MrDollarBills wrote:DOT wrote:nykballa2k4 wrote:I never had the problem watching in the 90's.
Yeah man, like I said
Nostalgia and selective memory go a long way
It's like 90% just "old man yells at clouds"
I dare anyone romanticizing the 90s to watch footage of any of Mike Fratello's old Cavs teams from like 95 onward and tell me with a straight face that the game was better then.
I think the officiating in the NBA is the biggest issue, along with some players not giving a sh*t about their profession and holding teams hostage. Guys like Kyrie, Ben, and Zion are bad for business. The style of play is still very fun, and skill is outweighing athleticism, which means if you aren't capable of being a multi facted player, you'll be headed to China.
Teams play better basketball nowadays. They are much smarter than they were back in the 90s, and skill sets have evolved to answer the demand.
But the feeling was just different in the Jordan era, at least in my memory. LeBron even at his peak never compared to Jordan in terms of mass appeal and mystique. The stars were the recognizable face of their respective franchises and had this mythical quality to them that no longer exists in the internet/social era, which in and of itself isn't necessarily a negative development.
But MJ carried the league to a whole other level. Most of the teams played a horrible brand of basketball by today's standards but there is something exhilarating to me about rewatching these
wars between Knicks and Pacers, Knicks and Bulls, Sonics and Nuggets, Suns and Rockets, etc. It felt like a tighter, rawer, almost truer, product, if that makes sense, from the jerseys, to the NBC theme, and the merch, but maybe we'll look back at this current era and feel the same way.
Or maybe not.
Kobe and Shaq could have carried it further if their personality clash hadn't gotten in the way. The ratings suffered for a solid 5 years after they split up.
The closest we came to the Jordan era this was 2016 with peak Steph and peak Bron but Durant had to fugging ruin it by trying to steal Curry's legacy. I will never forgive him for that, idgaf. The 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons brought back the feeling for me, for a fleeting moment.