ISH All-time Top 25 Forwards Project #19: Dolph Schayes vs Dennis Rodman.

[Kblaze8855]

Dolph Schayes



12 time all star
12 times all NBA(6 first 6 second)
1955 NBA champion
Career 19/12/3 player with single season peaks of 25 points, 16 rebounds, and 4 assists.
Led the NBA in rebounds per game in 1951
Led NBA in free throws twice
Second in MVP voting in 1958

*ill add a new what they were saying later...about to be late for work*


Dennis Rodman



5 time NBA champion
2 time NBA all star
2 time defensive player of the year
2 time all nba team(3rd)
8 time all defense. 7 first team
Led NBA in field goal percentage in 1989
Led the NBA in rebounds 7 seasons in a row and was second the season before he started that run
Elected to NBA hall of fame in 2011
Holds NBA finals record for offensive rebounds


What they were saying:

In this case...more a poll. In the 1990 GM survey:

Who is the best perimeter defender?

Joe Dumars (Detroit), 5 votes

Dennis Rodman (Detroit), 5 votes

Michael Jordan (Chicago), 3 votes

Michael Cooper (Lakers), 4 votes


Who is the best interior defender?

Akeem Olajuwon (Houston), 11 votes

Dennis Rodman (Detroit), 3 votes

Why it matters?

Rodman was voted the best perimeter defender(in a tie) over Jordan and the second best interior defender over guys like Eaton. He was quick enough able to stay in front of anyone and at other times guard centers. This is from 1996....

When it comes to [Alonzo] Mourning and O'Neal, Rodman shut down both centers during the Bulls' recent postseason run.

In a story on Oneal and Zo looking for big checks and Rodman looking for one too after Howard got 100 million.

Rodman has held Jordan in check and Shaq too at different points of his career.

Oh and he averaged over 21 rebounds a game for a two month period while doing it. And he had 34 rebounds....and 18 were on offense. That is...something. he was actually player of the month at one point in there too(in 1992).

[Kblaze8855]

And for anyone annoyed to see Dennis this high let me offer two explanations....

1. Basketball is alot more than scoring and he was an elite player in several elements of the game aside from it.

2. This is where he was voted in the lists I counted

19
16
19
25
19
17
19
16
12
18
24
17
17
25
21
20
20
16
19

More than that but thats just the few I glanced at for this.

ISH voted him up where he is. Ask them why if you have a problem with it.

[Carbine]

Comparing both players to their respective eras, I find it hard to imagine Dolph not winning this one.

[Kblaze8855]

Well yes. Dolph is closer to an elite player in the 50s than Rodman in the 90s. But id take Rodman. And that isnt an era thing. Id take Rodman over some players of a similar level now(not quite MVPs who led very good teams and put up 20/10). For example.....id take Rodman over Jermain Oneal who was I think 3rd in MVP voting and led a 60 win team or two. There is nobody to lead a team to a ring lately id take Rodman over(unless we count the 04 Pistons) but im just not gonna compare dolph to a Tim Duncan, KG, Dirk, Wade, or Kobe anyway.

Point blank...id take Rodman over a lot of people who put up numbers he couldnt touch. And I think id rather have his career too. Just for me personally to play. 6 finals and 5 rings all of them as a very good player? So no Horry/Kerry shit(Horry on the Rockets was similar to Rodman on the Pistons though).

I think Rodman is the best player to point to when discussing how people just dont care about defense and rebounding. Clearly having been rated this high people respect him...but he was never as respected for his ability as id have liked.

He was one of the hardest working, most well rounded(he could do everything but shoot and handle the ball....a lot of people cant do anything but those), impactful players in the league for a long time. he was smart..would do ANYTHING to win.

I respect him mroe than 90% of the guys considered better than him. He had the heart of Larry Bird with opposing skills. But he was flat out among the best players ever to me. Not best defensive...best players.


And guys like him will never get the love I feel they should. Russell aside...guys like him dont get that respect. And even Bill was scoring quite a bit at times. Dennis was too off the bench for a minute there but...nobody remembers it. he put up 15/10 as a 7th man on the Pistons for a couple months he just stopped pushing himself to score.

[NugzHeat3]

My problem with Rodman has everything to do with non-basketball related issues.

The guy was effective under leaders like Jordan and Isiah and coaches like Daly and Jackson.

You put him anywhere else, he's a headcase and his impact is not there despite the numbers being there.

Bob Hill just could not keep him under control and he's a big reason for the Spurs' loss in the 1995 playoffs. The guy is out there with his shoes off, refusing to take part in huddles or TOs, solely looking to pad his rebounding numbers instead of rotating on his man (Horry) and it got so bad that he was benched/sidelined for a couple of games in the Spurs vs Lakers series.

You can see it in the results too. The Spurs made the WCSF, won 59 games after trading him for Will Perdue (no other roster changes) and their defense didn't take a hit take a hit either. Will Perdue wasn't doing anything here. Rodman just wasn't having a lot of impact on that team. He did make Robinson somewhat of a tougher player though. I'd point to the Lakers and Dallas years too at the end of his career but those are sort of irrelevant since he was in his late 30s.

In his Detroit and Chicago years, Rodman is does his role very well. He's a specialist but a damn good one. Locking down his man, crashing the glass, providing versatility ect.

He's an underrated offensive player too. Offensive rebounding, setting screens, interior passing are things he did at an elite level. He's effective without the ball.

[D.J.]

Rodman. We're talking the best perimeter defender in the league in his youth, arguably the GOT rebounder while containing top bigs, a game changer, a momentum changer, and brought in fans to watch him play. We're talking a guy that put up over 18 RPG twice in the NINETIES and led the league in rebounds every year from '92-'98, and as a 6'6" player capable of playing positions 3-5.

(Horry on the Rockets was similar to Rodman on the Pistons though).

[BlackWhiteGreen]

Last I saw in the last thread was you saying it was a tie, then someone else put Pierce... how did Schayes win?

Just read it, seems a little subjective how you choose whose votes count and whose don't... I've always thought those who took the time to read up on players like Schayes were more biased towards them because of the amount of "Who the f*ck is he" responses. I guess no one's really going to be totally unbiased anyway...

[D.J.]

You put him anywhere else, he's a headcase and his impact is not there despite the numbers being there.

The impact was there. He took a huge load off Robinson's shoulders. Their failures in the '94 and '95 postseasons had to do with Robinson completely folding. In '94 against Utah, Robinson had games of 12/9 on 2/14 shooting and 16/11 on 8/21 shooting. Those were also back-to-back games BTW. In '95, he had games scoring 22, 21, 20, and 19. He shot 7/15, 5/17, 6/16, and 6/17 in those games respectively. Rodman averaged 16 RPG against Utah in '94(11, 17, and 20 and that order) and against Houston in '95, grabbed 12+ rebounds in all but one game and averaged 15 RPG for the series. Robinson was the problem in the playoffs, not Rodman.

Bob Hill just could not keep him under control and he's a big reason for the Spurs' loss in the 1995 playoffs. The guy is out there with his shoes off, refusing to take part in huddles or TOs, solely looking to pad his rebounding numbers instead of rotating on his man (Horry) and it got so bad that he was benched/sidelined for a couple of games in the Spurs vs Lakers series.

And that was a huge part as to why Hill was fired a little over a year later. Hill was god awful at motivating his players and getting the best out of them. The blame for the Spurs underachieving(outside of Hill) was Robinson playing piss poor against Utah and getting his ass pounded by Olajuwon.

You can see it in the results too. The Spurs made the WCSF, won 59 games after trading him for Will Perdue (no other roster changes) and their defense didn't take a hit take a hit either. Will Perdue wasn't doing anything here. Rodman just wasn't having a lot of impact on that team. He did make Robinson somewhat of a tougher player though. I'd point to the Lakers and Dallas years too at the end of his career but those are sort of irrelevant since he was in his late 30s.

The 4 years before Rodman arrived, the Spurs won 49, 47, 55, and 56 games. After going 49-33 in '93, they went 55-27 in Rodman's first season and 62-20 in his second season in San Antonio. They were certainly a good team prior to Rodman joining, but they did not get worse with him there. And because they had a good system, they won without him too.

[Droid101]

Dennis Rodman is the best rebounder in the history of the league by far.

Dennis Rodman has proven to impact any team he's on in a positive way. Teams play much better when he's on the floor than when he's not.

Five championships and many, many times being on the team with the best overall or nearly the best overall record in the league.

Rodman’s Win % Differential

As I’ve discussed previously, a player’s differential statistics are simply the difference in their team’s performance in the games they played versus the games they missed. One very important differential stat we might be interested in is winning percentage.

To look at Rodman’s numbers in this area, I used exactly the same process that I described in Part 2(b) to look at his other differentials. However, for comparison purposes, I’ve greatly expanded the pool of players by dropping the qualifying minutes requirement from 3000 to 1000. This grows the pool from 164 players to 470.

Why expand? Honestly, because Rodman’s extreme win % differential allows it. I think the more stringent filters produce a list that is more reliable from top to bottom—but in this case, I am mostly interested in (literally) the top. There are some players on the list with barely 1/3 of a season’s worth of qualifying playing time to back up their numbers—which should produce extreme volatility—yet still no one is able to overtake Rodman.
Here is Rodman’s raw win differential, along with those of a number of select players (including a few whose styles are often compared to Rodman’s, some Hall of Famers, some future first-ballot Hall of Fame selections, and Rodman’s 2011 Hall of Fame co-finalists Chris Mullin and Maurice Cheeks):



Amazingly, this number may not even reflect Rodman’s true impact, because he generally played for extremely good teams, where it is not only harder to contribute, but where a given impact will have less of an effect on win percentage (for example, if your team normally wins 90% of its games, it is clearly impossible to have a win% differential above 10%). To account for this, I’ve also created “adjusted” win% differentials, which attempt to normalize a player’s percentage increase/decrease to what it would be on a .500 team.

Quite frankly, Dennis Rodman was better at rebounding than any other player was better than other players at any other stat (roundabout... but true if you think about it).

He was a winner, plain and simple.

http://skepticalsports.com/?p=112

[Droid101]

I'd point to the Lakers and Dallas years too at the end of his career but those are sort of irrelevant since he was in his late 30s.

Please, point to the Lakers, you only help his case, as he still had an insane rebound rate and had the Lakers on the same pace of wins as the Spurs at the start of the season until he was cut for NO GOOD REASON.

[quote]And indeed, Rodman

[NugzHeat3]

The impact was there. He took a huge load off Robinson's shoulders. Their failures in the '94 and '95 postseasons had to do with Robinson completely folding. In '94 against Utah, Robinson had games of 12/9 on 2/14 shooting and 16/11 on 8/21 shooting. Those were also back-to-back games BTW. In '95, he had games scoring 22, 21, 20, and 19. He shot 7/15, 5/17, 6/16, and 6/17 in those games respectively. Rodman averaged 16 RPG against Utah in '94(11, 17, and 20 and that order) and against Houston in '95, grabbed 12+ rebounds in all but one game and averaged 15 RPG for the series. Robinson was the problem in the playoffs, not Rodman.





And that was a huge part as to why Hill was fired a little over a year later. Hill was god awful at motivating his players and getting the best out of them. The blame for the Spurs underachieving(outside of Hill) was Robinson playing piss poor against Utah and getting his ass pounded by Olajuwon.





The 4 years before Rodman arrived, the Spurs won 49, 47, 55, and 56 games. After going 49-33 in '93, they went 55-27 in Rodman's first season and 62-20 in his second season in San Antonio. They were certainly a good team prior to Rodman joining, but they did not get worse with him there. And because they had a good system, they won without him too.

I disagree.

Rodman's antics killed the Spurs' chemistry and even the players (Sean Elliott, Doc Rivers) called him out for it. Rodman was being a distraction, you can blame Bob Hill and I'd agree because he was a bit of a joke as a coach but as a player, Rodman deserves just as much flack. His antics were inexcusable.

I'm not necessarily concerned with the stats here.

Also, to be clear, I'm not excusing Robinson who folded under pressure and got dominated by Hakeem. He deserves flack for that and he deserves flack for being shut down by Malone/Spence in 1994 as well. But despite Hakeem going off, they could have won the series if Rodman rotated on Horry and played in the flow of the game according the game plan. Game 4 of that series was a 103-81 blowout for San Antonio playing @ Houston and after the game, the entire Rockets team said Rodman killed us and he was the biggest reason San Antonio won the game.

The Spurs were at their best, which meant Dennis Rodman was on his best behavior. Leading an all-out rebounding assault, Rodman finished with 12 points and 19 rebounds, including 12 offensive rebounds. San Antonio annihilated the Rockets on the backboards, outrebounding them, 64-39. At times, it looked as if the Spurs were playing volleyball and the Rockets were watching. Rodman had little to say after the game, but his performance spoke loudly.

"Rodman killed us," said Kenny Smith, Houston's point guard.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/29/sp...ts.html?src=pm
^In this game, Horry shot 2 for 9 so you can assume Rodman was playing good defense as well.

The chemistry and the environment is something Rodman doesn't quite enhance unless in the right situation.

Even in his last year in Detroit, he was beefing with the Ron Rothstein and the Pistons were content with trading him away. Rodman and Ron weren't on the same page. Rodman was showing up late for practice, thought Daly bailed on him when he bolted to Jersey and seemed like he wanted out.

They fired Ron and hired Chaney at the end of the season and look what Chaney says here.

"I hope to sit down and talk with Dennis soon," Chaney said. "Dennis put up the numbers last year but we can't have the disruptions.

^May 5, 1993.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...+problem&hl=en

[NugzHeat3]

Please, point to the Lakers, you only help his case, as he still had an insane rebound rate and had the Lakers on the same pace of wins as the Spurs at the start of the season until he was cut for NO GOOD REASON.


http://skepticalsports.com/?p=1397

Nobody would cut him for no good reason. You can give me his rebound rate though.

The guy was a massive distraction and only few could keep him under control or put up with his problems.

[D.J.]

Rodman's antics killed the Spurs' chemistry and even the players (Sean Elliott, Doc Rivers) called him out for it. Rodman was being a distraction, you can blame Bob Hill and I'd agree because he was a bit of a joke as a coach but as a player, Rodman deserves just as much flack. His antics were inexcusable.

He always was a drama queen, but he won you games. He couldn't have hurt team chemistry that much if they won 55 and 62 games in his only seasons there. Players blamed Rodman simply because he was the easiest guy to blame. No one wanted to blame the league MVP that stunk up the joint. In terms of blame, it's 1)Robinson, 2)Hill, 3)Rodman.

I'm not necessarily concerned with the stats here.

Also, to be clear, I'm not excusing Robinson who folded under pressure and got dominated by Hakeem. He deserves flack for that and he deserves flack for being shut down by Malone/Spence in 1994 as well. But despite Hakeem going off, they could have won the series if Rodman rotated on Horry and played in the flow of the game according the game plan. Game 4 of that series was a 103-81 blowout for San Antonio playing @ Houston and after the game, the entire Rockets team said Rodman killed us and he was the biggest reason San Antonio won the game.

You should be concerned with the stats. The alpha dog and league MVP was god awful in those two playoffs. Rodman not rotating on Horry are individual plays. Robinson had complete games where he just stunk it up and those games were also consecutive at times. And even if he bounced back, he didn't bounce back as much as he should have. Blame goes to multiple people. Basketball is a team sport. But Rodman is not more at fault than Robinson was.

The chemistry and the environment is something Rodman doesn't quite enhance unless in the right situation.

It seemed fine during the regular season. He had no problem helping the Spurs to an average of 58.5 wins in 2 seasons.

Even in his last year in Detroit, he was beefing with the Ron Rothstein and the Pistons were content with trading him away. Rodman and Ron weren't on the same page. Rodman was showing up late for practice, thought Daly bailed on him when he bolted to Jersey and seemed like he wanted out.

That Pistons team was on the downfall and everyone knew it. That 1993-94 season, Laimbeer and Isiah both played their final seasons. Laimbeer missed all but 11 games and Isiah missed 24 himself.

[HylianNightmare]

i would take Rodman on my team every day of the week, guy had his offcourt "issues" but on the court you could count on him to give you his all and play some great D and get you every damn rebound possible

[Kblaze8855]

I didnt mean horry was similar to 90s pistons rodman but similar role in the 80s on the teams when they were winning. 3rd or 4th best player. 5th to some. Said it because i said his rings were not of a horry variety and didnt feel like reading that horry on the rockets did quite a bit.