HotelVitale wrote:bledredwine wrote:LMAO my POINT was NO way STACKHOUSE puts 30 PPG up IN the 90s BECORE rule CHANGES and IT was TWO years AFTER a SIGNIFICANT change WHEN he PUT up 30 PPG :lol.
I'm just wading into this thread here, but I'm guessing you're aware that the early 2000s were the least efficient and lowest-scoring era in modern NBA history. Claiming that a rule change that happened in 1999 made scoring drastically easier would have to get around that fact.
Generally speaking, though, it seems like you guys are both missing the way of arguing about this. Bringing in random commentators like Scottie Pippen (whose opinions have never been widely respected), or arguing about one particular isolated case for pages (like Stackhouse), is obviously a much worse way of comparing periods of doing historical analysis than looking at direct evidence and making claims from that.
If you're convinced that some rule change completely shifted how defense was allowed to be played, it should be very easy to look up some games from the 'before' period and some games from the 'after' period and show that change in effect all the time. Or at least to show directly how things were changing. That's all that any good or reasonable or reliable commentator or analyst would do, and the only reason to take their word for anything along these lines is if they had done that and could easily show you evidence.
The Pippen thing from me was a joke, because when that poster gets beaten in an argument he resorts to posting opinions of former players and thinks it's the end-all in a debate. The Stackhouse thing was just to prove how awful his point was. He claimed Stackhouse could never score 30 ppg in the 90s, and his 30 ppg season in 2000-2001 was evidence of how much better defense was in the 90s. But the year Stackhouse averaged 30 ppg was the 3rd lowest scoring year by ppg since the merger. Only 1 year in the 90s had a lower ppg, which was 98-99. Just an awful point by that poster.
Instead of evaluating the stats and coming up with a narrative, he develops a narrative and tries to find statistics to support that narrative.