Originally Posted by
CDu
Eh, I disagree. I think it's a pretty darn good measure. If you aggregate win shares and win shares per 48 minutes, you get a pretty darn good "who's who" of NBA history.
Here are the guys who are top-30 in both win shares and win shares per 48 minutes in NBA/ABA history:
Kareem: #1 in WS; #7 in WS/48 (in part due to playing well past his prime)
Wilt: #2; #3
LeBron: #3; #6
Karl Malone: #4, #22
Jordan: #5, #1
Stockton: #6, #18
Duncan: #7, #17
Nowitzki: #8, #27
Chris Paul: #10, #5
Robertson: #11, #20
Shaq: #12, #19
David Robinson: #13, #2
Barkley: #14, #13
Russell: #19, #28
West: #20, #15
Magic: #21, #8
Durant: #23, #12
Bird: #25, #23
Schayes: #29, #29
Harden: #30, #9
Obviously no single metric (or two) is perfect, but this seems to capture the list of candidates for greatest ever pretty well to me.
More specifically, I might or might not use it as a purely ordinal rating of players. But I would feel pretty comfortable looking at the list of all-time win shares and all-time win shares/48 minutes lists as a pretty good barometer for "should this guy be on the top-75 list?" criteria.
In terms of capturing an individual player's greatness, I think it's a pretty good measure.