The-Power wrote:it's just really freaking hard to defend today's spaced out NBA offenses with multiple triple-threat players on the court in addition to certain rules or rule interpretations limiting defenses. It's more important than ever before to defend on a string in the NBA because teams are much better at exposing even the smallest defensive breakdowns, which also makes those more perceptible to people's eyes. NBA teams have become ever more professional and the talent pool they can choose from is at an all-time high. It doesn't make sense to believe that they just became worse at team defense. Instead, it makes a lot more sense that the offensive evolution just rendered effective defense much more difficult to accomplish and the kind of team defense that used to be sufficient to regularly get stops simply isn't any longer.
Yeah, any time I hear boomers complaining about how "nobody plays defense anymore", I just know they don't actually watch games, they just look at box scores, or they do watch but can't actually process what's going on
I made a whole thread on the General Board a while back reviewing game 1 of the 1993 Finals, and actually watching the game, it's abundantly clear how much of the "good defense" of the 90s was just because so few guys could shoot and dribble, like multiple possessions BJ Armstrong would bring up the ball and Kevin Johnson would be defending him with both feet in the paint before he crossed halfcourt
Yeah, rule changes have made it easier for offenses, but the game itself has evolved to the point where even if you went back to the rules of the 90s, scoring would still be way higher because of how good offenses have gotten.