So, given that I think we all agree Anthony Davis is an otherworldly talent, I decided it would be quite fun to compare him to some other Hall of Fame power forwards across their first 6 seasons in the league.
Due to the fact that the league has changed over time, I haven't included any power forwards who played before 1973, with the exception of 1 who I just included to give a reference point.
So I took the career averages and totals in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks over the first six years of careers of:
Anthony Davis
Karl Malone
Tim Duncan
Charles Barkley
Dirk Nowitzki
Wes Unseld
Kevin McHale
Kevin Garnett
and I ranked each of them in each category, 1 through 8. I assigned 8 points to the leader, 7 points to second place, 6 points to third, and so on. That allowed me to give a total overall score out of 80 for each player, as the maximum that could be gained was 8 points for each of the ten categories. After doing this, I found that Charles Barkley had an insane first 6 years. He was the only player with an accumulated score of over 60/80 after this first round of comparisons, and was 5 points ahead of the second place performer, Tim Duncan. AD did pretty well, coming in 5th of the 8 player considered, when you remember that he's had to miss so many games due to injury which drags down his accumulated figures. So, after one round of comparisons, the rankings were as follows:
Charles Barkley (63/80)
Tim Duncan (58/80)
Karl Malone (52/80)
Kevin Garnett (51/80)
Anthony Davis (48/80)
Dirk Nowitzski (33/80)
Wes Unseld (30/80)
Kevin McHale (25/80)
But, I understand that pure accumulated box score stats don't tell you everything. So I decided that I should go a little further than just those measurements, and dive a little bit deeper into the advanced statistics. Personally, I think some of the best stats for understanding the real impact of a player on a game are VORP, PER, TS%, and WS/48. I included total win-shares, as well as offensive and defensive ratings because they're commonly considered, but the problem of missed games comes up again for total win-shares, and the team you're surrounded with can have a pretty significant impact on your ORTG and DRTG so they're not my favourite measurements. In this round, the highest possible score was 56, given the 7 different categories being measured. AD fares much better when the advanced stats are taken into consideration; he still doesn't come first, but rather than fifth, he scores a very comfortable third place after only Charles Barkley and Tim Duncan; who, at this point, have obviously emerged as the best power forwards through years 1-6. The ranks in this round are:
Charles Barkley (49/56)
Tim Duncan (44/56)
Anthony Davis (39/56)
Karl Malone (34/56)
Dirk Nowitzki (34/56)
Kevin McHale (26/56)
Kevin Garnett (23/56)
Wes Unseld (18/56)
Wes Unseld really starts to slide down this list at this point, because we're dealing with advanced statistics that didn't exist for several of his first six years. That's why I've included him, as a demonstrative reference of how much information is missing when dealing with years prior to 1973. He has no listed ORTG, so he couldn't get any points for it, because I'd have literally no idea where to place him. A large part of the reason Barkley has done so well is that he was so incredibly efficient in these early stages of his career; a true shooting percentage of 64.6% is absolutely unbelievable, and is a huge factor towards his also amazing ORTG of 121!
Finally, I decided to do some measurement of accumulated accolades. This is difficult, because to some extent these are popularity contest awards (especially MVP) but because they're usually considered in legacies I decided to do them anyway. I counted all the times these players led the league in any category, appeared in the All-Star game, got MVPs (all-star or regular season), made all-NBA or all-Defensive teams, and how many times they led their individual teams in the 5 major box score stats. I didn't include Finals MVPs on this list, because that's much less of an individual accolade and more representative of having a team which is finals worthy. The total score available for this round was 66; because you could (in theory) achieve each of these 11 accolades 6 times at this point; once for every year. Rather than ranking them first, second, third, et cetera, I simply added up the numbers on their columns for this. The reason is simple; if I tried ranking them, there'd be multiple huge ties where everyone was getting the same number of points; 6 of the 8 players never won MVP by this point, for example, so do I give them all 0 points, or do I give them all 6 for coming in joint third? The simplest option was to just add up their totals. The scores here were as follows:
Anthony Davis (34/66) (I already gave AD his all-nba and all-defensive selection from this season, which he will definitely get)
Tim Duncan (32/66)
Kevin Garnett (22/66)
Charles Barkley (22/66)
Dirk Nowitzki (15/66)
Karl Malone (14/66)
Wes Unseld (10/66)
Kevin McHale (7/66)
This demonstrates exactly how much pressure has been put on AD's shoulders the moment he came into the league. Despite his excellent rebounding numbers, Barkley didn't have to immediately assume the role of lead rebounder; because he had Moses Malone on his team to help shoulder the burden. Despite being an exemplary shotblocker, Tim Duncan didn't have to immediately lead his team in rim protection, because David Robinson was still there performing the role at a high level. AD, on the other hand, has had to immediately become his team's best rebounder, scorer, rim protector, and average more steals per game than anyone else on his team. That is, until this year. Despite the fact that technically Boogie averaged more rebounds and steals than AD this season, I've still given AD the credit for leading the team in those categories because of Boogie not managing to reach 55 games, which I consider to be the cutoff point for consideration for anything.
So, after all of that, we can add up the accumulated running totals of every player in every category, and this is how the rankings come out:
Charles Barkley (134/202)
Tim Duncan (134/202)
Anthony Davis (121/202)
Karl Malone (100/202)
Kevin Garnett (96/202)
Dirk Nowitzki (82/202)
Wes Unseld (58/202)
Kevin McHale (58/202)
What does all of this tell us? Absolutely nothing, AD is barely halfway through his 20s and hasn't hit his prime yet, whereas by 6 seasons in Tim Duncan was already 28; the ages here mean that basically all of the other listed players hit their primes at some point during this six year stretch, whereas likely hasn't yet. It's definitely interesting though; AD has had a better first 6 years than Dirk, Garnett, Malone, McHale, and Unseld, all of whom are either already in the HoF or will be shortly, and three of which are usually listed as top 5 PFs of all time.
TL;DR, Anthony Davis is really really really good, Charles Barkley and Tim Duncan were really really really good, and I have far too much time on my hands.
If anyone's interested, here's the spreadsheet I worked this out in.
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Originally Posted by MSU-Sousaphone
