web123888 wrote:Well, no, this isn’t entirely accurate. A post game involves much more than back to the basket backing down defenders and scoring.
At exactly no point in this thread have I reduced it to such, so that isn't salient to my post
Olajuwon was at least one of the top 5 post players in the league’s history.
I'd agree that he's at absolute lowest, a top 10 post player all time. Honestly, I think top 5 makes plenty of sense. This is why I articulated earlier that the point is that he's a shade overrated when he's being called the greatest post player of all time and no one is accepting any other possible outcome, but that he was still incredible and an ATG.
It's not that Hakeem was bad, he wasn't. He was amazing, one of the best, particularly at his peak. The problem was more that he had pieces of his game which were weaker than others, or guys who were more effective but with less engaging aesthetic.
Anticon wrote:There's a lot of supposition in that around people's motivations. I've never heard it be a common view that he was the greatest post player of all time.
You can see it in this very thread.
I do think the concept of overrated when comparing a group do 3 or 4 players loses its meaning.
I don't. It's a very specific remark about how he's being discussed, and how people don't want to accept even the possibility that he couldn't be the best ever at the given skill, but while still acknowledging his proficiency.
And the introduction of aesthetics as a distinguishing factor is odd; he wasn't held back because of the artistic quality of his play, he was enabled by it. It's just that other players that weren't as pleasing to watch may have been better scorers.
I never said he was held back by his artistry. I said people overrate him to some degree because they enjoy watching him play. The same thing happens with Melo and Kobe, to one extent or another.
In saying you're choosing effectiveness over aesthetics you're not actually choosing that. You're just choosing another player that happens to be better, for various reasons. Aesthetics is irrelevant to that distinction.
It isn't irrelevant at all, you just took the argument in a different direction than was intended, despite me having explained this already elsewhere in the thread.