The 10 Best NBA peaks since 1977

after 15 videos and six hours of breakdowns we've arrived at the fruitless endeavor of ranking these players before we hit the countdown there are a few things to sort out first i considered a handful of active players as candidates for this series but they still may be peaking there are a number of videos on this channel about them already if you're interested there were also older players who didn't quite make the cut and for some of you these players will be in your personal top tens many of them will hopefully be featured in a future series but the best of the rest for me were probably dwayne wade and dirk nowitzki next remember the criteria for this series we're only interested in on-court impact that increases a team's odds of winning a championship there are also no time machines this is about a player's impact in his time relative to the league a peak must have multiple seasons so players with single year spikes will be slightly lower than if this were a list of one-year peaks and finally this list only includes stars after the aba merger in 1977 and the simple reason for this is confidence we don't have the same data quality going far back in time and we have a considerable shortage of film in the 60s and even the early 70s to work with so our confidence intervals back then are much wider wilt chamberlain bill russell jerry west and oscar robertson would all be strong top 10 candidates if we went back to the shock clock but there's a bit too much uncertainty to give them the same level of depth as these post-merger stars and uncertainty will be a theme on this list i'll emphasize ranges as usual but the size of those ranges will be larger than normal because these players are so good that a five percent confidence interval makes a bigger difference than with typical all nba level players and in a way that's one of my biggest takeaways from this series there's only so much we can reasonably differentiate between players of this quality with the tools we currently have with that said here's my best effort to sort out the best of the best if i held everyone else on this list constant and used an optimistic evaluation bill walton could go as high as 10th well either kevin durant or kobe bryant could be up at 8th but for me the number 10 slot goes to magic johnson magic is a candidate for the best offensive player in history because he relentlessly hunted for high end shots with his own scoring or passing this concept is discussed in thinking basketball the book in more detail and we also have decades of plus-minus data showing us that volume playmaking is incredibly valuable remember the lakers offense torched opponents during magic's peak but these were also gifted offensive rosters without irvine from 1986 to 89 the lakers were still 2.4 points ahead of league average in 29 games and some of those games were played without the secondary playmaking of michael cooper i also think we underestimate just how skilled magic was as a scorer looking at his adjusted playoff scoring by series we see times where he ramped up his own volume with great success those numbers inside the circles are his team's offensive efficiency so a plus 14 means the lakers offensive rating was 14 points better than their opponent's regular season defense a fantastic number as a central offensive hub i view magic as one of the three best decision makers in league history and that's reflected in his box score where he looks like one of the best offensive players ever a minor downside is that he needs the ball to exert that value so he paired best with finishers and great quick hitting post players but the much bigger issue in this conversation is his defense he often guarded bigger lesser skilled players while smaller more skilled defenders like cooper or byron scott took the opposing lead guard more importantly he just wasn't much of a paint presence despite his size usually playing one of the forward positions on defense so i see johnson as a neutral defender during these seasons and even a negative by the end of the 80s my low end evaluation would drop him behind everyone else in this series but his high end estimation would take him all the way to fifth while magic was a one-way superstar we saw the impact of two-way bigs throughout this series walton's defense and high post offense led to a dominant two-year stretch during an era of parody and stars like anthony davis kevin garnett tim duncan david robinson dave cowans and wilt chamberlain have all racked up championships playing this defensive number one offensive number two role you know who else played that role scottie pippen these aforementioned players have starred on 13 championship teams since the merger 16 if we include an even weaker offensive player like draymond green 18 if we include a slightly weaker defender like mid-80s kevin mchale and then there are lighter versions of this archetype like rasheed wallace and even late career kareem abdul-jabbar depending on where we draw the lines about half of the titles since the aba merger have featured one of these defensive stars who is also a big offensive contributor by comparison a little more than two-thirds of all post-merger championships have been led by clear-cut offensive superstars like magic or kobe which leads us to the case study for building around this archetype tim duncan alongside quality teammates duncan made these spurs a title contender in basically every season he was healthy during his prime his one number metrics in the playoffs are even better than magix although i do think there's some noise to sift through there his surrounding years look drastically different despite being a fairly similar player compare that to someone like garnett whose postseason numbers throughout his prime consistently echoed his historically strong regular season plus minus results kg's tricky to evaluate because he only played a few dozen games in minnesota and because scoring was his weakest attribute he was just entering his prime as a scorer in 2003 before leveling up again in 2004 which leaves us with four playoff series to analyze and half of those games were against the lakers a team statistically underrated by their regular season defense and a team garnett struggled with in general despite being a slightly weaker scorer in boston his playoff numbers in 2008 were better when he was the leading postseason scorer on a good but not great championship offense with small samples like this we can also look to the regular season 4 clues where garnett's adjusted scoring numbers against stronger defenses looked almost identical to duncan's during their best scoring years timmy did beat up on weaker defenses in a way garnett never did and i think that reflects a slight isolation scoring edge for duncan he was able to pressure the rim with his strength and low post gain duncan's playoff scoring during their peaks was a clear wrong above what garnett ever reached but garnett's also pretty clearly a better passer to me which gives him a minor playmaking edge ultimately neither of these players is driving a world-class offense by themselves they need to be paired with another heavy lifter or two and that's where garnett's extra passing outside shooting and quick hitting attack makes up some value despite duncan's edge in isolation scoring on defense i used to actually prefer timmy's rim protection for that era because his team's defenses were so good but i think it's pretty clear now that these spurs were elite defensive team without duncan he and kg actually saw similar changes in some of these defensive metrics for instance minnesota couldn't protect the paint like san antonio but the degree of improvement in paint defense with garnett on the court was comparable to dunkins and kg has the best defensive awareness of any player i've ever studied in a considerable sample that's enough for me to give him a small edge on defense and i value his passing and outside shooting next to better and better teammates if that's not crazy enough for you yet at number 7 is the controversial steph curry and yes curry also has an argument for as high as number three on this list if viewed optimistically these players are all just so ridiculously good and hard to clearly separate like magic steph is basically providing one-way impact but i slightly prefer his offensive package maybe if we look at his adjusted plus minus over three year periods steph looks like an outlier in offensive impact now one limitation with this stat is that it's hard to untangle it from a player's role on his team in this case steve kerr's offense which is why a compelling data point for me is how good curry was from 2013 to 15 which includes two years of mark jackson coaching him and it's before he ramped up his aggression to 11 in 2016. my bigger question with steph is whether that impact holds in the playoffs and as we saw during his episode i'd say it loses a little bite but the general signal as an outlying offensive force remains from 2016 to 2019 the warriors outscored playoff opponents by 10 points per 48 minutes with curry on the court and that was a 15 point improvement from when he sat in those games almost all of which came on the offensive end it's also apparent to me that curry isn't some clear negative on defense my concern there is durability related first could he stay healthy and then second how much could teams wear down his offense by targeting him on the other end and away from the ball that tactic seemed to have some success but opponents who sold out to take away his scoring still paid a gravity tax and since the box score can't capture that well it makes it look like his impact declined more than it probably did at number 6 i start to get a little more comfortable with kareem abdul-jabbar there's certainly less uncertainty for me with cap i wouldn't drop him below 10th although i'm a little lower on his high end than some of the surrounding players so he lands here remember this is strictly late 70s kareem so including a few of the prior years might even bump him up for me he was clearly a strong rim protector but there were also lulls in his defensive awareness i see him well below walton as a paint protector but pinpointing kareem's exact defensive impact is tricky and minor changes would move him up a few spots on a list like this another challenge is gauging his offensive impact without a three point line more modern post players can spruce up their shot creation by kicking it out to shooters for three but abdul-jabbar didn't have that luxury he had some post gravity and he could pass too but it was really his crazy scoring that powered most of his value we've talked about resiliency in this series and that sky hook was just about as resilient as it gets you can see from his series by series results that it was almost impossible to take away his individual scoring but i don't think he had the playmaking to crack the inner circle of modern offensive legends so while he's an incredible post anchor for the time i'm not confident he has one of the three or four best peaks since the merger at number five i have larry bird who could go all the way back to 13th using a low end perspective and yes broken record time could go all the way up to third when viewed optimistically unlike kareem bird's volume scoring is his biggest question mark in an otherwise transcendent offensive package we know his scoring declined in the playoffs and against strong defenses but this was still dangerous scoring among closer examination from 1984 to 87 his adjusted playoff numbers were good but a step down in volume compared to the best of the best in the regular season his scoring rate fell off against the athletic lakers defense but there's also reason to believe he was worn down by huge minutes in the playoffs and that infamous bar fight in the 1985 eastern finals might have hampered his scoring that year too without kevin mchale in the mid-80s bird did ramp up his volume by a few points so i do think he traded in some of his own scoring to set up skilled teammates and most importantly that scoring still demanded defensive attention that kept boston's offense at elite levels since we know playmaking is a huge driver of offensive impact i think bird's incredible passing movement shooting split-second decision making and propensity for finding layups made him an all-time level playmaker like curry that spacing movement and even gravity aren't easily detectable in a stat sheet but they do help the team's offense perform at amazing levels for example in 1989 boston played 40 games with their same starting lineup from the year before only with reggie lewis replacing an injured bird that team played slightly over 500 ball and posted a strong offensive rating relative to the league but when the celtics had that starting lineup together in 88 they were nearly six points better on offense posting a whopping plus 9.6 offensive rating and while it's only a single piece of information it represents the kind of ceiling raising i think bird had without all-time level scoring on defense he was a playmaker with great hands and some rim protection and was often early in paint rotations he was certainly limited as a perimeter defender but that's still a good positive package which is essentially the difference compared to magic here peak for peak much like positions 5 through 8 on this list i could flip a coin between third and fourth let's start with hakeem olajuwon whose defense moves the needle so much that it's hard for me to have him lower than tenth perhaps nothing reinforces the crazy value of rim protection back in the 90s like hakeem averaging nearly five blocks per game in the 1993 playoffs because the three-point line wasn't popular yet we have plus minus studies reaching back into the 90s slightly after olajuwon's peak and rim protectors display some massive defensive value in the 21st century the game's best offensive players have reached greater heights than the game's best defensive players but defensive superstars aren't that far behind while each individual player has some uncertainty in these studies the presence of so many dominant rim protectors at the top makes it likely that olajuwon was in a similar ballpark in terms of value in the mid 90s i actually find akeem's offensive impact to be a bit fuzzier he was clearly a great isolation scorer who gave teams a solid floor in the playoffs but he also never played on a really good regular season offense so we couldn't see him blend his game with another big time star his best offensive teammate was clyde drexler in 1995 and in 26 games they posted a healthy offensive rating before an even hotter stretch in their championship run playing inside out off of hakeem's post scoring was clearly the way to build around him and it's tempting to view their successful playoff offense with that shorter three-point line as proof that he's a heliocentric superstar but some of those lineups were offensively slanted and more importantly had more viable shooters than most teams could expect at that point especially with robert orry reigning in threes as they stretch power forward i tend to view olajuwon as the best of the two-way big men a solid offensive centerpiece with the right offensive talent around him but someone otherwise limited by his playmaking preventing him from cracking the top two on this list shaq on the other hand was a true all-timer on offense he was also aided by three-point shooting teammates but o'neill separated himself in a few ways from basically every offensive center in the first 65 years of the shock clock his off-ball presence constantly working for dangerous paint catches allowed him to fit next to perimeter stars without monopolizing the ball and he was also a solid passer so he could hit those shooters and cutters too if we return to that four year plus minus graphic in the playoffs shaq barely misqualifying because he only sat for 448 minutes but his impact looks enormous and unlike most big men that impact is primarily on offense ironically it's defense that keeps the diesel down for me the lakers surrounded him with a ton of three and d players and even though shaq had success as a rim protector his lack of mobility and engagement clearly limited his defensive punch relative to his size in a number of series over the years teams successfully attacked o'neill and pick and roll and stretch big men could give him problems as well most impact metrics view his regular season defense as good but a clear run or so below the great defense of big men and that defensive plus minus might be inflated because opposing coaches played so many unskilled bigs just to bang with shaq and eat up fouls still of all the players we've discussed so far my high end evaluation of shaq would take him above everyone else although there is still some separation between him and the top two players on this list michael jordan and lebron james before this series i thought michael had some space between him and lebron but i'm not so sure anymore then again i'm more confident in mj's floor as a player my low end range would take him just a hair behind shaq's high-end evaluation whereas james has more question marks for me that take his low end estimation down a bit more if i were building a team with role players who could shoot and defend i'd probably take lebron he's one of the three best decision makers of the three point era giving the entire offense a resiliency when you take away his scoring he punishes you with playmaking and yes i do think peak lebron was a better defender than this version of mj and this two-way impact makes james the greatest floor-raiser ever in my book on the other hand lebron matured more as a passer in later years whereas jordan pretty much lined up everything from 1989 to 1991 those were his best passing and his best scoring years well his defense and motor were still a lead as we saw michael has a really strong case for the best scorer in league history and that relentless pressure turned mj into one of history's greatest play makers his shot creation estimates are higher than lebron's were in his best three miami seasons even when wade went to the bench then again lebron's scoring doesn't seem that far behind jordan's he didn't match michael's overall volume but remember when wade sat lebron cranked his volume up to mj levels and the overall heat offense was dominant that whole lebron ball thing we discussed was pretty good pretty pretty pretty good i have both of them as top 10 scorers and playmakers ever during these peaks and both led high-end playoff offenses although jordan's teams weren't as efficient as lebron's until pippin and the rest of the roster rounded into form it was probably impossible to surround a superstar with specialists in the 80s and reach the offensive height that lebron ball generated with competent three-point shooters and that matters here since this is all about impact relative to era we only have league wide plus minus data in the playoffs since 1997 but jordan's three-year peak was up with the modern titans of this stat and in a more stable metric like augmented plus minus mj would rank second among all players on record of course lebron's best stretch is third all-time only that came in his first cleveland stint and the fourth best stretch also belongs to lebron from his second cleveland stint these results are all close enough that we can't really distinguish between them in a stat like this but lebron's miami peak was a step lower because as we've mentioned letting wade drive the offense at times took away some of lebron's on ball value it's a similar story in box only metrics where jordan has some separation from lebron's mvp seasons in cleveland and a slightly larger edge against him in miami ultimately i think team construction makes a big difference when choosing between these peaks lebron ball works with three and d rosters and stretch big men but it's also a slower more tactical approach that doesn't fit as well next to other ball dominant players so if i'm forced to choose and i don't really want to i'd give the number one multi-year peak to michael jordan essentially because i think he fits on more teams while lebron really has to be the engine with spacers around him to exert that mega value now i'm only one person so thinking basketball subscribers on patreon helped out by submitting their rankings after the series for a wisdom of crowds perspective the voters also had a clear top 10 with a slightly different order duncan and garnett first but garnett was far more polarizing he was in the top 5 on 15 percent of ballots versus duncan's 10 but kg was left off of nearly a quarter ballots entirely with kobe replacing him on about two-thirds of those lists bird and magic went next and then the series most polarizing player steph curry curry finished third in first place votes while also finishing eighth in top eight votes hakeem and kareem were in a virtual tie with abdul jabbar grabbing about twice as many top three spots as olajuwon well shaq was a clear number three placing second or third on nearly half the ballots and for the number one spot 59 percent of voters went with michael jordan enough to edge out lebron james and his 32 percent of the first place votes so after 16 videos 14 players and five glorious decades of nba history this has been the greatest peaks thank you so so much for all of your support during this series i really hope you found this final episode thought provoking if you're wondering where to find old games usa sports on dvd was a huge source for this series with thousands of games going back to the 70s a big thanks to crumpled jumper for providing the player art the youtube channel 70s fan for collecting classic footage featured in this series and a very special thanks to cody hodek for helping scout games along with our incredible video coordinator mike dela rosa to support this channel you can sign up at patreon.com thinkingbasketball and join our discord community get access to the stats used throughout this series and more i'll also link the most relevant episodes of the thinking basketball podcast below in the description box that is it for this series so until the next one wherever you are out there in the world i hope that you're having a great day [Music] you

Channel: Thinking Basketball

Views: 224,238

Rating: 4.9349852 out of 5

Keywords: NBA, NBA film analysis, NBA Analytics, Thinking Basketball, NBA highlights, NBA film breakdown, NBA scouting reports, scouting reports, Best NBA players, Best NBA players all time, Top NBA players, Greatest NBA players of all time, NBA GOAT, Best NBA players ever, NBA peaks, Best NBA peaks, NBA history, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, 90s NBA, 80s NBA, 70s NBA, Steph Curry, Curry gravity, Jordan vs. LeBron, Bird vs. Magic, Top-10 NBA players, Top-10 peaks

Id: FzzlvnncLOQ

Length: 26min 30sec (1590 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ariannis_grandttkmpo]

I like him making uncertainty paramount by listing both a rank and a range for the rank, for each contender.

What's really going to happen is, we reach the pearly gates and some angel says, "by the way, the greatest of all time is Wes Unseld. When it comes down to it, his cocktail of strengths is the exactly optimal mixture. And when things went well it was generally his doing whereas when things went badly it was forces beyond his control. I understand you guys have a lot of difficulty sorting this shit out down on the Earthly plane so I'm telling everyone as they come through."

[u/maltrab]

For those who want HIS list and not the fan list

1. Michael Jordan

2. LeBron James

3. Shaquille O'Neal

4. Hakeem Olajuwon

5. Larry Bird

6. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

7. Stephen Curry

8. Kevin Garnett

9. Tim Duncan

10. Magic Johnson

[u/pullingthestringz]

This series was probably the best historical nba content I've ever seen. If you like some nerdy nba content strongly recommend watching all of it.

[u/BUSean]

Just finished this, and I think the fact that he discusses the level of uncertainty he has about it all is my favorite part. It's just what I look for in an argument -- the confidence to tell people "I'm not sure, here's what I've got though."

[u/shanmustafa]

92 games without Wade/Kyrie LeBron had a 60 win pace lmao that's absurd

[u/II-III-V-VII-XI]

Phenomenal series

[u/Official_CIA_Account]

https://imgur.com/wL2ce7J

[u/dropdatdurkadurk]

a) Yeah Magic was tough to gauge he even said he couldve put him as high as no 5. Considering Ben's love for playmaking surprised he had him at 10. But then again Magic is probably the worst defender of top 10-15 players in NBA history(Charles Barkley is the worst if you go top 20)

b) He did a whole podcast on KG vs Duncan a year or two ago. I prefer Duncan but whichever I get it nbd.

c) I support the controversial pick of Steph at 7 and Ive often talked about how other parts of that GSW offense have become overrated as a byproduct of benefitting from Steph amongst other things.

d) Im not gonna pretend like Ive ever studied the specifics of Kareem's defense which he talked about dropping him slightly but that's interesting.

e) Bird 5th, Magic 10th. Hmmmm. I get it, great great offensive player but even for a peak series which might work against Magic a little that gap stands out a bit

f) I agree with the general Hakeem premise, probably a little underrated in temrs of defensive impact because it got obscured by his offensive stuff and people didnt fully realize how historic he was defensively. But yeah his offensive situations in Houston got a little underrated, ahead of its time with the floor spacing. Ultimately, 4th is fine but I was a little surprised by it.

g) Shaq. Im fine with putting him at 3. Im just a little surprised Ben did because I agree with his defensive assessment of Shaq. If your gonna put Hakeem 4th on the backbone of his defensive dominance and Shaq 3rd you just have to be absurdly high on Shaq's offensive dominance. which is fine just wasnt sure if he was gonna get this high

h) Im someone who has MJ>LeBron. But the gap has narrowed to the point I dont really argue about it anymore. Im glad he picked 1989-91 as the peak for MJ and didnt focus on the lack of ringzzzzzzzz that period

[u/downeastsun]

Fun series; I'm sad it's over. It's interesting that Taylor did go with MJ/LeBron as the only two with a claim for the number 1 spot. I think the conventional wisdom is probably right on that one, but I wondered if he might have somebody else crash the party.

I feel more secure in my "Hakeem was the third best player ever" take after this series.