BTW, I did some checking and comparing. Here is some #s from Clyde from age 22-28, which is Wades career to this point.
FG%- 49.3
Reb- 6.56 per game
Ast- 6.26 per game
Here is Wade to this point:
FG%- 48.2
Reb- 4.9
Ast- 6.6
Drexler is also better in steals and turnovers.
You can't just strictly compare separated time periods like that, though, because as someone said before, the NBA was a much different league when Drexler was 22--all the way up until he was 28--than it is today. Over that period of Drexler's career, the average NBA team scored 108.8 points per game. During that same age period over Wade's career, however, the average NBA team has scored only 98.8 PPG.
Drexler's PPG, ages 22-28: 22.37
Wade's PPG, ages 22-28: 25.41
We will ignore for the moment that the 3.04 PPG difference (in Wade's favor) certainly makes up--perhaps more so--for the 1.66 difference in rebounds (in Drexler's favor)
and the 0.49 difference in steals per game
and the 0.62 difference in turnovers per game because, as has been pointed out many, many times on this board, scoring is more important than any other facet of the game.
So then, ignoring all that, what we have to do is account for the
context in which Drexler's numbers were put up relative to Wade's. To do that, let's just simply add one point to each era's Team average PPG totals. This will represent the Minimum League-Average Win (MLAW) for both eras (109.8 for Drexler, 99.8 for Wade), which is the minimum number of points that need to be scored if you are playing the league-average team for that era (we will assume that in that game, each team will play era-dependent defense).
Looking at the numbers, Wade's PPG is worth .254 MLAWs' per game in his own era, whereas Drexler's scoring would net his team .204 wins per game in his own, making Wade's production roughly 25% more valuable against a neutral backdrop. In fact, Drexler would have had to average 27.9 PPG to equal what Wade has done so far in his career. And even if Wade and Drexler scored the
same amount of points per game over the time span we are interested in, Wade's production would
still be more valuable than Drexler's (to the tune of about 9%), because Wade scored his points during a time when they were harder to come by than they were in Drexler's day.
Now, taking into account the fact that scoring is the most important aspect of the NBA, Wade is
clearly the superior player, and by a wide margin. You can look at strict differences in stats when eras are comparable (i.e. closer together both in terms of time and the league environment), but when they become separated by longer and longer spans of time, you have to take into account the differences in the
leagues of the respective eras you are inquiring about before you can value the statistics put up in those eras.
This notion is similar to the one applied to minor league baseball statistics: given the variability across different parks and leagues in the minors (for instance, the entire California League and a good number of the Pacific Coast League teams play their games at altitude significant enough to influence the flight of a baseball so much so that it needs to be accounted for either by park factors, league factors or both), one must consider the
context in which batting and pitching lines are put up before one can properly valuate a prospect. An .800 OPS in the California League is just slightly above average, but in the Florida State League it is other-worldly.
