With all the recent talking head chatter about league contraction, I haven't found the argument particularly compelling that the talent level is diluted. If anything, I think there's more talent to go around than there was 20-30 years ago, with the influx of foreign players. The bad teams are no worse than they were in the 80's and 90's, and the good teams are comparably good. I have an alternate theory... Any such problem with the number of teams is due to there being too few good coaches. At any given time, there are maybe half a dozen truly good coaches, about the same number of awful ones, and then the rest are basically a jumble of average. This is very similar to the bell curve of good/bad teams, in fact. Most of the non-elite coaches are tired retreats, and the good ones stay put as long or longer than the top players. I started thinking about this because of the marked improvement of guys that played on the US team last summer. With pretty much all new faces, it doesn't make sense to attribute it to learning from Kobe how to attack everything with intensity... The only explanation I can come up with, beyond just confidence/belief, is that Coach K is really that much better of a coach than most everyone else. Seems to me, lots of guys went through the US Oly team prior to Coach K (post-'92) and saw no lasting improvement, so he deserves a lot of credit for whatever changed.
Interesting thoughts. However, I think just the opposite. The talent pool is diluted and with so many players in the NBA leaving school early the level of fundamentals is very very poor.
It would be interesting to structure the D-League and NBA like the Premier league and the Football league: - 20 NBA teams - 26 D-League teams - Bottom three NBA teams are relegated to the D-League - the top two D-League teams are automatically promoted to the NBA; next four compete in the playoffs, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. This does nothing for the shortage of good coaches though and I don't know how the draft would work...
A statement like that makes it clear you do not understand the difference between the D league and the offical league. There is no way a team can get the financing together to keep a good arena for the team if they are relegated to the D league for a year. D league teams average less people in attendance than a high school game, and are only in smaller cities. They don't even have enough revenue for one NBA quality player, and they aren't going to get it by playing for 200 person audience in the D league. Completely ridiculous.
Why is it this way? The D-League is basically a farm system for the NBA. It's there in the name; it's just for "development". IF it was more than that maybe more people would care. With profit sharing and draft picks a small market team could be more competitive . How do teams in the Football league survive? How does little ass Auburn put together a NCAA championship team? There would have to be tons of changes to make it work. I don't even know why I'm debating this. It would never happen
This is my view as well. There are a handful of teams with talent like in the 1980s. There is a serious lack of big men. The taller players who shouldn't be putting the ball on the floor are handling the ball more than they're supposed to. Look at this Atlanta Hawks team from 1977, for example. Sweet Lou Hudson, John Drew, and Truck Robinson. I'd rank them up there with today's Celtics. The team won 31 games.
I'm not too certain of your point when you mention a lack of big men, mention the Celtics who have many big men, and then say you would compare three guys, none of who are over 6'7". Yet two were able to grab a good amount of rebounds. (Not sure where Hudson fits in here.) Seems like if they were relying on basically SF nowadays to rebound for them, there was a lack of big men then, no? Probably why they only won 31 games.
If I were king, nobody would be very happy, and everyone would wear 70's clothes again... this is my Blast From The Past decree: 24 NBA teams (8 teams each in 3 conferences) 24 D-League teams (independently owned, but one per NBA team, geographically nearby if possible) Regular season - 76 games (4 games each versus your home conference, 3 games each versus the other two conferences - alternate home/away advantage every other year) Playoffs would be the top 8 teams regardless of division, top team in each division is guaranteed. There's now one fewer round, but every round is best of seven still. Add a 3rd round to the draft, specifically for D-League rosters. Allow a full roster of 24 players. Cut everyone's salary in half to compensate. They can still afford that house and car with 6 mil a year instead of 12. Nobody will be making less than 70K a year anyway. Keep active roster at 12, allow older players beyond 3rd year to play in D-League. Treat it more like AAA baseball. Talent level of D-League goes up, people show up to watch, and it actually earns a little money.
In the 1985-86 season, there were 23 teams. The US population was 237 million people. In 2010, there are 30 teams. The US population is 308 million people. So in that time, the number of teams have expanded by 23%, while the US population (the primary talent pool the NBA draws from) has also expanded by 23%. Dilution doesn't generally happen when you expand the numerator and the denominator at the exact same rate. On top of that, over 20% of NBA players are from overseas, when that numbers was 1 or 2% back then. That means the talent pool has basically expanded by 20% while the number of teams have remained the same. On top of that, thanks to Michael Jordan, Bird and Magic, the NBA had far, far more kids playing hoops in the 80's and 90's in the US than in the 70's, so the domestic talent pool is even larger than the raw numbers show. On top of that, thanks to miracle surgeries, better training and better diets, good players can generally play more years than they used to be able to, again expanding the available talent pool. When people say the NBA has been diluted "because of expansion," I just shake my head and ask, "How?"
I think because people only remember LA and Boston having super good deep teams, and think all of the teams were like that, instead of having, in the season you pointed out, 6 teams under .500 make the playoffs. Ahhh, the good ol' days. Bullshit.
Good points... there's always going to be pining for the good old days, too. My grandfather used to say MJ would have never won a championship against Russell's Celtics. I kinda looked at him with pity, but I see why he said crazy shit like that. That was his era, and he's fiercely defensive of it.
I call b.s. You're using fundamentals as a fill-in for a talent argument... Obviously, fundamentals can be developed with good coaching, as evidenced by the marked improvement of the US Team members. The players are there in at least equal abundance to any prior period, they're just not being well developed. (That was supposed to say "tired retreads" in the original post.)
What fundamentals, exactly? Stuff like FT shooting? Dribbling? What? I completely disagree, and it just sounds like an old man whining about these damn kids with their long shorts and fancy dribbling changing the game. But I am curious as to what fundamentals are lost from before.
Steven J Gould had a great book about pro sports and the illusion that leagues were somehow less competitive than they used to be in "the good old days," despite the influx of all these things that would seem to rapidly expand the pool of talent. The talent pool gets expanded not only by demographics and sports medicine, but just the enormity of modern pro salaries. There's far more financial incentive to dream about being an NBA player now than there was in 1977. So why is it the good old days were so much better? The answer he found was defense. Sure, you had to face Wilt in 1977. But just start clicking on the rosters of other decent but not elite teams from that year. Then start looking at the sizes. A lot of pretty good teams didn't have anybody over 6'8. Others had 6'11 stick figures weighing in at 220. Scattered in there were a couple of players of standard modern NBA center size, and you've heard of almost all of them because they were damned good relative to the feeble competition. It's almost impossible to find a Joel Przybilla-type in that era, because Joel Przybilla would have had far better stats. So as time goes by you get a lot more bigger players who may not have much talent, but they know there's a shit-ton of money at stake, so they learn defensive fundamentals. As decades wear on, the middle gets more and more crowded with pretty good defensive players. Teams also figure out with proper training you can turn that 220 6'11 stick into LaMarcus Aldridge-type mass. So decent-but-not-fantastic guys who might've run up big numbers in some other era suddenly find it hard to do anything in the paint so they become low-efficiency jump shooters. Gosh, the league is watered down because there aren't many 25 ppg low post players anymore! It happens on the perimeter too. Offense is about talent, but ask anyone and they'll tell you defense is about effort. When they are paying lanky 6'8 guys millions of dollars a year to defend, you bet your ass a lot of guys who may only be a little passionate about hoops suddenly start to care a lot more. They may not be able to dribble much, but if they can just stay in front of their man and hit the occasional jumper they have a spot in the NBA. Maybe they start, but even the bench positions are far more coveted than in prior decades. People remember Dr J dunks and Magic's passes. They don't think that much about Shane Battier or Raja Bell's defense. And of course stats don't really capture what those defensive specialists do. So we mourn the passing of the truly great eras of basketball, never really coming up with the logic to justify why guys getting paid $20k/year to run around in Converse All Stars could be so much better than the multimillionaire science experiments that are modern athletes. Oh yeah, that's right, it's because of "expansion."
I was bored, so here's some comparisons... I think the mid-to-late 90's were indeed as bad as the bad old days, and worse than the good old days. We're getting better again, but we're still not quite as good as the 70's/80's. They played fast and shot well, too (lots of fast break layups and dunks that were assisted on, no doubt). Notice how, as a league, we're reducing turnovers by about one per decade. Season - FG% FT% AST TOV 2009-10 - 46.1% 75.9% 21.25 14.22 2008-09 - 45.9% 77.1% 20.97 14.03 2007-08 - 45.7% 75.5% 21.75 14.11 . . . 1999-00 - 44.9% 75.0% 22.34 15.47 1998-99 - 43.7% 72.8% 20.72 15.32 1997-98 - 45.0% 73.7% 22.02 15.48 . . . 1989-90 - 47.6% 76.4% 24.85 16.06 1988-89 - 47.7% 76.8% 25.57 17.21 1987-88 - 48.0% 76.6% 25.76 16.73 . . . 1979-80 - 48.1% 76.4% 25.81 18.94 1978-79 - 48.5% 75.2% 25.75 19.79 1977-78 - 46.9% 75.2% 25.05 20.07 . . . 1969-70 - 46.0% 75.1% 24.71 N/A 1968-69 - 44.1% 71.4% 23.14 N/A 1967-68 - 44.6% 72.0% 22.84 N/A . . . 1959-60 - 41.0% 73.5% 20.63 N/A 1958-59 - 39.5% 75.6% 17.22 N/A 1957-58 - 38.3% 74.6% 17.24 N/A
Oddly enough, rather than the door into the NBA it is usually the door out of the NBA. "Don't let the D-League hit you on the way out!"
When I said lack of big men, consider Bill Walton, Kareem, Moses Malone, McAdoo, Artis Gilmore, Bob Lanier, Dan Issel, Dave Cowens, etc. Compare to... Dwight Howard, 38 year old Shaq, and who else? My list are guys who played in 1977, same years as those Hawks. My point about the Hawks was they had a big 3 that would be quite impressive in the league these days. And the league was so concentrated with talent that they were a 31 win team. Height isn't that relevant to being a power forward or whatever. Truck Robinson put up 22.4/12.8 numbers as a PF. Rodman was about the same height and put up some rebounding seasons for the Bulls that were the best in the NBA since Wilt and his 25+ RPG days.
