I didn’t realize how good Michael jordan was

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Scalma said:
Lol @ legit responses to this shit post.
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I only posted my thread as to ruffle Eric's feathers a bit. A little fun in these covid times. :)
 
I thought the defense back then was supposed to be better?
 
BonesJones said:
I thought the defense back then was supposed to be better?
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It wasn't, it was only more physical. More hand-checking was allowed, harder fouls were allowed without flagrants being called.

But the sophistication of defenses was far lesser and zone defenses weren't allowed. So you might get battered more in the 1980s and 1990s, which was tough in its own way I guess, but defense itself is actually better today in my opinion.
 
Minstrel said:
It wasn't, it was only more physical. More hand-checking was allowed, harder fouls were allowed without flagrants being called.

But the sophistication of defenses was far lesser and zone defenses weren't allowed. So you might get battered more in the 1980s and 1990s, which was tough in its own way I guess, but defense itself is actually better today in my opinion.
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I would agree with that assessment.
 
Minstrel said:
It wasn't, it was only more physical. More hand-checking was allowed, harder fouls were allowed without flagrants being called.

But the sophistication of defenses was far lesser and zone defenses weren't allowed. So you might get battered more in the 1980s and 1990s, which was tough in its own way I guess, but defense itself is actually better today in my opinion.
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players care a lot less about defense than they did twenty years ago.
 
Scalma said:
players care a lot less about defense than they did twenty years ago.
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Just rhetoric. You had tons and tons of matador defensive players in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone thinks of the Celtics/Pistons of the '80s or the Knicks/Sonics of the '90s as though they typified defense of that era. If you actually go back and watch games from those two decades, you see wide open shot after wide open shot. With the rise of advanced metrics showing how valueless players who don't play defense are, guys who just collect empty offensive stats and can't play defense are less valued today than back then.
 
Minstrel said:
Just rhetoric. You had tons and tons of matador defensive players in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone thinks of the Celtics/Pistons of the '80s or the Knicks/Sonics of the '90s as though they typified defense of that era. If you actually go back and watch games from those two decades, you see wide open shot after wide open shot. With the rise of advanced metrics showing how valueless players who don't play defense are, guys who just collect empty offensive stats and can't play defense are less valued today than back then.
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how is it rhetoric when players and coaches openly admit it?
 
Scalma said:
how is it rhetoric when players and coaches openly admit it?
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First of all, I've never seen large groups of players say they don't care about defense. Finding one or two dudes who say it (and I haven't even seen that, so feel free to show me these quotes just for the sake of interest) wouldn't prove anything. That would be like saying because a few players say they don't care about shooting threes, players these days care less about shooting threes. Second, that still tells nothing about how much players care about defense relative to players 20 or 30 years ago. As I said, there were plenty of matador defenders back then--whether or not we have quotes from those players, there's no particular evidence that players put less effort into defense now versus then.
 
Minstrel said:
First of all, I've never seen large groups of players say they don't care about defense. Finding one or two dudes who say it (and I haven't even seen that, so feel free to show me these quotes just for the sake of interest) wouldn't prove anything. That would be like saying because a few players say they don't care about shooting threes, players these days care less about shooting threes. Second, that still tells nothing about how much players care about defense relative to players 20 or 30 years ago. As I said, there were plenty of matador defenders back then--whether or not we have quotes from those players, there's no particular evidence that players put less effort into defense now versus then.
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Or looking at it from the other perspective, if players 20-30 years ago indeed cared a lot more about defense, the volume of open shots allowed suggests that they weren't particularly good at it.
 
Minstrel said:
First of all, I've never seen large groups of players say they don't care about defense. Finding one or two dudes who say it (and I haven't even seen that, so feel free to show me these quotes just for the sake of interest) wouldn't prove anything. That would be like saying because a few players say they don't care about shooting threes, players these days care less about shooting threes. Second, that still tells nothing about how much players care about defense relative to players 20 or 30 years ago. As I said, there were plenty of matador defenders back then--whether or not we have quotes from those players, there's no particular evidence that players put less effort into defense now versus then.
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average points per game league wide the past two years has topped 110. From 95-07, it didn’t top 100 once. Explain that. Teams are willing to sacrifice defense for offense these days, or is that false? A guy like Roy Hibbert would only start on specific teams today, while in his day he was an all defense caliber anchor.
 
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Scalma said:
average points per game league wide the past two years has topped 110. From 95-07, it didn’t top 100 once. Explain that.
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Are you kidding? Maybe the emphasis on far more efficient offense--shooting many many more threes, phasing out mid-range jumpers, bigs more oriented as rim-runners for lobs and less ponderous post-up players--has something to do with it.

A hallmark of '90s and '00s basketball isn't just open shots--it's watching a bunch of mid-range and long-range 2s being clanked. While the Jordan/Pippen Bulls and a handful of other teams were cool to watch, that was perhaps the ugliest era of basketball. Lots of plodding isolation basketball and tons of jacked misses. The triangle offense was such an innovation because it didn't rely on isolation basketball (though, obviously, Jordan and Pippen sometimes took their turns isolating when things broke down).

When trying to figure out why league-wide numbers change from era to era, I'd recommend looking at rules changes and schematic changes and not arguments that amount to "players now/then just lack(ed) heart/effort/hustle." Human beings don't change (i.e. they don't become worse with each generation despite what old people complaining about kids these days claim) and, if anything, players have become more and more specialized and serious about the game over the years as the incentives have grown.
 
Minstrel said:
Are you kidding? Maybe the emphasis on far more efficient offense--shooting many many more threes, phasing out mid-range jumpers, bigs more oriented as rim-runners for lobs and less ponderous post-up players--has something to do with it.
.
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Making bigs a luxury isn’t a great argument for your stance that defenses haven’t changed/gotten worse. They were the anchors back then. Would Shaq even start for the Rockets today?

And it’s not about efficiency, it’s about pace. The more possessions, the more points. A three isn’t a higher percentage shot than a layup. But a layup does take longer.
 
Scalma said:
Making bigs a luxury isn’t a great argument for your stance that defenses haven’t changed/gotten worse. They were the anchors back then. Would Shaq even start for the Rockets today?
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I didn't say defenses haven't changed, I said that defense isn't worse today. Defense and offense have changed dramatically, and both have become more sophisticated as data-driven analysis has provided more information.

Sure, a Shaq would be difficult for a lot of current defenses to handle (as if he wasn't in his own era), but by and large, if you dropped most of the offenses from the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s into today's league, they'd be utterly smothered, as the extremely basic and static offenses run back then have been entirely figured out.

And it’s not about efficiency, it’s about pace. The more possessions, the more points. A three isn’t a higher percentage shot than a layup. But a layup does take longer.
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It's about both, but it's mostly about efficiency. Not every team pushes the pace, and a layup doesn't necessarily take longer than a three--in both cases, it depends on the set-up. No team, not even the Rockets, just rushes down and fires up a three in a halfcourt set. In any case, I'm not sure why you're comparing the three to the layup, as if that's the difference between eras. Layups and threes are the cornerstones of this era. What's being phased out is mid-range jumpers and stationary post-up players. Post-up-based offenses do tend to be slower. Mid-range shots are no slower or faster than other types of shots. Pace is up not because of shot selection but because fast break points are extremely efficient, so more teams are trying to up their fast break points.
 
Minstrel said:
It's about both, but it's mostly about efficiency. Not every team pushes the pace,
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The slowest pace this season (95.8 possessions per 48 minutes) would have led the league in most seasons from '97 through '04. Pace definitely is a significant factor.
 
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PtldPlatypus said:
The slowest pace this season (95.8 possessions per 48 minutes) would have led the league in most seasons from '97 through '04. Pace definitely is a significant factor.
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That's fair. Every team pushes the pace relative to the league back then. But I agreed that pace was a significant factor. I still think that my assertion that it's mostly about efficiency is correct. Team push the pace so much because fast break points are so efficient. This was not a universal belief in the past--there were philosophical splits about how to play the game, whether to play a grind-it-out "defensive" style or a faster-paced style, and the idea was both were equally valid. While there are still teams that probably consider themselves "grind-it-out" today, fast break points being necessary and efficient is now simply accepted wisdom and baked in, such that every team runs more (as you pointed out) than teams in the past.
 
Minstrel said:
That's fair. Every team pushes the pace relative to the league back then. But I agreed that pace was a significant factor. I still think that my assertion that it's mostly about efficiency is correct. Team push the pace so much because fast break points are so efficient. This was not a universal belief in the past--there were philosophical splits about how to play the game, whether to play a grind-it-out "defensive" style or a faster-paced style, and the idea was both were equally valid. While there are still teams that probably consider themselves "grind-it-out" today, fast break points being necessary and efficient is now simply accepted wisdom and baked in, such that every team runs more (as you pointed out) than teams in the past.
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Let's look at it this way--comparing this current season to 1998 (since this is a Jordan-based thread). The leaguewide average efficiency (pts/100 poss) this season was about 110.4, as compared to 105 in 98, an increase of 5.14%, whereas the average pace of 100.2 (poss/48m) this year is 10.96% higher than the 90.3 average in 98. Seems like pace has increased twice as much as efficiency has.
 
PtldPlatypus said:
Let's look at it this way--comparing this current season to 1998 (since this is a Jordan-based thread). The leaguewide average efficiency (pts/100 poss) this season was about 110.4, as compared to 105 in 98, an increase of 5.14%, whereas the average pace of 100.2 (poss/48m) this year is 10.96% higher than the 90.3 average in 98. Seems like pace has increased twice as much as efficiency has.
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Sure, but does that tell us anything? The point of what I was saying is that they're interrelated. Teams push the pace because it's more efficient to do so.
 
Minstrel said:
Sure, but does that tell us anything? The point of what I was saying is that they're interrelated. Teams push the pace because it's more efficient to do so.
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If you're going into a chicken-or-egg discussion, then there will never be a right answer. All I'm saying is that the increase in overall scoring over the past 20 years is more attributable mathematically to pace than efficiency. You said it was "mostly about efficiency"--the numbers say otherwise.
 
To build on what Minstrel is saying, I think pace is an easier adjustment to make than a lot of other offensive adjustments that affect efficiency.
 
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