I didn’t realize how good Michael jordan was

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Okay. You seem a bit chippy for what I think is a fairly reasonable point, but we can leave it at that.

 

I said I wanted to leave it at that, but you really leave me no choice.

 

This is the internet the chippy can never stop!

 

You mean, once you pop, you can't stop?

 

It didnt seem that much more physical to be honest.

 

Nice to read some basketball arguments, seems like its been fooooreeeeeever.

 

I hated Jordan when he was a player and always rooted against him but I realized at the time that I was witnessing greatness that even the overcrushing marketing that surrounded him couldn't jackhammer into your brain. The memories of Magic/Bird/Jabbar/Dr. J/Walton were still fresh in my mind while watching MJ play, so I was able to put some contextual relevance to what I was watching when the Bulls won 6 titles (2 3-peats) in 8 years. Here was a man who literally Would. Not. Lose. Watching him fail in the 95 playoffs after coming back from his "retirement" (probably an unofficial gambling suspension) just fueled my belief that this man wouldn't lose again if he could physically help it. People talk about Kobe's "Mamba Mentality", MJ put Kobe to shame with his killer "Win At All Costs" mindset. Watch "The Flu" game sometime, the man was superhuman. I think that if his body hadn't started finally failing him when he put on a Wizards jersey, he could have dragged that team to a title as well.

 

How is this possible