Arturo Galletti is the Co-editor and Director of Analytics for the Wages of Wins Network. He is an Electrical Engineer with General Electric in the lovely isle of Puerto Rico, where he keeps his production lines running by day and night (and weekends) and works on sport analysis with his free time.
Dennis Rodman was inducted into the NBA hall of fame as part of the 2011 Class.
Some people disagreed with the choice.
Some have made rather convincing cases for his inclusion.
Here’s mine:
Rodman owns the two most productive seasons since 1978. He owns 7 of the top 100 seasons.
Table 2: Breakdown of Multiple Top Raw Productivity Players
| Name | # of Top 100 Apperances | Average of Rank |
| Charles Barkley | 10 | 113 |
| Magic Johnson | 8 | 173 |
| Dennis Rodman | 7 | 204 |
| Tim Duncan | 6 | 208 |
| Marcus Camby | 6 | 777 |
| David Robinson | 6 | 136 |
| Kevin Garnett | 5 | 474 |
| Dwight Howard | 4 | 172 |
| Hakeem Olajuwon | 4 | 504 |
| Shaquille O’Neal | 3 | 476 |
| Robert Parish | 3 | 692 |
| Wes Unseld | 3 | 115 |
| Moses Malone | 3 | 297 |
| Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 3 | 1233 |
| Dikembe Mutombo | 3 | 276 |
| Ben Wallace | 3 | 335 |
| Larry Bird | 2 | 289 |
| Andrew Bynum | 2 | 579 |
| Artis Gilmore | 2 | 396 |
Please keep in mind that I am using raw productivity per minute so Dennis Rodman two best seasons were more productive on a per minute center than any center, big man or player since 1978.
He played 30 minutes or more 557 times in the regular season. His teams won 392 of those games or 70% of those games. That would be on average 58 wins for an 82 game season.
In the playoffs, it goes to an unreal 45-17 or 72.5% percent of games won by his teams when he played 30 minutes or more.
As a point of reference, Shaq teams went 628-315 in the regular season (66%) and 111-74 in the Playoffs (60%)
He has 5 Rings and 7 Rebounding titles.
To me, this puts him in the pantheon. We can argue the exact ranking till we are blue in the face but he clearly belongs in the Hall of Fame.
I’ll leave you with one final thought: the greatest athlete Phil Jackson ever coached according to Phil?
One Clue. He's in the Photo
-Arturo
Amen!
Worm was a truly unique player, and not just because of his hair. He played 35.7 minutes per game at age 36, and never played less than 32 m/g after the age of 30. How many NBA players have there ever been with that kind of endurance as older players?
In the end, I think we at the WoW have to be glad that he made it at all.
In spite of making it to the HoF, I still think he’s one of the most underappreciated ever.
Man, what happened in your childhood to make you hate shooting so much?
man, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. how are you parsing these numbers, Arturo?!? i mean, on a list of most productive seasons, how do Tree Rollins and Swen Nater ever…EVER…wind up ahead of Michael Jordan?!? or Jerome Williams ahead of LeBron James?!? and Rich frickin’ Kelly (who?) makes the cut, but not Patrick Ewing?!? btw, the year that the aforementioned Mr. Kelly had one the “most productive” seasons ever, he averaged less than 10 points and less than 7 boards a game, with a PER around 14 (the league average is 15).
wtf?
Ben,
Shooting is overrated :-)
I think my next basketball project should be about how people who say “shooting is overrated” (like myself) sometimes massively underrate shooting. Particularly *bad* shooting.
i agree, btw, with you conclusion, that Rodman is a HOFer. he was certainly one of the best rebounders (an elite basketball skill) in NBA history, and has multiple championships. stats can be very misleading, however. and win% and championships are two stats that can easily skew a player’s value. the Worm, as great as he was, was lucky enough to have been surrounded by some of the greatest players in NBA history, first in Detroit, and then in Chicago. and that surely inflated his value, just as great players on weaker teams have deflated value.
chew on this: Luc Longley has more championships than Wilt Chamberlain and Patrick Ewing…combined!
Ben,
I do underrate shooting. What I actually rate is shooting effectively. I would really like to read what you come up with.
Even though it wasn’t the point of this post, the chart really made me realize how much progress Dwight Howard has made in the last couple of years. It will be interesting to compare him with Robinson and Olajuwon when his career is over.
The problem is that a player’s shooting efficiency is determined as much or more by what shots they take tas by how well they take them, and what shots they take are determined as much or more by their roles and responsibilities as by their skills and abilities.
I.e., if your main job is to take the bad shots when your team needs them, you could be the best in the league and never register in most efficiency models. Conversely, if you only ever dunk, or if your main job is to shoot open 3-pointers, you could be below-average at what you do and still put up great efficiency numbers.
As for the state of my research on the subject, it’s very easy to prove that the problem exists: e.g., you can easily show that the standard deviations on win% differential go through the roof for players that have significant shooting responsibilities—even *after* accounting for their efficiency. Doing anything about it, however, is a bit more complicated, and will almost certainly take more than conventional box-score stats can offer. I’ve done some preliminary analysis with PBP data, with some interesting results, but there’s a long way to go.
Ben,
Quick take: want.
I’ve seen this when I’ve done productivity vs. Usage. In fact, this explains why high usage high efficiency players are actually undervalued( Dirk is the most obvious example). He takes such a huge volume of shots that he improves everybody else’s selection without actually suffering himself.
Combat, this is raw data. If Arturo had adjusted for position played, Michael is a much more impressive player than Tree Rollins.
But then, players like Rollins and Williams may have had a great season or two. That doesn’t mean their career compares to Jordan or James. This is a list of greatest seasons, not greatest over the course of their career.
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Arturo as always great post. Sorry this might be a dumb question, but I haven’t been able to find an answer (I’ve been looking for a while too). Is there a place to get WP data for more than just the top 100 careers or seasons? I remember on the old site there was a link, but it only gave numbers for the most recent season, and I can’t even find that anymore.
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combat,
Why do you say that Dennis Rodman was lucky to play with great players? Why wasn’t he one of the players that others were lucky to play with?
I say Isiah Thomas was lucky he got to play with Dennis Rodman (and Bill Lambier). So were Jordan and Pippen, who no longer had Horace Grant. In fact, Jorden himself said in the before the 95-96 season (or perhaps it was just after the 94-95 season) that they weren’t good enough to win it all, they needed a dominant rebounder. Rodman joined the team, and suddenly they had a hard time losing.
I don’t believe this article says anywhere that Rodman was better than Jordan so please put away that straw.