Drexler was imho the team's best player during the playoffs for that second championship and Horry was arguably almost as important as Hakeem in that run.
You might want to review just how well Horry played during those playoffs. No one is saying he is anywhere within a million miles as great a player as Olajuwon was. But in that second title playoff run, Horry played some of the best basketball of his own career. In particular he shot really well. He posted a red-hot 59.2% scoring efficiency in those playoffs. Hakeem in turn played well, but by his own standards that was not his most dominant playoffs. He played a ton of minutes and had huge USG, but his production was a good-but-not-great .143 WS/48. Almost all of his relevant rates and efficiencies in those playoffs were below his career playoff averages.
Above is a great example of the over-use of advanced stats.
1995 Playoff Stats:
Hakeem: 33.0 points / 10.3 rebounds / 4.5 assists / 2.8 blocks / 1.2 steals / .533 eFG%
Horry: 13.1 points / 7.0 rebounds / 3.5 assists / 1.2 blocks / 1.5 steals / .550 eFG%
Anybody who looks at that those numbers and sees similar production -- or "importance" -- has a fundamental misunderstanding of basketball. Generally, scoring about 20 more points on similar efficiency in only four more minutes of action is a pretty good indicator who the more productive player is. If WS/48 suggests those two players are even, it's a broken metric.
Hakeem scored massively more because he had gigantic USG -- 35%. He was used to attempt to score on over a third of their possessions. But the efficiency of his utilization, while still good, wasn't as good as he was in other playoff runs. That's what the metric is telling us. As johnnygreen points out, this was largely due to double teams. For which Horry benefited and did his job by making shots.
Basketball is a team game and while Horry doesn't get those open looks without Hakeem drawing those double teams, those points aren't scored on those possessions without Horry making those shots.
Ultimately, this is just a red-herring and straw-manning (and some back-handed insults for free). I didn't say Horry was the equal to Hakeem. Just pointing out that his performance was critically important in that playoff run.
Your assertion that Hakeem carried a team of nobodies to a title all by himself just doesn't hold up. Clyde Drexler was on that team. Last I checked he was in the HOF. And he played fantastic.
Hakeem took by far the biggest chunk of shots in that playoff run, but the next five guys in utilization, Drexler, Horry, Smith, Elie and Cassell all scored at elite efficiencies between 58.7% - 64.3% TS. Those 5 combined for a unstoppable force of scoring with a TS% of 59.9% on 53.8 scoring attempts per game. The shooting of those 5 guys carried that team to a playoff TS% of 58.0%.
For comparison, last year's Warriors, whom everyone thinks of as a historic offensive juggernaut had a team playoff TS% of 58.1%.
Topic: Hakeem Olajuwon vs David Robinson: who was better? (Read 8007 times)