Wilt Chamberlain discussion

[QUOTE=32jazz]I wonder do people say foolish stuff like that about the undrafted Ben Wallace winning a ring over Shaq in 2004?

The fact that someone finds the time to post over ten pages :confusedshrug: about Wilt & the 60's/70's is a testament to their significance. You cannot have a serious discussion about the greatest players of all time without mentioning Wilt/Big O/Kareem.
Kareem(as well as Elvin Hayes)[/quote]

I agree. They were and are extremely signifigant. Someone mentioned newton earlier. His significance is amazing. It stands out. But I had a much, much deeper understanding about how the world works then Newton by the time I had finished high school. I was better as a direct result of Newton's work and me being better then him, because of him, ss precisely what makes him significant. That is 'exactly' what the deal is with Russel/Wilt.

[quote]who technically played in the 60's,70's & 80's proves the continuity / fluidity of the game from that era up until today. They were great no matter which decade they played.(Kareem won the NBA finals MVP at 38 years of age in '85 just as he had in '71. Elvin Hayes was an allstar in '80 . Both feats at advanced ages )[/quote]

The league was still incredibly weak in 1980 compared with 10 or even 5 years later. And Kareem may have won finals MVP but that in no way proves jack squat for so many reasons I have to make a list.

1. Parish was consistent, but no where near indicative of the best of the era.

2. One player who did well in one era and then was a shell of his dominance in the next indicates the previous one was strong, not weak. Averaging over 10 less BPG proves this when you mention Kareem. One player can not represent and prove anything about a generation of 100's of players.

3. 85 was the year the rookie season of the players who defined the peak of basketball. I don't think you can claim that Kareem playing rookie stockton/jordan/hakeem/Barkley/Willis/Thorpe and Malone/Ewing/Mutombo/Mullin/Oakley/Sabonis/Rodman/Robinson/Pippen (I'll just stop there, but it goes on for a while) were not even playing in the league yet.

4. Kareem had turned 38 like, a month before he had won that. Its disingenuous to state 38 when it suggests he played at that level a season later then he did. He played 95% of his games that season as a 37 year old. The season Kareem played when he was 38 was 85/86 when the Lakers went out to Houston because Kareem couldn't stop Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson. There is no rule for how to show age when comparing seasons but I think its just weak.

5. Kareem never had an injury. That luck combined with not playing physicial competent centers in the 70's results in his body not being broken down. Meaning Kareem was not your typical 37 year old player and was very much still in his prime albeit at the end of it. The way you frame it with his age it appears that even broken down at 38 he still was the MVP which creates a false sense of worth. Combined with the most talented players in history only being rookies. He wasn't broken down and it was more like a 30-33 year old player winning MVP today. A center's career in the 90's just did not last that long.

6. I thought it was classy of them to give the MVP to Kareem, but by that time the team was solidly Magic Johnson's. The offense ran through him 100% and Worthy was their scorer. as Kareem had moved into a key contributer/role player position. 18 PPG/14 APG/7 BPG agrees with me. Kareem obviously performed well and at a higher level for those 7 games but performing for a season at that level was beyond him.

Beyond that Kareem got shut out inside the paint. In the first game he had a 3 board/12 point effort. Then played great for two games for 17/14. Then he closed the series out with 6, 7 and 8 board efforts. Why did they endure the biggest finals smack down of all time? Cuz Kareem and the team stunk. Why did they win the series? Cuz Magic was, well, Magic and took over the series more and more every game they played.

1) 19-12-1 8/14
2) 14-13-4 5/9
3) 17-16-9 6/13
4) 20-12-11 11/20
5) 26-17-6 11/20
6) 14-14-10 5/15

I really love Kareem and his game. His sky hook was unstoppable. But he was not the same player at all even against the weakest period of 80's/90's superior talent and Magic was MVP of that series. Its a farce to suggest it wasn't.

7. The Lakers were STACKED! Its easy to look good on a team with Magic, Worthy and coached by Reilly.

8. Kareem's sky hook allowed him to turn and shoot on almost anyone. It was unblockable. Thats not a knock against Kareem but having a goto scoring move that does not depending on speed, strength or athletic ability helps a lot when you're 7'1" and can shoot it over everyone. As a center his stats were shells of his former play. He scored 23 points while his boards and blocks dipped below half of what he put up for regular seasons in the 70s. Suggesting as you did that Kareem did great against those players is a joke. He took them outside and shot over them because he knew he couldn't handle them inside. That why he went from his 70's numbers of 27/17/4blks to 23/6/1.6 blks.

I accept that he was getting old and all the valid reasons for his decline in production. But you're trying to say as a center he was still great in the 80's. He still had the sky hook and can probably still shoot it today with his eyes closed. As a center though, 6 boards and 1.6 blocks sucks just like your point does. Its weak and soft. And again, that was all played before the best bigs of all time were drafted or were out of their rookie seasons.

10. [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2eFdO7H7cU"]Kareem obviously has the worst rap and therefore is not cool. Rambis is obviously awesome![/URL]

Had to make one ridiculous point to match 'player a played awesome against one group of players and okay against a few of another group before they really learned to play therefore both groups are pretty equal.

[quote]Those guys legacies are cemented & internet rants cannot change the record books.[/QUOTE]

Man, you like to contradict yourself full circle huh? Whatever happened to:

[quote]The fact that someone finds the time to post over ten pages :confusedshrug: about Wilt & the 60's/70's is a testament to their significance.[/quote]

I think the fact that there are pages and pages of posts countering it all is pretty significant too. You confuse honoring these guys with evaluating them. What competitor would want hear excuses trying to inflate the way they played into something it wasn't. I respect everything a guy like Kareem did and that's why I say what he did was have an amazing all time career spanning 20-30 years. But I respect it for what he was and don't try to turn him or any of those other guys into something they're not which suggests who they were was not good enough to get that respect in the first place.

I disagree with that and you reaching to find any way to ignore what people can see plainly from watching the games from that era. They just were not as good and it was not even the same game.

[quote]In a league with 10 teams, it's more than expected that only a few players with both high talent and big minutes will come close to the best one. It's also expected not to have an all-time great or even a decent opponent in all your games. No-one ever did that.[/quote]

Why? And you realize you just accepted that the era was weak? A league with 10 teams would have higher concentrations of talent making it more competitive and harder to dominate... except Wilt absolutely dominated.

[quote]Hayes was a better athlete (and player) than most of today's big men. Of course I won't ask you whether you agree or not, but I know most do.[/quote]

Most don't. Most did when he played as a non-shell but that was over 30 years ago. I think you're getting better. Elvin Hayes could dribble, shoot and dunk. But I still have yet to see anything resembling Vince Carter jumping over a 7 footer to dunk on his head, or prime Webber's crazy athletic plays, or prime shaq/duncan/Robinson/Dream. What about prime Dyess? He's got nothing on him either.

[quote]I wasn't talking about his stats. I was talking about his overall game and athleticism. Every video of Wilt had most people admire him and admit that he'd be great even today, without needing any improvement. I find it very hard to believe that 80%+ of people who watched the video are Wilt's fans.[/quote]

Neither was I. I said when you watch tapes of Wilt its obvious he's a man amongst boys. Where do you pull 80% from? You can't just invent a statistic on what people think, says its true and use it as an argument. I admire Wilt too, but a player who doesn't box out in a finals game rides pine. Its that simple.

[quote]Actually I (and most of the others) do talk about greatness. I don't really care what would happen if so and so changed eras and remained "only" as good as they were, because that would never happen. You're born and grow up in an era, yet, despite this obvious fact, some continue using the "time transportation" thing.[/quote]

Its not time transportation its called evaluating 'basketball talent'. When you enter a conversation about talent (which is how the conversation started, and you clearly know is about) and bring up greatness its irrelevant because greatness is measured by things other then talent. You've stated that Wilt would dominate today. Is that based on his 'greatness'? Because Wilt got great walking over puny competition to the point that he didn't need to box them out but just reached over top of them for the board. You increase the competition and Wilt is no longer great. He could be good but thats not the player he was in the 60's.

[quote]Despite this, I still believe that a lot of all-time greats would do fine in just about every era, because nature didn't suddenly make humans 50% more athletic in a span of very few dacades, neither did it suddenly double their brains and logic and natural talent to do something.[/quote]

Yes, nature does do this. The talent pool that Wilt/Jerry west came from is 1000's of times smaller. The spots in the NBA are the same relative to the game's growth. That means you build a team of the 10 best people from 100 random players and that's your 50's/60's era team. Then I build a team from 100 freaking thousand players and that's my modern era team. My players are going to jump higher, be smarter, be more dedicated, be tougher, be faster, shoot better, know more, experience more, have better luck then your team. If you include the FACT that your team trains in a vastly inferior and underfunded development environment with people who are still learning and figuring out what the best way to play is, such as, they have not figured out that jumping will help you block shots and improve defense, where as my team has the best ever offered training environment and 20-50 years more examples to learn from, then you tell me you put money on your team? BS. Something happened in the 30 years since the 60s. Basketball became the second biggest and fastest growing sport in the entire world. Instead of drawing on 10's of millions of poor ass kids growing up in war time America playing with soccer balls its drawing on a global population that has tripled since Jerry West took his first jump shot. A paragraph is a collections of sentences pertaining to one theme. I'm making this one oversized paragraph because it covered the single theme of you being totally and throughly owned for holding an intentionally ignorant view of how talent has dramatically spiked in this sport over a few decades. I know you know it has. You know it has. But admitting as much means you don't have a leg to stand on so you pretend you don't know. I watched the same game you did and those player, Psileies, sucked.

[qutoe]The most fundamental differences of 60's basketball and today's basketball is advanced dribbling and game strategy. Yet, that's nothing that a decent player of any era would be unable to learn to an extent.[/quote]

Those things make you an incredibly better basketball player. Heres the difference: the weak era players did not learn them. The peak era players did. That's why they're better.

[quote]You don't even need to be a super dribbler to succeed. Stockton never did fancy things but was an very good to elite PG, and that's from the late 80's to the early 00's. As for strategy? A lot of Euroleague players are more advanced than NBA players nowadays in this field, without being more talented at all.
Athleticism, you say? Not as big a difference as some think.[/quote]

You're obviously a bit older. I dunno if you actually played basketball in your life or back in the day or whichever. But if you play against a guy who can truly has quicks AND can play above the rim, or if you ever did, you would never in your life say this. As if Stockton wins in the 90's at all without Malone/Others to execute crazy ahtletic crap off his sweet dimes. No player you've mentioned has the non-athletic qualities of Stockton OR trumps him as an athlete. He wasn't a dunker but he was crazy quick both in terms of speed and lateral quickness. That's why he leads nba history in steals and assists. And a fantastic shooter. His precision at speed is unmatched by anyone but Kidd/Nash but Stockton was a way better defender.

[quote]Remember, today we do have the luxury of compiling the most athletic moments, the highest leaps, etc, of a player in lists from practices and draft camps or in videos taken from all their games. Not so with older ones, and this led a lot to believe wrong things. Some used to think that Baylor wasn't actually a good athlete. because the only aired videos of him for many years showed him only perform a couple of simple dunks, without getting too high. Recently though, appeared this pic of him ([url]http://pro.corbis.com/search/searchFrame.aspx[/url] -- 2nd row, 3rd from left), which shows that he was much more athletic than these very limited videos made people think. Same with others.[/QUOTE]

Its a good point but I don't think someone like Allen Iverson or Wade or Shaq is athletic because I've watched a highlight reel. Its because every single game I watch them play in they do crap on a regular basis that astoundingly athletic. Watch AI in his prime penetrate. Or Bron's power dunk from high screen curl. That's an all day play. I watch whole games then and don't see even a highlight that's comparable to things bench NBA players do with their eyes closed.

Okay, its been fun but you're getting mroe and more ridiculous. At least you're strating to admit their talent was lesser even if you're trying to do it in a roundaobut way.

Psileas - report back with the league leaders in FG% in the 60's.

[QUOTE=indiefan23]Okay, so far

1. your arguing Bill Russel is a top 3 all time center. For evidence of this you say he played Wilt and beat him.[/QUOTE]

Not exactly. I don't have him over Wilt. Among all his teammates, he was the most vital part in winning 11 titles, but he still wasn't better than Wilt. I do give him full credit for limiting prime Wilt more than anyone else, though.

[QUOTE]2. You're saying Bill Russel is not 215, even though that's what the scales read when he was in the NBA.[/QUOTE]

And you read it where exactly? To the official lists which almost never updated their lists after college? The same lists that have Artis Gilmore at 240 lbs?

[QUOTE]3. You're saying Wilt was amazing, even though his team lost to a stacked Celtics team he usually outplayed Russel.[/QUOTE]

That's a main reason I put Wilt over Russell.

[QUOTE]4. You're claiming that an uncontested lay up after a fast break off a transition steal at half court and an awkward cross over on a slow defender means Jerry West was more athletic then Magic and Bird and could not only athletically match up with players like Jordan, Iverson, TJ Ford, he could be a star against them and defenders like Bruce Bowen, Shane Battier and Ron Artest.

Sorry, you didn't mention #4 but so far its my favorite thing anyone has said on inside hoops. Bar none. So its got to be mentioned again.[/QUOTE]

The average person will recognise quickness when he sees it. Except if...he doesn't want to. Which has been your case in too many instances.

[QUOTE]Why? And you realize you just accepted that the era was weak? A league with 10 teams would have higher concentrations of talent making it more competitive and harder to dominate... except Wilt absolutely dominated.[/QUOTE]

No, I said that having "only" 5 top ranked centers is nothing unexpected in a 10-team league. Actually, it makes things tougher for anyone. Hell, even 25+ team leagues didn't have many more great centers, and I won't even mention the percentage. Wilt's dominance over leagues with high concentration of good/great centers is a testament to his greatness.

[QUOTE]Most don't. Most did when he played as a non-shell but that was over 30 years ago. I think you're getting better. Elvin Hayes could dribble, shoot and dunk. But I still have yet to see anything resembling Vince Carter jumping over a 7 footer to dunk on his head, or prime Webber's crazy athletic plays, or prime shaq/duncan/Robinson/Dream. What about prime Dyess? He's got nothing on him either.[/QUOTE]

Why mention Vince Carter? He's not a big man, so take him out. Duncan (who also didn't dunk like Vince Carter, and no big ever did) is not a great athlete by any means. Certainly not greater than Hayes. His game isn't based on athleticism, after all. McDyess? He could become great, but his prime period was cut very short. It happens with certain super athletic guys. Webber was very athletic, but you saw yourself that the best Webber wasn't the young athletic guy he used to be with WAS. He was still athletic with the Kings, but didn't do the same stuff he did in his early days.

[QUOTE]Neither was I. I said when you watch tapes of Wilt its obvious he's a man amongst boys. Where do you pull 80% from? You can't just invent a statistic on what people think, says its true and use it as an argument. I admire Wilt too, but a player who doesn't box out in a finals game rides pine. Its that simple.[/QUOTE]

Regardless of who he was facing (and it certainly wasn't a man vs boys. Hell, Shaq has a bigger weight advantage compared to today's centers and you don'tsay anything), his talent could be easily seen. The moves that he tried alone are innovative beyond anything else seen back then and the standard he set remains extremely high for today's centers. How many centers shoot bank shots [B]and [/B]fade-aways [B]and [/B]finger-rolls [B]and [/B]can accelerate [B]and [/B]run like him [B]and [/B]have his defensive instinct [B]and [/B]dribble down the court, finishing a fast break with a behind the back pass, etc? Especially nowadays, I can't think of anyone.
Boxing out is strategy. It doesn't take real talent. No-one grew up to become great because he was great at boxing out and no-one started learning basketball by boxing out. It's still wrong that boxing out didn't exist, of course. All you showed me is 6 minutes of footage and you're trying to judge by this...


[QUOTE]Yes, nature does do this. The talent pool that Wilt/Jerry west came from is 1000's of times smaller. The spots in the NBA are the same relative to the game's growth. That means you build a team of the 10 best people from 100 random players and that's your 50's/60's era team. Then I build a team from 100 freaking thousand players and that's my modern era team. My players are going to jump higher, be smarter, be more dedicated, be tougher, be faster, shoot better, know more, experience more, have better luck then your team. If you include the FACT that your team trains in a vastly inferior and underfunded development environment with people who are still learning and figuring out what the best way to play is, such as, they have not figured out that jumping will help you block shots and improve defense, where as my team has the best ever offered training environment and 20-50 years more examples to learn from, then you tell me you put money on your team? BS. Something happened in the 30 years since the 60s. Basketball became the second biggest and fastest growing sport in the entire world. Instead of drawing on 10's of millions of poor ass kids growing up in war time America playing with soccer balls its drawing on a global population that has tripled since Jerry West took his first jump shot. A paragraph is a collections of sentences pertaining to one theme. I'm making this one oversized paragraph because it covered the single theme of you being totally and throughly owned for holding an intentionally ignorant view of how talent has dramatically spiked in this sport over a few decades. I know you know it has. You know it has. But admitting as much means you don't have a leg to stand on so you pretend you don't know. I watched the same game you did and those player, Psileies, sucked.[/QUOTE]

You're funny, hotairfan23. This "1,000's of times bigger talent pool" reference is among the funniest things you've said up to now, because when someone comes to think about it, it makes as much sense as Santa Claus existing AND finding the time to offer gifts to millions of kids within a day. Basketball was 70 years old and played pretty widely when West was a rookie, yet you claim things that match to a sport at its infancy. Even if you assumed that only 10,000 people dealt seriously with basketball as athletes in the USA in 1960 (a really small number), this should mean that tens of millions of such people existed when your so called "strong eras" began. Assuming that we're talking about 1985, this would take an [B]outrageous [/B]40.6% increase of the talent pool each year for 25 years to get, say, to a 5,000fold talent pool. Of course, it would also mean that a huge population of the country are serious basketball players and if we exclude women, children, old people, sick people, etc, then...maybe pretty much any USA healthy male between 20 and 35 has to be a decent basketball player and have even a small chance to play in the NBA...This is basketball we're comparing, not computer sells of 1970 vs 2000.

Even the mention that in the 80's/90's the talent pool was thousands of times bigger than in the 60's means you're still claiming that actually people back then were untalented, implying once again that this was the reason they played that kind of basketball. Sorry, but if you think a player in the year 2000 has some special abilities planted in his DNA which would make him able to execute a crossover dribble, which wasn't used in the 60's (therefore making you assume that 60's players, talent-wise, could not crossover), you're not worth my time.

[QUOTE]Those things make you an incredibly better basketball player. Heres the difference: the weak era players did not learn them. The peak era players did. That's why they're better.[/QUOTE]

Shooting, defense, passing, team play, even simple dibbling, I'll put all of these things above advanced dribbling.
60's-70's players knew all that stuff much better than 40's players, so if you want to call an era weak, then you should do so about the 40's. And, inevitably, you'll have to call our own era, right now, not the late 80's, not the early 90's, as the strongest ever. Because today's players can do these things even better now.

[QUOTE]You're obviously a bit older. I dunno if you actually played basketball in your life or back in the day or whichever. But if you play against a guy who can truly has quicks AND can play above the rim, or if you ever did, you would never in your life say this. As if Stockton wins in the 90's at all without Malone/Others to execute crazy ahtletic crap off his sweet dimes. No player you've mentioned has the non-athletic qualities of Stockton OR trumps him as an athlete. He wasn't a dunker but he was crazy quick both in terms of speed and lateral quickness. That's why he leads nba history in steals and assists. And a fantastic shooter. His precision at speed is unmatched by anyone but Kidd/Nash but Stockton was a way better defender.[/QUOTE]

West was at least as athletic as Stockton, and I'm being gracious to Stock. Taking into account that Stockton played at a high level even when he was past 40, against players almost half his age, this doesn't even make it close. Stockton at 40, despite being in great physical condition for his age, wasn't considered fast or quick. Yes, Stockton had a great shot and even greater passing skills. See why being a super dribbler isn't all that important compared to other things? What did Jason Williams or Steve Francis achieve with their flash and quickness and fancy dribbling? I bet they'd exchange their gifts with Stockton's gifts any day.

[QUOTE]Its a good point but I don't think someone like Allen Iverson or Wade or Shaq is athletic because I've watched a highlight reel. Its because every single game I watch them play in they do crap on a regular basis that astoundingly athletic. Watch AI in his prime penetrate. Or Bron's power dunk from high screen curl. That's an all day play. I watch whole games then and don't see even a highlight that's comparable to things bench NBA players do with their eyes closed.[/QUOTE]

Exactly, you're watching games every day. Compare this to watching 5-minute clips of older players, which are called "highlights", because these are among the only plays which are available and due to the lack of another word. Showing Jerry West taking his typical jump shot, which he did so many times every game, isn't a highlight and it never was. It's just a typical play and a sign that you have very few footage available. If all footage was available, there would be much better plays for guys like him.

[QUOTE=Psileas]Except he isn't and that it's certain that even today a lot of the most talented players learn the game under miserable conditions, which shows that there are more things than the equipment you used as a child.
Oh, and except that Bird might have trained in hoops like this ([url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du-fmgN_5Hc&feature=PlayList&p=4A407B932011BDCA&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=12[/url]) or hoops without nets ([url]http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/nba/1998/bird/flashbacks/1988flash.html[/url]) and that your assumptions about Jerry West growing up playing with a soccer ball are just that.[/quote]

They're not assumptions they're rational assertions. Its 'rationale' that Jerry West would not have played ball with a symmetrical ball because they didn't exist until the 50's. I think its rational to think that a poor kid with abusive drunk parents probably couldn't afford state of the art sports equipment.

The same for Bill Russel. He grew up the son of a janitor in a segregated 50's community. Something tells me he didn't have lots of cash on hand for high technology equipment.

[quote]West's skills are well-known. Fast, great shooter, good passer, quick and long hands, quick shot release, defensive instinct. You brought up the "soccer balls" thing first.[/QUOTE]

Yea, I brought it up because it was relevant.

[QUOTE=Psileas]Exactly, you're watching games every day. Compare this to watching 5-minute clips of older players, which are called "highlights", because these are among the only plays which are available and due to the lack of another word. Showing Jerry West taking his typical jump shot, which he did so many times every game, isn't a highlight and it never was. It's just a typical play and a sign that you have very few footage available. If all footage was available, there would be much better plays for guys like him.[/QUOTE]

I've watched entire finals with Jerry West... where do you get the idea I've only seen highlights? Dude could shoot. But you know, Deshawn Stevenson can shoot. Brian Scalenbrine can shoot. Jason Kapano can really shoot. Being a great shooter is not enough today. You need lots extra to be a star. West was not that fast and could not dribble well and totally could not dribble great when going fast. I just don't see how he's effective with Ron Artest/Bowen/Battier or a slew of other defenders on him. His latteral quickness and lack of a handle would make it easy to stay in front of him. Its not like Jerry West broke people down and blew by them and as a shooter if you don't have something else on the table that makes you a role player on winning teams.

Why would a coach let you handle the rock when players like Nash/Kidd/Parker/Arenas/Kobe/Jordan/Stockton/Thomas et al are around? Why would they recruit/trade for you for that purpose? Jerry West == JJ Redick without the footwork and better defense.

[QUOTE=Psileas]Not exactly. I don't have him over Wilt. Among all his teammates, he was the most vital part in winning 11 titles, but he still wasn't better than Wilt. I do give him full credit for limiting prime Wilt more than anyone else, though.[/quote]

Well, the argument started when someone asked how Russel was top 3, but whichever.

[quote]And you read it where exactly? To the official lists which almost never updated their lists after college? The same lists that have Artis Gilmore at 240 lbs?[/quote]

bball ref. It not like Wilt's 275 was measured differently then BR's 215.

[quote]The average person will recognise quickness when he sees it. Except if...he doesn't want to. Which has been your case in too many instances.[/quote]

You showed me West running down from half court and a crossover that any 2 guard playing today can do. Any of them. TJ Ford today is quick. Jerry West today is slow in comparison. He's pretty average.

[quote]No, I said that having "only" 5 top ranked centers is nothing unexpected in a 10-team league. Actually, it makes things tougher for anyone. Hell, even 25+ team leagues didn't have many more great centers, and I won't even mention the percentage. Wilt's dominance over leagues with high concentration of good/great centers is a testament to his greatness.[/quote]

That makes no sense at all. In a smaller league the competition would be more concentrated on fewer teams meaning it would be more competitive. If its more competitive its harder for a few players to produce more then everyone. That's why in 91 Robinson has only 3 more boards then the person in 20'th: there's so many betters players to compete with him. More teams means more players get in the league and that scrubby dude who can't board compared to everyone else gets in and gets beat up on by the guy who can.

[quote]Why mention Vince Carter? He's not a big man, so take him out. Duncan (who also didn't dunk like Vince Carter, and no big ever did)[/quote]

Dwight Howard dunks like VC, and VC is the kind of player they have to guard against and that kind of player bigs have to defend against. Carter is still a forward after all. In Bill Russel's time 6'7" Carter could have played center,so he's totally in the conversation.

[quote]is not a great athlete by any means. Certainly not greater than Hayes. His game isn't based on athleticism, after all.[/quote]

Now Duncan's a poor athlete? You're a joke. Lets see Elvin Hayes guard prime Shaq straight up and come away with 28/20/6blks. Do you know stupid saying Tim Duncan got to his level without being a truly elite athlete is? You basically say that any player who used their head and had good fundamentals was a poor athlete like they were in the 60's. TD is an incredible athlete with great speed, coordination and power for his size. He put it together with footwork Wilt and Russel couldn't even dream about.

Tim Duncan is an all time athlete. If he played in the 60's he would have matched up with Wilt and been bigger then him. Its just ridiculous.

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_-JyLBJc-s[/url]

[quote]McDyess? He could become great, but his prime period was cut very short. It happens with certain super athletic guys. Webber was very athletic, but you saw yourself that the best Webber wasn't the young athletic guy he used to be with WAS. He was still athletic with the Kings, but didn't do the same stuff he did in his early days.[/quote]

Yea, it happens cuz you have to guard players who are incredibly large, fast, and powerful. It increases the chances you get hurt because ball is played at such a higher level/intensity. Once you get hurt your effectiveness is gone as you just get eaten by the top tier talent. I mean, don't you realize that a big reason guys like Kareem/Hayes had such great careers is because they never got seriously hurt in 38 combines seasons and a big reason for that is because the league was not as physicial?

[quote]Regardless of who he was facing (and it certainly wasn't a man vs boys. Hell, Shaq has a bigger weight advantage compared to today's centers and you don'tsay anything), his talent could be easily seen.[/quote]

Uh, lots? He was a man against boys. Most everyone else was 4"'s shorter and 50-75 pounds lighter. Shaq is crazy but had peers who could compete with him.

[quote]Boxing out is strategy. It doesn't take real talent. No-one grew up to become great because he was great at boxing out and no-one started learning basketball by boxing out. It's still wrong that boxing out didn't exist, of course. All you showed me is 6 minutes of footage and you're trying to judge by this...[/quote]

Boxing out is a skill and athletic play based on quickness to get to a spot, skill to know your footwork, and strength to clear/maintain it. Its at this point that I realize you've never played organized basketball. All true bigs become great because they're good at boxing out. You're coach won't let you play if you don't. Its one of the first things you teach a center. Watch, if you place your feet here and move like this, you can force him out of the way and get every board. Ask Rodman if he became great this way. That goes on your list of :banghead: comments.

[qutoe]You're funny, hotairfan23. This "1,000's of times bigger talent pool" reference is among the funniest things you've said up to now, because when someone comes to think about it, it makes as much sense as Santa Claus existing AND finding the time to offer gifts to millions of kids within a day. Basketball was 70 years old and played pretty widely when West was a rookie...[/quote]

Its not the 60's pool, its the 40's/50's pool that that generation came from. The 60's is when they played. And the loose calculation comes from Bill Russel who was born in 1934. The world population more then doubled over the next 30-40 years. So in the 40s/50's a proportion of the US's 140 million played ball. Since basketball was not nearly as popular as it was in the 60's/70's and was dwarfed in comparison to other sports like boxing/football/freaking lacross/baseball so naturally those sports drew the best and most athletes.

So you have a small proportion of 140 million that realistically have the opportunity to play and its obvious that other sports are more appealing to athletes and ball is seen as a goon sport. The sport is only starting to be played in other countries. This is obvious as it took until 1972 for team USA to even lose a single olympic game.

30 years later basketball is becoming a glamor sport attracting the best athletes. Its a total global game as people play seriously in every country opening the pool from a proportion of 150 million to billions. The population of the world instead of 2 billion has more then doubled at 4 in 1975 and 4.4 in 1980. So, the pool of people who have picked up a ball and shot at a hoop has gone through the roof. Nearly every single school in the entire world has a basketball hoop today as the game has become a global sport. So yes, when it goes from 'north american game played by small proportion of countries population totaling 150 million tops' to 'global game played by every country with populations in the billions' the talent pool is 1000's of times bigger.

How many people even played basketball by the time Russell was born? Seriously, how many? I can't see it topping like, 10-20 million. Can you? Half the population would be too old to have been around when it started being played. Half of that population would be into other sports, hell, at least half of that population because basketball is no where near the most popular sport. You're already down to about 30 million people total. You half it again because there's just lots of people who don't play sports at all. Thats 15 million. 1000 times is 1.5 billion. Given how much more popular basketball is in a massive way, the fact that everyone alive was born when the sport was established on all levels, the nearly every school that people attend in the world now has a hoop, that everyone knows superstars like Michael Jordan (he's an international brand) and that theres a 4+ billion amount of people in the world I don't see 1000 times the talent pool as being so crazy.

Its a ceiling but its not insane. Its loose and by no means accurate and doesn't have to be to get the point across. Lets say its a gross overestimation. Okay. So lets rank our 10 best random teams then.

At 1000 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 100,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 500 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 50,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 250 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 25,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 125 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 12,500 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 50 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 5,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 10 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 1,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

And I can assure you, its larger then 10 times. Its in the hundreds with 1,000's not out of reach.

Face the truth.

[quote]Even the mention that in the 80's/90's the talent pool was thousands of times bigger than in the 60's means you're still claiming that actually people back then were untalented... Sorry, but if you think a player in the year 2000 has some special abilities planted in his DNA which would make him able to execute a crossover dribble, which wasn't used in the 60's (therefore making you assume that 60's players, talent-wise, could not crossover), you're not worth my time.[/quote]

Well, they do. Its just logical that if you take the best from more people you'll get the better genes. And I've never said players in the 60's wern't talented. I just said they're not comparable to peak era players cuz peak era players are hyper talented. Especially when you actually don't just compare the stars but evaluate the majority of players. I'm pretty sure I could have made an NBA team in the 40's and 50's just from watching tapes.

[quote]Shooting, defense, passing, team play, even simple dibbling, I'll put all of these things above advanced dribbling.[/quote]

Advanced dribbling? Crossing over is not advanced dribbling. One person could trap Jerry West on the wing and stop the fast break because Jerry was not confident to change directions while moving without his back turned to his defender. That's basic.

[quote]West was at least as athletic as Stockton, and I'm being gracious to Stock... See why being a super dribbler isn't all that important compared to other things?[/QUOTE]

Dear god. Jerry West was as athletic as John Stockton huh? Is that why Stock is the career leader in assists/steals in way less minutes and 1000's upon 1000's less possessions? That's a joke. Stockton played against Jordan/Pippen types and had to go to the hole agaisnt Dream/Mutombo/Ewing/Robinson. Stockton was quick, 'could' do the 3 primary dribbles a point guard should be able to do crossover in transition, through his legs, behind his back and could flat out play better then Jerry West. 'Fancy'. Love how you just pretend like people only do it to show off. Those are critical skills a guard uses to penetrate and break down a defense which Stockton did all the time. Stockton wasn't super flashy but could handle the rock. West could not.

Its not that West was a bad player. Its that he was not a Michael Jordan type player like his stats indicate. They're inflated because when he came into the league he was better then almost everyone else, but almost everyone else sucked a wet bag of suck.

[QUOTE=Psileas]How many centers shoot bank shots and fade-aways and finger-rolls and can accelerate and run like him and have his defensive instinct and dribble down the court, finishing a fast break with a behind the back pass, etc? Especially nowadays, I can't think of anyone.[/quote]

Uh, Big Baby Davis can do all those things.

Indiefan23, Psileas is probably the most knowledgeable poster on ISH. Why waste your time? He can actually back up and/or expand on his claims and know s the game inside out. Give it up.

Starting from the end:

[QUOTE]Uh, Big Baby Davis can do all those things.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, to the same degree with Harold Miner could do all the things Jordan did...We watch games too, you know. If Davis could do all these things, people would actually care about him.

[QUOTE]bball ref. It not like Wilt's 275 was measured differently then BR's 215.[/QUOTE]

Wilt's weight is among the very few that got updated (that's why I wrote "almost never", because there were exceptions), and even this was not his peak weight, which was at least 300 in his last seasons with the Lakers. Willis Reed was also listed at 235. Bob Lanier at 250. Wes Unseld at 245. These weights were college or, at best, rookie weights and didn't get updated. Same with Russell. Dwyane Wade is about 215 today and, despite his built, when you consider the very significant height difference, Russell had to be heavier. After all, if you think that an NBA Russell was 215, what the hell should be Russell's weight at college? 200 at most? At 6'9.5?


[QUOTE]You showed me West running down from half court and a crossover that any 2 guard playing today can do. Any of them. TJ Ford today is quick. Jerry West today is slow in comparison. He's pretty average.[/QUOTE]

We see it differently. In comparison with today's average guards, I find him quicker.

[QUOTE]That makes no sense at all. In a smaller league the competition would be more concentrated on fewer teams meaning it would be more competitive. If its more competitive its harder for a few players to produce more then everyone. That's why in 91 Robinson has only 3 more boards then the person in 20'th: there's so many betters players to compete with him. More teams means more players get in the league and that scrubby dude who can't board compared to everyone else gets in and gets beat up on by the guy who can.[/QUOTE]

You have to realize that once you normalize 60's players' stats into today's numbers, they are less impressive than they seem. For example, a player like West or Robertson could easily have 35 or even 40 ppg seasons if they had played in watered-down leagues, facing each other like 2 or 3 times a season and having the freedom to take even 30% of their team's shots. 60's players' stats were inflated due to pace, not due to poor competition.
Also, note that Wilt played a lot of minutes, so the adjusted stats of certain players would be closer if they could play as many minutes.
Third, you once again were wrong about the stats. Robinson was 4.6 rpg (aka 54.8%) above the 20th rebounder in the league. I won't even mention Rodman, who is the living proof that if you have a great talent somewhere and then you can concentrate on this specific area almost exclusively, you can become completely dominant, even in 90's leagues.

[QUOTE]Dwight Howard dunks like VC, and VC is the kind of player they have to guard against and that kind of player bigs have to defend against.[/QUOTE]

Dwight Howard dunks like VC? Here's another good topic you wouldn't get many supporters, because you seem to mean it literally.

[QUOTE] Carter is still a forward after all. In Bill Russel's time 6'7" Carter could have played center,so he's totally in the conversation.[/QUOTE]

After the mid-50's, Carter would never play center. Too short. Maybe he could do so against the shortest stiffs of the era, but not against serious competition.

[QUOTE]Now Duncan's a poor athlete? You're a joke. Lets see Elvin Hayes guard prime Shaq straight up and come away with 28/20/6blks. Do you know stupid saying Tim Duncan got to his level without being a truly elite athlete is? You basically say that any player who used their head and had good fundamentals was a poor athlete like they were in the 60's. TD is an incredible athlete with great speed, coordination and power for his size. He put it together with footwork Wilt and Russel couldn't even dream about.

Tim Duncan is an all time athlete. If he played in the 60's he would have matched up with Wilt and been bigger then him. Its just ridiculous.

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_-JyLBJc-s[/url][/QUOTE]

And yet, with all his "ridiculous athleticism", Duncan is still considered the most boring superstar maybe ever, he's considered an "old school" type of player, he prefers lay-ups to dunks, he prefers taking mid range and soft bank shots instead of beating the hell out of his opponents under the boards, he has virtually zero references among the NBA's elite athletes, the Spurs play some of the slowest basketball with him as the focal point of the offense and rarely execute fast breaks through him and he never got past 2.9 bpg, despite playing practically as a C.

[QUOTE]Yea, it happens cuz you have to guard players who are incredibly large, fast, and powerful. It increases the chances you get hurt because ball is played at such a higher level/intensity. Once you get hurt your effectiveness is gone as you just get eaten by the top tier talent. I mean, don't you realize that a big reason guys like Kareem/Hayes had such great careers is because they never got seriously hurt in 38 combines seasons and a big reason for that is because the league was not as physicial?[/QUOTE]

Then I also guess Karl Malone or Moses Malone never cared about banging with big opponents and that's why they lasted that much. AC Green, with less athleticism than McDyess played for 1200 games in a row. Probably because he wasn't physical at all. John Stockton must have been a softie when it comes to this as well, which explains why he was still playing great at 40+. Robert Parish? Same. Kevin Willis? Same.

[QUOTE]Boxing out is a skill and athletic play based on quickness to get to a spot, skill to know your footwork, and strength to clear/maintain it. Its at this point that I realize you've never played organized basketball. All true bigs become great because they're good at boxing out. You're coach won't let you play if you don't. Its one of the first things you teach a center. Watch, if you place your feet here and move like this, you can force him out of the way and get every board. Ask Rodman if he became great this way. That goes on your list of comments.[/QUOTE]

Don't worry, I played basketball and I know what your main point is. Which is wrong: This video (which I admit I should have posted it already) is about boxing out. Guess who are the poeple talking about it:

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH1LnAQp4cM&feature=PlayList&p=D9248404D5180EB0&index=0&playnext=1[/url]

[QUOTE]Its not the 60's pool, its the 40's/50's pool that that generation came from. The 60's is when they played. And the loose calculation comes from Bill Russel who was born in 1934. The world population more then doubled over the next 30-40 years. So in the 40s/50's a proportion of the US's 140 million played ball. Since basketball was not nearly as popular as it was in the 60's/70's and was dwarfed in comparison to other sports like boxing/football/freaking lacross/baseball so naturally those sports drew the best and most athletes.

So you have a small proportion of 140 million that realistically have the opportunity to play and its obvious that other sports are more appealing to athletes and ball is seen as a goon sport. The sport is only starting to be played in other countries. This is obvious as it took until 1972 for team USA to even lose a single olympic game.

30 years later basketball is becoming a glamor sport attracting the best athletes. Its a total global game as people play seriously in every country opening the pool from a proportion of 150 million to billions. The population of the world instead of 2 billion has more then doubled at 4 in 1975 and 4.4 in 1980. So, the pool of people who have picked up a ball and shot at a hoop has gone through the roof. Nearly every single school in the entire world has a basketball hoop today as the game has become a global sport. So yes, when it goes from 'north american game played by small proportion of countries population totaling 150 million tops' to 'global game played by every country with populations in the billions' the talent pool is 1000's of times bigger.

How many people even played basketball by the time Russell was born? Seriously, how many? I can't see it topping like, 10-20 million. Can you? Half the population would be too old to have been around when it started being played. Half of that population would be into other sports, hell, at least half of that population because basketball is no where near the most popular sport. You're already down to about 30 million people total. You half it again because there's just lots of people who don't play sports at all. Thats 15 million. 1000 times is 1.5 billion. Given how much more popular basketball is in a massive way, the fact that everyone alive was born when the sport was established on all levels, the nearly every school that people attend in the world now has a hoop, that everyone knows superstars like Michael Jordan (he's an international brand) and that theres a 4+ billion amount of people in the world I don't see 1000 times the talent pool as being so crazy.

Its a ceiling but its not insane. Its loose and by no means accurate and doesn't have to be to get the point across. Lets say its a gross overestimation. Okay. So lets rank our 10 best random teams then.

At 1000 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 100,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 500 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 50,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 250 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 25,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 125 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 12,500 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 50 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 5,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

At 10 times you are picking from 100 people, me from 1,000 and my team beats the crap out of your's.

And I can assure you, its larger then 10 times. Its in the hundreds with 1,000's not out of reach.

Face the truth.[/QUOTE]

First of all, we're talking about USA, not the world, so world population doesn't matter. After all, international players started playing in the NBA in the early 90's (of course I don't count these very few individual cases that happened earlier), so world population up to the late 80's doesn't matter.
The world population thing that you mentioned, along with the fact that the popularity of basketball exploded later compared to the USA (started from the late 80's and is still increasing), the fact that Team USA is no longer the "who's going for second?" dominator and the vast increase of internationals during the last seasons can easily mean that the real biggest talent pool exists nowadays.
Second, basketball's popularity even in the USA didn't stop growing at any point. Going by childhoods alone, which you did, Jordan-Magic-Bird belonged to the 70's talent pool (more like late 60's for the last 2 guys). LeBron belongs to the 90's pool. Like you did before, compare the popularities of the games in these decades (which you admitted was higher in the 90's) and you should similarly reach to the conclusion that LeBron's era>Jordan's/Magic's-Bird's eras. Especially if you add in the increase popularity of the game globally.
Third, whichever 25 or 30 year span you're comparing, even a 100-fold increase is still an extreme overexaggeration, not because I said so, but because the results do: Which span's pools do you want to compare? 40's and 70's? Let's say that there was a 400-time increase in this pool. If this increase was kind of steady, this would mean a 7.37-time deeper pool for each decade. This, in turn, should mean either that
1) A huge number of NBA teams should be added-I mean hundereds of teams during these 3 decades.
or that
2) with the number of the teams not increasing to an extreme degree (a 3-4 team increase is considered a big expansion), a huge percentage of players from year X should be out of the league or struggling to survive just a few years after beginning their careers.
Neither happened.


[QUOTE]They're not assumptions they're rational assertions. Its 'rationale' that Jerry West would not have played ball with a symmetrical ball because they didn't exist until the 50's. I think its rational to think that a poor kid with abusive drunk parents probably couldn't afford state of the art sports equipment.

The same for Bill Russel. He grew up the son of a janitor in a segregated 50's community. Something tells me he didn't have lots of cash on hand for high technology equipment.[/QUOTE]

Once again you're trying to magnify certain things, like the symmetricity of the ball. The balls were not as high tech as today's balls, but we already saw that balls very similar to today's basketballs started existing by the early 40's. You must be talking about 40's players, not 60's. If 40's balls were as largely problematic as you claim, do you think there would be any reason for organizing pro leagues in that decade, with the most important equipment of the sport being at a horrible condition? Don't you also think that, while watching videos from the 40's NBA we'd be able to see the ball bounce and move in weird ways and directions every time it was dribbled, which we don't?

[QUOTE=Manute for Ever!]Indiefan23, Psileas is probably the most knowledgeable poster on ISH. Why waste your time? He can actually back up and/or expand on his claims and know s the game inside out. Give it up.[/QUOTE]

Ha, yea, here's some AWESOME knowledge he's imparted on us.

Hey guess what... Tim Duncan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Charles Barkley and Isiah Thomas were all poor athletes. Boxing out is merely a strategy. Oh yea, and being able to jump twice as high as your opponent is not a very important part of the game. Its just fancy showing off. He claims one player playing well in one era and only okay in the next is indicative of both eras being about the same. Its all such a crap shoot.

That's some kind of knowledge. The guy is a 'fan' of the game but understands little about it. He's one of the most myopic fanboys on the site, that's for sure. I can back that up... would you like to see it?

Psileas , haven't you given this unreasonable clown enough jerkoff material. It's obvious this is how he gets his rocks off. Him having to acknowledge them(Wilt/Big O/Kareem...) is proof to their Towering legacies.His is silly/obscure 15 pages of confusion. I have never seen anyone questions Kareem's greatness which spanned three decades:confusedshrug:

[QUOTE]Ha, yea, here's some AWESOME knowledge he's imparted on us.

Hey guess what... Tim Duncan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Charles Barkley and Isiah Thomas were all poor athletes. Boxing out is merely a strategy. Oh yea, and being able to jump twice as high as your opponent is not a very important part of the game. Its just fancy showing off. He claims one player playing well in one era and only okay in the next is indicative of both eras being about the same. Its all such a crap shoot.

That's some kind of knowledge. The guy is a 'fan' of the game but understands little about it. He's one of the most myopic fanboys on the site, that's for sure. I can back that up... would you like to see it?[/QUOTE]

-Jerry West was a poor athlete who couldn't even get his hand above the rim and trained with soccer balls. However, Stockton, Nash, Billups and Duncan are all great or elite ones. Even Bird and Magic, even at their worst, were worlds better athletes than West.
-Big Baby Davis could do all the things Wilt could (that's a new gem right here). Plus, Greg Oden could run faster than him at his prime.
-Within 30 or so years, the talent pool in the USA increased by 3.2 gazillion times, regardless of what results show.
-Rumors that most players back then were measured barefoot and their weights weren't updated are myths just to make them look better.
-Wilt facing 4-5 very good/great centers in a 10-team league is not enough to qualify as good competition.

(And many more that I have no will to recall).

Dude, your understanding, perceptions and estimations at a lot of things you discuss are ironically bad to try and blame others for not understanding the game. Forget me, the "Wilt homer". Try to tell any of these things mentioned above to any sensible person who knows about NBA history and you'll be laughed at.