How to Evaluate NBA Players using Time Travel Movies.
MJ vs. LeBron is a classic sports argument. Time Travel movies show why it's so hard.
First, sorry that January got away from me! I’ll do my best to return to at least monthly writing. The good news is if you want to hear me in audio format.
The Boxscore Geeks Show with Brian Foster and me is bi-weekly. We primarily talk about the NBA, but we have a general view of stats, economics, and sports.
Nerd! with Jeff May is a monthly podcast about pop culture and pop-culture history. For example, we’re currently doing bad videogame movie adaptations, with our last episode being on 2005’s Doom.
And these podcasts lead us to today’s post. The topic of how to compare players has been a running theme on the Boxscore Geeks show.
In talking more with Jeff May, the topic of LeBron James vs. Michael Jordan has come up. And another point comes up. LeBron James plays in a modern era, with better training and rules. Fights used to be more common and weren’t punished as harshly in the historical NBA. So, yes, LeBron James has had one of the longest and most impressive careers, but would he have a 20-year career in the NBA if the Detroit Pistons attacked him night after night? Fair point! It turns out that years ago, Brian and I hashed out the basics of how to compare players across generations using time travel movies! Find the original episode here.
With that, here are four or five time travel methodologies to be aware of when comparing sports stars. Use them well!
Method 1: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
For those who don't recall Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (yes, for you youngins, that is John Wick in there!), two teenagers must put on an amazing history presentation to save their grade. For silly reasons, George Carlin gives them a time machine, and they collect Billy the Kid, Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Napolean, and Freud.
These figures were considered top of their field or historically important. The key to the presentation is Bill and Ted nab each figure close to their prime, bringing them to the present and demonstrating that person to their school while still being tethered to their time. The movie ends with them dropping each other back in their respective time. Don’t worry, I’ll talk about that at the end of the article!
Anyway, this is a classic player evaluation method. The very start of my NBA stats career was the book “Wages of Wins” by Dr. David Berri. Dave created the Wins Produced metric to evaluate player production — with the goal of tying it to wages, classic economist! A key part of his evaluation is he compares players at their position against the league average. This is somewhat useful because when he says, for instance, both LeBron James and Michael Jordan had 20 Win seasons, each is compared to the context of their era. Indeed, a player like Bill Russell considered an all-time great, finished his career with a True Shooting % — this normalizes three-point shots and free throws — of 47.1%. This would make the current league-worst Detroit Pistons blush! In his era, though? Quite fine.
So this Time Travel method of comparison? Quite sound and I like it. Take a person or player and compare them to the era they played in. See if you can get a baseline for each season/era for sports. Then you can do basic stats methods; ala, find what percentile of the class the person would be in, and go from there. Bill and Ted? Excellent methodology! I have noted in past, using The Tick cartoon as an example, why the baseline comparison isn’t super easy either.
I’d be remiss not to give a shout-out to chess Grandmaster Ben Finegold. This is the method he often uses when describing chess greats. While, statistically, Gary Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen are easy selections for greatest chess player ever, Finegold routinely brings up Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer as his picks because no modern player, relative to their competition, was as dominant.
Method 2/2A: Back to the Future
This is the method that’s going to get me in trouble, I know because some disagree. For those that don’t recall, the premise of 1985’s Back to the Future is eccentric scientist Doc Brown invents a time machine. Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, travels back in time inadvertently with it and dominates skateboarding and rock and roll in the 50s. In part 2, Marty’s nemesis returns to 1985 from 2015 with knowledge of the future to dominate the 1980s. And part 3 goes to the old west. Anyway! Here’s the key: the Back to the Future idea is that if you could take someone like LeBron James in 2013 and teleport them back to 1983, how would they be fair?
The answer? They would destroy the past. The knowledge of future events or future technology is such that any future generation — so far — would crush past generations. The idea that the 1996 Bulls, the only 70-win team in NBA history to win a title, could compete with a modern team? It’s laughable. Whenever an old talking head, ala Shaquille O’Neal, gets on to explain how his 2000s Lakers would crush the modern Warriors or Heat? I roll my eyes.
There is a very easy way out of this, for what it's worth. Current generations of players are so much better than the past because they can study the past and learn from it. For example, Kobe Bryant was getting videotapes of the ‘80s NBA while training in Italy. Something players like Magic Johnson and Dr. J didn’t have the benefit of. And, as more money went into the sport, the players also benefited. LeBron James spends around $1.5 million a year on his health. That was roughly 3% of LeBron’s NBA paycheck the year of that article. In 1985? Even adjusted for inflation, that is Michael Jordan’s entire NBA salary for the season!
So, my easy answer is this: any modern team, regardless of era rules, would destroy a past team. However, there is a subtle update to this that has come from talking with Jeff ala could LeBron bang with the Bad Boy Pistons? Yes, any modern team could defeat a past team in a best-of-seven series. And yes, any modern superstar would absolutely crush a past league. However, could a past player put up their modern career in the past if the rules were much rougher, the money was worse, and a lot of the modern conditioning/etc. was gone? I could easily see no. Michael Jordan was effectively done at age 34. So, the idea that LeBron James wouldn’t have the same GOAT career if he played in the 80s and 90s? I can give that some leeway, Jeff!
Method 3/2B: Hot Tub Time Machine
One of the sillier Time Travel movies that stars Crispen Glover is “Hot Tub Time Machine.” Through a magic hot tub, a group of friends have their minds transported back to their teenage bodies. Using the knowledge from their future selves, they crush the past, with one character pulling a Biff Tannen from Back to the Future and becoming rich in the future.
The distinction between this and Back to the Future is merely the knowledge of the future placed in the past. And this, I would argue, is still enough. Take, for example, Larry Bird. In 1985 the Celtics fell to the Lakers in the Finals. Larry Bird took a total of nine threes in the series! In 2000, the Indiana Pacers, with Larry Bird as head coach, narrowly missed the NBA Finals, with his team averaging over 20 three-point attempts a game. If Larry Bird were able to transport his mind back 20 years to his past self, he’d absolutely have a leg up on the past NBA.
If a player like LeBron could only transport their consciousness back in time into a good NBA player’s body, they’d dominate, too. Oddly, that plotline also shows up in Hot Tub Time Machine! With apologies, any knowledgebase that increases over time will favor the most recent group. This is called the Flynn Effect, which 100% applies to the NBA.
Again, when it comes to arguments, I will easily agree that teams like the 1986 Celtics, the 1996 Bulls, and the 2000 Los Angeles Lakers were amazing relative to their peers (Bill and Ted method) and contributed a lot to the modern landscape. But they’d also be crushed by the bodies and minds of modern NBA teams.
Method 4: The Clone High Method
Almost done, and the most fun method. The short-lived Clone High was an animated TV series where many historical figures were cloned and sent to high school for use by the US government. It’s a comedy! Now this is where it gets fun. While I agree Bill Russell was amazing for his time, I have said with conventional methods of time travel, he wouldn’t stack up. But, let’s suppose the following. What if Bill Russell was born in, say, 2003? He was 6-10 and 215 pounds in the 1950s! Of course, he’d be recruited, play high school ball, and likely be a one-and-done player. And he’d have modern conditioning, teaching, all of the advantages I gave 2023 LeBron James over 1985 Michael Jordan. And if this Bill Russell was a draft recruit for the modern NBA? Do I think he’d compete and be amazing? Absolutely!
Back to Dave Berri. Another one of his popular notes in the book Wages of Wins is - “The Short Supply of Tall People.” There are just not enough tall, coordinated people to play basketball. So Bill Russell would absolutely still be in demand, and with modern training, do I think he could shoot better and compete? Of course. And while there are bench players on historical teams, I don’t think this would apply to the modern NBA. I would argue any historical top player, if they were born such that they were entering the NBA in next year’s draft, would be an amazing NBA player that would still be top tier in the modern NBA.
The key thing to note here is that the difference between the older NBAs and the current NBA isn’t the quality of the former. players in the league. It’s the amount of knowledge and technology used to help those players. Now the Clone High method gets rough for a fun reason. So let’s wrap it up with a silly sideways time travel.
Appendix: The Darkwing Duck Contingency
In the Podcast history, Brian and I kept discussing this with Chris Yeh on the next show, where Chris predicted the 2020 Title.
In the sixty-third episode of Darkwing Duck, “Time and Punishment,” Gosalyn, Darkwing Duck’s plucky sidekick, is transported into the future. A similar plotline to Back to the Future 2. Unlike Back to the Future 2, though, Darkwing Duck makes the correct note. If Gosalyn traveled to the future, she would no longer be in the past, and that impact would affect the future. In this case, Darkwing Duck, so distraught he lost his sidekick, has become a tyrant.
This, by the way, would obviously be an issue in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. These modern characters return to the past with knowledge of the future, ala Hot Tub Time Machine.
And these even affect our clone discussion. Part of the reason why modern greats got great was watching prior greats. Steph Curry followed around his dad, Dell Curry, a stellar three-point shooter, and Muggsy Bogues, the best small guard in the game's history. So, if you cloned Muggsy Bogues, and he competed in the modern NBA, you’d have to concede part of that was the influence of historical Bogues. So, how would you evaluate Clone Bogues as an all-time great? Something to consider before we start cloning amazing athletes to placate nerds on the internt.
And a player like LeBron James? He has perhaps had the motivation to keep playing at his level to match Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s point totals or win an extra Finals MVP to surpass at least Shaquille O’Neal and Magic Johnson (I don’t think MJ’s six Finals MVPs are ever touched). The motivating factors of past greats might not be there for their “future” selves. Again, this question gets most nebulous. The era and competition players played in impacted their motivation, which impacted their play. So simply putting them in a future era, we wouldn’t be guaranteed the same career success. But, I still feel comfortable with my assertion that any historical great, if they grew up in the modern era, would easily compete and thrive in the NBA.
Wrap It Up
Alright, there you go, four different time travel methodologies to bring to any sports debate in the future. Am I right? Does the future always win? Would a clone of Bill Russell kick Rudy Gobert’s ass? Would the mind of Larry Bird make Magic Johnson cry? Feel free to let me know @nerdnumbers on any of the socials.
And hey, shameless plug, I’ve started breaking cards on Jeff May’s YouTube channel, https://youtube.com/@heytherejeffro. The tentative plan is every Monday at 9:30 pm EST. So if you want to yell at me in the comments there about how wrong or I right I am? I’ll take it!
Until next time, hopefully much sooner than April!
-Dre