Lockdown504090 wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:Lockdown504090 wrote:no, i actually think in the future, it will be widely understood that numbers dont mean very much for the time period of 2018-2023 or however long the players and owners let this style of play persist. teenagers understand that there was more defense being played during kobes peak than now
Defense was more impactful in lower scoring.... there's more defense played today, meaning more players are working harder defensively now than then.
Ill partially agree. defense REQUIRES more hard work than it did in the past, thats why the scoring is so high. teams do not have the will to play it on a nightly basis. the gap betweeen whats occurring on the floor vs what teams are capable of doing on the defensive end is just massive in comparison to any other era of the sport. Teams dont practice or prepare for opponents anymore, they just try to fine tune their principles, which they will eventually abandon in the playoffs based on opponent. team doctors and players are shocked if a team wants to practice 5 times a month now outside of film study. The raptors let some people watch practices for local coaching development, and we are all floored at how mild they are. they might as well be in a party chat on XBOX and talk about the game while they play COD, and they were doing this in the year we won the title even.
Practice was never a big thing. These teams play 82 games, plus preseason, plus the playoffs.
And teams have never focused on defense outside of big playoff matchups. The bigger change is that everyone today is involved in the offense. it used to be teams were basically playing games of 2 on 2 or 3 on 3, hell sometimes it was just one on one back and fourth. Today you have 5 guys guarding 5 guys with switches, rotations, and even teams that do more of an iso heavy set...everyone is still involved. IF teams there were teams capable of doing this 30 years ago, they'd have run teams off the floor scoring. Old rules or not.