Jordan was able to get a ridiculous PER with mainly 2 point shot attempts during a time where hand and body checking was allowed. I hated him, but I gotta give respect.
However, discussion of the impressiveness of various multi-sport athletes is actually interesting and gives your thread value.
Great stories! I didn't know that home run was predetermined for his mom. I had the privilege of sitting in the third row back on about the 20 yard line from the scoring end zone when he ran over The Bozz for an 80 yard td run.
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.
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.
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.
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.