70sFan wrote:Alright, yesterday I was playing with some lists for different choices and I think that longer lists for longer periods are significantly better for discussing less famous players and catalysing more interesting debates. I made the first draft of my 2001-25, 1976-00 and 1951-75 lists and it was really fun! In contrast, making top 10 lists for each decade is a bit dull, because we will have a lot of overlap between lists and very few wildcard names.
I am willing to run the project, as long as people will be interested in that. Please let me know.
Those eras seem okay to me. The only thing I’d say is that I don’t love that 2001-2025 basically spans a dead-ball era and the current hyper-efficient era. We’d definitely end up with some of the stale era-translation discussion with that timeframe. To some degree the same is true with the 1951-1975 timeframe, since the game was quite different at the beginning and end of that timeframe, but that doesn’t concern me as much (though admittedly that’s in part just because I’ve never really personally been all that interested in early-mid 1950s basketball, so likely wouldn’t be much involved in those particular era-translation discussions).
Ultimately, it’s a judgment call and this approach would work. The downside of doing fewer eras is that there will inevitably be less avoidance of rabbit holes. But a benefit is that fewer eras can allow for more players to be discussed within an era, which, as you say, might create more interesting discussion about less famous players. So there’s a tradeoff. I do tend to think fewer eras is almost certainly better if the plan is to have one player picked per thread. Lots of eras + one player picked per thread would either take forever or basically never involve discussion of anyone but the most famous players. So, to me, the options are either the approach you lay out, or an approach with more timeframes and some form of voting that involves picking more than one person per thread. Either way seems okay to me, and I think if you are willing to run the project (which sounds like a great idea—especially as this was your idea in the first place) then I’m totally on board with deferring to your judgment.
