and a better PF than Timmy D
"Who's better" is a question without an answer and not one that is worthy of an article. We can yap about it, talk about metrics, argue over what's more important but we will never find consensus. A more interesting question, with an answer: if we put Duncan and Garnett side by side, are Duncan's 5 rings to Garnett's 1 simply because the Timberwolves were a dumpster fire?
I can test that. I have tested harder things. Shit, I am running positional decomposition and heat maps on World Cup attacking chances. So I set it up. Not to make you skim for the answer: yes; definitively. Garnett had a higher peak when normalized for help and coaching. Garnett had a historically bad franchise he got drafted to. When Garnett got the tiniest bit of help and his team's strength equated to Duncan's — well, we all saw KG in Boston win that 'ship.
So I built a metric, duh.
Now, first things first: the metric didn't pan out. I didn't have the necessary tracking data for Duncan and KG's defense and for two players who's defense helped define their career, it felt silly to force a square peg through a round hole.
The metric is CORP: I stole the idea from Bill James and tried to apply it to basketball. Smashed together Thinking Basketball and Bill James: huge fan of TB, just throwing out Bill James cause I know he did this first.
But it is "Championships Over Replacement Players" and pretty self explanatory. How much did that individual player, personally, raise the team's chances of winning a title compared to a wholly average player?
I made sure it was help-adjusted. It doesn't allow someone to take credit for a teammate's contribution and doesn't let a player suffer for having a shit ass team.
The metric works, is surprising, and is getting it's own write-up soon. I just would be remiss if I didn't tell you where I tried to start since it is the most obvious place.
The Eight Pieces.
I thought about how an argument like this would go and conceived of 8 different facets of the game we could look at to figure out, comprehensively, what the deal is with these two guys. The headline: 7 of the 8 pointed right at KG at the badass he was, and the other shrugged. For what it's worth; I pre-registered everything and ensured that no goalposts would be moved.
On the individual tape, Garnett was just better. KG's peak was higher per Box-Plus-Minus. KG's peak season he posted a BPM of 10.2 and a VORP of 10.0. We're not talking "great PF" here…that is arguably a top-25 season of the modern era. Duncan's peak hit at 8.5 and 8.0 for the same metrics. Across their respective careers, KG carried a higher VORP, higher top-10-seasons total and a tougher offensive workload.
KG improved his teammates an insane amount. The easiest proof of this was Boston where KG's addition had Rondo, Perkins and PP all take steps simultaneously.
The Timberwolves were, and I can't stress this enough, a clown show. The highlight of this was the coaching. I measured how much each team's head coaching added in wins. Pop was worth about 6.35 wins a season. He was the coach of the Spurs for nineteen straight seasons. During KG's time with the T-wolves, he had 5 head coaches, who combined to contribute 0.60 wins. Over a 10x addition just on coaching alone.
Duncan's longevity was, in at least small part, due to his situation. Garnett ran 500 more minutes a season during his peak than Tim. And it is because they needed to. If they didn't, they sank. Pop, meanwhile, was resting Duncan into his forties. So even some of the side effects we measure as "great" were due to the situation.
KG only got handed one ticket — and he punched the fuck out of it. I have been doing deep work on the probability of championships. Like, A LOT a lot. So I ran their careers through the math to see what their odds were, each season, to win a 'ship. Garnett's entire twelve-year run in Minnesota summed to less championship opportunity than Duncan got in a SINGLE Spurs season. So Garnett was there for twelve years. His prime. And it, in total, added up to one-in-five chances of him winning a championship. Duncan's individual seasons started with over a 30% chance to win a championship. If that's not situational fuckery, I don't know what is.
The one knock, and I am gonna argue against it is that Duncan had better playoff numbers. But, it easy to have better playoff numbers when the team you are playing SEVEN GAMES IN A ROW has to gameplan against more than JUST YOU. Look at when KG got Cassell and Sprewell — what happened? Western Conference Finals, that's what. And what happened when Cassell gets hurt and he no long has help? 2004 collapse. However, the numbers say that Duncan was a better playoff participant. It doesn't explain a four-ring gap.
I ran a counter-factual. Basically, I threw KG on the Spurs and Duncan on the Wolves. It accounts for around 2.5 to 3.5 rings without getting weird and nerd-math on you.
The final point, and the one I think wraps this with a bow. Look at 2008. The Celtics team was the one time Garnett got a Duncan-tier roster and that dude bodied the league. "ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!" became fucking canon for an entire generation because of what Kevin Garnett did with the Boston Celtics in 2008.
Kevin Garnett was a victim of a poorly positioned and equally poorly ran franchise. I'm not arguing that Duncan is bad. Or overvalued. I consider him the GOAT Power Forward. He has the rings and legacy and Hall of Fame.
I'm just simply stating, with stats and facts, that there will be no goddamn Kevin Garnett slander in my ear shot because that man didn't lose to anyone more than his own team.