Are there any rules you consider integral to basketball?

[70sFan]

What makes you think that teams couldn't ignore Mark Eaton at the 3 point line? First of all, nobody would even put him there because he was not a shooter, unless he was setting a screen, second of all, illegal defense rule didn't prevent help defense, it prevented zone. I think teams would happily leave Mark Eaton at the the 3 point line to double Karl Malone.

You can't be serious...

Watch on YouTube

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14:52

It seems that you don't know how illegal defense worked.

I also disagree about offenses and defenses being more sophisticated now. The game is played too fast for that. It all comes down to 3 point shooting. If you have a look, you pull the trigger, that's the philosophy of today's offense. There isn't much thought that goes into the game anymore.

The game isn't faster than in the early 1990s though...

Besides, have you ever thought about considering why the look is created in first place? Have you bothered to look at how teams run their sets? Have you realized how insane off-ball game is right now?

No, 1990s basketball was much simpler. I'd argue there was no era in basketball when the game was reduced so much to one aspect of the game (isolation game) than in the mid-1990s.

[Gooner]

What makes you think that teams couldn't ignore Mark Eaton at the 3 point line? First of all, nobody would even put him there because he was not a shooter, unless he was setting a screen, second of all, illegal defense rule didn't prevent help defense, it prevented zone. I think teams would happily leave Mark Eaton at the the 3 point line to double Karl Malone.

You can't be serious...

Watch on YouTube

4:00
4:28
14:52

It seems that you don't know how illegal defense worked.

I also disagree about offenses and defenses being more sophisticated now. The game is played too fast for that. It all comes down to 3 point shooting. If you have a look, you pull the trigger, that's the philosophy of today's offense. There isn't much thought that goes into the game anymore.

The game isn't faster than in the early 1990s though...

Besides, have you ever thought about considering why the look is created in first place? Have you bothered to look at how teams run their sets? Have you realized how insane off-ball game is right now?

No, 1990s basketball was much simpler. I'd argue there was no era in basketball when the game was reduced so much to one aspect of the game (isolation game) than in the mid-1990s.

In these plays that you marked you can literally see his defender being in the paint. His defender is playing zone actually.

[70sFan]

What makes you think that teams couldn't ignore Mark Eaton at the 3 point line? First of all, nobody would even put him there because he was not a shooter, unless he was setting a screen, second of all, illegal defense rule didn't prevent help defense, it prevented zone. I think teams would happily leave Mark Eaton at the the 3 point line to double Karl Malone.

You can't be serious...

Watch on YouTube

4:00
4:28
14:52

It seems that you don't know how illegal defense worked.

I also disagree about offenses and defenses being more sophisticated now. The game is played too fast for that. It all comes down to 3 point shooting. If you have a look, you pull the trigger, that's the philosophy of today's offense. There isn't much thought that goes into the game anymore.

The game isn't faster than in the early 1990s though...

Besides, have you ever thought about considering why the look is created in first place? Have you bothered to look at how teams run their sets? Have you realized how insane off-ball game is right now?

No, 1990s basketball was much simpler. I'd argue there was no era in basketball when the game was reduced so much to one aspect of the game (isolation game) than in the mid-1990s.

In these plays that you marked you can literally see his defender being in the paint. His defender is playing zone actually.

No, he wasn't. He was forced to stay at the FT line and he couldn't go inside the paint. Eaton himself pointed out that to a referee in these actions. That's how illegal defense worked. That's not a zone, that's a soft man defense. His man was forced to play because he couldn't leave Eaton to protect the paint.

[Gooner]

You can't be serious...

Watch on YouTube

4:00
4:28
14:52

It seems that you don't know how illegal defense worked.


The game isn't faster than in the early 1990s though...

Besides, have you ever thought about considering why the look is created in first place? Have you bothered to look at how teams run their sets? Have you realized how insane off-ball game is right now?

No, 1990s basketball was much simpler. I'd argue there was no era in basketball when the game was reduced so much to one aspect of the game (isolation game) than in the mid-1990s.

In these plays that you marked you can literally see his defender being in the paint. His defender is playing zone actually.

No, he wasn't. He was forced to stay at the FT line and he couldn't go inside the paint. Eaton himself pointed out that to a referee in these actions. That's how illegal defense worked. That's not a zone, that's a soft man defense. His man was forced to play because he couldn't leave Eaton to protect the paint.

I mean he is touching the paint all the time, I'm not blind. And in second of those plays he just leaves Eaton to double Malone. Also take a look at Isiah Thomas and how he is guarding his man while watching Malone.

[70sFan]

In these plays that you marked you can literally see his defender being in the paint. His defender is playing zone actually.

No, he wasn't. He was forced to stay at the FT line and he couldn't go inside the paint. Eaton himself pointed out that to a referee in these actions. That's how illegal defense worked. That's not a zone, that's a soft man defense. His man was forced to play because he couldn't leave Eaton to protect the paint.

I mean he is touching the paint all the time, I'm not blind. And in second of those plays he just leaves Eaton to double Malone. Also take a look at Isiah Thomas and how he is guarding his man while watching Malone.

He stands at the edge of the paint at the FT line, this is not help defense modern teams use now. How could he play help defense in that position? He's useless at FT line.

I think you don't understand what zone is and what isn't... which is understandable considering that zones were outlawed for so long in the US basketball.

[Gooner]

No, he wasn't. He was forced to stay at the FT line and he couldn't go inside the paint. Eaton himself pointed out that to a referee in these actions. That's how illegal defense worked. That's not a zone, that's a soft man defense. His man was forced to play because he couldn't leave Eaton to protect the paint.

I mean he is touching the paint all the time, I'm not blind. And in second of those plays he just leaves Eaton to double Malone. Also take a look at Isiah Thomas and how he is guarding his man while watching Malone.

He stands at the edge of the paint at the FT line, this is not help defense modern teams use now. How could he play help defense in that position? He's useless at FT line.

I think you don't understand what zone is and what isn't... which is understandable considering that zones were outlawed for so long in the US basketball.

Meaning of zone defense is self explenatory. You guard the zone, not the man. That's clearly the case here. He is not guarding Mark Eaton. Illegal defense was created more for double team purposes, and it was supposed to prevent situations where 2 players stand between an offensive player and the basket,unless it's a hard double team. it doesn't mean that everybody had to be glued to their man all the time and that offensive players had a lot of space to work with because of it, quite the opposite.

[70sFan]

I mean he is touching the paint all the time, I'm not blind. And in second of those plays he just leaves Eaton to double Malone. Also take a look at Isiah Thomas and how he is guarding his man while watching Malone.

He stands at the edge of the paint at the FT line, this is not help defense modern teams use now. How could he play help defense in that position? He's useless at FT line.

I think you don't understand what zone is and what isn't... which is understandable considering that zones were outlawed for so long in the US basketball.

Meaning of zone defense is self explenatory. You guard the zone, not the man. That's clearly the case here. He is not guarding Mark Eaton. Illegal defense was created more for double team purposes, and it was supposed to prevent situations where 2 players stand between an offensive player and the basket,unless it's a hard double team. it doesn't mean that everybody had to be glued to their man all the time and that offensive players had a lot of space to work with because of it, quite the opposite.

Well, if you can't put two players between the basket and the ball, then you can't play a zone...

I never said that players were forced to glue on Eaton at the three point line, but the fact that Eaton defender was forced to stay at least at the FT line level basically exclude him from any help defense activity, with the exception of hard double. This makes offensive reads significantly easier, because you can either hard double offensive player with the ball (you can't do that with off-ball player) or you can hope that your man will be close enough to the ball that you can cheat. Defenses were much more predictable because of that.

You are also wrong that the Jazz didn't create the spacing that way - they did. Eaton is useless outside the paint, but his man still has to be outside the paint during the action. In a more packed paint era, such advantage could be game-changing.

[penbeast0]

What you do is you switch your big onto the PF, his man in theory switches to Eaton or in fact doubles the ball. Not like Eaton is going to make you pay for being alone. Bullets used to do it a lot with Manute Bol, parking him at the 3, so I saw reactions a lot. Jerry Sloan being much more conventional than Kevin Loughery as a coach, Utah didn't seem to do it a lot.

[70sFan]

What you do is you switch your big onto the PF, his man in theory switches to Eaton or in fact doubles the ball. Not like Eaton is going to make you pay for being alone. Bullets used to do it a lot with Manute Bol, parking him at the 3, so I saw reactions a lot. Jerry Sloan being much more conventional than Kevin Loughery as a coach, Utah didn't seem to do it a lot.

I never said teams couldn't deal with that strategy, but the sheer fact that something like that existed back then shows how ridiculous the concept of illegal defense was. Of course teams could make it work, although some teams were better at creating artifical spacing than average.

Of course it's just the top of the whole mountain of problems. Lack of zones, soft doubles, off-ball doubles and overloading the strong side made defense significantly stiffer and less adaptable.

[Laimbeer]

We played "army basketball" waaaaay back in the day. There were literally no rules - just whichever team could grab the ball put it through the hoop more times won. Looked more like rugby. But it was basketball dammit.

Anyway, if you're trying to put a ball through a hoop, I think it's basketball.

[Outside]

With illegal defense, IIRC, there were three basic aspects:

-- You could double-team the player with the ball (or triple-team, or however many guys you wanted to put on him, but for all practicality, it meant you could double-team the ball).

-- You could not double-team a player who didn't have the ball.

-- If you were not guarding the player with the ball, you had to be within x feet of an offensive player (3 feet, I think).

It was actually a lot more complicated than that, with special situations and quadrants and other crap that made it hard for anyone to understand, but that's a simplified version of it.

If you double-teamed the player with the ball and that player passed the ball, you could no longer double-team that player, and one of the defenders had to immediately either double-team the player that now had the ball or had to defend a player who was undefended.

The main intent was to eliminate zone defenses, but coaches exploited the specifics of the rule to gain an advantage. For example, it led to a lot of post isolations, where the offense would clear everyone out except their post scorer so that their post scorer could go to work one-on-one (think of Adrian Dantley as a player designed for this purpose).

In the Eaton or Manute Bol example, they would park them at the top of the three-point circle, which did these things:

-- It effectively required one defender to always be guarding the big at the top of the circle, drawing them away from the basket, so that the other offensive players had more space inside.

-- It made it easier for the lumbering big the get back on defense and protect the paint against fast breaks.

-- It made sense for those types of bigs, who weren't scoring threats inside.

It also gave perimeter scorers more freedom to operate one-on-one outside the paint.

It was all so stupid. I understand the basic reason that the NBA wants to outlaw zones (freedom of movement for drives to the basket by spectacular wings and guards), but international play allows zones, and NBA teams have figured out how to use zones that avoid parking a shot-blocking big in the key. I'd like the NBA to just flat-out allow zones. They have zone-busting perimeter and mid-range shooters, and coaches are such geniuses that they'd devise ways to punish teams that, say, just park Gobert in the paint.

[Doctor MJ]

This talk about peak illegal defense is interesting. As I've said, to me, the things that split basketball from non-basketball are:

1. Largely following Naismith's rules.
2. Legal dribbling (no dribbling makes it a kind of netball).
3. Enforcement of rules against violence (without this, you have a rugby-like sport that I've always known as jungleball).

Everything else, including illegal defense, to me just creates variations of basketball.

But I will say: I think the philosophy of illegal defense is just about the most anti-Naismithian thing you can do and still have it qualify for basketball, and I think it was a huge mistake that the NBA ever started going in this direction - and the killing of illegal defense probably the wisest rule change since the adding of defensive goaltending to the banned list.

That might seem like a contradiction because both involve taking options away from the defense, but while defensive goaltending is a very simple rule that was utterly necessary once you started getting guys who could goaltend, illegal defense was a bunch of spaghetti code that left the audience confused as to why anything was actually happening out there all in the name of forcing coaches & players to implement schemes that were less effective than what common sense would have you do.

Now, in their defense, the motivation for illegal defense was to help offense at a time where defense was stifling the sport. They weren't wrong in their diagnosis of the problem, but their solution wasn't just problematic for the time, but it got worse and worse until eventually you had utterly bizarre schemes in the '90s that were just about the furthest thing from what Naismith would have imagined.

In that sense, it's not so much that the '90s were simple, so much as they were complicated to the extreme along certain dimensions that had long since stopped adding aesthetic value to the game for most viewers (everybody loved Jordan of course, but Jordan didn't really rely on illegal defense). Rule changes have simplified the game in those dimensions, and in doing so allowed coaches to re-optimize their approach which then lead to new complexities which improved flow, allowed a player's BBIQ to shine more, and eventually led to the general embrace of offensive strategies that frankly would have worked great in any era with a 3-point line.

Incidentally, there was a proper solution staring folks in the face in the '40s: The 3-point shot. There was experimentation with a 3-point line in college in the '40s, and if the broader basketball world had just gone that route then, we probably would have had pace & space take over the world soon after given that the dominant scorer of the pre-goaltending period was a long-range bomber (once you had guys who could goaltend, without a defensive goaltending rule all long-range shooting was in the process of being killed off).

If this seems far-fetched, do understand that key rule changes from the '20s-40s dramatically re-shaped the game into something with far more potential for spectator popularity - a) removal of the cage, b) enforcement of rules against violence, c) getting rid of jump balls after every possession, d) goaltending - and so adding 3's at that time really wouldn't have been any more radical than that.

[70sFan]

The whole fear of zones in pro American basketball is something I will never understand. These are the best players in the world, they would adjust and solve zones...

[Cavsfansince84]

The whole fear of zones in pro American basketball is something I will never understand. These are the best players in the world, they would adjust and solve zones...

Zones were always looked down upon as something college teams/players needed to play good defense. So I think that's where the stigma of them comes from.

[Doctor MJ]

The whole fear of zones in pro American basketball is something I will never understand. These are the best players in the world, they would adjust and solve zones...

It's pretty weird.

Growing up I was always told that if you let NBA level athletes play zone then the offenses would just be overmatched...but then when zones were re-legalized people talked about them like they were a gimmick that was quickly solved for and not to be taken too seriously. How can both of these things be true? Feels to me like there was a lot of backwards justification going on.

From reading historical books, my understanding is that what they were actually doing was trying to empower perimeter scorers to be able to drive to the interior, because they thought audiences would find that very exciting. I feel like this is something that could be called the Luisetti-fication of the game because he utterly electrified basketball fans beginning in the 1930s, continued to do so in the military, and was expected to come back and be a superstar after WW2. Of course, he ended up having medical issues that ended his career right at the end of the war, so he never had that pro impact, but the early-to-mid 40s could be said to be dominated by a) interior scorers like Mikan who dominated the boards and b) long-range set-shot bombers like Bobby McDermott who broke zones by being so far out and didn't necessarily thrill audiences like Luisetti did.

I know that Paul Arizin was specifically talked about as the type of player that these rules were trying to let shine, and I see a lot in common between Arizin & Luisetti.

So in this sense, it was less about helping Offense and more about encouraging actions that drove crowd excitement.

And yeah, I look at all this now and think, "Just paint a 3-point line, and the spacing will take care of itself." It took a long time for NBA coaches to understand this, but honestly I think in the 1940s everyone would have figured it out rapidly. The inability to optimize strategy that we see from NBA coaches is the sort of thing you only get when a particular paradigm is so engrained that people are afraid to be creative.

[CharityStripe34]

It would be interesting if they got rid of defensive 3 seconds to see how would teams adapt.

[trex_8063]

Traveling rule. If you are allowed to take 3 steps it's not basketball anymore. It takes away from fundamental skills like dribbling, timing and footwork. You are allowed to dribble then gather the ball and make one more step to finish, that's basketball. That's why you can't compare players from different eras because players are allowed to travel now whenever they want.

By "now" you mean since the 1990s?

Or 1950's?

The one video we've discussed of that game between the Fort Wayne Pistons and NY Knicks from 1950?.......Carl Braun shuffles his feet at the start of nearly every drive.