Don’t forget that the rims in the 60s used wooden backboards and crappy rigid playground-style hoops that everyone hates.

It’s like saying ‘well the Roman Empire kinda sucked because I guarantee me and friends with a nuclear submarine and a single Marine could defeat them’

I’ve always thought the best way to compare players from different eras is how far above they were from average players and other stars of their eras.

Agree but you need to factor in the number of teams in the league.

Winning a championship in an 8 team league is like getting to the conference finals in the current 32 team league.  

But we don’t do that. If it’s about how much someone accomplished in their respective era then Bill Russell is undisputed clearly the goat of all American professional sports. But no one actually thinks he’s on the same stratosphere as Jordan or Bron because most people don’t take his era seriously

Don’t browse here as much as I used to, but good to see the wiltchamberlainarchive man still posts here

I don’t think its needed to rank player then vs now. I played hs late 80s college 90s. Im always impressed at the level of footwork ball handling and defense these days.

Love the post.

I honestly don’t think you can rank players. Period. We’re talking about the .1% of the 1%. There are some days SGA is better than Joker. Other days Joker better than SGA. There is such a fine margin that it really comes down to, “who is feeling it more today?”

I’ve always preferred putting players and teams into tiers. LeBron and MJ are in a tier together. It’s understood that on any given day one might be better than the other.

Should have been plumbers and service league men if we want to go lower

Being a collegiate star doesn’t mean you still don’t have a limited skillset. Even since the early 2000s, it’s been obvious how high the skill requirements are growing. Roleplayers need to 3&D and handle the ball a bit else they’re played off the floor almost immediately - compare this to again, even just the 90s or 00s where you had people who straight up couldn’t dribble or shoot playing serious time.
Also you severely overestimate college even back then. It’s like the G-League - barely animated corpse of IT that literally couldn’t buy NBA minutes was putting up 40 there. Not “hitting your stride” at pro levels means you’re shit lmao, there’s levels to sports.

Sure, but they wouldn’t have all the sick handles we’ve come to expect from modern players - their play style would look a lot more like the guys from that era.

I don’t really agree. The current skillset and body type being optimized for is very disparate from what was being optimized for in the 60s and 70s.

And that goes back to the “science” and “data” aspects.

There’s shooting coaches that break down your jump shot. Video. Slow mo. Video easily assessable. Film. Tendencies. The arc and release point of a shot.

I was a D1 hurdler, and if I even had an iPhone during college to capture and breakdown my lead and trail and arms and everything it would have absolutely led to better times.

Think of the very basic things we take for granted now; videos, health and wellness/recovery, none of that existed in the 50s-70s.

You’d probably be told by the trainers a beer and a cig postgame are the keys to being elite lol.

I think what he’s trying to say is that the athletes themselves are more skilled than they were back then, and in the future will be more skilled than they are now, not that their athleticism itself is necessarily the differentiator. In that sense I agree, because what is capable of being done on the floor, the skills, the training to advance the skills, etc., is always being pushed and elevated. You expect everything to get better as time goes on.

But, to engage with your discussion on the difference in athleticism, I guess the real issue comes from having to assign a “baseline athleticism”, or the idea that you have some sort of innate athletic ability and floor/ceiling that can be separated from differences in medical care, lifestyle (diet/nutrition, environmental quality, etc.), training, gear, etc.

Outside of who is or isn’t more athletic than your examples, you can ask if Wilt were born today, would he appear more athletic? The chances are yes, he would. He’d have had better nutrition (probably), he’d have better medical care, shoes that aren’t made of cardboard, and perhaps most critically, he would have been practicing and training in a much different manner. Advancements in all of these things correlate to advancements in outcomes.

I mean looking at the league today damn near every single person in the NBA, including all the gigantic “plodding” centers that are around, appear as more fluid athletes than many all-time greats. I mean you have Mitchell Robinson out here in an open gym looking like Tracy McGrady. They can handle the ball, dribble it up the floor (even if not at an NBA level), they’re more mobile and fluid as defenders compared to prior eras of stiffer guys, but I think it has a lot more to do with all the exterior stuff than some sort of innate human quality – that is to say, its not just that guys back then if they grew up now would be more athletic and guys now if they grew up back then would be less athletic, its that if they swapped places as adults the difference in athleticism would be noticeable as well.

I mean - as athletic as Giannis is, he’s gonna look a lot different having to play in converse, on uneven wood flooring, taking coach flights, eating 1960s food, with 1960s medical tech/understanding, under 1960s NBA rules.

Additionally, if the world even just the league were more similar to what it is today, say they running 100 high PNRs a game in the 1960s, you’d have had a lot more big guys who are able to move all around the court and not just park themselves like totems in the paint. You can do this with any example of a skill that is prioritized now that was not prioritized back then.

One of the cleanest examples of “they could do this back then too if they were incentivized to” is dribbling. There is no question that nowadays, across the league, people have “better handles.” But this is as much about the evolution of a skill (not necessarily athleticism) as it responds to how the NBA officiates it.

Here’s some Globetrotters stuff from the 1950s where nobody was really gonna get called for a travel or get yelled at in a game, and there is still an emphasis on keeping the hand all the way on top of the ball. I think it is fair to say that 75 years ago guys were just as athletically capable of handling the ball as they are now. As with everything else, it just takes the right environment to incentivize the skill, and the iteration of athletic skills and feats progresses with time - but it’s rarely-if-ever some issue with raw athleticism.

Its important to note that part of the increase of “athleticism” is that the evolution of what is possible is always being pushed and things that were outstanding athletic feats at one time are commonplace today.

25 years ago if a guy did a between the legs dunk, he was considered a top-tier athlete, dunker, etc. Now, probably 90% of the league can do this, you can see it any time you watch lay up lines from high end high school teams, etc. Guys who were 6’8” and could handle the ball, pass, run, dunk, shoot, guard multiple positions, were complete outliers - now every team in the league with at least one or two of them. Is that an increase in athleticism,

That still brings us back to whether we define athleticism by “what we saw someone do” or “what they are innately capable of”, and I’d still agree with you that actually measuring that is quite difficult and even harder to separate that from the fact that different athletic skills and abilities were prioritized in different periods of the league.

There are obviously great athletes of every era, but here’s what I’ll say:

- The general level of jump shooting ability in the league has significantly improved, particularly compared to the ‘50s and ‘60s. Bill Sharman, for example, won free throw titles in ‘53 and ‘54 with respective marks of 85.04% and 84.44%. The ‘25 season saw 32 different players shoot at least 85% from the line. Also, while it’s right to defend Dolph Schayes and his goofy-looking push shot from unfair criticism, shooting mechanics and training are far more standardized than they used to be. In any competitive setting, it’s an advantage to be able to build on the example of those before you

- Think about the talent capture basketball has achieved over time–this is to say, how many people who could be elite at basketball are playing it. For most sports, I actually don’t think most elite talent is discovered for either infrastructural reasons or the popularity of alternatives (if you’re a really huge, really strong kid in the American South, for instance, it’s much more likely that you go into football than wrestling even if you have the potential to become a world-class wrestler). Because basketball is uniquely height-dominant, however, the people with the physical traits most likely to make them great at it are very easy to spot. Height also makes you less mobile and worse at a lot of other sports past a certain point, so basketball is one of the only sports extremely tall people can successfully specialize in. As the game has grown in popularity and globalized, exponentially more talent has been captured. We haven’t had an American MVP since 2019, and that’s because tall guys from other countries are being systematically pushed into basketball. Khaman Maluach was just walking on the side of the road somewhere in South Sudan when someone noticed him and told him to go to Luol Deng’s camp. In the ‘60s, Maluach is like, a really big car salesman or something. We’ve created a much, much stronger talent pipeline

You can find people making stupid statements anywhere on the internet, but I don’t think most fans think talent and athleticism will continue to trend upward linearly. They will continue to improve, but diminishing returns and all that.

In its early days, the league and the sport in general had far less reach. Less people even being aware of the opportunity to get paid to play basketball leads to a far smaller pool of athletes. It took decades for that pool to grow, and for advances in technique and training.

Long story short, I don’t expect the talent gap between the 2060s and 2010s to be as wide as the 2020s and the 1970s, but there will still be a gap.

You measure it by using measurables. Wemby is ridiculously tall and can shoot 3’s at a decent clip while also being a defensive monster. But besides those “subjective” stats, players can cut quicker and run faster for longer due to sports science on strength, speed, conditioning.

Go look at the all time records for track and field sports and notice how just about everything is held by recent athletes. The athletes of today are consistently bigger/faster/stronger than they ever have before. More people grow up with proper nutrition and access to information on diet plans to start training there body at a younger age.

You can argue over the semantics of “better”, “bad”, or “skilled” but from almost every actual “measurable” statistic when it comes to players athleticism, the players of today are just more advanced.

Go look at how small linemen were in the NFL compared to the hulking monsters of today that can also sprint/move faster than ever before as well.

Not only that, but as medical science improves players can also play at this faster pace while staying healthier than ever before. Baseball has Tommy John surgery that allows pitchers to throw harder than ever, and then when they inevitably hurt their arm, they can get the surgery and have a decent chance of coming back at 100% capacity where as before it was just over for them

Players today are without a doubt, 100% more consistently “athletic” than players of the past.

Imo basketball is by FAR the worst big 4 sport on the topic of old vs new players.

Take the NHL for instance. Just about everyone will admit that athletes today are more “skilled”, but the undisputed GOAT will always be Gretzky, aka “the GREAT one”. He wasn’t more skilled than athletes today, but for the era he played in he was head and shoulders the GREATEST player by a larger margin than anyone else has ever been and probably will ever be.

Younger and younger players are lighting up the league with highlights every year, because they come in already physically and mentally ready for playing against these full grown adults. They come in faster and quicker because they have years of science filtering out what works and what doesn’t work.

We are talking about different things. The level of top talent is dramatically lower coming from a pool of 50m to a billion. And again there’s also the incentive structures which are radically different.

Simply getting in the path? Not sure what you’re talking about. You always had to be set and not move.

Well phrasing it as “find out what’s the most amount of steps allowed and the most amount of off arm pushing” is clearly painting it as negative and not in good faith lol. Its very much a diss, and seemingly purposefully.

Sarcasm aside, it is very much a skill to manipulate the ball to end your dribble to where you can take your steps to cover the ground and direction you want. While the steps allowed are the same in all eras(as seen in step-throughs, pivoting), the definition of when a dribble has ended has for sure been expanded upon. And no era should be looked at as lesser, easier, or less skilled because of that.

It’s also a skill to use your off arm to manipulate your defender, especially since its used a lot as an equal combat to players riding your hip out of position or with their own arms. Refs in all levels generally allow a “one cancels out the other” type view with that situation specifically. Real basketball is a physical game and if both parties are being a similar level of physical, then play on. I do agree some get egregious(i.e Jayson Tatum at times) but not every call got called in the past either ya know. I thinks refs jobs are harder than ever.

I think a lot of the people putting down as today’s dribbling, gathers, and body-use as “easy/cheating” either dont play or have never played in any decent level of competition(not you specifically, referring to the general comments Ive read in here).

I love basketball in general, the older eras are better than what people give them credit for. And we do have to look at the differing rules as a “both ways” thing, but not while putting one down. If your goal is to encourage and further knowledge and discussion around this, you’re only gonna attract already like-minded/biased people with that language. While others/modern era fans are just gonna see it more as just more shit talking/complaining or “old heads hating on the game” type talk.

Lol, is this bill Simmons? Cousy is the most overrated player ever. 

I played at a fairly high rec level and I’m sorry but a 5’8 slow dude who can’t jump and only can dribble with his dominant hand gets run off the floor. 

I never said they were terrible. But as you go down the list of talent in an era the talent gets much worse when compared to the current talent. The pool of talent has been expanded enormously. The 100th best player today is wildly better than the 100th best player 50 years ago.

https://runrepeat.com/height-evolution-in-the-nba

Here are a bunch of body stats of players today compared to past years. Are shoes and floor differences causing players to be taller on average? Do NBA players wear a special shirt to make them have lower BMI’s while they are getting tested?

Yes! Thank you - basically one of the points I’m trying to illustrate in the videos or discussions like these

He’d be third in scoring on the Clippers

He was short, unathletic, and couldn’t shoot. Maybe you could argue he’d develop a jumpshot today but there’s no way to know.