OhayoKD wrote:Samurai wrote:Owly wrote:Whilst, personally, I struggle to see the case for him on the stated criteria for the project "1. Career, rather than Peak or Prime. How you weigh Longevity is up to you, but consider the entire Career." The difference is obvious: it's the voters. Whether one finds the reasoning (they've) offered here compelling (or find earlier lists, back end voter reasoning more compelling) ...
Clearly voter preferences/criteria change, different people voting, and persuasive or non-persuasive arguments can move someone up or down. Although it would seem that even if one's criteria changes to favor high peak and disregard longevity, one might think that the emergence of other high-peak bigs since 2011 (Giannis, Jokic, Embiid) who received no votes in 2011 would push Walton (or other high-peak, no longevity types) down rather than up. Personally I haven't seen an argument that adds to his longevity to move up on my preferences but to each their own.
You can reduce it to peak vs longetivity I guess. But sometimes it is about the player evaluation.
I think early meta-discourse quite largely overrated the impact "longevity" was having in list-shifts, when the true driver(which is now becoming clearer the further we go), has been a creeping elevation of great defensive bigs, including those who get the bulk of their value defensively.
A list where draymond shoots to 51 foreshadows Walton jumping as well.
Owly wrote:One other thing is ... voting methodology has changed.
And more generally, not wrt this methodology versus previous ones, but any method looking at top candidate (versus deep list aggregation ... or I suppose being given a list and asking to reverse rank by eliminating the least favored) will favor polarizing players. The group on average prefers the guy at 120 on everyone's list but he never gets any votes because we only get to any one voters ... say ... 90th player, whilst the guy who is, say 75 (or perhaps above, but say 75) on 1/3 of voters lists and say 400th on 2/3rds may well get in. This isn't to say this is necessarily or precisely the case here, but I believe Walton is a polarizing candidate.
Of course criteria is not just to accurately represent/average a group's views at a moment in time but includes factors around facilitating conversation and ensuring the project is manageable.
Just to elaborate a bit on my support of Walton(as I was one of the posts Owly referenced):
I had been unsure of how much I would support Walton given his longevity issue(despite always being a fan), but as we got further along, and he got on the ballot, and I took a closer look at his numbers(and, in all honesty, watched the four-part 30-for-30 doc) about him), I started feeling more strongly about him.
We can have general rules and preferences about the types of players we support, but there can also be exceptions to those rules and preferences based on certain standout factors.
So, for example, I don't generally go out of my way to support players for whom their primary skill is volume scoring on mid-to-poor efficiency(while I love volume scoring on high efficiency), but Allen Iverson was an exception to that, given how dependent the team was on him to generate any offense at all, and given the Finals run and taking a game off the Lakers. Gus Williams might be another exception, though I'm not sure I'd call volume scoring his primary skill.
In this case, while I've never been a big longevity guy, I do have a line where I'm reticent when the longevity is below a certain level. Walton does fall below that level, but like I said in an earlier post, I felt that his peak was significant enough, and his championships meaningful enough, that I could make the exception for him(whereas I don't think I'll be supporting Tatum and Doncic this round, despite being big fans of both). I mean, in simple terms, he was a more efficient scorer than Tatum(+2.9 rTS career vs +1.3 career, and Walton's efficiency in his best years was higher than that), a different universe of defender from Doncic, and given his reputation as an ATG playmaker at the big position, better in that area than Tatum as well, and maybe not such a big gap between Walton/Doncic on that front.
I took particular note, given the longevity issue, of how well Walton's production held up in 1986 vs 1977 despite having nearly a decade and many careers' worth of injury troubles between them. He was obviously only playing 19-20mpg in 86 as opposed to the 35mpg he was playing in 77, but looking at PER 100 numbers, box composites and efficiency in both RS and PO, he held up very well:
RS:
In 1977: 23.7pp100, 18.3rpp100, 4.8ap100, 1.3sp100, 4.1bp100, +5.2 rTS, .215 WS/48, 6.7 BPM
In 1986: 18.6pp100, 16.7rpp100, 5.1ap100, 1.2sp100, 3.3bp100, +6.5 rTS, .157 WS/48, 3.0 BPM
PO:
In 1977: 20.4pp100, 17.1rp100, 6.2ap100, 1.2sp100, 3.8bp100, 52.7% TS(-3.3% from RS), .162 WS/48, 6.0 BPM
In 1986: 21.3pp100, 17.3rp100, 4.5ap100, 1.0sp100, 2.0bp100, 61.6% TS(+1.0% from RS), .175 WS/48, 3.1 BPM
This, to me, gives me reason to believe he'd have been a consistent force if he'd been able to stay healthy. I know we're supposed to vote based on what happened and not what could have happened, but this had an impact on me - 1986 wasn't a throw-in, it mattered a great deal to my evaluation.