« Reply #37 on: October 18, 2023, 10:27:09 PM »
The Celtics have the most talent #1-6 of any roster.
Not according to basically every publication that has ranked players.
There is a list of ranked players, but is there a weighted average of top-6 by team? You need that in order to assess overall talent.
Boston has 4 players in the top 62 on ESPN, but no others in the top 100. Tatum was 6, Brown was 19, Jrue was 26, and Porzingis is 62.
Here are some other teams considered contenders
Bucks - Giannis 1, Lillard 14, Middleton 46, Brook 69, Portis 81
Nuggets - Jokic 2, Murray 17, Gordon 51, Porter 68
Warriors - Curry 5, Klay 41, Wiggins 54, Dray 55, Paul 76, Looney 88
So close on some and some of it is preference. Now Jrue is pretty clearly the best 3rd option of any team with his 26 ranking. But the Bucks have a better 1st option, better 2nd option, and have 5 guys in the top 81. The Warriors have a better 1st option, but their 2nd - 4th options are worse than Jrue, but better than Zinger, and then they add 2 more players in the top 88 (so 6 in the top 88). Nuggets have a better 1st option and better 2nd option, but a worse 3rd and 4th and have just 4 in the top 100 like the C's (though White is probably before KCP, but KCP isn't a bad player). Al is getting up there in age, I think he should be solid at like 20 mpg, but you might say a lesser talented player that is more reliable is preferred to Al at his current age.
There are other teams that have 5 or more ranked in the top 100, but they lack the top end talent so it is hard to list them and the Lakers were the only team with 2 top 10 players, but only Reaves also cracks the list and he is well after 50 (the Suns had 7, 11, and 37 but no one else).
I refer you to the ESPN ratings are trash thread, and the article in which the rankings author says Derrick White has a better case for being in the top 50 than outside the top 100. That is all.
same thing generally with CBS or the other sites. The simple reality is Boston has been out performing its talent for years and the team is not generally the most talented or so much talent. At least not by these sort of things. ESPN is one of the few rankings that even has Brown on the top 20 as most do not.
I think we need to be careful of shifting the burden of proof here. Is it really a reasonable leap to say that Boston is outperforming their talent based on a criteria-free list, crafted by committee, to elicit conversation?
I'm not shifting anything. I've been saying that for years. Those lists just provide outsider support to what I've been saying. The results Boston has had have have usurped the talent on the team. There are very few teams in history that have even 3 CF with roughly the same key players without a top 5 player on the team (the Wallace Pistons being the other main team for an extended period). Boston has done it 5 times in the last 7 years and has done it many of those years without a top 10 player (Tatum the last 2 times, but the other 3 no top ten player - unless you count IT4 that 1 great season). Most of those 7 years, Boston has had just 1 top 20 player on the roster.
On a tangent, but is there any argument that IT wasn't a top-10 player that season? He was 5th in MVP voting, 3rd in scoring, etc.
He definitely had a top 10 season, but that isn't necessarily the same thing. And lots of guys score well. I mean 2 years ago Trae Young and Demar DeRozan were both in the top 5 in ppg. Beal had consecutive years finishing 2nd in the league in scoring. Yet I don't think anyone considered them top 10 players. Heck Paul George might not even have been considered a top 10 player in 2019 (at least by a lot of people) and he finished 3rd in both MVP voting and DPOY voting.
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