About Those Numbers From The 1960s...

http://statitudes.com/blog/2014/03/25/about-those-numbers-from-the-1960s/



About Those Numbers From the 1960s…
March 25, 2014



When I was a kid, I can remember looking at a basketball encyclopedia and being amazed by some of the statistics from the 1960s:

Wilt Chamberlain once scored over 50 points per game.
Bill Russell annually grabbed over 20 rebounds per game.
Oscar Robertson averaged a triple double for an entire season.
And the list goes on.

I was born in the 1970s, but the decade I most closely identify with my childhood is the 1980s. We had Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and later Michael Jordan, but I can remember thinking “These guys are good, but they must not be that good. Their numbers aren’t close to those put up by guys like Chamberlain, Russell, and Robertson.”


What I failed to realize then — but realized later on when I started to look at things with a more discerning eye — was this:

Players from the 1960s were playing in an environment where points and rebounds occurred with much more frequency than they do today.
The talent gap in the 1960s was much wider than it is today, allowing for more extreme performances.
Let’s start with the first point.

Back in 1960-61, Elgin Baylor put up numbers that, without the proper context, are ridiculous: 34.8 points and 19.8 rebounds per game.

How ridiculous? Only one other player in NBA history has averaged a 34/19 line for an entire season.*

* That player, Wilt Chamberlain, did it the first six seasons of his career (1959-60 through 1964-65).

But in the 1960-61 season, the average NBA team took a whopping 109.4 shots per game, a number that far outpaces the current average of 82.0 shots per game.

Although there are far more rigorous ways to do this, let’s take the simplest approach and reduce Baylor’s per game averages by 25 percent (a reduction that is proportional to the change in the average number of shots per game):

34.8 × 0.75 = 26.1 points per game
19.8 × 0.75 = 14.9 rebounds per game
Those numbers are still outstanding, but they also reveal that Baylor’s 1960-61 season is much more comparable to Kevin Love’s 2013-14 season (26.5/12.7) than would appear at first glance.

In fact, if we do this basic adjustment for every season of Baylor’s career, his career averages of 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds per game drop to 21.8 and 10.8, respectively.

Once again those are still outstanding figures, but they also show that Baylor’s per game production was much more similar to Tim Duncan’s per game production (19.9/11.1) than the raw numbers suggest.

Now let’s move on to the second point, the talent gap.

In general, extreme observations are more likely to occur as the dispersion around the mean increases.

For example, suppose you have two groups of women. Both groups have the same mean height (64 inches), but group A has a standard deviation of 3 inches while group B has a standard deviation of 6 inches. Which group is more likely to have to have at least one six-footer?

Since the means of the two groups are the same, the group with the larger standard deviation is going to have more extreme heights, so in this case the answer is group B.

What does this have to do with the NBA? The plot below shows how the five-year moving average of the standard deviation of win shares per 48 minutes (WS/48) has changed over time:





As you can see, variability was much higher in the 1950s and early 1960s than it was at any other point in NBA history.*

* It should be noted that mean WS/48 is always right around .100.

There are some other interesting features to note on this plot:

The moving average took a sharp jump from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. This was due in large part to the NBA adding seven expansion teams from 1966-67 to 1970-71.
The moving average significantly dropped in the mid-1970s. That decline was most likely due to the washing out of the expansion effect as well as the ABA/NBA merger.
The moving average jumped again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was once again due to expansion, as the NBA added two teams in both the 1988-89 and 1989-90 seasons.
Getting back to the main point, some of the video game numbers that were posted in the early part of the 1960s were due in part to the large variability in player performance at that time.

Don’t believe me? In the table below, I present the number of seasons where a player logged at least 1,750 minutes and the percentage of those players who had at least 10 wins shares by decade:

DECADE-----NO.-----WS ≥ 10
1950s-------339-----13.57%
1960s-------531-----14.88%
1970s-------1020----10.78%
1980s-------1278-----9.86%
1990s-------1370----10.58%
2000s-------1544----10.75%

In a nutshell, seasons of 10 or more win shares were about 40 percent more common in the 1960s than they were in the decades that followed.

None of this is meant to denigrate the accomplishments of players like Chamberlain, Russell, and Robertson, surely three of the ten greatest players in NBA history.

Rather, the intent is to illustrate that some of the air needs to be taken out of those gaudy statistics from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

We don’t need to pine for the good old days. The superstars of today — James, Durant, Paul, Duncan, and Nowitzki, to name just five — are more than living up to the accomplishments of their predecessors.



bob
MY NOTE:  I've provided the link to this article.  Anybody who would like to rebut these conclusions directly may do so by going directly to the link.  There is a comments section that I'm sure will be read.  Perhaps this guy never heard of Darwinian Selection, and how the competition for fewer jobs will increase the overall talent levels, not reduce them...Has any league ever become more talented with the addition of new franchises?


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I have a feeling Sam will refute this writers statistics/claims in a very logical concise manner.

cowens/oldschool wrote:I have a feeling Sam will refute this writers statistics/claims in a very logical concise manner.

cow,

I'm actually really, really looking forward to Sam's response. That's why I wrote that about how comments can be posted to the site.


bob


.

The 1959-60 NBA: Boston - Philly - Syracuse - NY
St. Louis - Detroit - Minny - Cinci

Yes I know a lot of those trips were by bus, but SO few teams, SO much concentration of talent, and SO little jet lag! No wonder those teams were better.

The 1961-62 makeup was pretty much the same except Minny moved to LA, which, makes one respect the Lakers accomplishments all the more, since almost all their away games prompted jet lag. That they finished the season with a .667 win percentage is amazing ---- but not as amazing as the Celts .750 win % that year!

Seems to base some of this on number of shots taken back then vs now? And some of those points seem valid.

Wonder why that would be?

Well I happen to believe you did not see much if any SLOW DOWN, walk the ball up offense. Most teams back then realized the easiest way to score was to beat the other team down the floor and get the ball in close by taking it to the rim. Also without looking it up think teams might have shot less fouls back then and that alone would make up for some of the FG differences.

DO I recall ever seeing a ISO in the 60's?

Only ISO I saw was me ..............watching the game alone.

Comparing players and teams from different ears in any way shape and form is difficult. Things change. Rules change.

beat



beat

Judging by the FG attempts it was a different game from today's

According to Basketball reference.com, the year Wilt averaged 50 ppg the league average for FG attempts was 107.7 per game at a .426 make percentage.

Last year it was 83 FGA's per game at a .454% make rate.


"Perhaps this guy never heard of Darwinian Selection, and how the competition for fewer jobs will increase the overall talent levels, not reduce them...Has any league ever become more talented with the addition of new franchises?"

This may be true if the talent pool is the same.  I don't have the numbers but I think it's obvious that many more people play basketball now than in the early 60's. For instance,  if there were players developed in a foreign system in the early 60's good enough to play in the NBA we sure didn't know about them.

Now...if a ten team professional league was drawing on today's non-NBA talent pool we'd really see some ball.  Talk about  Darwinian selection.

Whether today's increased talent pool is sufficient for a 30 team is a different question.

It is frustrating to have this type of stuff persistently raise its head, but such is the nature of the world.

First off, anyone who thinks that Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Elgin Baylor were comparable to a typical all-star never watched them play. They are among the best to ever play the game, period.

There too many variables between eras to think you can simply compensate numerically by multiplying the old guys' stats by 0.75 or say that the standard deviation of win shares in the old days means x, y, or z when so few stats were tracked then (blocks, offensive vs. defensive rebounds, steals), some stats (assists in particular) weren't given the same way, and the philosophy of how the game was played was entirely different.

And none of this accounts for differences like what constituted traveling or carrying the ball, the level of physical play allowed, hand checking, the impact of the three-point line, the "thou shalt not foul the SportsCenter highlight player inside this protected circle" area under the basket, or even the tightness of the rims. The vastly smaller league made the talent more concentrated on fewer teams and the times you played a quality opponent much higher.

There are so many factors involved, including social ones, that this cursory attempt to compare the greats from the 1960s and wrap it in the appearance of statistical analysis is exasperating.

Looking at the analysis, another thing that might be interesting to see is what percentage of shots (or points) those high scoring stars were responsible for on their team, and whether today someone who takes a very high percentage of their team's shots (looking at you Mr. Bryant) and is seen as a selfish ball hog is actually taking less shots than someone back then may have.

Another stat that might be interesting to examine is minutes per game. In today's world where superstars are signed to huge, multi-year contracts, there is less likelihood that a coach will put a player back in the game just to pad their stats, or if they are nursing a nagging injury, etc. They know they need to manage that player's minutes and the wear and tear on their bodies or their team will be out a lot of money. That may have been less of an issue in the past. Look at baseball as a comparison, where pitchers in that era were expected to throw complete games, relievers threw 3 innings if they got in the game at all, and doubleheaders were a normal, frequent part of the schedule. Now days, pitchers are considered good if they get to the 7th inning, specialist pitchers throw to one batter, and players complain for days about having to play in doubleheaders. Expectations have changed as salaries (and revenues) have gone up.

-V

The culture of basketball is much different now than it was back then. These days it's a bunch of isolation crap and nowhere near the same level of offensive attack. 109 FGs per game is unheard of now and to be honest it'd be a lot of fun to watch.

Any theories as to why (basketball) athletes of the 60s could run circles around (basketball) athletes of today?



KJ

The dollar was backed with gold until 1972.

KJ,

Great athletes would be great athletes in whatever era you put them in. There are obviously differences in training, nutrition, health care, and so on, but I don't think the players of the 1960s could run circles around the players of today as athletes, or vice versa.

I do, however, think that the 1960s had a remarkable aligning of the planets that brought us a golden age for centers. It seemed as if Russell, Chamberlain, Thurmond, and Bellamy were the dawning of a new era, opening the floodgates for even more great centers to follow, but we've actually had fewer great centers since then. To think of those four all-time greats playing at the same time and in a league with only nine teams where they faced each other all the time, it's remarkable. I suppose something like that will happen again -- a bunch of all-time greats at one position coming along at roughly the same time, not the league being only nine teams -- but the '60s were a rare occurrence in that regard.

We're supposedly in an age of point guards, but I don't see an all-time transcendent group like the '60s had with centers. The best of them, Chris Paul, is a fine player, but he's a tick or two under six foot tall, and Oscar would criminally abuse him (he was 6'5", strong, and quick). There are some very, very good players, guys who will be Hall of Famers even, but not quite in that upper echelon of the greatest players.

Duncan belongs there. I think LeBron does too, despite the enmity he inspires around these parts. There's Kobe. Durant may get there. But despite what the author of this article says, I don't put Dirk there. It's all so subjective.