One_and_Done wrote:The answer to question 1 is pretty obvious to me. If you can walk, you can crawl. The fact that you’re used to walking doesn’t mean you forgot how to crawl, and will suddenly struggle to adapt to this scary crawling thing.
This isn’t a good analogy, for reasons I talk about below. But I just want to note that the operative question here isn’t whether someone can merely perform the action we’re talking about. It’s whether they’d be able to do it at a really high level that is above their peers. Even guys like Rudy Gobert are capable of doing fancy dribbling. He’s just not good enough at it in the context of the NBA. I think this is important, because I think you’re engaging in a subtle rhetorical sleight of hand, where you’re talking about whether past players would be able to do modern-NBA things at a level that’s above most players in the modern NBA, while simultaneously talking about whether modern players would be able to do past-era-NBA things at all. These are extremely different bars to cross, and applying completely different standards is not a coherent framework.
Guys would go into a training camp, learn the new rules, and be fine. They don’t need to develop a new skill to dribble like 60s players, they just use a subset of their existing skills. It’s “harder” to be effective with 60s dribbling, but it is not harder to perform 60s dribbling.
That is the distinction I feel most have missed. A guy who has a super advanced handle can easily go back to a simplistic version of it, in the same way a man who walks and runs can still figure out how to crawl.
It actually *is* harder to perform 60s dribbling. Or at least it is harder to do so while playing at speed, changing directions, and not getting the ball stolen from you. Everyone keeps telling you this. The dribbling they had to do in the 1960s is not some lesser-included skill in today’s players’ arsenal. It actually is meaningfully more difficult in certain ways. And because it is meaningfully more difficult, players today do not practice doing it, because it would be stupid to do it. Players today are not learning how to dribble at speed or change directions or protect the ball while not carrying. There’s no reason to learn to do that. It’s not something they learn how to do before they learn how to carry the ball. It’s a genuinely more difficult thing that they don’t learn because there’s no reason to. So there’s nothing here to “go back to.”
If you think guys today could learn the 1960s rules and be fine, then I happen to generally agree with you. But it’s not because 1960s dribbling is something that today’s players all learned to effectively do before they learned the dribbling they currently do. Rather, it’s just because they’re related skills such that we can generally assume that someone who excels at one will probably excel at the other. The problem for you is that you can’t come to that much more reasonable conclusion, because to do so would require you to extend the same courtesy to players of past eras that you do to current players. So, in order to preference the current players, you are forced to fashion an argument about prior eras’ skills being lesser-included skills within modern players’ skill sets. In some situations, that actually is true. But dribbling really is not one of them.
On to the second question. Could old timey players adapt to modern dribbling/handles? Absolutely not. Someone just said “Oscar may not dribble like Kyrie, so he’ll do it like Lebron”, as though what Lebron does is easy. It is not. Guys who have never had to learn more advanced dribbling skills, let alone deploy them in real games, can’t just will them into existence.
Again, this is a pretty obviously bad argument, because no one in today’s game practices dribbling without carrying, and they certainly do not “deploy them in real games,” because to do so would be genuinely stupid. So, by your logic, today’s players wouldn’t be able to “will th[ose] [skills] into existence.”
That leads to what the impact would be. Well, in the case of guys trying to bring 60s handles into today’s league they’d basically be unplayable.
In the case of guys trying to bring today’s handles into the 1960s, they’d be even more unplayable, because they would literally be called for a violation and turn the ball over like every single time they attempted to dribble. They’d be the worst player in the history of the NBA unless they adapted. But adapting would require them to do something that they have not ever really practiced “let alone deploy[ed] . . . in real games.” Of course, you assert that they would just “go into training camp, learn the new rules, and be fine,” despite the fact that that would require them to engage in actions that they are absolutely not used to. And you know what? I agree with you that they’d be able to do that, because they’re related skills! But there’s no reasonable reason to believe they’d be able to do that *and* that 1960s players wouldn’t be able to do the opposite. Your entire argument rests on a completely false premise that today’s players actually meaningfully learn how to dribble like they did in the 1960s and that they actually deploy those skills. That is obviously false, and I think anyone who has learned how to play basketball in the last several decades should easily know that. The reality is that in both scenarios we’d be asking these players to dribble in a way that they are not at all used to. You just draw completely inconsistent conclusions about what would happen in those scenarios, while everyone else discussing in this thread does not.
So the translation works much better for new players going back, than old players moving forward. But the other side of this to remember is that we’re not comparing like for like. The 60s was a terrible league, with a terrible product. We shouldn’t care as much about backwards compatibility, because the comparison should mostly be about how you would do in the best league with the best quality and strongest tactics/players.
I think this is a more cognizable argument. The NBA was a nascent league in the 1960s, and basketball was simply not as popular, nor was the NBA particularly lucrative. We’d therefore expect the talent level in the league to be lower, because it simply attracted less potential talent. And that could potentially lead to a conclusion that great players from the past wouldn’t translate as well. Maybe there were Jordans or LeBrons out there in the 1960s who just weren’t in the NBA because basketball wasn’t popular enough for them to have bothered. If so, that’d lead to a conclusion that the best players from that era aren’t actually necessarily in the same percentile of talent as the best players today. I find this argument to actually be a reasonable one. So I personally do tend to have more skepticism of players from that era. But I will note that it’s not a deterministic argument. I think it’s almost certainly true that more talent was attracted to basketball in later eras than in the 1960s, but that doesn’t *necessarily* mean that there was untapped talent out there in the 1960s that was better than the very top guys like Russell, Wilt, etc. It’s a factor that should just lead us to have more uncertainty about players from that era IMO, rather than definitively downgrading them.
