A Whisper In The Noise: When Pierce Was Better Than Bryant
Early Tuesday morning, former NBA pariah Stephon Marbury found himself too giddy from a rousing night of dance lessons and stargazing to fall asleep. So what does he do? He pushes out a few tweets disparaging former teammate and Celtics captain Paul Pierce.
Makes sense.
His actions, anyway, not the content of his remarks. Marbury was a player, an all-star alongside some of the men he – after a night of really nailing those Jitterbug spins – feels compelled to rail against from time to time. And because of his approximation to these people, many of us can’t help but listen.
Seemingly at random, Marbury’s tweet-taunt (twaunt?) was that L.A.’s Kobe Bryant is a better player than Pierce. He also supposed that Pierce wouldn’t agree to this sentiment and – still unprovoked – sent out a second tweet claiming Pierce’s “style is played out.” Perhaps he was referring to his choice of suits, but I doubt it.
Marbury has never shied from running off at the mouth (or the tweet), but that he leveled such an unprovoked and, dare I say, obvious observation made it an oddly compelling one.
Maybe Starbury knows something we don’t. What if every hoops analyst, fan and basketball theorist somehow totally dropped the ball on this. I mean, in the last two years, both Bryant and Pierce do have the same number of rings, after all. What if Paul Pierce was, at one time, better than Bryant?
Turns out, Pierce kinda sorta was. The following graph compares the two players’ Win Shares throughout the decade. A win share is a statistic that complicatedly calculates how many wins a team owes to the individual player. If the Celtics win 60 games in a season and Pierce has a 13 win share, he is responsible for 13 of the Celtics’ 60 wins. Another way to think of it is if you removed Pierce and his 13 win shares, the Celtics would have only won 47 games that season.
Pierce / Bryant Win Share Chart (click to embiggen)
If Win Shares illustrate the impact an individual has had on a team, you’ll notice that Pierce only helped his team more than Bryant in one season (2004-05). You’ll remember that as the season Gary Payton and Karl Malone left the Lakers and Bryant wallowed on one of the worst Lakers teams of the last 20 years. His Lakers went 34-48. Bryant was responsible for 21.5 percent of his team’s wins. Pierce’s Celtics that year were 45-37. Pierce was responsible for 25.6 percent of them.
The downside of Win Shares is that Bryant was on some very good teams during the last decade and Pierce mostly wasn’t. Therefore wins came more easily to Bryant than Pierce. So let’s look at a more individual-heavy stat: the Player Efficiency Rating (PER).
PER, simply put, adds together a player’s positive contributions, subtracts his negative contributions and rates a player on a per-minute basis in the form of a number. The league average is 15.
Pierce / Bryant Player Efficiency Rating (Click to embiggen)
Pierce only tops Bryant once in PER and it’s during Pierce’s lockout-shortened rookie year. After that however, Bryant clearly never looks back.
So what happens when we combine WS and PER? First, we call it something catchy like “Whisper.” Whispers take into account both a player’s worth to their respective team and their overall performance in a game. Does Pierce ever come close?
Pierce / Bryant Win Share + Player Efficiency Rating (click to embiggen)
Besides the tie in the 50-game 1998-99 season, Pierce’s WSPER was only higher than Bryant’s once and even then it was pretty close.
As for Marbury? The suggestion that Pierce’s “played out” game can’t stand up to Bryant’s implies that at one point it could. But unless Marbury was specifically discussing Pierce’s Win Share or WSPER stats from 2004-05, I’m not sure he’s got a leg to stand on. They’re not in the same tier. Except for 2004-05. Pierce was a better player in that one season. He shot more efficiently, rebounded more, stole more, shot five fewer shots a game and played 16 more games than Bryant.
But that’s it. Bryant’s been better ever since. Comparatively, Pierce’s style has been “played out” for five seasons.
To be honest, I regret exerting this much energy into disproving a tweet that no one really believed anyway.
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