Seventy-Five: Best NBA Players and Teams Rated by Statistician who has Seen Games Since 1947

By Dave Heeren

This book features the NBA's statistical history, its all-time greatest teams and players, the best shooters, rebounders and playmakers. One chapter features statistical evidence that TENDEX was much more effective in rating players for the NBA draft than were the league's professional scouts. Book ends

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684860463

Dave Heeren

Dave Heeren began attending New York Knicks games in 1947, while still in elementary school. He invented the TENDEX system at the age of 20, which later became for many years the most widely used system in the world for rating pro and college basketball players. At age 23, became statistician for his favorite team, the New York Knicks. Wrote nine books with emphasis on TENDEX, including five editions of Basketball Abstract, which became an often-emulated standard for basketball stat books. His TENDEX player ratings were printed for a decade on the NBA website, were used by head coaches of more than half of the league's teams and served as basis for the database of a basketball encyclopedia. Professional basketball leagues based in Europe and Australia formally adopted TENDEX ratings for their players.

Book preview

SEVENTY-FIVE

Best NBA Players and Teams

Rated by Statistician who has Seen

Games Since 1947

(League’s entire 75-year history)

DAVE HEEREN

Seventy-Five

Copyright © 2021 by David S. Heeren. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

1603 Capitol Ave., Suite 310 Cheyenne, Wyoming USA 82001

1-888-980-6523 | [e-mail]

URLink Print and Media is committed to excellence in the publishing industry.

Book design copyright © 2021 by URLink Print and Media. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922433

ISBN 978-1-68486-026-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68486-046-3 (Digital)

21.10.21

CONTENTS

Chapter One

A Personal Look at NBA History

Chapter Two

The Fabulous Foursome

Chapter Three

Greatest NBA Team: Surprise!

Chapter Four

Call them the Shootists

Chapter Five

PAR for the Playmakers

Chapter Six

The Surprising Rebounders

Chapter Seven

Defense: The Three R’s

Chapter Eight

Underrated and Overrated

Chapter Nine

Durability and Tenacity

Chapter Ten

Versatility and Athleticism

Chapter Eleven

Most Amazing Fact about NBA Scouts

Chapter Twelve

Filling in the Blanks

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

This book was written because its author attended NBA games during every one of the league’s 75 seasons and created most of the statistical concepts in use by the league to this day.

The first TENDEX formula came into being in 1958. By that time, at the age of 19, I had become an NBA fan, attending New York Knicks games every winter at Madison Square Garden.

Before the 1961-62 NBA season, the Knicks hired me and early that season chose me as the team statistician. TENDEX often received attention from one of the four greatest players of all-time, Wilt Chamberlain. I remember how flattering it was to have Wilt looking over my shoulder and asking questions about his TENDEX stats.

Much later, from out of nowhere, in 2003, I received a phone call inviting me to a meeting with publishers working on a new basketball encyclopedia.

I attended the two-day event, and I believe the rejection at that meeting of my prime TENDEX formula and replacing it with a deficient formula (an outdated version of TENDEX) was the No. 1 reason for the encyclopedia’s failure to find favor with many NBA fans.

Let’s say I’m a big NBA fan picking up this encyclopedia in 2003 at a store during the same year as Michael Jordan’s third and final retirement.

Chances are that I am going to look first at the stats of Jordan, the most popular player of his era. And I am going to put it right back down again, probably with an angry leer, when I learn that Jordan was not rated Player of the Year a single time in the encyclopedia’s year-by-year database.

I am glad that I did not tell the encyclopedia’s editor that the database chosen for the encyclopedia was based on a TENDEX formula. It was the only deficient formula among the two-dozen in my system. If I had told him, he might have mentioned TENDEX in the encyclopedia and I would have joined the encyclopedia’s publishing staff as targets of Jordan fan ire.

The faulty TENDEX formula omitted the important divisor for positional rating and has not been used in any of my basketball books. Centers, forwards and point guards always, on average, rate higher than shooting guards. It was possible (and happened eight times) for the greatest shooting guard (Jordan) to lose out in the Player of the Year ratings to players less dominant at other positions, according to the deficient formula used in the encyclopedia. TENDEX actually honored the great Jordan three more times than his NBA contemporaries, who picked him five times as MVP.

Statistics, unlike book texts, could not be protected by copyright, and so the thievery was rampant. Bob Bellotti was the only statistician I am aware of at that time who didn’t try to borrow stats from me, change them a tad and pretend he was the originator. Bellotti telephoned to ask permission for using the TENDEX formula he knew I didn’t like and persuaded the editor that it should be used in the encyclopedia. I liked his candor and the fact that he wasn’t one of the thieves.

There was a lot of plagiarism of TENDEX going on. It started with the stat system’s initial national exposure via The Sporting News and a basketball magazine in the 1980’s. This was followed by a series of five annual Basketball Abstract books. So much of what I wrote was published by nationwide sources that it was no problem for would-be plagiarists to rewrite my words and copy my stats.

Once, a borrower didn’t even bother to rewrite. He just reprinted a segment of text that I had written. But, somehow, the thieves always seemed to foul up even worse than the single errant TENDEX formula because they just didn’t understand basic statistical concepts.

With a sportswriter/friend, John Harris, we produced an annual TENDEX Draft Report which, during 30 seasons of computations from 1984 through 2013, showed TENDEX to be superior to NBA scouts by a ratio of five players (TENDEX winners) to three (winners for the scouts) overall.

For example, the scouts placed Jordan only No. 3 in the 1984 draft when he was the TENDEX decisive No. 1. TENDEX outdid the scouts on more than two-thirds of the super-elite players drafted during those years, including a perfect record (100%) for the first five players in the Jordan draft.

The better the players, the better TENDEX was at rating them. NBA scouts were earning millions of dollars when, for a few dollars, any fan (or NBA executive) could pick up draft ratings more accurate than those of the scouts by spending a few dollars for a TENDEX draft report..

By that time, TENDEX was being used, not only on the official NBA website, without being acknowledged as TENDEX, but also officially by the top professional leagues in Europe and Australia. They did credit TENDEX.

Some of them made changes in their versions of the TENDEX formulae. A European statistician told me, I think it was in the year 2000, that he was cutting in half the statistical significance of free-throw percentage in his version of TENDEX in an effort to protect Shaquille O’Neal, who was a horrible free-throw shooter.

I replied: Why does the best player in the world need your protection?

But even Shaq does not measure up statistically to any of the elite TENDEX foursome consisting of Jordan, Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and LeBron James. The four are close enough by the numbers so that you can make an argument for any one of them.

Dave Heeren

CHAPTER ONE

A PERSONAL LOOK AT NBA HISTORY

It was the early days of my first job after university graduation. In January of 1962, I was sitting at my desk in New York City’s Madison Square Garden studying basketball statistics when I became aware of a large person standing behind me.

Are you rating the players? They told me it’s what you do.A huge hand reached out with index finger pointing at a row of Philadelphia Warriors statistics on the page in front of me. What’s my rating?

I noticed that the finger was pointing at the line of statistics belonging to Wilt Chamberlain, whose team would be playing that night in the Garden against the New York Knicks. At age 23, I was on salary with the Knicks to do what I most enjoyed: Statistical tabulations for the team.

I looked up and made eye contact with Chamberlain, who at that moment became the first NBA superstar to make my acquaintance.

I was reminded of dropping a 300-pound weight – Chamberlain’s actual weight – in the saddle of a race horse and then shoving the horse onto a track and expecting it to defeat other horses that had 100-pound jockeys in the saddle.

Unlike the thoroughbred race horses, Wilt was powerful enough not only to carry all that weight, but to beat every other contemporary NBA big man running back and forth on a basketball court. He was a world-class quarter-miler besides having a feathery fingertip touch for rolling the ball into the basket when he had no chance to break through for a dipper-dunk.

Wilt and I were about the same age, but I felt somewhat intimidated by the man who had the broadest shoulders on a rock-solid physique that I had seen. Even his slender legs rippled with muscle.

He was known as Wilt the Stilt because of the physical contrast between his huge chest and slender legs. But, if you looked closely while he was being guarded by No. 1 rival Bill Russell, it was clear that all parts of Wilt’s body, even the legs, made Russell’s look small. Wilt outweighed Russell by 80 muscular pounds.

The Boston Celtics concentrated a lot harder on helping out Russell in his matchup with Chamberlain than the Warriors did on the reverse project. Even so, Chamberlain nearly always won the statistical edge over Russell while the multi-talented Celtics usually won the games.

Without even finishing the numbers I can tell you this much, I said to Chamberlain, You are either the best or second-best player in the NBA.

Chamberlain, who was much more down-to-earth than you would expect from a man of his revered status, smiled. Better than Russell?

A lot better than Russell, I said. He’s not one or two.

You mean the Big O?

The two of you both are having seasons much better than anybody else in the league’s history.

Well, it’s not much of a history. Only about fifteen years.

I think the numbers you and Robertson are putting up will be targets of record seekers for a long time, I said.

Smiling, Wilt responded to a hand motion by one of the Warriors’ coaches and turned to leave. On his way out to the basketball court he looked back and said, Well, maybe this season it’s my turn to be the MVP.

According to NBA records, it wasn’t. Russell won the official award for one of five times he was so honored.

Robertson gained a slight edge over Wilt from TENDEX for MVP that season, even though Chamberlain was setting scoring records that haven’t been challenged in the past 60 years.

The two ranked one-two in the league, according to TENDEX, for a record 10 years in a row. One or the other was ranked No. 1 by TENDEX for 11 years in a row. The split was Robertson six, Chamberlain five.

Russell, the best player on a team consisting mostly of Hall of Famers, was at no time the league’s best player, according to TENDEX. But 11 times he was either the best or second best player on the league’s best team.

As for me, I wouldn’t have another one-on-one conversation with Wilt until 1998, one year before his death. But in the intervening 36 years, no one in the NBA exceeded or even equaled the seasons Chamberlain and Robertson had concurrently in 1961-62.

Actually, no one has to this day, although Russell Westbrook came close. He did have four recent Triple-Double seasons, but failed to match Robertson’s