About Me
My name is Payton McCarthy, I have been a basketball fan for most of my life. I have a Bachelor's of Science degree in Mathematics, and I played basketball through high school and AAU. My father, Ian McCarthy, owned a professional basketball team in Canada, the Saint John Mill Rats (now the Saint John Riptide), and was co-founder of the NBL of Canada. Throughout this time, I was able to grow up seeing and learning from professional basketball players, coaches, trainers, and managers from a young age.
I remember meeting, at one point, Cliff Levingston, a former NBA player who played most of his career in the 1980s. He was at one of the NBLC draft combines, and there before all the prospects showed up he showed me how to shoot properly with the correct form. Some of the team's scouts went with my father and I out to dinner later that day, and he told me stories of his days playing in the league. In fact, one thing in particular he told me stuck with me for years.
He told me he played against Larry, Isiah, Magic, MJ, Hakeem, all of the greats in his era. He said by far the best player, game for game at their peaks, was Larry Bird. "Larry Bird...?" I said in confusion. "Better than Jordan??" He reaffirmed what he told me by telling me that not only did he play against Jordan, but he was also his teammate for 2 years on the Bulls. And still, he thought that Larry Bird was better, the best player ever. I was in awe. That young, I never heard anyone really say there was a player that was truly better than Jordan at that time. So this coming not only from an ex-NBA player, but also an ex-teammate of Jordan himself?? Incredible. Would I agree with Cliff today? I wouldn't say so myself, but from that experience my respect for Larry increased many times over.
GIF of Cliff Levingston reacting to Larry Bird from the Hawk's bench
(3/12/1985)
Since then, over the years playing and watching basketball, the debates between players are endless. Especially when legacies are in debate. "This player is greater than that player", "this player is the GOAT", "are they a top-75 player right now?" These questions and these debates seem to have always been around, and always will be. For me, I got sick of the debates from all the TV and media personalities, mostly due to the countless inconsistencies, blatent biases, and sometimes even blind favoritism. "There's got to be a way to solve for this" I would often think. But how do you solve for consistent results about something that is so seemingly subjective and heavily opiniated?
And that's when I had the idea to just see and test out if I could create a way to "calculate" a player's career and legacy. At first, it started out as a fun hobby that I would mess around with in my free time. But as I stuck with it and the results started coming back to me, I was intrigued with the seeming accuracy of what I was creating. It was never perfect, and it probably never will be. But seeing some of those positive results led me to believe that maybe I was onto something, and so I kept going with it. I kept adding players, adjusting and fine-tuning formulas, and even re-inventing the whole thing at one point.
Now, over 3+ years since I first started this hobby, I believe the results are worth sharing with everyone, and hopefully enough people appreciate it as well. One thing I learned from this process is that at the end of the day, technically there is no wrong answers. The final results between players that are only a couple of spots apart are close enough to still be debatable, which is the beauty of a sport like basketball. The list that my Calculator generates is meant to act as a public reference to compare and contrast with your own opinions and that of your friends.
Which brings me back full circle. Why did I begin this project, and why have I continued it to this point? Because this is one of the things I appreciate the most about basketball, the legacies created and left behind. Creating this project not only helped me to be educated and appreciate better of what the history of what happened before in previous era's, but it also helped me to appreciate the history that is being created now, right now, and what could be created in the future.
We are lucky enough to be able to watch history be created in live time, and that's really cool to me. Creating this Calculator, I believe, has helped me keep modern history as it unfolds in a proper perspective with the rest of its history. The idea is we can properly see how a player's legacy evolves and rises up through the Calculator's rankings as their career is alive and going, like an unending race to the top. That's pretty cool to me, and hopefully in sharing this with all of you and the larger basketball community that some of you will also be able to appreciate it the same way that I do.