I pulled all of the players that have played at least to age 29 and plotted the total attribute ratings of the best of them all on the same graph. The picture isn’t real clear because there are a lot of lines on this graph but one thing is very very clear. Al Horford is doing something no one has ever done before. He’s living forever. He’s just refusing to die. In his age 40 season, his total attribute rating is only about 100 points lower than it was at his peak. That means he has only lost about 10 points per training camp for 10 years. It is hard to describe how insane this is. It is almost like this guy is living in an alternative universe… or maybe he has something the rest of the players don’t have, like the elixir of life.
Still, though, his ratings have gone down 100 points. Where have those points come from?
Welp, not from skills obviously. His skills ratings have maybe only gone down about 10 points over 10 years. This is honestly one of the most shocking results my analysis of this game has ever produced. His skills ratings at age 40 are about 200(!!!) points higher than those of his peers, and by his peers we are talking about the very best players this game has ever seen. Just look at his player page from this year.
He is a 39 year old center with a 78 jump shot. Are you kidding me? He still has 94 in defensive rebounding and 86 in blocking and the list of eye-popping ratings goes on and on. His performance has hardly dipped. He’s putting up 16 points, 9 rebounds, and almost 3 blocks a game at the age of 39. Horford put up a VA of just over 400 last year. Look at that compared to his peers.
The best of those guys are squeaking out 100s in VA. Again, we’re talking 300 points better than the best. What Al Horford is doing is completely unprecedented. When or how will it stop? Well, if you’ve ever seen a little documentary called Crimes of Grindewald, you know that the elixir of life doesn’t really maintain one’s physical fitness. Hence, at 0 quickness and 4 jump, there are some signs of cracking for Horford. In fact, Big Al was never that athletic to begin with and his decline in athleticism has been perfectly on par with his peers.
So for all of us waiting for Horford to die, we can hope that at some point he may just not be able to move any more, which I assume would prevent him from being good at basketball, no matter how skilled he is.
This article only has 600 words but please consider the amount of data work put into this.
