Gender: Male Location: Planning to take over the WORLD!
Robert Horry says the new guys beat the old guys!
horry ticked some people off with these comments. what do you think about them? ARE today's athletes so much better than the athletes of just 20-25 years ago?
in horry's defense, he's been around a long time, and does know a thing or 2 about championships. still, his comments are a little . . . surpising to say the least.
todays athletes are more athletic. That is they are bigger, stronger, faster, have better technology and medicine for training and recovering from injury. This does not make them more skilled though.
Gender: Male Location: Planning to take over the WORLD!
but if skills are equal, doesn't that mean the advantage goes to bigger and stronger?
one thing that some of the older guys MAY have had that the new guys lack is more drive. less money back then, i think more played because they LOVED the sport. no pampering, not as much whining it seems. while not as 'strong' as today's athletes, i think it is very possible the older guys were . . . tougher, if that makes sense.
yea i get what you are saying, they were maybe stronger mentally. Im not saying skills are equal though. Some old timers had more skills some had less. The big difference I think is they had to rely on their pure skills more back then because they couldnt make up for it as much with pure athleticism like some people can now.
Gender: Male Location: Planning to take over the WORLD!
that actually makes some sense to me. it's an interesting point that i don't think i've heard before. i find it very hard to say whether horry is right or wrong. we get so accustomed to thinking the past was 'better' than the way things are now, and we idolize the great players so much that i think we lose perspective at times.
i won't go so far as to say the spurs would beat the lakers and celts of the 80s, but i think it would be a lot closer than most likely do.
Depends on the athletes and the sport. You have John Madden saying that the '85 Bears could beat any of today's teams, and Terry Bradshaw issuing similar statements about his 70's Steelers teams. Then guys like Horry saying that there's a definite gap.
No doubt there's better training and enhancement drugs (don't kid yourselves kids) in all sports. But the numbers don't add up. Free throw percentages are at catastophic lows currently. Larry Bird's 3-point percentages pwn the crap out of most of today's elite bombers. Hell, we can still watch footage of a young Magic Johnson and be awed by his ball-handling and passing skills.
The NBA probably DOES have more individual talent. Ball handling, driving the lane, etc. But don't tell me that in the current offensive drought (yes, offense is another category lacking compared to a decade or two ago) in the NBA we have players that passed and shot as well as the great Laker or Celtic teams. The mid-range jumper has all but disappeared in the game...and even stars like Lebron are evidence of this.
Could the Spurs have beaten those teams? Sure. But they also would've been in for a dogfight.
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As for other sports where steroids play a bigger role (baseball, football) it's harder to compare because there's a bigger gap in the athletes. A 60's football team would get steamrolled due to the sheer size of linemen these days, even if certain stars and skill players had the same skill levels. Lynn Swann, for example, could play today, but the Steel Curtain D-line would likely just be average....certainly not a dynasty-building, fear-inspiring war machine.
And it's hard to watch Babe Ruth swing a bat and imagine that he'd be putting up legendary numbers in today's game. Some, like Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente (probably the most "complete" players seen in the game until the modern era) could certainly play today. Same with pitchers. But a lot of them would get played off the field, pitchers and batters alike. Nolan Ryan could consistently hit high 90's throughout his career, and his breaking pitches broke as much as anyone's...so 80's player or not, the dude could deal. You can't argue with that kind of statistical dogma. But there's definitely been a trend toward bigger and faster, and the percentages of pitchers who can pitch into the 90's on the gun is a lot higher than it once was.
So did Jordan, Magic, Kareem. Hell, Wilt did too....he led the league in blocks a ridiculous number of times. But they also managed to win games that were more interesting than 75-70.
The Spurs play defense. But the league is in an offensive drought. Big difference between the two. Average scores aren't all due to defensive adaptations.
In general. In old games you can see where they just don't play defense right and it leaves the other man wide open. Blocks is not what I'm talking about; just basic defense which was lacking back then surprisingly.
Perhaps, but it does nothing to allay my assessment that team offense has still taken a dive, in terms of passing, shooting skill, and selflessness. I'm not refuting that the NBA has progressed in many ways over the years, with defense being a likely candidate, but the game as a whole hasn't progressed to the point where today's teams would simply curbstomp those of 20-25 years ago. Far from it.
KMC Community Forums
Jun 20th, 2007 09:41 PM
