It’s kind of funny how many people are scoffing at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s venting about not having a statue outside Staples Center. (Reminder/disclosure: I’m a SportingNews.com employee.) Yes, it’s rude to ask for someone to build a permanent tribute to your greatness, which deserves some tut-tutting, I guess, but KAJ does have a sliver of a point that his career is underappreciated.
Take, for example, Bill Simmons’s repetition that KAJ was a “ninny” who didn’t play defense the second half of his career. When that level of influencer says that kind of thing over and over again, more and more people accept it, or at least become indifferent to it. Yet, when Simmons wrote his Book of Basketball, his sincere attempt to assess the NBA’s legends, he named KAJ his third-best player of all time, behind Jordan and Russell.
And even then, I think Kareem is underrated and hasn’t received his due as one of the very best players in the history of the game because of this pernicious idea that he was a “soft volume scorer”, even though that “soft volume scorer” was impossible to defend for over twenty years, if you count his college career. This isn’t like Moses Malone, an inner-circle Hall of Famer who isn’t regarded as such; it’s that Kareem was arguably the Most Valuable Basketball Player Ever, and no one will admit it.
I’m as loyal a defense fanboy there is, but even I can’t ignore KAJ’s insane offensive production the first seventeen years of his career. And for the first twelve or thirteen of those years, he was also a premier defender. Ignore the name-calling and look at the production. Everyone knows about the points. Even if he only led the league in PPG twice, early in his career, he was consistently the one guy in the league who did everything at an elite level:
- Led league in PER 9 of first 12 seasons.
- Led league in blocks per game 4 of the first 7 seasons they kept track of them.
- Led league in Defensive Win Shares twice, and was among the leaders year in and year out, while also leading the league — or close to it — in Offensive Win Shares year in and year out. For that matter, he led the league in Total Win Shares 9 of his first 12 seasons in the league.
- Led his team in REB% year in and year out, and the worst you could say was he was an above-average rebounder through his age-34 season. Of course, his numbers may also be skewed downward because he was such an unstoppable scorer away from the basket, out to sixteen feet.
- Almost certainly should have won the 72-73 MVP, which would have given him four in a row and six in seven years. But Dave Cowens’s Celtics won 68 games to the Bucks’ 60, giving writers enough cover to reward Cowens’s excellence.
Here’s the larger point. Assume we have a chance to re-draft the entire NBA universe of players, past and present, with every player starting at his rookie season. Things will play out differently than they did, of course, but we have their full careers up to this point as a detailed scouting report. On some level, yes, we have to account for the players today being bigger, faster, and stronger than they used to be, so someone like LeBron James will be an easy lottery-level pick, whereas someone like Dolph Schayes probably wouldn’t be drafted.
Taking all that into account, I’d draft Kareem Abdul-Jabbar first, with consideration for Wilt Chamberlain and Hakeem Olajuwon before considering Michael Jordan. Call me crazy, but I’ll take a big man who was top-three on offense for fifteen years and top-five on defense for twelve over a guard who was top three on both for fifteen years because my big man will make my perimeter players better in a way your guard simply can’t do for his big men. Jordan may have accomplished more, but Kareem was more valuable.
11:38 am - 20 May 2011
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Filed under: #basketball #Kareem Abdul-Jabbar #Michael Jordan
