Ben Taylor: If I’m going to make the home run argument (for GOAT offensive player) Curry might have the best one. One of the great lessons of the last decade is we’re talking about a 6’2 dude from Davidson as possibly being a better offensive player than Jordan. Based on data & watching the film...Curry is the guy out of all the guys, who really seems to have the argument to offensively eclipse MJ & Magic & Lebron
From his latest podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinking-basketball/id1428290303?i=1000516818076
This is where stats get dangerous. Stats today are still very primitive and the conversation is going to switch in the next two decades. APG for examples is going to be quickly put on the back burner when scoring opportunities are going to be contextualized much better.
Credit:sriracha82 for initial post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCKSvjBnCRQ&t=1s
1:52-on: Ben claims Wilt’s 1962 is not in the best 100 seasons of all-time.
But Ben never tells his viewers that Wilt’s 1962 ranks in the TOP 4 ALL TIME in WS, OWS, and PER.
If that's not a top-100 offensive season, then where does it rank? Ben never says.
2:48-on: By ignoring era/context, Ben misleads his viewers about Wilt’s scoring rate per possession
Ben says that Wilt's PTS/poss would rank only 7th in the league in 2020.
But Ben TOTALLY IGNORES CONTEXT, the difference in league scoring efficiency (ORTG) between 1962 & 2020
CONTEXT: PTS/100 possessions (ORtg/DRtg) were 17% higher per possession in 2020 vs. 1962.
Adjusted to 2020 ORtg from 1962, Wilt’s 1962 would be: 45.0 PTS/100 poss, or 33.8/75.
That's not "7th in 2020"; that's 2nd after adjusting!
And it's 4th HIGHEST ALL TIME!
Ben focuses on Wilt’s scoring volume (without adjusting for era). Ben mentions Iverson as another volume scorer.
But Ben ignores that Wilt--unlike Iverson--combined very high efficiency with volume: 113 career TS+, including 110 TS+ in his high-scoring Warrior years.
3:21-on: Ben’s focuses on Wilt's unadjusted PTS/poss numbers.
But he never mentions that other great players of Wilt's era--Baylor, Oscar, and West--had lower numbers unadjusted for context than Wilt’s.
Thus, Ben never mentions that young Wilt was THE GREATEST SCORER OF HIS ERA
3:21-on: Ben claims that Wilt was a "black hole." To support this, he shows a graph of TSA/poss and AST/poss.
This graph is misleading bc--once again--Ben does NOT adjust for context: League average AST/poss were 28% LOWER in 1962 compared to 2020, so Wilt's AST should be adjusted up 28% to make 1962 equivalent with 2020.
Thus, by not adjusting for era, Ben is underestimating Wilt's AST/TSA by 28% in his misleading graph.
Ben also does not supply context by comparing Wilt to other "finishers," as Wilt was early in his career.
Wilt's best comparison is Shaq.
Adjusted for context and MP/G, Wilt’s first 7 years and Shaq’s first 7 are almost identical in TS%, TSA/AST, PTS/36, AST/36, and REB/36.
Regarding AST/TSA, Ben ignores most of Wilt's career.
Wilt was a “black hole” for his first 3 years.
But for 8 straight years afterwards, he was in the TOP-3 among all NBA centers in AST/MP (note: his high MP didn’t help him in this stat). And he was in the top-6 all 11 years.
Ben claims that Wilt was “an outlier of outliers” when it comes to being a “black hole.”
The rea
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I watch a lot of his videos, including his recent greatest peak series, and I like him a lot, but some of his takes have not aged well. For example, Harden not being scale-able, and benefiting from D'Antoni's system. Also, his top 10 rankings at the end of each season can produce some odd results, like LeBron being 6th on his list in 2019.
Also, some of the stats he uses are incredibly subjective, like the passer rating one.
What do y'all think of him as an analyst?
https://preview.redd.it/bql9m32ylmm61.jpg?width=1448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b5e91bb6c0843040e64b0b46fe62c798ec2ec37d
Ben Taylor, r/nba's favorite analyst, has talked about Harden's on ball dominance for years, how it would prevent him from gelling with other superstars that have the ball in their hands, and how that ultimately precludes him from being among the top 3-4 players in the league.
I always found that pretty ridiculous because Harden is just immensely talented as an overall offensive player and while he has monopolized the ball in several seasons in the past, he's easily good enough to adapt to any system. We're seeing this now how Harden is working seamlessly alongside Kyrie and Durant to engineer one of the best offenses we've seen.
Is it time to do away with this narrative about Harden, despite it coming from this sub's beloved analyst spokesman?
The pool report is out from the reporters asking the refs questions about what happened with Draymond’s 2nd tech. The ref said it was because of profanity perceived to be directed at an official.
Through the ref said he heard the explanation from Kerr, Draymond, & others, that did not change their minds on rescinding the technical. Draymond obviously did not buy that:
> In response to referee crew chief Ben Taylor’s quotes, @Money23Green tells @TheUndefeated: “Wow. Bold. Privilege.”
> https://twitter.com/marcjspears/status/1352507763788668928?s=21
Draymond’s reputation definitely got him on this one. Too bad for the warriors, as they went in the tank after that.
They discussed about general state of the game and how the basketball currently looks, I'll just point out couple of things they talk about, they talked about bunch other stuff so add them in if you remember.
1 Free Throw that would bring 2/3 points instead of 2/3 Free Throws that bring 1 point today
The idea of this would be to speed up the course of the game, to have less waiting during free throws. This experiment is currently being run in the G-League and there they have noticed that the FT% at the level of the whole league has decreased a bit, but this was to be expected given that throughout history players on average shoot better on the second throw. Also, they noticed that players take more time before shooting the free throw than when they shoot 2 of them.
Long Breaks vs More Shorter Breaks
Also one of the things they are interested in is timeout/pause analysis, but from standpoint of players (meaning, to what players respond better in terms of recovery and conditioning).
That is, is it better to have shorter breaks, or is it better to have breaks/timeouts with a longer duration?
And they observe this by taking into account the physical indicators of the players, how their heart rate and other things react to those breaks (since each player has some sort of heart rate monitor and other things as far as I've figured).
Also, they came to the conclusion that the commercial breaks are far too long (obviously).
Cost/Benefit of the Replay System
They also wondered if it makes sense to have a replay system, or rather how fans react to it, so they conducted a survey with fans to see if they were willing to sacrifice time to see the right decision being made, and most of them said they indeed wanted to.
Therefore, they concluded that it should be invested as much as possible into getting a faster review of suspicious situations.
Is there too much offense?
This was a question that Ben asked Evan. After that, they talked about how recent rule changes actually benefited offensive players, but weren't intended to.
They mentioned how the Zaza rule (when defending player plants foot under shooter) gets abused and how players get more and more free throws because of that (they soon went into a discussion about free throws, 1st point of this post). They both agreed that this has to be regulated a bit better.
Also, I'd like to add that the shot clock reset rule to 14 seconds also helps with boosting offense.
As mentioned at the beg
... keep reading on reddit ➡Spotify link to Ben Howard‘s new album: https://open.spotify.com/album/09P40BHcaue9iF4QasXMTK?si=kBr9cZtpTKaC3sHM-4bIQg
Link to Taylor‘s song:
https://open.spotify.com/track/5pcjystBtalYeqaiXCcgEY?si=i6XEIeYMQPmZ6Cps4gW6ug
I‘m currently listening to Ben Howard’s nee album and it‘s very interesting both sonically and lyrically but I definitely need some time with it.
Taylor‘s new song is very catchy and I like that it shares some lyrical parallels to "Clean". It‘s certainly not up there with folklore and evermore but I like it nonetheless.
Aaron‘s range is remarkable. Feel free to discuss your thoughts about these two new releases! :)
On his most recent episode of the Thinking Basketball podcast,Taylor has a conversation with Evan Wasch EVP of analytics for the nba,where they discuss many of the things that Simmons and Russilo were whining about on that legendary podcast a few sundays ago.
That being said,I was wondering what the people on this sub think about the answers given in the episode,and should Bill get a sizzling exclusive interview with an NBA employee like that.
Ben Taylor: If I’m going to make the home run argument (for GOAT offensive player) Curry might have the best one. One of the great lessons of the last decade is we’re talking about a 6’2 dude from Davidson as possibly being a better offensive player than Jordan. Based on data & watching the film...Curry is the guy out of all the guys, who really seems to have the argument to offensively eclipse MJ & Magic & Lebron
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinking-basketball/id1428290303?i=1000516818076 From his latest podcast, it’s a good listen
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