Whoever listed Duncan ... really? Duncan is pretty much just as old and worn out as KG is, and IMHO KG is the more versatile player right now. In fact IMHO KG always was the better player.
Tyson Chandler or Brooke Lopez, please. KG would move back to PF of course.
Brook Lopez?
You really want a 7 foot center who struggles to grab 7 rebounds per game?
Joakim Noah: WP/48 of .219 and 9.8 WP. Amazing passer too for a C.
Those are the top Tier.
Next would be Marc Gasol, Al Horford, Dwight Howard, Javale McGee, Deandre Jordan, and Andre Drummond. Possibly Greg Monroe.
Those are the "stars" I'd rather have.
The list no one will agree with:
Omer Asik, Tiago Splitter, Larry Sanders, Kosta Koufos, Greg Smith (love this kid), Marcin Gortat
There are 24 centers with better Wins Produced this year than KG. KG is an all time great, just not this year. This is one of his worst seasons by FAR. He is producing .082 WP/48 in alot of minutes, coming to only 3.0 Wins Produced. His 2000/2001 was his last "bad" season with a pretty good .143 WP/48, with 9.3 WP (with a massive 39.5 minutes/game)
You DO realise that there is more to basketball than WS / 48 right?
Joakim Noah is NOT a top Tier Center. He's a good center, not top tier. The only reason I'd consider Noah over KG is future potential - in their current states I'd take KG any time, but Noah obviously has more years in him.
Javale McGee, Deandre Jordan and Andre Drummond are not stars. I don't know much ab our Drummond but McGee and Jordan are pretty similar players - athletic bigs who's talent level pretty much stops at dunking, rebounding and blocking shot. Jordan has practically no offensive game, and McGee will lose you more games than he wins with his moronic behaviour.
Tim Duncan is averaging almost a double-double and 2.8 blocks in 29 minutes and getting payed less stop being a homer
First off, i did not use Win Shares per 48, it was Wins Produced per 48, a completely different stat. It is the highest correlated stat to actual NBA wins derived and has been able to predict within a percent or two of the total actual Wins a team gets (averaged over every team). Now beyond that, i know that is not the be all end all of analysis, i just knew that my post was getting long and discussing much more in depth stats would have been very long winded. Your analysis of Deandre Jordan, Mcgee and especially Drummond are quite lacking. These players are stars in that they produce on the basketball court far above average. Did you know that Javale Mcgee's Turnovers/48 is exactly average for his position (his career average is actually lower than position average). Doesn't sound incredibly boneheaded to me. Over the last 4 years he's averaged 13.7 rbds/48 and over 5 off rbds/48! That's awesome. He also has an amazing True Shooting % of 58.9%! (centers average 54.2%). Truely a gifted player who has a bad rap.
The vaunted '95%' correlation of Wins Produced is a bit of a case of patting oneself on the back. The individual WP apportionment are ultimately fractional shares distributed from whole team wins, thus in aggregation simply reconstitute themselves. If WP did not do that well at team win correlation I would be worried. The problem with WP is that it suffers from the same fundamental flaw that Win Shares and PER suffer: The weighted value assigned to each contributing 'box score' stat that goes into its calculation is both arbitrary and completely lacking context.
By 'context' I mean that the weight of expected production in each category is contextual based on team and role. The expectations of a starting center on team A are completely different from the expectations of a starting center on team B. Even more so the difference in expectations across different positions. Each player may be just as 'valuable' to each team but for completely different reasons.
Derivative, aggregation stats in basketball currently all suffer from this problem.
Similar stats in baseball, such as WAR, have proven successful for the reason that in baseball, you have several key differences:
1) There is no salary cap. Thus dollar valuations of contracts are closer to market driven rather than skewed by cap and exception rules. This is important because it provides a sanity check for the models.
2) Roles in baseball are highly compartmentalized, well defined and consistent across teams. The offensive expectations of all hitters are consistent across all positions and teams. The defensive expectations across positions are different, but are again, consistent across teams.
3) Even though defensive expectations are different across positions, we are able to know exactly when a player is in each position.
These things enable models to adjust say, the defensive value of a shortstop versus that of a DH.
Basketball lacks all of these things and aggregate 'roll up' stats continue to be a crap shoot for evaluating individual players.
This is not to say that PER, WS and WP are completely useless. But they are only useful when comparing players within very tightly similar contexts.
It's late and I don't have time to post a full rational on why, but having looked extensively at a lot of the statistics prior to the All Star break, I remain unconvinced that any center in the East is playing better than Kevin Garnett so far this season. I've posted elsewhere showing that his rate normalized production and efficiencies across all aspects (offense AND defense) were pretty clearly better than those of Chandler, Noah, Bosh, Hibbert et al. The reasoning ultimately boils down to that everyone of the other centers in the East is fundamentally flawed along some axis. It is important to note that in this analysis, yes, I am assigning my own arbitrary 'weight' to each factor. But it is MY analysis and it should reflect what I consider valuable in the assessment. I admit I did not do the comparison with centers from the West. If I have time, I may pull that together. I can accept that its possible one or two of those guys out west might edge KG.
So, to the purpose of the thread - if the question is who I would take over KG right now fort he present? No one.
If for the future? That depends on how far down the road. Long term, probably Vusevic or Drummond. Not so long-term, maybe Noah.
Topic: What center would you rather have instead of KG ? (Read 7032 times)