Snakebites wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:Snakebites wrote:This is the key here. Reggie Miller never made it past All NBA Third Team because his coaches didn't value the three and he wasn't encouraged to take them more.
Reggie would be better in this era, not because his own era was "harder" but because coaches had no idea what they had.
Miller never made it past 3rd team because the voters simply were wrong about how important and impactful he was. And to your point, similar might happen with Curry in a pre analytics world.
Now the bigger issue with Miller is that he never even had a season taking 16 shots a game. That's a concern perhaps.
Yeah, I do think his stats would be more impressive if his coaches understood how much better three pointers were than midrange shots.
But yeah, you're right. He already was extremely underrated even if we're looking at what he actually did and not trying to extrapolate.
I said this in my other post, but will again here. The reason Reggie didn’t Curry it up back in the 90s isn’t cause coaches didn’t understand how important 3s were lol. Its because he was no where near good enough to do what Curry and others are doing today.
Again, there is an ocean of difference between the top shooters today and back then. The thing people don’t account for the most is shot difficulty. Probably half (or more) the shots Curry takes would be awful shots for Reggie. If his coaches would have accepted him taking all those his shooting percentage would’ve absolutely plummeted which is why he didn’t. Not because he could but all the great basketball minds of the past just ‘didn’t think of it’ lol.
A routine play for Curry (or Harden, or Kyrie, Dame, etc, etc): Curry dribbling the ball, uses a screen set for him, his defender cheats it on top (already something that we NEVER saw then), so he steps back maintaining his dribble, the screener resets the screen from the other side, Curry goes around it with the ball, this time gets his split second of daylight and quickly gets his shot off. How in the world, does anyone who has ever watched Reggie (or Mullin, Bird, Richmond, etc), think that Reggie was good enough to hit that shot, and that the only reason they didn’t do that, is because they didn’t think of it. Reggie would hit that shot, in a game situation, maybe once or twice out of ten. It would not have been a good shot.
People really underestimate how difficult these shots are. I was a great three point shooter (for back then). Was a top 2-3 shooter on my college team (Canadian, so not D1 lvl of course), and I could never in a million years have been good enough to do what these guys are doing today. Reggie was my favourite player back then, and I used to follow him tons. I remember an interview where he was talking about training with his big sister and he wouldn’t leave the court until he took 1000 shots every day. I can guarantee you, if he did that, and he became as great as he did, that today’s players took the same idea and doubled or tripled it. I think people think that all these guys train the same amount, but just focus different things.. not at all. If people saw the amount of training a guy like Curry has done to be this, even compared to Reggie, MJ, or whoever, it would make their head spin.
The other laughable thing I always see on these forums is the good ole ‘well this guy was a great three point shooter back then, so he would be an even better player today, because he would of course be an even better shooter today’. Ok so now were just assigning imaginary skills to past players to compare them to today’s. Reggie doesn’t just magically become a better shooter today, unless he changes what he focused on, or we magically buy him more and (much) more training time. Same with all players. ‘Oh but MJ would just be an amazing 3 point shooter today obviously’, is something I see all the time on here and its just so silly.
The stories we all heard from these guys like Reggie and MJ and Bird and so on, are legendary stories, and it made us want to be better. And theres people like me who trained maybe a wee bit harder because of it, but then theres people like Curry who heard those same stories and sprinkled in some crack to them and now we have a NBA full of these guys. They’ve learnt all the moves they had and enhanced them. Copied all their shots and how to do them from further away.
Its so easy to just say ‘today’s players are flat out better, BECAUSE of yesterday’s players’ without insulting the older players. Hell this is mostly done in literally every other sport, but egos in this sport prevent it lol.
Coaches in the past can only wish they had the crop of players today, and if they did, we wouldve seen 3s being jacked up from all over and every type of action. But shooters back then were no where near that lvl just yet.
