re: Official French Open Discussion Thread

quote:

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Not your best effort.


(1)
First of all, if you agree that Serena at her peak is the best ever, then you absolutely agree with (iii). Secondly, why in the world would you respond to that hypo with the above-bolded? The very purpose of the hypo was to avoid a response like the above-bolded. Why do you think I called her Sarah Sparingly?


(2)
It's a perfectly apt comparison. The only way you could have had any problem understanding the analogue of the comparison is if you didn't immediately recognize that Bernard King was a better basketball player than Robert Horry by several orders of magnitude.* Hopefully you did, and you would have understood that it was illustrating how a "trophy room" analysis can lead to absurd results. But this wasn't your best effort, so I guess you didn't.

I mean, if you yourself are applying the alien test and selecting Serena, why did you even reply to my post? The point I'm making is that a prime vs. prime "alien test" analysis is simply a better, more illustrative test. It's more meaningful. It's apples to apples. It's a focused analysis. It doesn't worrry about how many titles Monica Seles won -- it asks whether Steffi at her best could beat Seles at her best -- and so it doesn't disadvantage a player who got stabbed during a changeover. Or, similarly, a player who was injury prone.

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I was probably more of a dick than I needed to be here. I hadn't gotten my workout in yet. Was grumpy.

I understand what you're saying about the King/Horry comparison, but it wasn't meant to be read that literally. And, most importantly, I wasn't able to think of a tennis player from Bama off the top of my head, so I just went with the first Vol/Bama-based analogy that popped in my head. And I've seen enough people on this board cite championship rings as a metric for evaluating players -- this is normally done while simultaneously performing cyber fellatio on Kobe Bryant -- that I figured people would get the point I was trying to get across.*


*To be clear, I do agree that championship rings are a terrible terrible metric for evaluating the individual merits of NBA basketball player.**

**But not nearly as bad as using championship rings as a metric to evaluate NFL quarterbacks.