What do you consider "good teams"? Some of those Spurs teams completely lacked talent. No one can look at that 03 championship team and label that as a good supporting roster.
I don't necessarily agree either about KG winning multiple titles if he replaced Duncan. While KG was a better passer he wasn't as good in the post. Those early Spurs teams were built completely around the threat of Duncan as a post scorer which then opened the game up for the rest of his teammates. It was the true definition of making his teammates better. He had a great sense of when to take over offensively or when to fall back and let a Parker or Giniboli cook. Under a lot of other great players they likely never would've had the chance to develop into who they became because so many other stars are stat obsessed and want the offense to run through them. Especially with them being late draft picks.
I think Duncan is easily top 10 and wouldn't be mad at having someone top 5. He's penalized for being one of those players that put their stats to the back for the good of the team. He also wasn't flashy defensively and instead used his length and positioning to play defense instead of chasing blocks or steals.
To me he's the hardest player to rank in all time discussions because so much of what he did wasn't on stat sheets.
I consider a team good or great relative to the season or era they competed in...
Most of his teams weren't historically great, but then, most players don't have more than a couple teams that are historically great...
The '03 Spurs were #3 in NRtg, #3 in DRtg, #9 in ORtg. They won 60 games, bruh. Relative to some of his other Spurs teams, this one was weaker, sure, but they weren't a bad team. #3 in NRtg. That team was defensively stout and while offensively challenged, they still had a Top 10 offense. The only squads in ball you'd realistically even debate, we're better than '03 SA, would be Detroit, Portland, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Sacramento, or Dallas. At worst we're saying the '03 Spurs were the 7th best team in basketball...
At worst....realistically we do not believe there were six teams better than the team that won the title, that isn't the case any season, there are never six teams better than the champion. Teams don't luck up into the championship by not being one of the best teams in basketball...
We give these revisionist passes to every player when it's convenient, and I don't think we always notice when we do it with Duncan because of the way we frame his career. Because he was such a low key personality, post-retirement the last 8 years I've noticed that we can tend to sometimes shape his career as more challenging than it actually was, when in comparison, he faced little adversity relative to most of his GOAT peers. In real time of his career, we all saw that he never had a bad team, it was Russell all over again in more ways than one...
He was Evolutionary, Modernized Bill Russell...
I do agree that he uniquely empowered his teammates because he didn't need the ball, or the spotlight, but part of this too, is there were simply guys with greater offensive talents than Duncan. That's not shytting on Duncan, it is what is. A more gifted offensive player could have had the ball more but empowered his teammates just the same; I don't think Duncan is the only GOAT player Parker or Ginobili could've found success with. Particularly given, one is one of the greatest 6th men ever, and the other is a historically underrated point who at his peak was very much an elite player even if not quite meeting the definition of "superstar"...
So I think it goes both ways, I think Duncan can be penalized by some because he wasn't loud or scored a ton of points. But I think in other cases we penalize other people because they got their results in a different manner than how Duncan got his, when in most of those situations those guys had more adversity than Duncan, but also more developed offensive talents as well...
Duncan just didn't peak highly enough to have a real case as GOAT to me, in order for that to be the case there would have to be a definitive window of time where, while Kobe and Shaq (the two main competitors of his era) were at their apex, Duncan clearly distance himself as better. There are definitive windows of time that Mike, Bron, Kareem were clearly the best players in basketball...
He doesn't have enough All-Time front to back playoff runs either, he's got '99 and '03. Those other 3 guys have more than two All-Time postseason runs and to be quite honest, the best of those players was outright better than the best version of Duncan...
To those three in particular, we are also talking about three guys who were defensively elite at peak as well, and three guys who were significantly stronger scorers and offensive engines than Duncan...
These are also three players who had real limitations around them they had to overcome, be it ownership, management, coaching, roster construction, teammates, or all the above at once, these guys had to overcome significant adversity more than Duncan had to. They had to carry more responsibilities. This matters...
Again, none of this minimizes Duncan's GOATness, it's a more than fair point that the Spurs organization is a second-tier franchise at best in its non-Duncan history. He's the piece that connected everything and made them annual contenders, and it's part and parcel to why I accept him as high as the 4th greatest player ever...
But for the reasons I listed above, I do not think he has a legitimate case as
the greatest player ever...
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