165bows wrote:Sure but it’s not all there is either. Plenty of dudes would be different or out of the league today so not sure that we can just scale it to today just because. More skills needed now just the way it is.
It's very different today, for sure. But the guys who play today aren't randomly smarter; it comes from access to training earlier and differences in coaching, etc. A lot of them would be able to change up their game. We've even seen vets from that era doing it in this era. Late-stage Grant Hill, for example. Hell, we saw Bruce Bowen (who was useless at the FT line) turned into a capable corner 3pt shooter two decades ago, you know what I mean? The guys who would be out of the league are more the fringe guys than the stars. And we've seen translatable skills in the crossover eras. We also saw guys adjusting their raw TS as the league changed from 05 onward, and there is a meaningful difference in how the game is played now. Faster tempo, more emphasis on 3pt shooting, percentages in the paint are at an all-time high without a large change in acrobatic finishing, etc, etc. Finishing percentage at the rim is up 10.5% compared to 2004, and that isn't because everyone is suddenly and magically a better shooter (especially because we were seeing rim percentages rise in the years before this even from guys who had been in the league for ages).
So yeah, the anti-earlier era stuff is a little melodramatic and hyperbolic a lot of the time. Obviously, the individual payer and their skill set matter. But someone like Kobe would obviously be very good today, and someone would have be trolling to suggest otherwise, you know?
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