NBA Message boards in the 80's

[dhsilv2]

And I'll tell you what... looking back, it was an AMAZING feeling.

You never knew what to expect.

I vividly remember my surprise when, in the 1994 All-Star weekend, I got the sunday newspapers and saw the East starters:

Shaq
Derrick Coleman
Pippen
Kenny Anderson
BJ Armstrong

I was like,

"Who are Coleman and Anderson?"

And, most importantly... "how the heck is BJ Armstrong an All-Star?"

I remember seeing a bunch of Bulls games, and never thought Armstrong was THAT good...

I had this thought while reading your comment.

I don't believe the rumour that MJ was forced to retire by Stern because of his gambling, but if you imagine some kind of backroom power struggle between Stern and Jordan, then you can imagine Stern pulling strings to prove to Jordan that the league made him and not vice versa. Hence, delusionally: "See, we can make BJ Armstrong a star, just like we made you a star."

As I said, I don't believe any of this, but it's an interesting idea.

I mean, the dude was clearly not an All-Star... starter...

Yes, I don't believe it either. I think the motive is his father's death, it's pretty clear to me. That caused a huge effect on him. As far as I know, he was very close to his father.

As for Armstrong, it's very strange indeed, but when you take into account the All-Stars starters were determined by fan voting, and that Chicago was overachieving greatly that season (Jordan had just retired), it could be explained that way. Also, Horace Grant was voted in as a reserve as well.

Grant had the stats to back up being an allstar that year. Heck he had the stats to be all nba that year. His WS and VORP especially were crazy that year. BJ's pre allstar scoring was what got him in and it dropped off post allstar game a good bit. Mind you...pre allstar he still didn't have allstar stats lol.

[scrabbarista]

Hey, anyone else remember books?


Those were awesome.

I have a collection of roughly 30/35 basketball books, mind you!

And dozens more in digital format...

And tell you what, all of them are in english language... meaning, I had to import all of them from the USA!

Love books. I have thousands in the house. From many different topics. One of my favourite hobbies.

Oh, and before I forget: remember when you told me, in another post, that you sent me a PM? I didn't receive it, just checked my inbox... could you send it again, please?

books

My collection isn't so big, because I change residences too much. But I know I've read over a thousand. Maybe bought even more.

I checked my Sent box and didn't see my message... Wish I could remember what I wrote... I know it wasn't very long...

[miamiheat319]

Also, there were NBA magazines, many of them. I used to buy everything I saw, it was very cheap. There was even the Slam Magazine here, somehow it was imported and I bought dozens of them, even manage to subscribe it for a few years. Still got my collection somewhere in the house.

Cheers!

great stories! this may be a dumb question but were the magazines translated to portuguese or in english?

loving the stories from everyone else too. i'll add i remember going to the library when i was in school and renting player biographies. that was another good way to learn about players

It depends on the magazine. Usually they were imported:

- Slam was definitely the original edition, in english then. It still surprises me to this day how they were able to import the magazine from the USA to Brazil (and mind you, not in a capital, big city, but distribute it to the smallest cities around the state - it must have been quite a demand back then)... and tell you what, you could find the magazine in multiple places, like even in a gas station in the middle of the road!

I still have my Slam collection somewhere in the house. I remember the first one I got, it was with Grant Hill on the cover. Rookie Grant Hill! It was issue number 7 IIRC.

Later on I managed to do a subscription of the magazine. Do you imagine how I did it? I asked for like 10 dollars from my father, sent it via letter to the USA, and voila... 3 months later a magazine was delivered at my father's house. They really kept their word, gotta give them that. And I had this subscription for like 5, 6 years.

- There were national (portuguese brazilian printed) magazines, yes. I remember it quite clearly. Man, the NBA was such a fever during that time. I started playing basketball when I was 12, and by the time I was 16/17, now in high school, I remember a guy who used to play with us who had a Charlotte Hornets logo tattooed on his back.... and I kid you not, he told everyone he was planning on tattooing all the team logos on his back, lol. I wonder what he's up to nowadays, that was like 30 years ago.

- There were also european imported magazines. I remember one which was in portuguese language. Now bear in mind: portuguese, and brazilian portuguese are different languages, very similar, yet with different meaning for words, let me give you 3 examples:

- "Cacetinho" means "french bread" in portuguese, but it means "little dick" (slang) in brazilian portuguese.

- In Portugal, "embaraçada" means "pregnant"; in Brazil, "embaraçada" means "embarrassed".

- "Rabo da bicha" means "end of the line" in portuguese (rabo = end, bicha = line), but in brazilian portuguese it means "homo's ass" (rabo = ass, bicha = slang for homossexual).

Imagine the confusion reading the magazine...

I remember an article about the Chicago Bulls, and in a certain part it said something like this: "this player is on the rabo da bicha on their rotation, it will be very difficult for him to overcome that situation"



I just took a great trip down memory lane...

Love it! Thank you for sharing!

[Edrees]

Can you explain to me how this existed? The internet was around in the 80s? Where exactly was this posted and found?

Proto-internet was around during parts of the '80s, early '90s. In it's infancy. Similar to file sharing, I guess you can say?
Nothing much like it is today, very basic, archaic, prototype, primitive, developmental stages, non mainstream, etc.

Read the whole thread and it will make sense to you. Takes too long to explain it all. lol

I just finished reading it, appreciate the nudge. Everything makes sense now. Very cool stuff and I learned quite a lot from this thread, I was a very false perception of what the pre 90s internet was (underestimated it)

I had read the first 2 pages of the thread and nobody even questioned it up until that point, but it was the later pages that had all that in there.

[madskillz8]

Maybe not as impressive as the OP, here are the GB on June 1, 2002

https://web.archive.org/web/20020601193258/http://realgm.com/boards/viewforum.php?forum=6&38791

Too bad we can't click on these threads, and realgm's current database starts from 2008.

Also props to Ostertag for donating a kidney to his dying sister. He played four more seasons after that.

Whatcha mean? I can click on the threads.

Well, more often than not Web Archive only has the main page but not much else in the database. I clicked a couple of threads which are not archived which made me believe none of them are available.. As other poster has already pointed out, that's not the case and more than half of the links are working for this snapshot. Enjoy!

[Roscoe Sheed]

interesting thread about the Kobe elbow against Bibby:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020615075202/http://realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?topic=57327&forum=6&18

[Drakeem]

There's zero chance people went this deep to fake something. And it reads EXACTLY like you'd expect it to read. Anyone who thinks fans have changed has their head in the sand.

It’s absolutely fake and yes, people will go balls deep to perpetrate a deception. Look at Trump for example.

I don't even want to know what kinda dumb political stuff you're trying to get to. But there's nothing here to indicate this is faked. Especially given every generation is exactly the same as the last. Be it sports, politics, or anything else. Old people complain about young people and change. And to be fair, they're right. The all star game was always terrible. Fans have always been too dumb to grasp the value of 3's. And so on and so fourth.

I remember during COVID I wanted to educated myself on some of the classic pieces of literature available to us, so part of that was going through stuff like The Republic by Plato. When I realized that these people THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO were complaining and formulating thoughts about the same gripes we have today, that's the moment I realized that while we're all "special" in the sense of we should value each other and the beauty of human life, we aren't unique, different, or as advanced as we like to think we are.

[dhsilv2]

It’s absolutely fake and yes, people will go balls deep to perpetrate a deception. Look at Trump for example.

I don't even want to know what kinda dumb political stuff you're trying to get to. But there's nothing here to indicate this is faked. Especially given every generation is exactly the same as the last. Be it sports, politics, or anything else. Old people complain about young people and change. And to be fair, they're right. The all star game was always terrible. Fans have always been too dumb to grasp the value of 3's. And so on and so fourth.

I remember during COVID I wanted to educated myself on some of the classic pieces of literature available to us, so part of that was going through stuff like The Republic by Plato. When I realized that these people THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO were complaining and formulating thoughts about the same gripes we have today, that's the moment I realized that while we're all "special" in the sense of we should value each other and the beauty of human life, we aren't unique, different, or as advanced as we like to think we are.

Yeah there are some quotes, but I've never validated them, from that era on the youth of that day. Same crap we hear today. We all get older, we all long for the past, and our parents and grandparents were doing the same damn thing. It's just how we age.

[Deivork]

This is a gem! The Berlin wall was still up! Feels like time travelling.

[Deivork]

Pretty funny here.

Even 40 years ago, some folks were still complaining.

https://groups.google.com/g/net.sport.hoops/c/_i748SYWaf8

Alright, this is gold so allow me to post it as a quote for all to see. This is what people were complaining about in 1985:

Why is the NBA so boring? Except for maybe Boston, Philadelphia, and LA, I
>> doubt whether most of the readers of this note can name 2 starters on any
>> other team. The interest in the NBA is minimal. Most of the people I know
>> (are they the wrong people?) have no idea who's in first, what the divisions
>> are, or even what the team nicknames are. Is that because we don't have a team
>> here in Columbus? or is prevalent throughout the country? So tell me...why
>> isn't the NBA making it?
>> ...bob garmise...at&t bell labs, columbus...
>
>I'll tell you why the NBA is so boring!
>
> 1. Zone defenses are not allowed --> detracts from defense
> 2. 3-to-make-2 free throws --> thwarts comebacks
> 3. Bad shot selection
> 4. One-on-one play
> 5. 3-point shots --> further encourages bad shot selection
> 6. 24-second clock --> encourages bad shot selection and one-on-one play
> 7. No necessity for coaching, therefore there is none -- it's sandlot bball
> 8. Refs don't call charging --> discourages good defense
> 9. Refs don't call traveling (better this year I've heard)
> --> allows for dunks from mid-court
> 10. 20-second timeouts --> to easy to get out of trap situations
> 11. too many playoff teams --> who cares about the regular season anymore

So, people back then complained about the lack of defense, 3-point shots, refs not calling travels and the RS not mattering anymore.

Sounds familiar?

Thank you for this gem, jkvonny.

It's like we haven't evolved and the nba was already half a scam back then...

[jkvonny]

Can you explain to me how this existed? The internet was around in the 80s? Where exactly was this posted and found?

Networked communication well predates the late 90s. Universities, libraries, DARPAnet... HTML debuted around 93 if memory serves but AOL and CompuServe and the like also predate that.

War Games, a movie released in 1983, had modems and internet connections. They were just slow as all hell.

Yup!
All of this!

ARPANET, too. TELNET and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), NSFNET, etc all of that advanced technology, fancy stuff that the techie nerds and students were messing with back then (pre '90s and early '90s). lol

EDIT: Sidenote. My half siblings' father (my step father) . Very smart man, he's a retired AIr Force vet now (engineer and also his civilian job life after retiring from the US AF). This man would have all these computer magazines and books (PC MAganzine, PC World, Personal Computer, Your Computer, etc) around the house during the '80s and '90s. I remember he would buy all kinds of computer parts and telephone, modem like equipment, key pad/board, etc from the RadioShacks. He basically built a computer from scratch!! We sit there and watch him start to communicate with other military ppl from different parts of the country over the computer with same networking, black screen, greenish lettering, and and buzzy sounds. And this was during the '80s! lol I was a kid back then and was like "WTF". They were probably under the same kind of networking group.

So you can imagine the early, primitive years of "internet", networking.

Yes! WarGames, great movie.

Here's a great clip

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

[jkvonny]

Can you explain to me how this existed? The internet was around in the 80s? Where exactly was this posted and found?

Proto-internet was around during parts of the '80s, early '90s. In it's infancy. Similar to file sharing, I guess you can say?
Nothing much like it is today, very basic, archaic, prototype, primitive, developmental stages, non mainstream, etc.

Read the whole thread and it will make sense to you. Takes too long to explain it all. lol

I just finished reading it, appreciate the nudge. Everything makes sense now. Very cool stuff and I learned quite a lot from this thread, I was a very false perception of what the pre 90s internet was (underestimated it)

I had read the first 2 pages of the thread and nobody even questioned it up until that point, but it was the later pages that had all that in there.

No worries!

Glad to share and nudge you along.

[GSWFan1994]

Hey, anyone else remember books?


Those were awesome.

I have a collection of roughly 30/35 basketball books, mind you!

And dozens more in digital format...

And tell you what, all of them are in english language... meaning, I had to import all of them from the USA!

Love books. I have thousands in the house. From many different topics. One of my favourite hobbies.

Oh, and before I forget: remember when you told me, in another post, that you sent me a PM? I didn't receive it, just checked my inbox... could you send it again, please?

books

My collection isn't so big, because I change residences too much. But I know I've read over a thousand. Maybe bought even more.

I checked my Sent box and didn't see my message... Wish I could remember what I wrote... I know it wasn't very long...

Just send me a message and we'll go from there. Very important issue. You'll understand. Thanks, my crustaceous friend.