Clyde Drexler was maybe half the player Hakeem was in those playoffs.

Team	Player		SPM	Minutes	Difference
CLE	Leon Powe	-1.63	6.0%	6.63
MIA	Jamaal Magloire	-1.14	9.0%	3.38
OKC	Etan Thomas	-6.04	8.1%	2.50
POR	Jeff Pendergraph-0.33	10.2%	2.48
PHO	Robin Lopez	-0.59	25.0%	2.25
POR	Joel Przybilla	0.38	17.1%	2.21
OKC	Serge Ibaka	-0.92	33.4%	2.15
WAS	Brendan Haywood	1.34	40.7%	2.07
NJN	Sean Williams	-5.34	5.7%	1.74
DEN	Chris Andersen	2.69	42.8%	1.69
CHA	Tyson Chandler	-1.40	29.3%	1.67
TOR	Reggie Evans	-0.56	7.9%	1.58
CLE	J.J. Hickson	-2.50	42.7%	1.54
ORL	Marcin Gortat	-0.33	27.6%	1.52
HOU	Kevin Martin	0.81	21.6%	1.35

And the ones who dropped:

Team	Player		SPM	Minutes	Difference
MEM	Hamed Haddadi	-6.56	6.0%	-1.80
LAC	Craig Smith	-0.84	31.3%	-1.78
NOH	Aaron Gray	1.23	6.6%	-1.69
MIN	Brian Cardinal	-0.75	6.7%	-1.43
NJN	Eduardo Najera	-3.66	5.2%	-1.40
WAS	Fabricio Oberto	-3.10	16.4%	-1.40
IND	Roy Hibbert	-1.82	51.6%	-1.35
NOH	Hilton Armstrong-3.13	6.0%	-1.32
CLE	LeBron James	12.51	75.0%	-1.29
NYK	David Lee	1.39	75.9%	-1.24
CLE	Shaquille O'Neal-0.59	31.3%	-1.23
GSW	Mikki Moore	-4.96	10.3%	-1.17
SAS	Tim Duncan	5.00	61.6%	-1.16
PHI	Jason Smith	-3.32	16.6%	-1.16
TOR	Hedo Turkoglu	0.79	57.4%	-1.15

Residuals:
      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max 
-19.77436  -3.06230   0.09454   3.15127  18.08864 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) -7.63483    1.36781  -5.582 2.70e-08 ***
pts40        0.80394    0.10274   7.825 8.07e-15 ***
tsa40       -1.37758    0.19088  -7.217 7.45e-13 ***
tsa40^2      0.01815    0.00517   3.510 0.000457 ***
3pa40        0.42556    0.07036   6.048 1.74e-09 ***
fta40        0.42231    0.10522   4.013 6.20e-05 ***
ast40        0.69283    0.08403   8.245 2.90e-16 ***
orb40        0.50781    0.16804   3.022 0.002543 ** 
drb40        0.39389    0.09694   4.063 5.02e-05 ***
tov40       -1.57465    0.23722  -6.638 4.06e-11 ***
stl40        2.70845    0.27003  10.030  < 2e-16 ***
blk40        0.99447    0.18518   5.370 8.75e-08 ***
mpg          0.07715    0.01731   4.456 8.79e-06 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 

Residual standard error: 4.871 on 2052 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.2803,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.2761 
F-statistic: 66.61 on 12 and 2052 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16 

That's not horrible -- there definitely wasn't as big a drop-off in fit as I thought there'd be.

Very interesting to see Clyde's and Dream's ORtgs laid out like that. I've very surprised Hakeem's were so low (relative to his skill level / success), and it's also probably telling that Drexler's regular season ORtg didn't change at all when he moved from Portland to Houston in '95. He was in the middle of his most efficient year when he got traded, and he kept it up.

You can get all mad if you want me to and claim that I'm just trying to avoid WS because its giving me a result that I don't like, but I gave you enough reason why I think that Drexler's scoring performance was inflated.

Even if this were the case, you seemed all but ready to dismiss the entire metric altogether based on this one example. That's not a valid way to critique anything from an objective standpoint. And by the way, this isn't a straw man argument by any means. Simply an attempt to remind people what the goal of this whole blog and these stats are in the first place: to give as accurate a representation of the sport as possible. Names and results simply reflect the construction, philosophies, and methodologies of the metric in question. Those things are more important than finding a way to spit out the name "Hakeem" or "Clyde" when someone asks who the best offensive player for the Rockets in the '95 playoffs was, for example.

Also, this whole thing reminds me of the "80/20" argument that Bill James used in his studies. Asking questions is fine, but people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss something because it gives a result you don't expect. That is part of the nature of learning.

Neil - Any plan to add SPM to the play index and player profile pages?

I'd like to at some point, but Justin and I have to work on cleaning up the formula and making it as rigorous as possible. Which is sort of what we've been doing in this thread, too.