ThaRegul8r wrote:tsherkin wrote:Kobe has won more titles and been to the Finals more than has Dr. J
I was thinking on Erving's career, and I'm going to ask a question, which I do not want people to get overly emotional about or sling
ad hominems over. If it is impossible to refrain from doing so, then simply do not respond to this post. But thinking over Erving's NBA career—and this is one advantage of actually knowing what happened at the time, one thing that was continually mentioned was Philadelphia's lack of a dominant center whilst going up against all-time great centers:
In those years that the 76ers made the Finals but did not win — 1977, 1980 and 1982 — they didn’t have a center to compare with the rival’s center. In 1977 it was Bill Walton against Caldwell Jones and back-up, ever erratic Darryl Dawkins. In 1980 and 1982 it was reversed, with Dawkins starting and Jones off the bench, against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Again, no contest. Philadelphia finally solved this problem in September 1982 by getting Moses Malone from Houston for Caldwell Jones and a 1983 first-round draft pick.
After the 1977 NBA Finals, in which Erving averaged 30.3 points on 54.3 percent shooting from the floor, 85.7 percent shooting from the line and 60.4 percent true shooting, 6.8 rebounds, 5 assists and 2.67 steals, this was written:
What the team lacked was a dominant center, and what it had was an abundance of hot-tempered, big men. The most important ingredient of most NBA championship teams had been an outstanding center. But the 76ers had Darryl Dawkins, who should still be playing college basketball; Caldwell Jones, and Iarvey Catchings. Yet, with all that, the 76ers came within two games of winning the NBA championship.
The mismatch of the series was Bill Walton against either Caldwell Jones or Darryl Dawkins
Erving had now played in the NBA six years and had lost in the NBA Finals three times. The common denominator in these defeats was the fact that Philadelphia was losing the battle in the middle. Bill Walton had dominated the 1977 series. Wes Unseld dominated the 1978 playoff series. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (and Magic) won the center battle in 1980 and 1982. Robert Parish and Kevin McHale gave the Sixers fits.
The 76ers signed free agent Moses Malone when he was the best center in the game—and Philadelphia won its second (and last) NBA Championship.
And when they did, it was Erving who put the capper on the championship:
Doc’s finest hour puts signature on 76ers’ NBA championship crown
INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The elder statesman made his points eloquently.
Seven of them in a row in the fourth quarter heat and fury of the 76ers’ world-championship win.
The old guy kicked up his heels. And then he showed them to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Seven points in a row. When the NBA championship was on the line, Julius Erving’s box-score line was full of drama.
In the same building in which his self-control broke and he cried unashamedly in defeat last year, in the Los Angeles Forum, before 17,505 hostile witnesses, Julius Erving, 33 years old, a dozen years as a pro, three times a loser in the NBA finals, walked off with the smile of a winner Tuesday night.
Erving, the Sixers captain and for so long the heart of the Sixers team, was its driving force when the championship was won, 115-108, over the Lakers to complete a 4-0 sweep of the NBA finals Tuesday night.
“After coming in second three times (since coming to the Sixers in 1976), you start to ask why it happens,” Erving said outside the riotous Sixers locker room. “I would like to give thanks to the Creator, not only for the times we were victorious, but for the times we lost. Those times built our character as men. Without what happened then, we wouldn’t be the same now.”
But without what happened in the final 2 minutes, 1 second, without what Dr. J, a basketball artist, created, they wouldn’t be champions today.
The Sixers trailed, 106-104. The Lakers had the ball and were waiting patiently for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, another senior citizen of some note, to swing up another sky-hook and repulse this latest Sixers’ challenge. Abdul-Jabbar had the ball, but he was a redwood surrounded with snarling buzz saws, so he had to pass it out. He aimed the ball for Michael Cooper on the right wing.
“I gambled a little bit and left my man, Jamaal Wilkes, who I really didn’t want to leave,” said Erving. “I just hedged a little bit.”
And one of those huge hands — the same mitts whose massive handprint used to stamp the Sixers as his team, beyond doubt, beyond question — struck the ball down. Erving flew away from the pack and dunked to tie it.
The Lakers took the lead back on a free throw by Magic Johnson, then got the ball back when the indecisive Sixers failed to get a shot off in 24 seconds.
Again they called on Abdul-Jabbar, but in this 2-hour, 37-minute test of wills, the biggest Laker, depleted by 40 minutes of play, missed with a baseline hook. It was his second critical error; it was Erving’s second opportunity to slip on the championship ring that had always been just out of reach.
A fast break, Mo Cheeks blazing down the floor, Erving hurtling in from the left wing, put the Lakers in jeopardy. But Cheeks’ shovel pass to Erving was too low; it was beneath his knees. The wings would be clipped again, it seemed certain.
“It was too low, but it wound up in the right place,” said Erving, who controlled the pass somehow, then dumped a scooped shot off the glass as Johnson fouled him. The Lakers took time out, hoping to rattle Erving into missing the free throw, but he hit nothing but net afterward, completing the three-point play that made the Sixers’ lead 109-107.
Abdul-Jabbar, called on again, drew a foul from Cheeks, as both teams, weary, relying on muscle memory, relying on what had always worked before, before Moses Malone and Andrew Toney and Magic Johnson, went to their old war horses.
But Kareem hit the back of the rim on his first foul shot. His second reduced the Sixers’ lead to 109-108, with 42 seconds to go.
“The offensive leadership of this team at clutch time is provided by Moses or Andrew (Toney) now,” said Erving. “I was looking for them first.”
But he couldn’t get it to them and, as the shot clock wound down, Erving ended up face-to-face with Johnson, 18 feet from the basket, just inside the right-hand arc of the foul circle.
“I hadn’t been shooting that well,” said Erving. “But I let it fly and it was in the Lord’s hands.”
He may be 33 and graying now, but in the face-down with Johnson, Magic had blinked. Erving’s jumper hit nothing but net. Again.
The Lakers, the worst three-point shooting team in the NBA, had 24 seconds to learn to love the bomb.
Two of them, bracketed around another Abdul-Jabbar turnover, missed, and a final, anticlimactic dunk show by Malone and Cheeks took place amid an ongoing celebration by the Sixers’ bench.
“For us,” said Erving, after the incredible rush of events had spent itself, “this is a beginning. This isn’t the end of a long, cumbersome journey. It is the beginning.”
He hugged NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien and he hugged Sixers’ general manager Pat Williams. And he hugged owner Harold Katz.
“I cried here last year, for the first time since my brother died in 1969,” Erving said, referring to the sixth-game defeat at the hands of the Lakers that ended another unsuccessful bid for the title. “But Mr. Katz took one look at the tears in my eye and he said, ‘You won’t have to cry again.’ ”
In the locker room, his teamates [sic] were geysering champagne and coach Billy Cunningham was beckoning the elder statesman to join in the fun.
Just before he left the room, as final testimony to the sense of permanent values derived from 12 years in the flux of this high-speed game, Erving said, “I’ve had three rings (two in the ABA) in 12 years as a pro. So don’t get the idea this ring was just for me.”
He nodded toward the locker room. “They needed it more than me,” Julius Erving said.
When he finally got the big man he never had in the NBA, the result was one of the GOAT single-season teams.
Yet when you compare his career to Kobe Bryant's, what was a problem for Erving was actually a strength for Bryant. He was fortunate to go to a team that had Shaquille O'Neal, who some call the MDE, and who was voted to have the second-greatest peak in NBA history on this board's 50 Highest Peaks Project. Playing with Shaq from 1996-97 to 2003-04, the Lakers made three Western Conference Semifinals appearances, one Western Conference Finals, four NBA Finals and won three NBA titles, all consecutively from 2000 to 2002.
Then he had Andrew Bynum, who the Lakers drafted with the tenth pick in 2005, and got Pau Gasol from Memphis in February 2008. After acquiring Gasol the Lakers made three straight Finals from 2008 to 2010, winning back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010. Then after being swept by the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference Semifinals in 2011 and beaten by the Oklahoma City Thunder in five in the Western Conference Semis in 2012, the Lakers acquired Dwight Howard. Unlike Erving, Kobe has never lacked for quality big men. In between the time Shaq went to Miami and the Lakers acquired Gasol, did Kobe have any more success than Erving did? So I'm not sure how it can be so easily said that Kobe had more success when he had a surplus of what Erving lacked.
lj4mvp wrote:Until Moses got there, Dr. J had to go against front courts of
Walton*/Lucas
Unseld*/Hayes*
McHale*/Parish*
Kareem*/Chones/Haywood (I'm not sure which started)
Kareem*/McAdoo
THe players with teh askerisk aren't just in the HOF, they are all part of the NBA at 50 team. Most of those years, Dr. J's front court was Steve Mix and Cauldwell Jones.
What would Erving's NBA success look like if he had Moses sooner while going against peak Walton and prime Kareem? Or what about if Milwaukee kept him and he got to play with Kareem?
