Anthony Davis and Trajectories (183 views)

[eric]

It is commonly believed that Anthony Davis is due to take a leap in his fourth season. Let us look at history from the ABA-NBA merger to the present. It turns out that last year Anthony Davis became only the twelfth player to post 14+ Win Shares in at least one of his first three seasons, so let's look at this very elite company in chronological order:

Michael Jordan
David Robinson
Shaquille O'Neal
Anfernee Hardaway
Grant Hill
Dirk Nowitzki
Amar'e Stoudemire
LeBron James
Dwyane Wade
Chris Paul
Kevin Durant

Now, two of the top ten all-timers are in there, another four MVPs, three Finals MVPs. It's a good place to start. But obviously the first thing that jumps out about this list are the cautionary tales. Amar'e, Hill, and Anfernee felled by microfracture; Paul, Robinson, and Wade with less devastating injuries but still ones that noticeably diminished their athletic ability; Shaq ate a lot of doughnuts. Eerily, four of these men suffered major injuries in exactly year 4: Shaq, Penny, Amar'e, and Wade.

Even putting that aside, however, there's no trend of year four leap for these players. If we strike all the injured year fours from the record (as well as Jordan's year two), we get averages of 7.4, 11.1, and 15.2 Win Shares for years one through three, followed by 14.6 for year four. Not only that, the only two players to improve their WS from year three to four at all were Chris Paul (17.8 -> 18.3) and of course Michael Jordan (16.9 -> 21.2) who had the highest values for any player in both years. GOAT.

Anthony Davis is almost exactly on this trendline, which again is clearly a good thing: he has gone 6.1, 10.4, 14.0. If he stays on trend, we would expect him to get 13.4 Win Shares this coming year. That would have been fifth best in the league last year; again, clearly a good thing. What we don't expect from history is a dominant 18+ year that brute arithmetic would suggest. Bottom line,

Let's All Just Relax about Anthony Davis

[eric]

You may be wondering where Larry Bird and Magic Johnson's names are on that list. It's not an oversight. Magic was a co-second option until the Lakers got rid of Norm Nixon and didn't really take over as a first option until the late 80s, and it's really hard to get multiple 14 WS players on the same team. (How hard? Hasn't happened in over 20 years. See end of post for answer.) Bird is just slightly overrated. Tim Duncan is also a surprising no-show, but it turns out his second year was the first lockout and prorated over 82 games he probably would have reached 14.

92 Bulls: Jordan and Grant
89, 90, 91 Jazz: Stockton and Malone
87 Celtics: McHale and Bird
70 Knicks: Clyde and Reed

Six times ever. Really hard.

[dilworth]

Interesting. Good stuff.

[Druce]

eric, what is your take on scottie pippen?

[eric]

Druce

I haven't done a lot on rating secondary players, either among themselves or against primary options. Here are some facts, though, all courtesy of basketball-reference.com:

-Pippen's PER-USG was stable at -4 in the Jordanless years when his USG increased. Though it didn't increase by all that much, we can be reasonably sure Pippen could have handled a larger number of touches without loss in efficiency.

-In terms of cumulative Win Shares, Pippen was behind Grant for the first threepeat (32.5 to 33.6). This relationship also held for the playoffs: 7.4 to 8.4. However, Pippen made two All-NBA teams during that run and Grant made zero in his entire career.

-In terms of cumulative WS/48, Pippen's numbers dropped in the playoffs by a far higher percentage than Jordan's did for both championship runs: .288/.267 .168/.148 and .279/.268 .203/.169.

As far as I'm concerned, you can compare a wrench to a wrench or a hammer to a hammer. Trying to compare a wrench to a hammer makes no sense. If an age-adjusted Drexler switches places with Pippen, does anything change? Do the Blazers win in 1990 or 1992, do the Bulls win any fewer in general, do the 94 or 95 seasons turn out differently? Who knows? Who cares? There's no objective way to even begin to know, which means any discussion on it is just people listing their opinions.

What we know is that Scottie Pippen had 5 seasons of 10+ WS as a secondary player. That puts him on the Kevin McHale, Bob Parish, Shawn Marion, Pau Gasol, John Stockton level, and for me there's no higher tier for secondary players. The names in the list really illustrate why it's hard to rank secondary players, though, because success is primarily determined by the primary player. Does Pippen have the most rings because he's the best of them, or because Michael Jordan is the best of Jordan/Bird/Nash/Kobe/Karl, or both? Again, there's no way of knowing.

[KwYawnza]

Karl Marx used a theory of historical trajectory to explain how capitalism will fail and a new egalitarian system was to emerge in its place.

[eric]

Last night Anthony Davis put up 29 and 11 in an 11 point Pelicans loss, continuing a trend where his per-game stats are eerily similar to last year's (24.4 10.3 1.9 vs 24.4 10.2 2.2) but the Pelicans always lose.

Of far greater concern, the Pelicans were -23 in Davis 34 minutes and thus +12 in the other 14, and for the year his on/off is an astonishing -1.4.

Monty Williams got a lot of justified criticism, and it's almost obligatory for a great player to have a coaching change early in their career. (Duncan and Russell are the only exceptions I can think of.)

The Pelicans' supporting cast is generally terrible, but so were the 07 Cavs, the 89 Bulls, and so on.

Even my conservative estimate of 13.4 Win Shares is wayyy out of the question for AD this year: he could play every minute of every game at a .300 WS/48 clip and not even break 13.

.

The Warriors are dominating the headlines and LeBron is going to be our national schadenfreude target until he's been retired for ten years, but there's something seriously amiss with Anthony Davis; or rather, something seriously amiss with what we "know" about Anthony Davis. I have no doubt the usual suspects will publish about his will to win, or his body language, or how stats can't tell you everything, or how he got paid too much too soon, or any of the usual excuses. Sometimes we're just wrong about a player. This is one of those times.

[Citizen Cane]

just needs to spend some time with the Miami Heat