Going through the interesting (albeit partly outdated) collection of Dirk-articles amassed on the latter pages of this thread, I feel encouraged to submit a late contribution myself.
It's a piece from the TheBasketballJones-blog after game one (that I didn't got to until after game two) and it's really just a chart listing career playoff-performances based on WSper48min for the last thirty years with some explaining and Dirk-praising fluff around it. The metric isn't an easy one to get fully into and I didn't, but that table was just too good-looking to forget about and not repost it here, so I'm glad that thread offers that opportunity without taking the focus away from what's important for tonight's game 4. These playoffs move on so fast, and it seems almost impossible to keep up wit all the good stuff out there, especially with the well-deserved love Dirk suddenly gets all over the interwebs.
Quote:
Because Nowitzki has never won a championship ring, he isn’t widely considered to be one of the elite post-season performers of the modern era. It’s difficult to argue against this perception because, after all, rings are ultimately how we measure players. As ridiculous as it seems to many that people continue to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan, those comparisons will never go away if Kobe ever captures that sixth ring.
Nowitzki’s dominance in this year’s playoffs has me ruminating about where he ranks among players in the post-season, starting with the beginning of the Magic-Bird Era. Magic and Bird both made their NBA debuts in the 1979-80 season, so that seems like a good starting point for the sake of this discussion. In terms of how we compare players, I went with “Win Shares per 48 minutes” (WS/48) among players who have appeared in at least 50 playoff games and averaged at least 30 minutes per game.
It’s no shock to see Michael Jordan at the top — let’s face it, we’d have to disqualify this metric immediately if it didn’t rank him first. As for LeBron James, our personal feelings about him don’t change the reality of his talent so I can’t quarrel with his runner-up status. And in third place is our boy, Dirk, ahead of Magic Johnson, Tim Duncan, and everybody else.
I don’t consider this list to be as insane as a lot of people might. There’s no disputing the greatness of Magic, Duncan, Shaq, Bird and Kobe, but they all won their championships with assistance from another player on this list. Would Magic have a ring without Kareem? Would Duncan have a ring without Robinson and Ginobili? Would Bird have a ring without McHale? And then there’s that whole Shaq/Kobe/Wade/Gasol thing.
This ranking or any list of its kind conjured up by exceptionally complex statistics should never be regarded as the gospel truth about who are really the all-time greats of the modern NBA era. But I do think they provide excellent discussion fodder. Personally, I think it’s not crazy to point out that at least one of the LeBron/Dirk/Dwight trio would almost certainly have a ring by now if they had assistance from another top player. If you want to blame them for not being able to carry mediocre supporting casts to a championship, that’s your prerogative.
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http://blogs.thescore.com/tbj/2011/0...ra/#more-19996
(if this popped up in the PGT or anywhere else before, well... so be it, I don't think it hurts to look at it more than once to develop an ablility to fully wrap one's heads around Dirk's greatness
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