I haven’t been keeping up with this conversation but one thing people forget with Mutombo is he was the second best player on a Finals team. He averaged 16.8 PPG, 12.2 RPG and 2.2 BPG at age 35 against Shaq in the peak of his prime.
He did. I was rooting for Philly (as was probably most everyone here). While Mutombo dropped 16.8 ppg in the finals, he was also playing 41.6 mpg. That would convert to 14.5 points per 36 minutes. Obviously Mutombo was eating up almost all the minutes at the 5, Shaq was playing 45 mpg that series. The other bigs on Philly were Matt Geiger, averaging 10.7 mpg and scoring 17.5 points per 36 minutes, and Todd MacCulloch who only played 6.3 mpg but scored 14.9 points per 36 minutes. Todd MacCulloch is more relevant because the following year, he was the starting center for New Jersey when they got swept by the Lakers in 2002. MacCulloch played 18.3 mpg in that series and averaged 14.8 points per 36 minutes. NJ's other big was rookie Jason Collins, who played 19 mpg and scored an anemic 8.1 points per 36 minutes.
But this is neither here nor there. Nobody was knocking Mutombo and none of this is discounting what Mutombo does. The discussion about Mutombo started because someone said that Rudy's decline is overstated and that he'd probably age similar to Mutombo, who was "a really solid player into his mid 30's." Someone responded to that to say that it was a different game and that "the days of Mutombo or Eaton plugging the lane in late career looks different with today's athletes and spacing." This then led a different response that stated "Mutombo had a significantly better offensive game than Rudy, for one he had a jump hook." I objected to this idea, noting that Rudy’s offense on paper is 25-30% better than Mutombo, a pretty big disparity for a claim that Mutombo’s offense was “significantly better” than Rudy’s, to which the argument then pivoted to stating that it would be doubtful that Rudy could score in double figures in the 90s. After that ensued a larger analysis that couldn’t support that argument even with the most generous of interpretations.
The bottom line is that there’s a recency bias and an availability bias at play here. People are freshly (and more frequently, as they watch Jazz games) exposed to Rudy’s flaws, so the idea that Mutombo’s offensive game was “significantly better” than Rudy’s sounds and feels right to some without appealing to any kind of objective measure beyond a sentiment of a recent distaste for Rudy’s offensive game and being about 15 years removed from seeing any relevant raw Mutombo footage. I don’t believe people would have realized how drastically different the numbers really are between the two of them, even after correcting for pace and any other variable. If people had seen or known that, I don’t believe anyone would have made the arguments that got us to this point, and I don’t believe anyone would try to pivot the argument to him not being able to drop double figures in the 90s. Ostertag dropping 11+ points per 36 minutes in his first two years is the nail in the coffin on that argument. But what’s been said is what’s been said so the argument is being made more palatable by appealing to more and more esoteric and untestable ideas.
