Legler and JJ break down modern offenses, why scoring is up, etc.

[ScrantonBulls]

Legler is honestly too good/smart for ESPN, his material gets glossed over in favor of stupid Perkins or Stehen A click bait and hot takes

Legs is amazing. I was disappointed that multiple point in this thread deemed his point invalid because he works for ESPN. He has a lot of good stuff to say.

[WestGOAT]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

Watch on YouTube

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

Didn't one world cups totally shut down Giannis by using press and double teams... These scrubs (with no athletic bone in their body) which according you lots wouldn't even make anywhere near NBA just shutting down the best player in the world. Curious.

Speaks more to how limited Giannis bag is, Dončić has no trouble with international ball. That said, imagine how much Giannis would feast in the 80's and 90's with the illegal defense rules. There would be NO walls allowed to be build in the paint.

You think the Jazz exploited Shaq in the late 90s by spamming PnR? Not exactly true, they also were able to get him out of the paint cause he was forced to guard whatever stiff they had at C out to the 3-point line cause of this nonsense "illegal" defense officiating.

[DOT]

My favorite part of these threads is people who haven't watched a game from the 90s in 30 years saying they remember every game perfectly

Or them pulling up playoff games as proof

Show me a game in the middle of January between 2 teams that would go on to win 30-ish games that year and tell me it's as good as you remember lol

I guarantee you not a single person here was watching on January 11th, 1992 as the big 3 of Mitch Richmond, Lionel Simmons, and Wayman Tisdale of the Kings take down the Moses Malone and Dale Ellis Bucks in OT, and if you did, you don't remember nearly as much about it as you would the Lakers-Rockets game from 2 days ago.

So much this. I know not to take somebody seriously if they say "lol you never even watched player XX play. your opinion is invalid." That's what we call the MavsDirk41 special. It's usually and argument somebody makes when they have nothing else. The human memory is not good at remember intricate details. A person's memory from games 30 years ago is complete ****. That's why we use statistics to tell a story, or go back and rewatch full games if you so desire.

Couldn't find anything from that actual game, but here's some Moses Malone highlights from that same year against the 1992 Chicago Bulls:

Watch on YouTube

I think my favorite part is at 39 seconds where Malone faces up, and the defender just stands there and lets him get around him, then the help defense doesn't even try to contest, he just gets out of the way. Then the last clip, nobody even puts a body on him, they just fly by falling for pump fakes

Where physical defense?

But this actually goes back to my other point, that the reason we have video of this game is cause it was against the Bulls. Games weren't as easily accessible back in the day, if you weren't in that specific media market, you would only see nationally televised games. So even if you were around back then, you didn't get a complete picture

We also tend to compress the past, like that person saying if I were to watch that Kings-Bucks game, I'd've seen "great" post play from Moses Malone, because they just see the name and assume he was Moses Malone for his entire career. He was still a starter in 1992, but he was 36, hadn't made an All Star game in 3 years, and would be basically out of the league after that season. What I would've seen was an old man who still had a few tricks up his sleeve, but whose glory days were long past. That's why I said people don't remember specifics, just the broad strokes.

[the sea duck]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

Watch on YouTube

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

[HotelVitale]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

There are no new rules that would have any impact on breaking a press. Enforcement of legal dribbling has changed over the years but that change was completely finished by the late 90s.

'Skills' vs 'refs' is a bad way of framing things, though, focuses on the wrong things and also gets people defensive on both sides. The vast vast majority of the changes in the game now from the 2000s are simply about a totally new strategy and approach to scoring that wasn't about refs at all and didn't exactly follow from new 'skills' either. Teams simply went from trying to shoot over or around individual defenders (in the post or with midrange screens) to using picks to create space to attack in spaced-out courts. It's a completely different way of initiating offense and creating shots, and the game totally changed as a result of it. It did require more shooting and ability to attack closeouts (and less big bodies in the lane), so the skill level on the floor certainly increased--but it increased because the strategy required that, not because players were simply coming in with more shooting and attacking skills. It might not seem that way now since young players are practicing those skills like crazy, but there was SO much talk about spacing from like 2005-2012--before the switch to everyone doing picks and 3 pointers--that all of us who were around then should remember that transition, even if it was uneven and went in first and starts.

[HotelVitale]

Old heads can't cope with the fact that today's players are better. The fact that the 3 pt line was there for decades, and they were too stubborn/dumb to use it, is also a source of embarrassment.

This always gets me. If you want me to believe they were just as good and could have hit the 3s if they were just allowed to take them, you have to cede the league was filled with a bunch of idiots. You mean to tell me the goal of the game is to outscore your opponent but you decided taking the shot that gives you more points is not something you're going to do out of some misplaced pride or idea of purity?

Yeah, kinda funny when you put it that way. On one hand I really do get how people would want to defend their accomplishments because they actually were playing the modern style of the time and battling heroically in it...but on the other hand yeah it's like you were fighting each other with the handles rather than the blades. Some ex players probably just can't let themselves think that way since it takes away from their accomplishments (though it really shouldn't).

[ballzboyee]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

There are no new rules that would have any impact on breaking a press. Enforcement of legal dribbling has changed over the years but that change was completely finished by the late 90s.

'Skills' vs 'refs' is a bad way of framing things, though, focuses on the wrong things and also gets people defensive on both sides. The vast vast majority of the changes in the game now from the 2000s are simply about a totally new strategy and approach to scoring that wasn't about refs at all and didn't exactly follow from new 'skills' either. Teams simply went from trying to shoot over or around individual defenders (in the post or with midrange screens) to using picks to create space to attack in spaced-out courts. It's a completely different way of initiating offense and creating shots, and the game totally changed as a result of it. It did require more shooting and ability to attack closeouts (and less big bodies in the lane), so the skill level on the floor certainly increased--but it increased because the strategy required that, not because players were simply coming in with more shooting and attacking skills. It might not seem that way now since young players are practicing those skills like crazy, but there was SO much talk about spacing from like 2005-2012--before the switch to everyone doing picks and 3 pointers--that all of us who were around then should remember that transition, even if it was uneven and went in first and starts.

How are the defensive 3 second, removing hand checking, freedom of movement, formalization of the gather step (really just an extra step), greater enforcement of touch and flagrant fouls, ignoring hesitation dribbles (carrying) etc. related to any kind of scheme shift in the NBA? These are clearly just top-down arbitrary formal and informal rules designed to facilitate offensive players and increase scoring. Removing hand checking undoubtedly makes it a lot easier for shooters to gain space and hence be more effective on the perimeter which in turn has allowed shooting specialists to flourish. Each time the NBA has changed the rules to allow offensive players greater freedom to create on the individual level, scoring numbers have skyrocketed immediately at a league-wide level. Not a coincidence.

[The Explorer]

Serious question: Do you honestly believe the game today is more physical than it was pre-2015?

"I'd allow for more physicality in the game. I'd allow for hand-checking, things like that. I feel like European basketball is more physical than the NBA is right now. I think the NBA needs to be more physical. Not to the sense of the way the Pistons were playing where guys are literally fearing for their safety when they're up in the air, not that kind of basketball. But something where you're not getting called for a body check or light hand check or things like that. I think it just makes the game ridiculous."

"It trickles down to NCAA. I could barely watch some of these games in the NCAA because, like, a player touches a guy with a thumb, and it's a foul in a situation where it costs them the game. That type of stuff drives me crazy. That would be the first thing I'd change."

"I think it needs to be more enjoyable. It's more enjoyable if there's a certain level of physicality. You get to see players go mano-a-mano a little bit instead of, Oh, my God, he put a hand on me, it's a foul. That's got to go, man.

"It challenges players to improve their skill level, too. If you can hand check, things like that, you really must be fundamentally sound, you really must be able to handle the ball to get past defenders."

- Kobe Bryant, 2018

You guys know that most players are just making random observations and shooting from the hip right? They're not looking back at tape or doing studies on how the game has changed or anything, they don't really care about actually answering the question and are just talking like people do to pass the time.

Hand checking was really, really not a thing back in the 1980s or whenever. Go and watch games on youtube, you won't see hand-checking happening almost at all and it certainly doesn't have a significant effect on games. And when the Pistons were supposedly body-checking everyone who went up for a shot, the NBA was actually in one of its highest scoring/highest efficiency eras too.

You do know that Bryant made these comments while working on ESPN 'Detail' series in which he broke down film of the 2018 season games right? So no, he didn't shoot from the hip, it was during detailed analysis.

[JonFromVA]

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

There are no new rules that would have any impact on breaking a press. Enforcement of legal dribbling has changed over the years but that change was completely finished by the late 90s.

'Skills' vs 'refs' is a bad way of framing things, though, focuses on the wrong things and also gets people defensive on both sides. The vast vast majority of the changes in the game now from the 2000s are simply about a totally new strategy and approach to scoring that wasn't about refs at all and didn't exactly follow from new 'skills' either. Teams simply went from trying to shoot over or around individual defenders (in the post or with midrange screens) to using picks to create space to attack in spaced-out courts. It's a completely different way of initiating offense and creating shots, and the game totally changed as a result of it. It did require more shooting and ability to attack closeouts (and less big bodies in the lane), so the skill level on the floor certainly increased--but it increased because the strategy required that, not because players were simply coming in with more shooting and attacking skills. It might not seem that way now since young players are practicing those skills like crazy, but there was SO much talk about spacing from like 2005-2012--before the switch to everyone doing picks and 3 pointers--that all of us who were around then should remember that transition, even if it was uneven and went in first and starts.

How are the defensive 3 second, removing hand checking, freedom of movement, formalization of the gather step (really just an extra step), greater enforcement of touch and flagrant fouls, ignoring hesitation dribbles (carrying) etc. related to any kind of scheme shift in the NBA? These are clearly just top-down arbitrary formal and informal rules designed to facilitate offensive players and increase scoring. Removing hand checking undoubtedly makes it a lot easier for shooters to gain space and hence be more effective on the perimeter which in turn has allowed shooting specialists to flourish. Each time the NBA has changed the rules to allow offensive players greater freedom to create on the individual level, scoring numbers have skyrocketed immediately at a league-wide level. Not a coincidence.

The problem is quantifying it, especially when hand checking is actually still in use. I remember when the rule went in, the refs were blowing their whistles if a defender put his hand on a ball handler on the perimeter because it was a new point of emphasis. Now they seem to just look for an obvious push, because the incidental contact rule allows the refs to ignore any contract that didn't affect the outcome of the play.

Some players made great use of hand-checking, for instance for my Cavs it was Eric Snow. The change in the rule pretty much ended his career, but that's not saying much because he didn't offer much beyond some veteran smarts and tough/physical defense by that point in his career.

Guys had to learn how to move their feet on defense, it took them a minute.

Not really a big deal, IMO.

Even when the Pistons moved on from Ben Wallace and decided to bring in Flip Saunders and embrace offense; I always felt rather than gaining the ultimate modern weapon of shooting & space, they'd lost their edge which was to get defensive stops when they had to.

[Harry Garris]

Shooting at the level of the best nba players is a very difficult skill to develop. That doesn’t just happen overnight. Training and coaching methods develop over time that’s why we saw a gradual adoption of the 3 pointer.

Even still, it's crazy how long it took for players to cut out long 2's and replace them with 3's. It's not like the math is all that complicated.

It blows my mind that the NBA took until the 2010s to really understand the value of the 3 pointer. I swear I figured this out when I was in grade 2 playing NBA jam and chucked a lot of 3s with good 3 point shooting teams.

An embarrassment for older players who were taking 20 footers.

In the future there will be developments in basketball strategy that seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight and people will look back at our era and scratch their heads why we didn’t think of them.

Sometimes advancement isn’t as obvious as it seems, or it takes awhile to implement. A really famous historical example of this is the moldboard plow. A simple design which massively increased productivity in farming. Europeans never invented it despite it being an “obvious” design choice, and they used really terrible inefficient plows for thousands of years despite advancing in technology in all these other areas until the Moldboard plow was finally imported from China in the late Middle Ages and revolutionized agriculture overnight.

[HotelVitale]

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

There are no new rules that would have any impact on breaking a press. Enforcement of legal dribbling has changed over the years but that change was completely finished by the late 90s.

'Skills' vs 'refs' is a bad way of framing things, though, focuses on the wrong things and also gets people defensive on both sides. The vast vast majority of the changes in the game now from the 2000s are simply about a totally new strategy and approach to scoring that wasn't about refs at all and didn't exactly follow from new 'skills' either. Teams simply went from trying to shoot over or around individual defenders (in the post or with midrange screens) to using picks to create space to attack in spaced-out courts. It's a completely different way of initiating offense and creating shots, and the game totally changed as a result of it. It did require more shooting and ability to attack closeouts (and less big bodies in the lane), so the skill level on the floor certainly increased--but it increased because the strategy required that, not because players were simply coming in with more shooting and attacking skills. It might not seem that way now since young players are practicing those skills like crazy, but there was SO much talk about spacing from like 2005-2012--before the switch to everyone doing picks and 3 pointers--that all of us who were around then should remember that transition, even if it was uneven and went in first and starts.

[b]How are the defensive 3 second, removing hand checking, freedom of movement, formalization of the gather step (really just an extra step), greater enforcement of touch and flagrant fouls, ignoring hesitation dribbles (carrying) etc. related to any kind of scheme shift in the NBA? These are clearly just top-down arbitrary formal and informal rules designed to facilitate offensive players and increase scoring. Removing hand checking undoubtedly makes it a lot easier for shooters to gain space and hence be more effective on the perimeter which in turn has allowed shooting specialists to flourish. Each time the NBA has changed the rules to allow offensive players greater freedom to create on the individual level, scoring numbers have skyrocketed immediately at a league-wide level. Not a coincidence.

Well first none of the things you mentioned up top has any impact on breaking a press, which is what we were talking about. The carrying thing would be like but like I said that was already fully in place by the late 90s, that era was famous for some pretty monstrous looking carries.

Second I don't have any dog in this fight and everything I'm saying about it comes from looking at game tape. I've watched a lot of games from the 80s-2000s on this topic and I honestly see virtually zero evidence that handchecking effected the game, let alone accounted for a fundamental shift in strategy. You don't see very much of it to begin with, and when you do it's mostly because point guards and wing used to start plays by going butt-to-the-basket (resting a hand on players in that situation is still legal but you rarely see it on the perimeter now cuz that style has completely disappeared). This point you made sounds fictional to me, it's just not describing what happens in games: "removing hand checking undoubtedly makes it a lot easier for shooters to gain space and hence be more effective on the perimeter which in turn has allowed shooting specialists to flourish." Watch some tape from the 90s-2000s, you'll see that there's a good amount of midrange shooting off the bounce then than now and there's no handchecking that happens on those plays. The defense on the perimeter is always in a defensive stance a few feet away from the guy on offense, just like we're all taught in 3rd grade and just like players are now. And fouls are called just as much on drives from the perimeter then and now. And like I said before, most plays these days aren't isos and begin out of pn'r and DHOs so hand-checking is irrelevant anyway.

It kind of seems like you've convinced yourself that the and don't need to see any evidence of it. Like I usually say in these discussions, the NBA does indeed like the change to a faster game with more 3pt shots and drives and has done some things to encourage it--but there's a huge difference between riding a wave that started elsewhere and creating that wave. I really haven't seen any credible argument or even a decent small set of evidence to suggest the NBA's decisions were a crucial driving force behind them. If you have some I'm all ears/eyes, promise I won't be stubborn or anything about it.

[HotelVitale]

- Kobe Bryant, 2018

You guys know that most players are just making random observations and shooting from the hip right? They're not looking back at tape or doing studies on how the game has changed or anything, they don't really care about actually answering the question and are just talking like people do to pass the time.

Hand checking was really, really not a thing back in the 1980s or whenever. Go and watch games on youtube, you won't see hand-checking happening almost at all and it certainly doesn't have a significant effect on games. And when the Pistons were supposedly body-checking everyone who went up for a shot, the NBA was actually in one of its highest scoring/highest efficiency eras too.

You do know that Bryant made these comments while working on ESPN 'Detail' series in which he broke down film of the 2018 season games right? So no, he didn't shoot from the hip, it was during detailed analysis.

I'll take it back for that then, and try to watch the series and see what it's saying. But in general when people treat players in interviews or little talk show segments as historians, they're really really missing the purpose. Guys have no interest whatsoever in being accurate or historically objective, it's just pure barbershop talk.

[HotelVitale]

- Kobe Bryant, 2018

You guys know that most players are just making random observations and shooting from the hip right? They're not looking back at tape or doing studies on how the game has changed or anything, they don't really care about actually answering the question and are just talking like people do to pass the time.

Hand checking was really, really not a thing back in the 1980s or whenever. Go and watch games on youtube, you won't see hand-checking happening almost at all and it certainly doesn't have a significant effect on games. And when the Pistons were supposedly body-checking everyone who went up for a shot, the NBA was actually in one of its highest scoring/highest efficiency eras too.

You do know that Bryant made these comments while working on ESPN 'Detail' series in which he broke down film of the 2018 season games right? So no, he didn't shoot from the hip, it was during detailed analysis.

Just checked this out--these were indeed just off-the-cuff comments made during a long interview with some guy named Ben Cafardo from espn+. It was part of a media tour that he was doing hyping up the Details series when it was starting out, and the questions about more physicality etc comes in towards the end of a long Q&A, they come up when a journalist asks Kobe to keep talking about the topic of tensions with refs and arguments in games. Here's the original: https://www.espn.com/radio/play/_/id/23116225.

There are no episodes of that show that are trying to break down this question or address it. I'm watching this breakdown of his own 2009 WCF series vs the Nuggets that's pretty cool though. It's here if you have hulu/disney plus: https://www.hulu.com/watch/11ea390c-db98-40ec-9f28-17d12ba1dd10 The analysis is fairly basic but the tape is cool and gives you a good appreciation of Kobe's skills at his peak.

Interestingly, the whole thing is about spacing and Kobe's 'lesson' was that the offense had to be as spread out as possible for them to succeed. At this time in the evolution of the game spacing was more about opening up the interior for stars, and most role players weren't yet able to shoot 3s yet nor did they start running pn'r all day yet. But this episode shows you really clearly how and why NBA offenses started to shift towards really maximizing spacing. Interesting variation of it was happening that same season with Dwight Howard (his first season with Rashard Lewis and Turkoglu spacing floor), and of course with Lebron playing with Mo Williams, Delonte, Boobie, etc while still having the big stiffs in the lane.

[HotelVitale]

^One more thing then i'll stop taking over this thread: Kobe also explicitly makes the point that guys like Ariza and Odom were working really hard in practice on their 3 balls at this time because they knew they had to for the team to succeed. If you need a clear example and snapshot in time of players actively working hard to catch their skills up to the new style that the game was going in, it's right here in 2009 and directly from Kobe's mouth.

[the sea duck]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

i mean, ball handling was a completely different thing back then too, to be fair.

part skills improvement, but it's overstated. the enforcement of rules leads to a change in the perception of skills and it has a cascading effect on other skills and other facets of the game.

There are no new rules that would have any impact on breaking a press. Enforcement of legal dribbling has changed over the years but that change was completely finished by the late 90s.

yeah 1) i'm talking about rule enforcement. 2) ball handling has continued to get more relaxed throughout the last two decades in different ways. 3) the clip we're looking at is from early 90's, not late 90s.

[jpengland]

legit shocking how effective the bulls full court press was in the 90s, really highlights the lack of ball-handling teams had back in the day:

Watch on YouTube

I mean yea the Knicks did that to themselves playing defensive line-ups, but still shocking.

No way this works against modern offenses.

This is a great point.

Majority of modern offenses break that press immediately and find an open three.

Players are just much,much more skilled across the board now.

[SportsGuru08]

LOL, Kobe and Steve Nash, two of the few players that played from the mid 90’s up iñuntip the mid late 2010’s saw the NBA’s blatant attempt to incredibly soften up the
game to make it more attractive for the soft Euros and the high school/one and done AAU developed numb skulls that were starting to invade the league by the mid 90’s. I’ll take Kobe and Steve’s opinion more seriously than two scrubs like Legs and soy boy Reddick LOL

https://youtu.be/9v9IJp5Oc6g?si=KCuIYDIYWULtGpna

https://youtu.be/EHN3d9bpJ-g?si=DhpKov2qOJmFJMmG

Basically David Stern, Stu Jackson, Jerry Collangelo and Rob Thorne got collective heart attacks when the Spurs, Pistons and Pacers dominated the NBA from 2003 to 2005 and basically when to work and go about neutering defenses and turning the league into the chuck and duck abomination you see today

This. It's easy to say scorers today are "more skilled" when defenders are more handcuffed than ever before. Chucking up threes and uncontested layups with nothing else in between doesn't make today's players "more skilled."