Dates

[penbeast0]

Does anyone know the date when the NBA started measuring players in shoes rather than stocking feet?

For that matter, when did the assist rules change so you could take steps after catching a pass and still count it as an assist? (I will look this up if I ever need it but just in case someone else has already done so)

I'd ask when they stopped enforcing the carry rule but that's sort of hard to say for certain . . .

[TrueLAfan]

The third edition of The Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball for 1977 said that players had measured in shoes for a year. That seems to set the date at 1975 or 1976. There's various mentions in books about players being measured barefoot. It's pretty common in biographies of older players--Bill Libby's biography of Jerry West (pretty much any Bill Libby book) and Wilt's Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door come to mind. The first mentions of players measured in shoes seem to come in the very early 80s. It's possible the practice wasn't universal until about 1980...but I personally remember being measured barefoot as a 15 year old in 1978 (6' 3"), and being measured in shoes in 1980 and being listed at 6' 6". I had grown to full height by 1980, and I'm almost exactly 6' 4.5" barefoot.

You can also see this by looking at how the average height of players has a bump that started in about 1975, and levels off in the mid 1980s...just what you'd expect from players beginning to list heights in shoes in 1975, and . The average height of players was between 6' 5.5" and 6'6" between 1960 and 1975. Between 1975 and 1986, it went up 1.5" to 6' 7.5"...almost exactly the amount of height you gain from being measured in shoes. It's been between 6' 7" and 6' 7.5" inches ever since. (At the draft combines, the average height of rookies is almost always between 6'5 and 6'6" inches barefoot...the same as NBA players have been since 1954.

I have no idea about the assist rule, but if I was guessing...I'd say it was the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, assists were given on about 52% of baskets made, and had been around that number for a while for a while. In the 1970s, it went up to 59% by the time the three was introduced. It stayed around 59-61% for the next 25 years, although it's dropped a bit recently. Still...looks like the 1970s. More and more, I'm thinking that the 1970s basketball and everything that was going on in the game was a lot more interesting and exciting than I used to think.

[penbeast0]

Thanks. I would guess marketing pressure from the ABA pushed both changes as both made the players of the day seem more impressive. The 70s were a crazy era, the changes of the 60s made it to the pro leagues big time with black power and drugs both exploding into the league. It gets a bit of a bad rap relative to other eras since it was just after the first big expansion plus the ABA diluted the talent pool even more.

That and it seemed like the big scoring wings (well, 2 guards anyway) of the day all modeled themselves after George "Defense is for people who can't score" Gervin rather than after two way players like John Havlicek. This went on into the 80s and being a great 2 way player on the wings didn't really seem to come into vogue until the "be like Mike" days of Jordan making it cool to dominate on both ends. (Notice I say wings. Great bigs had always been required to dominate both ends or get a rap for being soft like McAdoo or Bellamy. Great point guards had also frequently been great two way players like West or Frazier)