How do the 1982-83 Sixers compare to the greatest title teams? The numbers show that it’s complicated — and unfair.

Any conversation about the Greatest of All Time needs to start with Horace “Hod” Lisenbee. Nobody has ever accused him of being a great pitcher. He finished his eight-year career in the majors with more walks than strikeouts, and he averaged only 2.9 free passes every nine innings. In 207 career outings, he posted a 4.81 ERA. He got some MVP votes back in his rookie season of 1927. But it was pretty much all downhill from there.

Thing about Hod, he was never much of a ballplayer growing up. Legend says he preferred flinging rocks into the Cumberland River. Didn’t step on a mound until he was 21 years old, when he entered high school. After his high school team cut him, he decided to play minor league ball. A few years after that, he was a major leaguer.

The extent to which any of this is true depends upon the extent to which you trust whoever is in charge of Lisenbee’s Wikipedia page. But the fact that it sounds even remotely plausible speaks to one of the difficulties of comparing athletes and teams from bygone eras. The talent pool was a bit different back in the day.

One thing that is verifiably true is that Babe Ruth got to face ol’ Horace 77 times during a five-year stretch of his career. Those 77 plate appearances resulted in 10 of his career 714 home runs.

What does any of that have to do with the 1982-83 Sixers? Well, nothing. But as a part of The Inquirer’s ongoing series commemorating that magical team, my editors have asked me to offer a data-driven look at how those Sixers compare to the greatest championship teams of all time. And I can only assume they did that with an evil gleam in their eye, knowing full well how impossible a task it to be. As Cutty said in season 3 of The Wire, “The game done changed.”

The reality is that today’s NBA, like all sports, is practically incomparable to the one that existed 40 years ago. Back then, the three-point line was in its third season of existence and players were still getting used to the fact that they did not get three free-throw attempts to make two shots. In 1982-83, NBA teams averaged a whopping 2.3 three-point attempts per game and made only 23.8% of them. That season, the Sixers were the fifth-best scoring team in the league, averaging 108.3 points per 100 possessions. In 2022-23, that would rank dead last. On the flip side, the Sixers allowed just 100.9 points per 100 possessions in 1982-83. That mark ranked fifth in the NBA that season. Forty years later, no team in the league has a defensive rating lower than 104.5.

A lot of it is a simple numbers game. Call it evolutionary economics. There are more elite athletes on planet Earth today than there were 40, 80, 120 years ago because there are more people on planet Earth today than there were 40, 80, 120 years ago. After all, the more people there are, the more of those people will end up being elite athletes. The more elite athletes there are, the better the best of them have to be in order to separate themselves from the pack. This is a simple matter of fact, as long as we take for granted that the physical characteristics that form the bedrock of athletic ability are normally distributed. The larger the area under the bell curve, the more outliers there will be.

A good analogy is high school sports. There’s a reason why most state high school athletic associations have separate classifications based on the size of school. Pick the five best basketball players in a student body of 100 versus the five best in a student body of 1,000, and there’s a much better chance that the latter five will be better.

Back in 1920, when the population of the United States was 225 million smaller than it is right now, Ruth was hitting home runs off pitchers who worked in butcher shops in the offseason. How many career home runs would he have hit if those 62 at-bats against Lisenbee were replaced by 62 at-bats against Max Scherzer? Probably fewer than 10. In which case, what do his 714 career home runs really mean in the grand scheme of things?

The point isn’t that Ruth would have been a triple-A slugger in the modern day. It’s that Ryan Howard would be banned for being a witch if he were dropped into Ruth’s time. Actually, he would be banned for another reason. But I guess that further speaks to the point.

Consider the talent pool in the NBA. When the Sixers won the title in 1982-83, there were exactly seven players in the NBA who were born outside of the United States, only three of whom actually grew up on foreign soil: Panama’s Rolando Blackman, the Bahamas’ Mychal Thompson, and Canada’s Jim Zoet.

This year, according to Basketball-Reference.com, there are 133 international players in the NBA, including the top three favorites for the MVP award and four of the top five finishers in last year’s voting.

So, how do we put the 1982-83 Sixers into some historical perspective? Funny enough, the fairest way to compare teams between eras is probably to compare them to teams from their own era. That is, compare each team’s relative performance against their peers.

For instance, the 1982-83 Sixers outscored opponents by an average of 7.7 points per game. That equates to about 7.1% of the 108.5 points per game that NBA teams averaged that season. That ranks 19th among the 43 NBA champions since 1979-80.

They rank similarly when you compare the way they performed relative to league average in points-per-possession on the offensive and defensive sides of the court. Their offensive rating of 108.3 was about 3.4% better than league average, which ranks 21st among NBA champions. Their defensive rating of 100.9 was about 3.3% better than league average, which ranks 20th among NBA champions.

Where the Sixers really excelled was on the offensive glass. The 1982-83 Sixers pulled down a staggering 37.1% of their offensive rebound opportunities, a mark that was 11.1% above league average for that season. Only four champions had a better performance on the offensive glass, all of them the Jordan Bulls, led by the 1995-96 team that finished 20.6% above league average in their offensive rebounding efficiency.

Postseason performance is even more difficult to judge given the fundamental way in which the NBA’s postseason format has changed since 1982-83. Consider Moses Malone’s famous prediction:

Fo’. Fo’. Fo’.

In today’s NBA, that only gets you to the Finals. In fact, that 1982-83 Sixers team was the last to only need 12 victories to win a title. The next year, the NBA added an additional best-of-five round. In 2003, they changed the first round to best-of-seven.

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By a lot of measures, that 2016-17 Golden State team has the strongest argument to be named the Greatest Of All Time. For starters, they actually did go Fo’-Fo’-Fo’, including a Western Conference Finals sweep of the 61-21 Spurs. Those Warriors won 15 straight playoff games before failing to sweep on the road in Game 4. Golden State’s average margin of victory that postseason was 13.53 points per game, nearly a full point higher than the second-best point differential in history.

It’s even more impressive when you consider that the team the Warriors faced in the Finals deserves a mention as one of the greatest teams of all time. The year before, the LeBron 2.0 Cavs actually beat the Warriors in the NBA Finals. That 2015-16 Cleveland team ranked fifth among NBA champions in the three-point era in average margin of victory during the regular season relative to league average. The No. 1 team on that list was the 2016-17 Warriors, followed by the ‘95-’96 Bulls, the ‘14-’15 Warriors, and the ‘96-’97 Bulls.

All of us are prisoners of our eras to a certain degree, and James’ second tour through Cleveland might be the best example of that reality. The Warriors of that era were so good that we probably don’t appreciate how special James was when paired with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. There was a two-year stretch in which the Cavs went 6-7 against Golden State in NBA Finals games. That says a lot.

The ‘82-’83 Sixers were great. That’s what matters. The thing about greatness is that it kind of ends there. You see it, you know it. It is or it isn’t. They were a team of their time, and they were one of the best. They rank fifth all-time among NBA champions in steals per game, third in blocks per game, first when you combine the two. They played suffocating defense, rebounded the heck out of the ball, dominated those who were in front of them.

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Would they beat the Warriors? No. Nor would they beat Jordan’s Bulls, or LeBron’s Cavs, or Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers. But they beat an early version of the Showtime Lakers, and that says something.

In the end, maybe Malone was the original analytics genius. There are really only three numbers that matter.

Four. Five. Four.