Ol Roy wrote:OhayoKD wrote:Ol Roy wrote:Diet and exercise have always and continue to be mostly dependent on the player, regardless of era. Careful eating and obsessive training are not brand new inventions. One problem with dogmatic modernism is that is leads people to dismiss the top tier athletes within just a couple of generations, even though human evolution doesn't work that way, and (whether people want to admit it or not), while advancements are more noticeable across the broad talent pool, they remain largely on the margins for the best individuals.
You are expressing incredible confidence in what is an entirely baseless assertion. There is more to athleticism than leaping, weight, and height you know? Even Wilt isn't the peak of athleticism unless you ignore stuff like fluidity of movement and the higher the bar for "skill" becomes (with broadening access to trying to achieve it), the less likely it is for an exceptional individual to stay exceptional.
While it may be comforting to think the best are always the best, there's simply no reason to actually think it's true.
I notice that the athletic discounts given to players tend to be proportional to the amount of nice, pretty, color footage available. Sounds like a perception bias.
Some folk's conceptions of time are really weird. The 60s and 70s were not long ago! I wonder if some have a psychological need to believe they could whoop their dads and granddads. Like, most people grew up eating at the same table, although processed food has become worse over the years. If anything, general physical activity has declined. This idea of magical food and exercise advancements is really funny. There simply isn't going to be that much variation over such a miniscule time horizon.
I think the bigger difference is selection for certain athletic traits is different, and of course the available population of guys with size, athleticism and then eventually skill is very different than it was 60 years ago. There ARE differences in how we train athletically, aimed at emphasizing some of these traits, but also in terms of coordination, time spent, emphasis paid to weight training... although an earlier remark about how player-dependent that is comes back as relevant. Not everyone is Karl Malone (who was a well-known outlier in his own time) or Lebron in terms of maintaining their bodies. Not everyone is Steph, maintaining his ankles and doing his neuro/coordination training. Or Kobe's legendary (and perhaps somewhat self-destructive) workout drive. Some guys still raw-dog it. It took Jordan into like his second season before he started getting serious with Tim Grover. McGrady didn't really start training until prior to the 02-03 season. We don't really see guys crushing beers in the locker room at half-time or smoking as much anymore, but I mean, if you want to pick on habits like that, you see it much later than just the 60s, that's for certain. To say nothing of the coke problem the league had in the 70s and 80s, lest we pick on the 60s too much for anything.
But yeah, I think it's more about selection than it is about anything else. And then, to an extent, the dribbling rules when we start talking about lateral movement. Oscar didn't have bad burst, but if you allow him to hang a stall dribble the way guys do in this era, he'd look different moving left to right, that's for sure. It started to change a little in the early 70s. Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, those were dudes who started to push the boundaries a little bit. Nothing like today, nothing even like Iverson, but a little more than what we'd been seeing in the 60s at least.
These dudes were athletic. Oscar, for example, was a tank, and he could jump. He certainly wasn't slow-footed. One could argue about the footage and his speed relative to peers and all that all day long and it would remain inescapable that he was an athletic dude.
Mmm. The nature of the game is also a thing. It was extremely post-centric. Like, to a detriment. Outside of transition, everything was being set up in the post all the time. Inside out, inside out, inside out, even without dominant stars. Lots and lots of guard post. West and Oscar did tons of it. That's part of why I was mentioning Oscar's J out of the backdown in my earlier post, you'd see him back down from above the foul line into the left or right-side block and then take a fallaway all the time. So in a set like that, you're not really pushing the boundaries of lateral quickness, you're using positioning and timing to set up jumpers, which is also part of why the league average FG% of the time were generally lower. And with little incentive to shoot from distance, you're challenging shotblockers all the time inside without a ton of room to move. You had some high-fliers. Connie Hawkins hit the ABA in the late 60s at last and the NBA in 1970. Elgin Baylor. And then more and more in the 70s as the different style of the ABA started to filter into the NBA, particularly after the merger. But the NBA game wasn't really showcasing a lot of speed, apart from straight rushes in transition.
Makes it a bit hard to evaluate athleticism as we prefer to look at it through today's lens, no doubt.
