Translating the NBA’s Mythic Greats

Wilt ChamberlainWe interrupt our regularly scheduled statistical doppelgänger series to dig into the archives using another of my stat toys — the Era Translator. The recent articles about Basketball-Reference’s All-Time Wizards/Bullets, the Rushmore conversation, and the new Showtime documentary about Wilt Chamberlain has me thinking about the mythic players of yesteryear and my various efforts through the years to introduce a reasonable approach to comparing eras.

A few thoughts before I delve into the translations. Most of the conversations we comparing modern players and players from previous eras degenerate quickly into some variation of time travel theory. To me, this sort of discussion…