Garnett's lead over the second best Celtic in '08: +.058 WS / + 1.4 OBPM / + 2.1 DBPM / +3.6 BPM
For comparisson's sake, here are other "clear alphas" numbers in years they won:
Kobe in '09: -.019 (yeah, that's negative. Gasol had a better WS/48 than Kobe) / + 1.6 OBPM /
- 0.2 DBPM / +1.4 BPM
Duncan in '05: +.005 WS / - 0.7 OBPM / 0.0 DBPM / 0.7 BPM
Lebron in '12: +.071 WS / + 2.2 OBPM / 0.8 DBPM / 3.0 BPM
And last, but not least, Dirk in '11: -.005 (would you look at this? Dirk's historic run has actually another player with the better WS/48
) / + 2.8 OBPM /
-1.8 DBPM / + 2.3 BPM
So, as you can see. If Garnett wasn't clearly and "by far" the best Celtic player in '08, then neither of these other guys were. Would you agree with the statement that Dirk wasn't the Mavs' best player in '11 "by far"?
Why do you draw the line at 23 ppg? That's arbitrary as , tbh.
Dirk's career ppg is 20.7 - Garnetts is 17.8 and the difference is actually shorter in prime years (which was literally what I said) because KG past prime years were a lot worse than Dirk's past prime years in terms of scoring.
Since we are talking who the better player was, let's just look at the stats that help us indicate that:
Garnett: PER: 22.7 - WS/48 .182 - BPM: 5.6 - VORP: 96.9
Dirk PER: 22.4 - WS/48 . 193 - BPM: 4.5 - VORP: 84.8
For all intents and purposes, KG was the better player, tbh.