My childhood 
2001 NBA All Star Game appreciation thread
- Thread starter Ethnic Vagina Finder
- Start date
Go HAM from behind the line in the final seconds
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
:deandre:
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
McGrady threw it off the backboard and dunked in that game and they let him.
*sidenote, Darius Miles did that dunk the night before in the rookie game, and no one remember that*
wasn't as hard? lol did they play less games? was the game 40 minutes instead of 48? Was the game not more physical back then as it is now.
They didn't cry to stern and made him change the format of the schedule to give them less back to backs less 4 games in 5 nights etc...
nikkas say anything
lol the season wasn't as hard.
For 90% of the regular season especially, FAR less effort was given on a play-by-play basis, there was a lot less off-ball movement, and defense was played with much less effort. Guys got up for the playoffs and for big rivalry games or other highlighted games, but 90% of the time there was less effort being expended on a minute-by-minute basis.
Read the old heads talk about the eras where they didn't even defend the three-point shot, where they didn't even know how to do a defensive switch, where they didn't even try on defense until the fourth quarter. Most of the time everyone tries to big up their own era, but if you pay attention those quotes are out there.
Right now the NBA has better athletes than ever before, better training than ever before, better nutrition than ever before, better medical staff than ever before....and yet stars still dropping like flies. There were injuries back in the day, but not like this. Michael Jordan made it to the end of the playoffs with the top-8 in his rotation intact for SEVEN straight years. Can you even imagine that today? You can't just claim that ligaments and bones got "soft", that's nonsensical. Every other factor (fitness, nutrition, medical care) should be making injuries far less common than they used to be. The two factors driving injuries up are wear and fatigue.
Similarly, minutes are a far bigger deal than they used to be. Wilt Chamberlain averaged 46 minutes/game for his career, averaged 48.5 minutes/game one season, yet fatigue was rarely a factor. Can you imagine that today? It's impossible, ridiculous. Kareem averaged 43 minutes/game in the 1970s. Those were relatively meaningless regular-season games, yet they were barely coming off the court, and it didn't significantly matter.
It's been 8 seasons since any NBA player went over 3200 minutes in a season. It's been 24 seasons since any NBA player went over 3500 minutes in a season. Yet go back a bit further and you see at least one player going over 3500 minutes for 20+ seasons in a row. Even as recently as 2006, every single player in the top-10 minutes for that year played more minutes than ANY player has played in the last five years. Go back to 1973, and every single player in the top-10 played more minutes than anyone in the NBA has played in the last 10 seasons...in fact, over 200 more minutes than anyone at all played last year.
Were they all superhumans, magically playing far more minutes yet without as much fatigue? Magically putting more wear on more poorly conditioned bodies with worse medical staff and yet still getting as few or even fewer injuries? Of course not. The game was just a lot more demanding on a night-by-night basis, especially on the defensive end and especially in off-ball play. And so the stars were less considered about the wear they were putting on their bodies and the potential for injury in something like an all-star game.
You can't get the feel for that by watching NBA Classic replays, because that's all playoff stuff and big rivalry games. You have to watch the day in, day out, average regular season games. Those of us who are kinda old (I started watching bball in 1987) remember it, remember the constant fast breaks and lax defense of that 1980s and early 1990s era, and then remembered the isolation offenses where 3-4 guys on the court were standing around on most plays. And if you read the people who write seriously about the 1970s and 1960s, or watch game film of random games instead of just the big games, it was even worse back then.
It's the basic problem of an arms race. When the game started, lazy defense was the norm. Bill Russell was the very first player to seriously try hard on defense, and it began to change the game...because if one guy was out there trying hard, and everyone else stays lazy, then everyone else is going to lose. Playing soft only works out if everyone else agrees to do it too.
So every time a team breaks the previous culture and tries that much harder, puts in that much more off-ball movement, goes harder that much earlier in the game, works that much more tirelessly on defense, other teams are forced to either match or be left behind. And as a result, the amount of effort being expended in the meaningless regular-season games, day-to-day, can only grow. if a team tries to dial it back, start expending less, they're going to fall behind everyone else.
And thus, players getting more tired earlier (Westbrook's own coaches have pointed out that he can't really go more than 4-5 minutes at a time without wearing down and becoming less effective), fatigue increases, and injuries increase. And when all that's going on, going 100% in an all-star game, which used to be a highlighted game to go hard in for the exposure each year, now looks like a liability.
So every time a team breaks the previous culture and tries that much harder, puts in that much more off-ball movement, goes harder that much earlier in the game, works that much more tirelessly on defense, other teams are forced to either match or be left behind. And as a result, the amount of effort being expended in the meaningless regular-season games, day-to-day, can only grow. if a team tries to dial it back, start expending less, they're going to fall behind everyone else.
And thus, players getting more tired earlier (Westbrook's own coaches have pointed out that he can't really go more than 4-5 minutes at a time without wearing down and becoming less effective), fatigue increases, and injuries increase. And when all that's going on, going 100% in an all-star game, which used to be a highlighted game to go hard in for the exposure each year, now looks like a liability.
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
A lot of the stars then were injury prone and missed a bunch of regular season games
MurderToCassette
Sa Da Tay
Saw this on NBA TV a few weeks back...had me feelin some way 
This shyt was a blowout breh lol, they (the East) weren't playing defense in that game. They made that comeback in the 4th, which is why this game is remembered as epic. It's not like it was some back-and-forth game or some shyt.
Fixed.
McGrady threw it off the backboard and dunked in that game and they let him.
*sidenote, Darius Miles did that dunk the night before in the rookie game, and no one saw that*
