mind. Okay, before we do a couple who went down for me, I think based on this conversation, one of the hardest players was Russell Westbrook. And we ended up, we ended up sort of leaving him on the outside of the full episodes because we wanted to talk about kid. We wanted to talk about all these skeleton key entry point concepts, but Westbrook came up a lot throughout the series as well. And Westbrook has this similar. There's a little bit of a dwayne wade. In fact, when I was watching Wade, I'm realizing like, okay, in a weird way, Westbrook's offense is like a lesser polished version of what we're seeing with dwayne wade. And I think that's That's why Westbrook blips a lot of these signals that we looked at throughout the series. Like we've talked about the improvement in your teammates' true shooting percentage. Russell Westbrook, he gets a pretty good crank on regardless of the permutation you put on there with Kevin Durant, without Kevin Durant. Like he has numbers that are plus four, plus five, plus five and a half percent increased in his true shooting percentage. And of course, he drags it back down a little with his own scoring. But there's something there, I think, with him as a downhill rim pressure guy, who also is pretty good at diving up in those spots, much like Wade. It's a similar archetype offensively. And I just struggle with Westbrook. I've gone down on him over the years. I've gone back. I don't entirely know sort of what category, what range of player feels right for him. He was coming out of it. He was one of the hardest guys in a player. I'm like, well, yeah, we talked about him cracking the top, you know, 21 or something as a high end. But for me, I'm not really, I'm not really sure. I think we can do the list at the end and figure out where these guys are, but he was a hard one for me. I think the thing with Westbrook is you could, you could line up the pros chart and the cons chart. And it's pretty compelling on both sides of it, right? Like he has the sort of inactivity off ball that's like the opposite of what we were just talking about with Kobe and Kauai, right? Like he has his impact on teammate percentage, but it's all because of what he does on ball. Like every single bit of it is because Russell Westbrook is an incredible downhill pressure guy. He's got great vision. He can spray it out for three, he can dump it off and things like that. You can't stay in front of him in transition. But once he gets off the ball, it's like, oh, what's he really doing here? And then defensively, interestingly enough, he's got the motor. Like he doesn't stop going, right? There's probably even more so on offense, but he's constant, but it's not like clear if all of that energy is always aimed towards the correct thing, right? So he doesn't have like, he has the motor, but like KG also has the spatial awareness. KG also has the threat detection and things like that. So Westbrook has the tools and they pop up in these really valuable ways, but then you see some of these other things, and you're like, oh, I don't know, I have to knock you down a bit more versus somebody that's a bit more polished. See, I think what you're describing is that he's a highly interactive player. So he's so hyper ball dominant that when he's the only guy who's ball dominant, he's a really nice fit with Kevin Durant, who doesn't want to be ball dominant. And in fact, you can put a bunch of defensive players on this team and this kamikaze downhill force that we've seen from other players, like Yannis, like Dwayne Wade, there's a lot of value there and it turns out it fits really nicely with Kevin Durant, but where you start to get really nervous is like, well, what happens if he plays with another player who needs the ball? What's what's what's Ross doing? Is he spotting up and taking 11 threes a game? What's happening there? And he has a little of the same thing defensively where I think at times Oklahoma City was really dangerous because of his activity and because of his length and athleticism. And then there are other settings where you're like, but I need that communication brain focus awareness thing going on. And of course, he's a sleepy, spacey defender who gets the controller unplug sometimes. So there's a real duality there, which is what I'm saying. He's kind of, I would say the hardest player for me to really make sense of after all the concepts we talked about in the series. And bringing it back even to the ranking thing and what you said he's highly interactive, we had kid over him in the series, but I'm also not convinced that replacing Westbrook with kid would have made those Thunder teams better. I'm not positive that putting Jason Kidd next to Kevin Durant with all those guys would have put them over the edge. There's a chance that Westbrook just worked better with that particular build, which is the whole basketball aspect of it. There are instances where you would rather have Rossal Westbrook than Jason Kidd. Put a pit in that thought I want to come back to that later. The players, I'm a little bit lower on. Yannis, maybe I feel like the way to describe Yannis is I have more clarity on this thing that I've been struggling with for years with Yannis, but I'm a little bit lower on James Harden and I'm definitely lower on Anthony Davis because all of the things we've talked about with how the different ways you impact your teammates, I think he's just relatively weak offensively with that. And I think we get the best of Anthony Davis when we have a playmaker that can unlock his role gravity, his rim running, some of that element of his game. But for me, I got excited and over indexed in 2019. Now, 2020, this is when he was still in New Orleans, 2019, on him as a playmaker because the Pelicans moved him a little bit more to the high post. This is before the season went off the rails and he can handle the ball and he can pass a little bit. But as we've looked at in this series in such detail, there's a difference between being able to do it a little bit and do it in a way that actually helps your teammates significantly, right? So what that means is, let's say you want to run the offense through AD in 2019 and his assists go up. I don't remember where they went to for a sister game or five a sister game or something like that. And you watch the film and you're like, "It's pretty good. That's pretty good." But when you go to a good team, what pretty good means is you would then have to replace the LeBron James pick and roll possessions with Anthony Davis at the elbow. And that's not that good. And I think that's to some degrees why you don't see AD playmaker as much in his Lakers career is what you saw in his Pelicans career, right? So my point is just because a player can do something occasionally doesn't mean it's giving you this offensive lift for your teammates around you. And to me, that takes a little bit of value away from him offensively and that's a clear, again, another point of clarity for me in terms of, okay, what's going on? Why do we see these numbers? Why have we seen this? You're, yes, you need to say something. I'm trying to backtrack. If I'm not mistaken, 2019 you making content about Anthony Davis is that you calling him the hybrid big? Is that what you're thinking of? 'Cause when I think about you talking about Anthony Davis, it's the fact that he's this hybrid big, he can do stuff off ball. One of the best lob finishers we have ever seen. Have you changed it all as him being like a secondary player next to one of these other players? 'Cause I think the aspect of Anthony Davis is like, if you were to line up these guys as to who you would want next to somebody like Steve Nash, who you'd want to have somebody next to like Dwayne Wade or the Braun James, I feel like Anthony Davis would still be really, really high. But is the idea now that you're lower on him if he doesn't have one of these oxygen sucking ball handlers on the court with him? - No, I think they go together. Because if you're the secondary playmaker on a high level championship offense, you wanna be able to both provide lift for your teammates when the star's on the bench. And you wanna be able to provide lift for your teammates on the possessions where we run stuff through you instead of you being the screener and roller every time with the Braun James, right? - Okay, does that make sense? - That does make sense, yes. Whereas like, I think it's, yeah, I don't always wanna directly compare people even though we're probably gonna, we've done that multiple times already, this podcast. But like if you wanna see what we're talking about, you wanna watch like Anthony Davis offensive plays and then go watch like Kevin Garnett, right? And just see the different ways that KG kind of occupying the same space, occupying the same position and whatever else, is just able to do a little bit more with this handle, getting downhill, setting up his teammates, moving off ball, things like that. There's just more of that kind of like soft skills that he's doing. Then Anthony Davis, that's not just like the road, you gotta be at the elbow, you gotta be set in a screen, rolling into this space and things like that. So I think like the variety, the diversity of what he's able to do on offense is just solid tier two below somebody like Garnett. Exactly and I think this is where a stat over long periods of time with different teammates, like what's happening to your teammates, true shooting percentage when you're on the court, becomes valuable because if you don't have a ton of off ball gravity, if you're not a great playmaker, if you're not an incredible passer, if you're not, now again, I've seen a D handle and make plays, but for whatever reason, you can't just gift him the idea that he can run 30 inverted pick and roll a game, pick and roll a game and carve up a defense because when you look at what happens to his teammates, shooting when he's on the court, there's almost no change in New Orleans, zero to one percent. And these nice signals and the reason why he's in this series is because when you get to the playoffs and things look much better, you're still like 2%. Right? So this is clearly just not the way Anthony Davis has impacted the game. He's not going out there and creating all these easy shots for his teammates. I was just gonna ask somebody like Curry, is he, I feel like we've talked about Curry very highly. Do you see him about the same or are you actually higher on him after doing this study again? I'm roughly the same. If anything, trending maybe a little bit higher, feeling more comfortable with the high side. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So I interrupted your great transition. I don't want to hover on this too long, but I thought of Steph Curry. So keep going for what you're reading. There was no great transition. I think the last thing I wanted to hit here was for the exact same reasons. James Harden also playing this very extreme, unique style and then looking at what happens to his teammates, all these different permutations of his teammates when he's on the court. And the idea that the rockets were playing a little bit ahead of the time was spacing. And to me, that's why when James Harden's on the bench, the rocket's offense was always pretty good. And that's a big deal. And so then when he comes in the game, he's not necessarily getting them way, way better shots than you might think. He's always flirting with this like plus two, two and a half percent changes. Team H3 shooting is absolute best situation. Was when Chris Paul was on the bench. I think this was Hardens Peak by the way, in 2018, 2019. And you get that plus four, but is, I don't know if they're shooting luck involved with that. I think it's mostly a signal, but his team H shot 31% from three or something when he was on the bench. You get a similar thing in Brooklyn. And so we had that episode. And then right after that, we had the Tracy McGrady episode. And Tracy McGrady is a player throughout the rest of the series who you get to see that playmaking, that path he was a very good passer and that gravity as well. And just the, it goes back to Kobe, just the presence of these guys that move around. They come off the screens. They come off floppy. They're floating in different places and the defenses and the game plans, whether it's justified or not, the coordinators on the other side are flipping out about them every time they play. And so even Tracy McGrady, we didn't talk about it because you and I both thought, so many people would think we were low on McGrady, which apparently people thought we were high on McGrady. I don't know what's going on, but we didn't talk a ton about the signals from Houston where he's clearly a lesser player. He clearly has these injury issues and he's a lesser player. And yet in Houston, he has the same thing. It's like, I'm not the same thing as his incredible years in Orlando. But again, you're like, oh, what happens when Tracy McGrady's on the court, well, his teams are like three, three and a half percent better in true shooting. His efficiency drags it down a touch, but this is the sign of one of these sort of forces as offensive engines that's floating out there and doing a ton of stuff and musk mucking up the defense. And I kind of wonder if people overlook those first couple years in Houston because they think very highly of Yao Ming, you brought Yao up last episode and well, Yao might be a very strong defender. I'm not sure we have a lot of evidence that he was like a big offensive player. And so you're left with McGrady having a pretty good signal dragging these Houston teams when he's after his peak when his body is not the same to respectable offensive heights. So yeah, that was, I just wanted to circle back. I don't know if you have any other thoughts on this, but these are, these are things that I've noticed as we've gone through the series. Well, something that I really want to highlight because I think we did talk about it on the McGrady episode for a second, but you talk about the Houston signal still looking really good for the teammates. We talked about the change in his own shot selection at that time. Like the remitems go away down. He calls on the long mid range so much more because his body's just degrading at that point. Like we talked about, I think it's last good season. He's like 28. Like this is not a guy that had a long extended prime. So he has this interesting thing that somebody like Kevin Garnett has where he plays on a better team, little outside of the prime, still good, right? Still like very good, obviously, but not quite as good as maybe a couple years earlier, Kevin Garnett and in Minnesota, Tracey McGrady with Orlando. And then you see these really nice signals in Kevin Garnett's case, monster signals coming from Boston. And then you go to the film and you're like, he's just better in Minnesota, like individual. He's just a better player. So if we see all these signals and we see these things that are happening in Boston, I think we can extrapolate a bit a little bit and be like, yeah, this, this would probably have been the case that he'd done this earlier in his career. And I think you can say the same thing about Tracey McGrady. Like you have these nice signals. You see some of the success he sees and you, you see in Houston. And if he had been in Houston around 2003, as opposed to like 2006, 2007, like he would have just been that much better. We probably would have had a much healthier sample to talk about McGrady and the, these, like robust ways we did for everyone else. Well, one thing we didn't mention when we talked about Houston is just the lift and the fact that he's still having some impact and the team results. And I think they're important to help contextualize. As you said, the fact that it was clearly better in Orlando and the height of what we're talking about in Orlando is like a level or two above this as an offensive player. So in 2006, Yao Ming and Ray for Austin, that's the, I was going to come skip to my Lou. I'm skipping my Lou, baby. Yeah. I was like, he has an actual name. Sorry, Yao Ming and Ray for Austin, when they played and Tracy McGrady was out of the lineup for 21 games, that team played at a 30 win pace. Okay. When McGrady came back in the lineup for 22 more games, they played at a 48 win pace. The next two years, we get a lot of Yao injuries and frankly, we get some Tracy McGrady injuries as well. So we get more of these like zoomed out what's happening when on a full game level, when a player misses time. 2007 and 2008, when Tracy McGrady and Austin are in the lineup and Yao Ming is out, they played a 55 win pace for 51 games. Let me say that again, it's a 55 win pace without Yao Ming for 51 games. That's in 2007 and 2008. It's a very, very heavily defensively constructed roster where McGrady's like getting them to like league average-ish offense. I think because of the playmaking components that we're talking about, some of that scoring that we're talking about on those jumpers that Cody cited and then the rest is defense. And when he goes to the bench, the offense just falls apart. They become the worst offense in the league. When you add Yao, there were a 61 team for 78 games. There are 61 team for 78 games. I just, I feel like it's, it's an important thing to help contextualize what was happening a couple years earlier when he was clearly better. So, I'm trying to look at this here in 2008, the rockets end up winning 22 straight games that go on a 22 game winning streak. Yao is part of the lineup for a chunk of it, but then he goes out and they continue the streak for like 12 more, 10 more wins or something like that. So yeah, just to add a bit of that. Didn't team back in injured at the end, too, didn't they win one or two or something? That was a crazy streak. Yeah, that was a ridiculous defensive team. That team was awesome. Yeah, that was a fit. Should we do a Chuck Hayes hour? Oh my god. That should be, that's the like mid 2000s Danny Green guy. Like go, go learn about Chuck Hayes, everyone. That's, that's the guy. Okay, I said to put a pin in it a second ago. I've got a handful of key takeaways, key learnings from the series. Do you have any or do you like me to, to start? You, you start with some stuff. I took the last one. You start here. Okay, so I think we already talked about it, but the, the box score can lie and it can lie quite a lot and we have to always remember that all the other stuff that we're not measuring is so important, which means 25 points and 5 assists for one player is not the same for 25 points and 5 assists for another player and sometimes more doesn't equal better. Right. Sometimes you could have more points and more assists have the same scoring efficiency and compare that to a player with fewer points, fewer assists and the same scoring efficiency. And the player who has less of the stuff you measured could be better. And I think that's a super important takeaway. Another great example to me is the turnovers. That's a classic one where we like focus on a player's turnovers and we're like, ah, he turns them all over this much. But if you're suppressing turnovers for the team because it turns out there's, we didn't have time of possession and these other more complex ways to measure it, that's a pretty big deal. So that's, that's the low hanging fruit one that we've already talked about in this episode. But I think what's interesting with the box score lying thing that you're talking about like 25 and 5 and 25 and 5 might not be the same. The same player on the same team might not be the same player, you know, like on one hand they might average 25 and 5 when their star teammates on the court, but the team may go to the bench and all of a sudden they're 30 and eight or something like a 35 and a shake ill just Alexander like Jalen Williams goes to the bench. He scored like 40 points, 75 and like plus 1% or something like that. So even like the overall box score and you pull up the team page and you're like, oh, let's see how so and so is doing. Oh, yeah, just this much. He doesn't always average that much. It's completely dependent on all of these other factors. It's so funny. You said that because you asked me about ranges and like a specific ranking. I no longer think of players as like, this is a 28 point per game score, right? Because some players it's more rigid. We talked about Yannis and some of his scoring patterns being more rigid. But some players it's more flexible. So I guess the next big learning for me or the best theme of the series and takeaway is that basketball is truly an interaction sport. Every single player in basketball interacts with other players, even the more rigid side like Yannis, you're still going to get synergies and interactions depending on who his point guard is, depending on whether you put better shooters out there or worse shooters out there. Right? Yannis's stats may look similar, but the reaction to the defense and the effectiveness of a style of play is going to change who is out there. So interactions are universal. Players synergies are real. They're common and there are definitely a handful of big ones that jump out to me. Yeah. And I think can I spoil something? You have written down because this is a conversation that I want to talk about. How do you know what I have written? Do you see my notes? Yeah. I just tapped into your computer. I'm taking a peek at it. Right. It's this idea of my security. Of these of synergies. And I think you wrote something that's really interesting. That's like the quest for true synergy. And I remember this. Go ahead. Cody is truly inside my computer somewhere. I wonder if I took what you said and I just like I jazzed up a little bit and that of the word quest in front because who doesn't want a quest, right? But I think it's the idea of like, is it possible to have a perfect true synergy with another player? And make two extremely high level players, put them on the court together and actually not have them lose any offense value. And maybe even like if you say yes, is it possibly possible for them to actually elevate each other in a way, which would be like an Uber perfect synergy. I feel like these are your notes. I have no recollection of this whatsoever. Maybe, let me throw out what I think were some of the clear synergies we talked about in this series and maybe that'll stimulate a little bit more and if not, we can move on. I think clearly you can start with this idea of a lone star that when you have no other big star forces out there, it's just role players. We're really not talking about a lot of synergy stuff other than spacing or something like that. Maybe some finisher at the basket. You can start with these very simple ideas of like, do I have slasher and cutters and finisher, do I have shooters and spacing? I can play my game the way I want to play my game. I want to clear out the court, give me the ball every time I want to run 100 picking roles. That's the most basic level of synergy. Then we could get, if you're a ball-dominant player, we could get a second ball-dominant player. Now, we might have some issues. It's not obvious how you're going to synergize unless you can do stuff without the ball in those positions. I would call that first level sort of like basic or solo. The second level, you might run into some redundancies. Then I think you get these interactions where you have some synergies and we talk about this with hybrids or off-ball players. Then I think you get really good synergies and maybe this is where you were going with my notes. You get really good synergies. We talked about Shaq and the paint pairing with a penetrating guard that can slash and finish or something like that. Then I think you get possibly this full level of synergy where you have these perfect pick and roll partners where you have perfectly dependent and interdependent players relating to each other. Maybe that's where you were going. I do think we see all different kinds of synergies that exist between big men, smalls, off-ball, on-ball, shooters, slasher, etc. Someone says it in the comments. This is actually the first tandem I thought of, but if you had like peak KG and Stefan Curry on the court. It's just the way that they both play. I can't imagine either one encroaching on the other's offense. In fact, I can see a situation where they might even be better with each other. They would just post some of the best numbers they could possibly post. I think we talked about Dremon having some effect with Steph Curry, but also Steph Curry on his own. It's just like lights out, unbelievable. The best impact we've seen on teammates we've ever seen. Also if you take like, let's go a level higher than KG. If you put like Steph Curry and Yokeich on the same court together, I don't know. Is there something that's like, well, Yokeich wouldn't be able to have the ball quite as much, but it also doesn't matter because Curry's doing so much stuff off-ball. Also, part of Curry's brilliance isn't just the off-ball thing. It's the fact that he maybe is one of the tightest handles ever. He effectively gets where he wants with it and can get in the paint and cause people to fly around that way. Maybe you're losing a little bit. I guess that's the question. Is Yokeich and Curry, like, would they be a perfectly, like, in sync synergy or are we still taking a little bit from each other just because they need to have the ball to some degree? Yeah, I don't know. As we talked about last time, there's some redundancy with movement shooters and these great perimeter gravitational forces because once you have one, the second one, you've already opened the rim. So the second one can only open the rim so much more. So then this synergy becomes, you know, it's like Clay next to Steph Curry. Clay, what's lovely about Clay, not just his movement, is the shooting part. So when you create the opening and the ball gets kicked around and it's a three instead of a layup, Clay's one of the best shooters ever. So that's fantastic. But man, if Clay's opposite could dribble or attack the basket, then I think we'd have a whole new lane of synergy that we could access. And so when you ask me about KG or even Yokech, I think it has to be pointed out that Dremon green speed gives him an advantage that probably synergizes better in transition, right? In some of those situations in early offense, then both Garnet and Yokech would have. And this is the whole Dremon as a center of playing point guard thing. Like the literal speed of him grabbing and ball handling and sprinting down the court is a synergistic element with a movement shooter like Steph or Clay or players like that that can kind of match that and get out and use the instantaneous pace to help scramble to defense. So it's, but my whole point is it's very complex and there's a lot of different ways that this can happen. Yeah, the transition point is perfect because it just shows how dynamic it is. It's like, sure, we can talk about all these other half court things, but it misses the key part that Dremon's unlocking in transition. So that's a really good point. Okay, another learning for me was something we already talked about, which is the very complex relationship between your own true shooting and then the fact that your influence on your other four teammates, true shooting is enormous. And I went through briefly how complex that that can get. That's one of them. I have one or two more. Do you have any specific takeaways or themes from the series that we haven't talked about? Can I say, this is probably cheating. I like to do this a lot on the pod. And I say I came away with a question that I want to investigate going forward. Is that a learning that I've asked the question? Yeah. So we're talking a lot. And this is actually where I brought up the aforementioned Dan agreeing to Drew Holiday. So buckle up everyone. But you talked about like primary on ball guys being surrounded by role players and whatever else. And when you look at team constructions, like role players are super important. The guys that you fill out the rest of the roster are key to how successful you're going to be. The thing I'm thinking about is how much can a role player actually impact teammate, true shooting percentage, rim attempts and things like that? Because we're talking about like we're freaking out when like one of the best offensive players ever changes it like five percentage points, right? But like say you throw somebody like Danny Green out there that's occupying like the fifth position on the offense or even like you go to 2023 and you have like Drew Holiday all star point guard playing like the fourth offensive position. How much can you reasonably expect somebody in that role to actually impact the other teammates around when there's these these other high load offensive players? So I think that's the takeaway is me thinking about this question. Yeah. Well, I think it's clearly not with the superstars that we've discussed. It's not three or four or five percent because they're not driving the ability to help four players on the court. But what I think becomes very interesting, even if you leave aside the actual numeric value for a second is studies like, okay, I've talked about this before, studies like, okay, let's put one shooter out there. All right. How does that help Dwayne Wade or Kobe or Yannis with the spacing now we have one shooter. Let's put two shooters out there. Let's take our center and put our center out at this three point line and make him a shooter. He's not a primary driver of offense, right? Usually, but each time you add one of these and I know teams have tried to do studies that look at the difference between like 2.7 and 3.3 average spacers on the court and things like that. Each time you add one of these, you're tapping into this interactive component that we've been discussing in this episode. And maybe one individual player doesn't do much, but the interaction between two starts to do something. The interaction between three is now much greater than the sum of the parts. But oh my God, we're at the 2014 spurs who are one of the most important, if not the most important case study for what you're asking Cody because every single other great offense at NBA history that we can see is driven by stars except for the 2014 spurs. They're the only offense that can get to those heights without a single offensive engine or two driving them. And before you get on your keyboard and you're like, what about Tony Parker? What about Managing Obli? What about Quietlin or what about Tim Duncan? You can take any of those dudes off the court and the 2014 spurs still look incredible offensively. They are totally unique in that element. And I think to your question, that hits that what happens when you get a multiplayer interaction that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. 2014 spurs. Is there a player on there that we're maybe just talking about that might be juicy as a role player? Are you doing right now? Somebody that's been very important to this series has just been in the background for a lot of teams and players that we've been talking about. You're going to let everyone know Boris Diaz going to go number one. Boris on the list. Man, that team had Boris Diaz and Danny Green. Just what I mean, that's exactly it. Like that's what happens. I love that answer because it's not like you and isolation are going to make and I'm not talking isolation in terms of like you're running an isolation. In isolation is like you're the only role player that has skills. Because if you're a good role player, that allows other good role players to go out there with you. And all of a sudden you're going to have a strong ecosystem that just supports like so much more you could do than if you had like one or two super weak links that just like kind of drives everything into the mud. But the spurs use the role players to create a multiplicity of skills that fit together. So I have Boris Diaz and Tony Parker. So I have two good passers and playmakers and extra passers. I have Danny Green and Marco Bellinelli. So I have two shooters on the court, right? Tim Duncan at that point was another good extra pass or things like that. So they just needed enough ball handling and penetration, enough movement shooting, enough spacing, enough extra passing in every single lineup to work really well with the X's and O's that they had that were ahead of their time. That then what happened on every spurs possession it felt like is when we start with a little micro advantage and then we make another pass and we get a little bit more of an advantage. We get a little bit more advantage and we look for better shot and better shot and better shot and better shot and boom. We got a three. Yeah, yeah. And then you get to the finals and he just like doesn't miss ever for weeks on it That might have been 2013, but there's a finals in there. He's just straight up didn't miss 2019 where he shot at 46% or whatever it was Okay, so another one we talked about was and it just worth stating for posterity that The decisions you make with the basketball and with your body moving your body around the court Can supersede your scoring numbers and impact? This is what we started with right your rim passing and your gravity are Insanely valuable like that's what we're on our thing here scoring is great. It's still probably the most important thing, but my goodness if you're really good with moving your body and Really good with passing and making decisions that is incredibly valuable if you're a high-level basketball player in the NBA And the last big thing for me that's a theme in this series or a takeaway From this series is Cody I would say there's no magical true shooting percentage threshold like you have to be above this certain number to create good shots for teammates There's no math. It's not like we can we just mention this with Tracy McGregor It's not like you can go well McGregor was like 3% below league average in Houston Therefore his passing and playmaking couldn't have been that important because the defense didn't respect him It doesn't work like that we can talk about why it doesn't work like that But that is a huge thing because what it means is again You can't index on someone's scoring efficiency as a direct proxy or a commensurate relationship between how much they're helping their teammates I mean, that's the Jason kid corollary right? It's the idea that you can't just look at somebody scoring and be like we know for sure how much a defense is gonna Respect him. We know for sure how he's gonna be able to set up his teammates with passing and stuff like that So you say the the Houston team act but Jason kid. I think also really illustrates this well dream on green Even illustrates this very well Westbrook. This is Westbrook Westbrook was one of the players who I asked this question originally Years ago What I was doing a ton of research into the value of playmaking passing I've a really old nylon calculus article where I say hey, actually There's this really important relationship that seems to emerge between the fact that you need to pressure the defense with your scoring And how much you're able to get the defense to react and then play make if you don't pressure the defense with your scoring It becomes harder and harder to pass players into open layoffs and into open threes and things like that So it seems like there's some threshold with your scoring But what about the efficiency? What if you're what if you're like minus 4% what if league average true shooting is 55% you shoot 50% does that mean defense is ignore you and I think the the simple one minute digestible answer is when you go to the basket Defense is do not care if you are a rim finisher at 58% or 66% they have to slide a body over to take away the layup Right, so every time you do that. This is where the Russell Westbrook is such a great example Every time you do that that's how you create offense for your teammates and you finish when you take the shot you finish at some percentage That is different than how much they were react to your outside threat Steph Curry is the ultimate example of someone reacting some defense reacting to your outside threat But the defense may not actually react that much to Westbrook's outside threat Which leaves it in Westbrook's hands to jack a bunch of inefficient shots But that doesn't change how much he helps the defense when he gets downhill So there's no real clear relationship between your efficiency and how much you can help your teammates And I think that's a really for me again another really important takeaway because for years I was like is there actually a like will they just leave you alone? Heck Cody and Twan Walker with the Celtics has really good offensive numbers helping his teammate because he was a big Who could space handle the ball get downhill? He was a really good passer and then he just took like 13 bricks from downtown every game just to bring his efficiency down I think talking about LeBron and Steph Curry I know that episode shout out Antoine Walker I'll illustrate this really well too because you know we pod a few years ago about Steph Curry and his slump right and she do like 38% or something from 336 I don't know what it was defenses didn't defend him any differently Whereas LeBron goes to Miami brings down to the volume of 3 point attempts he takes per hundred possessions He shoots like 40% from three Defensive still aren't freaking out about the three point shot They're like well, we're still gonna go under and hope today takes a bunch of these right so the percentages can change you can look at it But unless there's like truly a fundamental shift in how they're able to score from that distance Defences are probably just going to be like all right We're gonna kind of defend you how we've defended you these last couple of years. Do you have any more or shall we go to Let's say the best offensive players of the series. Let's do that. That sounds great. I got this can be a quick one I Think it's really important and I think it's valuable for most everyone we've talked about You need to be an insane cardio shape to get the value that we're talking about and like it sounds like it's kind of a joking answer But like these off-ball guys being able to constantly move into space to be able to see like a rip in the defense that you can Just kind of slither in there to be Steph Curry to constantly come off pin downs and take hits and one of her else Like the level of conditioning to be the absolute best at some of this off-ball stuff and to constantly fight for space and stuff like that Is really taken for granted and I don't think there's enough stories just about how ridiculously like how ridiculous of endurance athletes Some of these guys are if you talked about LeBron and and Al Horford's like how is he still going run minute 48 and he's still chugging along and and Steph Curry Is just a monster. We'll talk about Victor Webman Yama at some point during the preseason, but Yeah, you just you gotta constantly be able to move your body and know where to move your body Okay, let's do because it's come up a lot. Let's try to make a list of the best offensive players only in this series because we've had some monsters It's been some of the greatest offensive players of all time number one. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna count upward. How about that? Okay? Number one Victor Webman Yama. Sorry. Sorry. I got confused Number one I'm gonna go with Steph Curry. Yeah, and what was interesting is when I Evaluate players and try to put them in this form I do it for the player himself Based on film study data whatever I compare the player to different years I do the player and then I start a circular process where then I start comparing them to other players to see like where the heck Did this guy end up next to the other players? So there's like an independent thing that I start with and then I compare them to the other players and I feel it Any adjustments I want to make sure I've got the big picture which requires looking at more than just one player That's the dirty secret of player rankings code. You can't be an expert in one player You have to be an expert in like a hundred players so you understand the relative difference between the players. I say all this to say What I ended up with was Steph Curry number one I Think he could be as low as four And the player I have number two Nicole Eokitch. I think he could be as low as three. I just think they're made differently It's weird. I have Yoke with a slightly higher floor than Steph Curry, but I have Steph Curry with a slightly higher ceiling But also we're talking about like three and four So at the end of the day like is not the floor and see they're like touching like they basically look parallel if you stand back far I thought you were gonna be like Ben who the heck is who the heck are the other two players there? Well, I mean we've talked about a lot of great players like nothing at this point is gonna shock me because it's the the point that's like All right Steph Curry you can make the case that if you needed to run a billion picking roles You just needed somebody to just like be stronger than everyone and get to the basket every time that maybe he's not gonna add that value So like I can see the counter arguments for some of these other guys I was so in my head about finishing the Steph Curry episode in time last time that we went through all the process of his Gravitational impact and things like that and we forgot to come back Cody to the fact that he also helps his team Is at the three-point line which is so important because that's why he like might be the most additive offensive player of all time He is particular warping of the court Doesn't take away it seems anything from other players because it opens the rim and it opens the three-point line because the three-point line is so much more real estate Than the rim I I had a good laugh after the episode where I'm like I forgot to finish the entire I started the story I forgot to finish The entire story people have asked if you look at change in true shooting percentage Yokech is he's got these six six and a half percent curry has six percent Dwayne Wade has six percent those are kind of the kings of those stats Those three guys Steve Nash also has six percent and we talked about LeBron getting like five five and a half percent I mentioned that because I would say I think third 2017 LeBron I Think I would have third I put him in the two to four range and Steve Nash I would have right behind him in the two This is where it gets really interesting the two to seven range because these guys are really good I think when you get to the top offensive players and just having a little variability Allows you to go like you know. Yeah, I could there's plenty of teams where I want you know Dwayne Wade instead of Steve Nash or something like that So LeBron versus Nash right obviously there's the size difference and vertical athleticism and stuff like that both very heavy pick and roll Operators what about LeBron's game giving him a tighter band than then Steve Nash oh I think the the fact that um, I don't know if he has a tighter band I just think he's just a little maybe just a touch better because of the off-ball stuff because of the cutting and his ability to screen and get into the short role is so big coming downhill. That's probably the differentiator that you're driving at. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I should also mention with Steve Nash. I think last time we talked about Steph Curry and his teammates, rim shots being assisted at this freakish level. Steve Nash is kind of the king of this stat Jason Kid is also right up there as well. But the thing with Steve Nash is his teams won't get quite as outlierish as the number of assisted field goals at the rim that Steph Curry's team will get. But the difference is when Steph Curry goes to the bench, that number only goes down like 12%, you know, only like 12%. In other words, the warriors are still above average in their system at like passing players into layups because they don't have a lot of post players. They don't have a lot of penetrators. But the sun's, it's a joke. It's an absolute joke. There's a 22% change. So Nash, you know, when you're on the court, it's like, hey, we're outliers at getting layups that are assisted and then Nash goes to the bench and that entire phenomenon of assisting layups disappears. And so to me, I would just say, if anyone ever says Steve Nash is a system player, that is the one stat that literally obliterates that idea and punts it to the moon. It's impossible to be a system player when no one else can come close to replicating the thing that makes the system so valuable. - And I'm gonna backtrack one of the learnings I had. And I don't even know if it's a learning, but it's just shown so much here. There's just so many ways to do it. There's so many ways to do it. You can impact rim attempts. You can impact three point shots, but you could be Steve Nash or Steph Curry and your games will completely different and depending on how the team is built, it's just not gonna look the same, but the results statistically are going to be similar in that sort of way. So you can't be like, I want my players to be like this. You just kind of have to accept what they are. - Before we move on, last time you were asking about arguments that could be made against Steph Curry for being number one or being the greatest offensive player ever. Did you come up with any more? I was looking for them all week and I stumbled upon this like, okay, well, what happened? 2017 to 2019, in the playoffs, when Kevin Durantz on the bench, and I was like, but it's still, they were still a plus eight offense. So I don't, I was just thinking about this all week. I was wondering if you came up with better ones. - I guess the best argument is, there's probably a couple guys that'd rather have running a pick and roll than him over the course of like 30 possessions. That's about all I got for you. - Okay. Next up for me would be, now these three guys are really, really close and really, really interesting. I almost felt like they could all be interchangeable. Shaq kind of feels like he has the highest floor of the group, if that makes sense. We're nitpicking at this point with these three players. They're very close. So I'm gonna say Shaq, Kobe, Dwayne Wade, Shaq would be four through eight, Kobe five through eight, Dwayne Wade, five to 10 in my ranges. Any thoughts there? - I'm actually really interested, and it's a one slot difference, but I'm really interested in you having Kobe above Wade right now. - Oh, I had them almost identical, and I'm just like, you know, at the end of the day, maybe some movement stuff means I'm gonna prefer you on a few more teams, maybe the fact that he's a much better outside shooter, means I'm gonna prefer you on a few more teams that you can't go wrong with either of those players. - Yeah, no, give me either Kobe or Wade, and I'm not gonna argue with you. Like that sounds great, good. - Yeah. Shaq, by the way, also, you know, we talk about improving your team's, sort of, your team mates, true shooting percentage, right? Shaq has these like plus five percent stuff, but Shaq is so darn efficient himself that he also gets the team system up at like plus seven, and I think he and Curry and Yoka, which are basically the only players that ever really touch that. So that's why I say to some degree, I feel most comfortable with Shaq from that group. He truly is kind of an offensive marvel as we discussed in his episode, like a nuclear weapon. - Yeah, the thing about Shaq too, that's really fun. This is defense, but I think it's important to talk about here, and this has to do with the backup biggs and whatever else, but there's such a shift in how often teams can score in the paint against the lakers when he's on the bench, and there's such a shift for how well the lakers are able to score at the ribbons off the bench that like the two different teams of the Shaq lakers, and then the Shaq on the bench lakers, is probably the biggest like overall shift of any player I would venture like ever, like if you factor in both offense and defense, and that doesn't really like factor into the ranking, I just find that to be interesting. - It's a pretty big inversion, right? Yeah, it's like the op, it's like Bizarro team. The Bizarro Superman reference for those-- - I love that. - Lovers, yeah. Okay, let's round out this top 10. No one's gonna get upset about these players. Okay, next I'm gonna go Luca 5 through 11. He's kind of like a machine in terms of helping his teams. He's like pretty consistent with the plus 4% teammate true shooting, despite any permutation, and we've just talked about some of his playoff stuff, and then there's a little bit of a drop, I would say Kevin Durant would be 8 to 12, and James Harden would be 8 to 13, Durk Navitsky would be 8 to 13, Shay 9 to 14, these guys are now out of the top 10, but they have a high range in the top 10, Shay would be 9 to 14, and Tracy McGrady would be 9 to 14. So somebody like Durant, right, maybe dropping down, he's pretty close to Luca, but is that the fact that he doesn't have like the on ball stuff, but also off ball, he still doesn't have quite the like Steph Curry type of gravity, like he's a good gravity guy, and he's good on ball, but he's not the best at either one of them. - Yeah, I think I'm compelled by all the things we talked about with gravity movement coming off screens, floppy, the ability to handle the ball a little bit, you know, he doesn't have what team act has in terms of necessarily passing or ball handling and on ball stuff, but I'm compelled by the total package of that, and like this 610 Super Shooter who still helps his teammates a little bit, but then he's like usually hyper efficient, even when he's not that efficient, right, people are like, ah Durant fell apart, you're like, he scored like 30 on like 58% true shooting or something, it wasn't actually that big of a value loss, and I'm really, I'll tell you the single thing that really kind of moves me, that I have a hard time getting off of, he played 3000 minutes without Russell Westbrook from 2013 to 2016. That's not a small sample, that's 3000 minutes, okay? In those 3000 minutes, they had, this is Russell Westbrook on the bench and Durant with mostly defensive players. He played with Reggie Jackson, these are the top minute guys, Reggie Jackson, Sergie Baca, Nick Collison, Tobosephalosia, Kendrick Perkins, Derek Fisher, Jeremy Land, Lam, Dion Waiters. That's what we're talking about. We had a plus six offensive rating in 3000 minutes, and Durant was huge swings in the plus 11 or 12 point, I don't remember off the top of my head, but that's pretty compelling for a guy that's like making a pretty darn big offensive impact. I have a hard time getting off that. That's pretty incredible, especially when he's able to, to elevate really good teams even higher there. They're talking about it in the comments here, so I thought I'd bring it up. Let's, 'cause I know, I think we talked about an imbede season where he was maybe not quite the disoffensive peak, but he had more of his defensive peak. If we were talking about peak offensive joel imbede, where do you think he would land in this ranking you just put forth? - Oh boy, so are you asking about the one, from 2024 that we just never really got to see in the playoffs or something like that? - I guess that's the thing, is you see him for half a regular season, and it's an incredible, I guess I don't even know how to curve that question, 'cause you're right, we don't see him in the playoffs, and it's half a regular season, but based off the film and whatever else, where about do you think you would drop him? - I think that the tricky part is not having really a decent feel for the playoffs sample for how he was gonna respond to that. I'm not sure he's offensively better than any of the players that we just went through. - Okay. - You know, he's a really good offensive player, but these guys are, they're insanely good. I mean, just Durant and Dirk, again, very compelled by the gravity and the mismatched problems, and they're curling up in the middle of the floor, coming off screens, off-ball, and just the impact signals are enormous for those kinds of players. So I'm not sure and Bede would crack this list, although he may be close. Where did I round out, Shay, and Tracy McGrady and 9 through 14, right? Yeah, I'm not sure that he would be ahead of any of them. Man, could you imagine if Joel and Bede was when he was healthy, was as good as any of the 10 players we talked about, and then also like an elite defender, that peak would be, that would be like a top three or five peak of all time, I would say. - So I were excited about, was that the 24 season? - That was 24, yeah. - That was 24, I mean, like lock for MVP for the period of time he was playing, just ridiculous bonkers stuff he was doing on the basketball court, but you know what I was talking about, That's all I have for you. the playoffs and these guys do it across multiple seasons. They do it with various teammates and whatever else. So it's too bad. Like there's a lot of guys in NBA history that we didn't get to see actualized. And you know, there's still time left. I hope in B.D. is one of those guys they can come back and do it. Okay, so are you gonna make me rank the overall players now or can we get out of here without actually doing that? You know, the people should be happy. We just did. There's two rankings in one episode. Two rankings. Like the keyboard warriors, they don't know where to throw the pitchfork in the torch. They should just like throw it straight up in the air and hope for the best. I love the zone Cody. Just a distraction. It's all we're doing. Yeah, okay, so let's. A tear pen. Everyone wants to know who's who's new or who know? Oh, we're gonna we're gonna go from the top down. You want to start at 25? I can do it either way. I don't know. I'm not looking forward to this part of the show. I love the last. Everything we've done, we can wrap it up. Let's see. Someone in the audience is asking for defensive top 10. I just don't think there are 10 mega defenders in the series. I think we tracked it as we went through with Garnett for me being number one. Dreymon Green probably being number two. Did I say. I think I said Tim Duncan would be my preferred third, I believe. And am I forgetting anyone? Dwight Howard maybe would be fourth. Anthony Davis. Anthony Davis is right there. And then Janus. And then unless I'm forgetting someone, I think that's kind of all our defensive player level of the year guys in the series. I think that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so overall you want me to go from one to 25 or 25 down to one. You know what? Let's end with a bang then. 25 to one. Okay. Well, I kind of still don't know about Westbrook or Kid. Which is right. Which is right where we started. I will say that after going through the series, I'm a little bit. I'm back to being a little bit higher on Westbrook. And so I will say that I think Westbrook I have as a. I think Westbrook high end you can get to 20. And the low end is 32. And Kid I have written down as 21 to 32. Okay. And I think that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. We had Tatum next at 20 to 28. We had Dwight Howard next at 17 to 28. And that boy, I wonder. I don't know. Dwight felt so clunky compared to some of the other players that we went through. 18 to 26, Mono Genobili 17 to 24. And then there's a pretty big jump to the next group of players. James Harden 13 to 25. So just think about that for a second. Think about that. If these players for me have a range of 13 to 25, that means that a ton of the players listed between 13 and 25 might be better in certain situations or worse in certain situations. Because that's everything we've talked about in this episode, right? So there's like some team constructions where I'm like, yes, from players 13 to 25, half of the series, I'd rather have James Harden. And then there's other team constructions where I'm like, no, I'd rather have one of these other guys. Even someone ranked below him. And I think that is. To me, that's the biggest takeaway in doing something like this in a 25 year period where we're trying to hone in on one season. It just feels intellectually corrupt to be like, yes, this player is exactly right here and this player has no argument over him when it's just. I don't know how you would make an argument that there aren't some teams where you'd want one guy over the other when we're comparing like five to 10 to 15 players sometimes. Yeah, no, I think that's the point of the entire series here is like these are the best players, different contexts, offer different skills and it's not always like a clear linear draft order. Okay, next is Luca 12 to 24, so very similar. We talked about tracing the grady's high end and the uncertainties around him. So he's 10 to 24. I have Anthony Davis written down next. I really don't know what to do with Joelle and B to be honest. I think to the question from the audience earlier, I'd love to get Joelle and B 2024 in the series and just celebrate that. But then everyone listening is like, why are they even talking about Joelle and B? We would much rather have him not be in the top 25. So Anthony Davis 12 to 23. I should have included years, right? What was I thinking? I don't know. I can't put it in the comments. I'll put it in the comments. I'll put it in the episode description and everyone can see in the episode description the years of choice. The reason I thought of that is because with MBEED, so Davis is 2020 obviously 12 to 23 and BED, I think I ended up going with 2023. Is that sound right? I think so. Yeah, were we leaning 21 because he was more of a defensive record? We were talking 21. That's why I can't remember. But I think 2023 maybe 10 to 23 is his range here. And then again, we get another shift up. We get another shift up to shake out Shakeilda, Sal Alexander in 2025. And this is where it gets really fun. Cody has ranges seventh to 20th. Dirk Navitsky seventh to 19th. So you can see these great players kind of some of them have to pack at the back end of this pseudo tier, if you will. I think next was Chris Paul in 2014. And Chris Paul, my high-end range was six for him. Six to 17th for Chris Paul. After that, we have Steve Nash at eight to 19. Now, I'm not sure how to handle this because I didn't know what to do with Chris Paul's injuries. And as I said in the ranges just a second ago, I think I would rather make the argument for healthy Chris Paul having these slightly higher end ranges than Nash. They're all very close like I said when we did the episode. I mean, Dirk was right right there. I'm honestly just not comfortable about any of these three players. I need your help. But between which ones Chris Paul, I think you're highest on Nash in this group. So you're not going to help me. No, no, I'm not. What was the third? Dirk was the third. The group that I went through just now was Dirk from seven to 19. Yeah, Chris Paul when he's healthy is six to 17. And then Nash is eight to 19. Yeah. Yeah. So it almost feels like they should be flipped. I'm not going to I'm not going to worry about it. Son, but my order from from best from best to worst. Right. I'll usually inflammatory language. I go Nash. Chris Paul, Dirk Navitsky. That's the order you go in. That's right. Yeah. And I kind of feel like if we're just talking healthy, it's Chris Paul and then Dirk and Nash are so close. But who knows? Next is Kevin. Next is Kevin. Kauai Leonard. There are too many Ks in the great players of basketball history. Kauai Leonard 2017. We went seven through 16th Kevin Durant 2000. I like 2016 probably seventh to 15th for Kevin Durant. So a little bit more comfortable on the low end. And Yannis is six to 15th. It's interesting as you go up just like the high end just kind of push it into that top six the low end getting a little bit more confident about the range. And that's the that's the best way to describe how I feel about these players. As we go through Kobe Bryant is eighth at six to 15th Dwayne Wade 2009 is next at fourth to 11th. I think Dwayne Wade very good at basketball at this point. Yes, I think kind of probably underrated and forgotten to time. And there's a whole complex thing with what happened with the heatels Cody and LeBron coming in there and Wade's knee injury and people really indexing on that and forgetting about 2006 and no one cared about 2000. I can't believe when you told me when he finished third an MVP in 2009 and obviously he's going up against the LeBron super all time season and then Kobe's still great. But I'm like, that's MVP Dwayne Wade 2009. That's like an MVP toward a force and it feels like it's a little bit forgotten. Hey, man 2009's tough. Sometimes you get picked first in the draft and don't know who he do turklew is. So, you know, oh, nine's like a history epox ago. Is that a Cooper flag reference. We could talk about it in the preview. Okay. Tim Don, we now we get now we get to some real heavy hitters Tim Duncan two to 10. Nicola Yokech and this Cody. This is where I really need your help. I literally have written down one or two to nine. I just there. I think in the spirit of the series, I'm going to say. Well, I want to say one to really point out the sort of what we talked about a couple summers ago in an episode that was so important to me, which was who could be the goat. Remember we talked about who could be the goat. We just said we shouldn't be so dogmatic and confident about these things. How do we really know like that it's unreasonable to think Jerry West was the best player in the first 30 years of basketball or something like that. So that part of me wants to say, Yokech has these outlier signals. Yokech has obviously this case for the greatest offensive player ever. Maybe there's something there. One to nine, but also honestly the valuation I end up with kind of is more like two to nine for him and Kevin Gardiner almost in the exact exact same boat. Do you have any thoughts on this or just code in case anyone has noticed I've asked Cody for a lot of things. - Life preserver, many times through this exercise. And he's like, you are on your own. - You're having so much fun doing this. I know this is the best part of the episode for you. - I lean KG over, right? If that's the question here, I still-- - For the high end. - For the high end. - Yeah, I think I mean-- - You think he has an argument for number one, but not Yokech. - I, this might make people angry. I think KG has a better argument for number one than Yokech does. - Yeah. - I agree with that, but at a very marginal, like very splitting hairs. And also, I should also remind everyone, the ranges we're talking about, I think it's important for just sanity and clarity. Anytime we do a range, we hold everyone else on the list constant, right? But what we're not doing is we're not saying, if we take the low end of number one and the high end of number 17, and that's where it gets really interesting where it's like, of course I can make an argument that Yokech is above my number one, if I take the low end of the number one as well. So I think I just talked to myself into the spirit of the, the spirit of this exercise. Yokech is two through nine. - Yep. - And Garnet is, I think also two through, and we'll do one, I'm with you Cody. I'm with you. - Yeah, yeah. We'll do one or nine. - There's just something about, like KG just works everywhere all the time on both ends of the court, and I'll unabashedly say the KG just rocks in so many flexible ways that, I don't know, I think he has a better case, and I'm sticking with you on this one. - Next, I'm gonna go with, Steph Curry, one through nine. Notice the nine, and I think this is just a function very similar with Yokech of like, you have a neutral defensive player, so there isn't that, there's not that much variability there, and the rest is just how low can you get on his offense? - Shaq, one through six, at number two, and at number one, I'm gonna go with 2013 LeBron James based on our conversation, even though I think 2017 LeBron James is, as we said in the best offensive rankings, a better offensive version. The defense is just too compelling. It's just too compelling, yeah. - I don't know what to do about Shaq. I think, I really don't know, if I made the list, I can't promise you that I wouldn't put Shaq number one. - Yeah, Cody did say this to me a long time ago, and I didn't tell him for a while who I was gonna have number one, and he was like, is it Shaq? It might be Shaq, Shaq is the thing. I just don't think there's any way to reasonably think high enough of his defense, to really make it, like obviously he's relatively close, right? But to really, for me to feel really comfortable about it, whereas LeBron is a better defender. LeBron is a better defender than 2001 Shaq. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. - I think I turned a little bit recently, like I think I held Shaq's defense in higher regard. I think I maybe overrated the paint defense, the room protection and stuff, but again, you watch all of these guys in close proximity, and maybe this is in fair, but you go from watching a lot of KG playing defense, and then you watch Shaq play defense, and some of the awareness stuff kind of bubbles up, some of the like, oh wow, there's some holes here that Jason Kidd's kind of picking at. There's some inactivity that people are able to pop out and do something about, right? And it's like there's an inflexibility to the defense, even though there's like some Titanic signals in the paint. So on one hand, I could, like if you're gonna come in strong and say actually, here's a really strong case for Shaq being a moderately good defender. I mean, he is a good defender, but a better defender than we're talking about, then yeah, I'll accept him at number one. But I think the defense of case for LeBron does vault him above this. - I wanna say one more thing about defense, 'cause obviously throughout the series, we have a lot of two way players. As I always do when I do these kinds of projects, and we just talked about LeBron's defense being a tiebreaker. There are a lot of people out there who send me messages, and they're very thoughtful and they're very reasonable, and they say stuff like, you know, man, at the end of the day, I just wanna have that offensive guy can build around who can be a force in the playoffs, et cetera, et cetera. And the thing is, if you look through any kind of large sample data, like we look through in this series, the impact signals are always gonna be bigger for the great offensive players and the great defensive players. They just always are. That's how basketball works. You have the ball and you're in control on offense and you're not on defense. But parentheses, maybe Bill Russell, you know, and his error maybe things were different. But I think when people do this, and they kinda like have this dismissal of defensive players or two way players, whether it's Yannis or Kevin Garnand or Hakeem Alajewan or David Robinson is another on and on and on and on, I think they're double counting. We already know that the defense is way stronger than the offense. We said we have three defensive player of the year, sorry, five defensive player of the year kind of candidates in that in this whole series. I don't think any of their defense, maybe with the exception of KG, would get into our top 12 or 14 offensive players conversation that we just talked about. That's the difference. So all I'm saying here is making an impassioned plea. Just if you really, really, really, really love offense that much, I think you're, we're already making it in. I just think people double count when at the end of the day, they're like, "Ah, I'd rather have this LeBron "that's a better offensive player." I don't see the evidence that 2017 LeBron, who I agree is clearly a better offensive player than 2013, is gonna be so much better in a playoff series that he can make up for the defensive gap that he gives back. And that's where I worry about double counting when people are just like, "You can't, you can't have, "I can't, you can't have Garnett up there, "you can't have Tim Duncan, Tim Duncan, what?" You can't have him up there, stuff like that. And I mean, like LeBron comparing him to himself, like the 2013 range is just, he's just so much bigger and so much more active defensively. And I know I keep bringing up KG, but like the defense and Dremont Green and the way that you can button up and it changes the geometry of the opponent's court and it helps everyone else in your team. Like that's another way I wish we could measure things. It's just how valuable some of this other stuff is defensively. And maybe we'll do the series again in another decade and we'll be like, actually, we've come up with some new stats that rethink so a lot of this defense. Or maybe I'll never rank anything ever again. To support this podcast, patreon.com/thinkingbasketball. That's the best way to do it. We're excited to kick off the season. We're gonna have member videos coming back when the season gets going shortly. We will be back for the season preview for the 2026 season. If you're listening from the future, hopefully you've enjoyed this podcast series and this episode and what we've gone through. It was a lot of fun for me. Cody convinced me to do this at the dawn of the summer and he did not really fully tell me what he was roping me and I thought we were doing like three episodes and then getting to some other topic about Chuck Hayes from 2009 or something like that. And here we are, 14 episodes later. Cody, look what you've done. - This is probably the most fun I've had podcasting. If I'm gonna be completely honest with you, this is the most fun I've had. Across all the things that we've talked about, across me, punting on ranking the top shooters in the league. Like I know there's just some great times, but this one probably takes the cake over things like that. - Thanks to everybody for all your great comments throughout this series and your support. And thanks as always to our Patreon supporters and our YouTube subscribers who follow along and have commented throughout and have supported us from the audience in this series. It's been a lot of fun. That is it. That is it for this one. You have one more thought? - I do have one more thought. I have saved this one more learning from the series that has nothing to do with basketball. We're gonna spread it out to real life and it circles back to Mono Genobli. And when we talked about Mono Genobli and I think Kobe Bryant has it too, what makes them successful is that you cannot chase them off their spot. Their spot is being chased off their spot. And to you all out there listening to this, living your lives, not being professional basketball players, being comfortable being chased off your spot and then you will find success in your own rankings for how successful you are in life. - Thanks for listening to this one. And of course, we hope you are having a great day. (upbeat music)