1st and 10: How would Wilt do in today's NBA (Anyone catch this today?)

[QUOTE]Yeah, but regardless there's no doubt his FGA would drop a lot. Especially with scouting what it is today. It's hard to imagine Wilt getting much more than 21-22 FGA on a good team(which the 1962 Warriors were). It's harder to get a lot of FGA when you're playing with your back to basket. Wilt's game from everything I saw was mostly with his back to the basket. Even high scoring centers who played facing the basket more and took a lot of jumpshots like Ewing and Robinson never got to 21 FGA per game. Olajuwon did twice, but then again Hakeem was on a team with no stars most of that time and he also played facing the basket more than Wilt as far as I can tell.
In my final estimate I gave Wilt 29.5 ppg up from the 28.1 when adjusted to Shaq's FGA and I gave him 56 FG% up from the 53.3% he initially got when his numbers were adjusted. That wasn't based on any particular math. I just knew that Wilt's FG% would jump up even higher and as a result his ppg would. 56 FG% on 21.1 FGA and 61.3% on 9.1 FTA would give him 29.2 ppg. I gave him the same FGA to FTA ratio as he had in 1962.
I scaled down the numbers even more because I didn't think Wilt would get 25 FGA in today's game. If he did then I believe he could have approached 33 ppg, but I don't see any center coming near that. Olajuwon, Ewing and Robinson weren't anywhere near that and they faced the basket a lot.[/QUOTE]

I think that both Hakeem and Robinson would be able to take more than their "ceiling" of 20-21 FGA if their teams decided to go for them at the expence of their %'s (which happened with Wilt and the '62 Warriors). Even Shaq was able to have a 21 fga season in his prime (on high accuracy). I bet all these could average 3 fga's more and pad their stats if they wanted to (sometimes, even if they managed to make only 1/3 of these additional shots, they'd still exceed 50% FG shooting). Centers didn't take 30+ shots per game in the 60's, either. Guards and forwards were mostly the ones who did the higher scoring. Even Wilt didn't do it all the time. Take '64, for example: Wilt averaged 28.7 shots per game, which is roughly the adjusted equivalent of the number of shots Hakeem or David took at their primes, and that's only 2 seasons after '62 and 1 season after '63 (when Wilt averaged more than 35 fga's for a good part of the season). Similarly, I bet that he could go for more than 28.7 fga's in '64, but there was no need to.

[QUOTE]That's fair, but while Wilt would be getting the extra rest other players would get in a rythym at times and it's not like they'd just stop shooting the instant Wilt came in. Plus the players today are atleast a bit bigger and more athletic so that would tire him out as well. In 48 minutes you can also keep shooting even when you're cold and even Wilt would go through cold stretchs because his game wasn't just 5 feet around the basket. In 40 minutes he wouldn't always have the luxary to shoot himself out of those cold stretches. So I think there are a lot of points either way.[/QUOTE]

The first argument, though it makes sense, describes mostly the European style of play or the style of teams like the Spurs. From all I've seen during all these years, as long as a team's mega-scorer (in the order of LeBron, Kobe, etc) gets in, it seems like their teammates do shoot less than when they were sitting.
Superstar substitutions nowadays (whenever there's no foul/injury trouble) occur in the stretches when

1) they need some rest and the coach decides that using the bench player will provide more help at that moment

or

2) there's some part of the game when they generally tend to be less productive in general. Most superstars tend to be at their least productive period during the 2nd quarters of games (though that's not a rule that always applies). Like you also mentioned the scouting department, a well-organized team should figure this out. Probably some did back then as well (I'm almost sure the Celtics did), but I doubt they payed as much attention as teams do nowadays.