I think some player are too closely clustered to be accurately ranked against one another, so I prefer to divide them into tiers. Players are on the same tier are roughly as valuable. I'm ranking based on current value, no consideration of future value. Nowitzki P. Gasol Amare Bosh Garnett Duncan Aldridge Griffin Randolph Love
Bosh?! Have you been watching the playoffs? Chris Bosh over either Aldridge or Randolph is flat out silly.
You realize that Bosh plays behind the 2 best players in the league right? Pau had a bad playoffs series, you wouldn't rank him lower. Plus Bosh was great against Chicago and pretty good against Philly.
Have you seen how Aldridge plays with Roy? Now imagine him playing with James or Wade, let alone both. He might not even dare to take a shot. Of course Bosh's production has gone down...he's nowhere near the player James or Wade is. He's still a better go-to guy than Aldridge based on his play in Toronto, IMO. If Aldridge had a full season like his mid-December-to-mid-February run, he'd probably rank in the second tier. Randolph is a liability on the defensive end, which prevents him from rising higher on the list. It's what also keeps Love and Griffin lower on the list.
I think LaMarcus is as good as any power forward in the league. Including Dirk. Dirk's better offensively, but LaMarcus is better defensively.
In Bosh's best season as a Raptor, he led them to 47 wins, 1 less than Aldridge did last year; and in a worse conference. Both guys didn't have much in the way of supporting cast either. I'd understand if you put them on the same tier, but I can't see how Aldridge is in a lower tier than Bosh.
With the same teammates? I never have and never will evaluate player talent by wins and losses, since basketball is a team game. Isiah Thomas wasn't a better player than Michael Jordan when the Pistons were a superior team to the Bulls. Saying "neither had much in the way of supporting casts" isn't terribly meaningful. It's not either "great supporting cast" or "not great supporting cast." There can be significant differences between even mediocre supporting casts. I'd much rather have the players the Blazers had around Aldridge this past season than the Raptors had around Bosh last year. Bosh's production last year in Toronto was significantly better than Aldridge's this year. Aldridge doesn't play significantly better defense. He might (might) be slightly better defensively, but not to a large degree.
The Bosh I was talking about was the Bosh in 06-07. TJ Ford and Calderon were good then, Parker was not bad, and they had a relatively injury free season. Despite playing in a worse confederence, he still didn't win as many games as Aldridge did last year. He lost 7 more games last year than he did on 06-07. I feel like were arguing the common topic of whether or not wins factor into player comparisons. I think they should be somewhat weighted against their performance, and that's my position. Besides, we're arguing about them as players NOW. You can argue that Bosh is playing next to Wade/LeBron, but his efficiency in almost every area has dropped from last year, and that's not something I would expect to happen to him with a lesser role.
His scoring efficiency went down, which is not something I would have expected. His Offensive Rating was pretty much in line with his past years and his Defensive Rating went way down (lower is better). He had his best season by Win Shares. Not to say any of these metrics are ideal or definitive, but I think they corroborate what I'd consider the common sense hypothesis, which is that Bosh didn't suddenly become a worse player. I think he's simply not being utilized optimally, because utilizing three stars optimally is harder than just one. And he's obviously the lowest on the totem pole of the "big three" so if anyone gets used sub-optimally, it will be him. I don't think he's way ahead of Aldridge, and I think Aldridge had a period of last season where he was playing like the Toronto Bosh. He just didn't play that way for the entire season. If Aldridge can play with more aggression and remain productive, he'd be about as good as anyone. His willingness to fade into the background for periods (even as the no-doubt best player on the team) makes it unclear, as of now, as to whether he can be a consistently elite player, IMO.
