Farewell to the Greatest Power forward in the NBA: Tim Duncan
The post-Jordan NBA era unofficially ended on July 11, when San Antonio Spurs legend Tim Duncan announced his retirement after 19 seasons as a pro. Duncan was at the forefront of the league for the past two decades, winning five championships and a pair of MVPs as the best player of the generation that entered the league as MJ was on his way out. Even though he played in a small-market like San Antonio, his relatively low-key public persona or all the things that go into a nickname like the Big Fundamental — Duncan’s greatness remains undersold in many quarters. So here are a couple of ways in which he made a case for being the best player in modern NBA history.
All-Around Greatness
Duncan never scored more than 25 points per game after age 25 and he didn’t crack 20 PPG after turning 30. His low-post game, premised around that classic bank shot, was solid but rarely feared, particularly later in his career. However, Duncan augmented his point totals with good efficiency, great rebounding and a nice passing touch for a big man. His exceptional play abilities allowed him to anchor the Spurs’ offense even when his days as a big-time scorer were in the past.
As for the defensive side, Duncan was uniformly incredible throughout his career. He was named to 15 All-Defensive teams — the last of which came at age 38 — and led the league in defensive Win Shares five times, to go with nine other top-five finishes. In terms of suppressing offensive efficiency (relative to league average), Duncan’s Spurs were the NBA’s best defensive dynasty since Bill Russell’s Celtics. Even in the twilight of his career, Duncan was consistently ranked among the league’s top five defensive players according to the plus/minus metrics. He’s undeniably on the shortlist of the best defenders in basketball history.
Put it all together, and it’s hard to find a modern player with a better combination of offensive and defensive résumés than Duncan. To measure this, the statistics from Basketball-Reference.com: value over replacement player (VORP) and Win Shares, both of which strive to capture a player’s total on-court influence over his team’s success. Duncan is the only player to have played the most minutes as a power forward, with 58, 738. Not only were his minutes impressive, but throughout his career while he was on the court he had a rating of 108.1 in offense and a 110.3 in defense. The harmonic mean of those two numbers comes out to 109.2, which no other player who has played the power forward position comes close to Duncan’s numbers.
Great Both Young And OldDuncan also performed those acts of all-around greatness for just about two decades straight, playing like a Hall of Famer as both a young player and an old one. Critics have been curious as to how rare that combination was for a player:
Which other players in the NBA, and in the other major team sports, have had so much impact over their full professional lives? In other words, which of them were both very effective as young players and as old players?
For an answer, sports analysts looked at each player’s Win Shares before age 25 and after age 32, taking the harmonic mean (yes, that again) of the two numbers to find players who matched Duncan’s career path. It was clear that there weren’t many other past or current players who matched the numbers Duncan put up in his career.
Even after all the numbers are tallied up for the great ball players who have played in the NBA, Duncan still trails Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It’s really tough to beat that guy in longevity-based measures — but Duncan did pass Michael Jordan for No. 2 all-time in other sports analysts metrics, another feather in Duncan’s cap as one of the best and truly unique players in NBA history.
Better Than The Raw Numbers?As great as Duncan looks according to the numbers above, there were studies done that conducted using derivatives of the basic box-score stats. Those can be fine for estimating a player’s value in a broad sense, but they have a tendency to misfire in some areas — such as defense, or even the subtler aspects of offense like screening or space-creation — where Duncan happened to excel.
Perhaps that’s why, when Real Plus-Minus creator Jeremias Engelmann released a bank of adjusted plus/minus data encompassing the 2001-2014 seasons, Duncan ranked as the third-best player of that era, trailing only Kevin Garnett and LeBron James. That’s slightly higher than Duncan placed according to Player Efficiency Rating (he was fifth), Win Shares per 48 minutes (also fifth) or even Box Plus/Minus (sixth), which is designed to emulate plus/minus ratings derived from more granular data.
In other words, Duncan’s contributions might be somewhat underrated when we line up his stats against those of other greats from history. His accomplishments and contributions to the game will not go unnoticed and the love he has for the city of San Antonio will not be underappreciated. The NBA won’t be the same without him in it next season.
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