bastillon wrote:1. The desire to negate the adv of HoF bigmen: Teams increased pace to counter Mikan and then Wilt/Russell. Its the desire for early offense before def bigs can set up that increases pace not fastbreaks.
a possibility, but I can't explain why they were taking inefficient shots anyway. if the idea was to get early offense to get a quality look, then why didn't they establish a better (smarter) offensive philosophy ? I don't get it.2. Overall talent: Every coach would like to uptempo unles he has a great bigman. He doesnt because of talent. When you look at the most talented teams in NBA history you see a natural increase in pace. Bird/parish and McHlae are not fast break super athletic players but they played at a fast pace because they were very eff and forced other teams to run to keep up.
Celtics were playing at this pace just because the league was playing very fast overall. if you look at them in comparison to their peers, they're pretty average in terms of pace. what made them run a lot was in-era style which was fast, that's all.
I didn't see Bulls run a lot and they certainly had the opportunity to do so with Pippen and Michael.
Bulls didnt run because they didnt have alot of talent. They forced TOs with a 3/4 court trap. Those TOs then led to pts. Paxson/BJ Armstrong/Ron Harper are just not the guards that want to run. Grant and Rodman needed all the help they could get on the boards.
I dont understand the post about early offense and the shots being ineffectient.... Its not like the 1950s teams shot at 55% and then they went to 42% in the 60s. You call 44% a bad % but thats a relative statement. with hindsight of 50yrs. Its no differant that calling out RAF pilots from the battle fo Briton for not useing F15 eagles and saying they arent real pilots because they never used jets, radar and guided missiles.
Go ahead and play a 90 possesion game vs WIlt who dominates the boards and shoots 70% from the field. Thats a recipe for disastor. Sure you may not win going uptempo but if you dont your going to shoot a dismal FG% and Wilts going to foul out half your team.
but seriously, his passing (considering huge volume of shots that he put up) was poor. most likely he turned the ball over a lot. a guy who shot a lot, passed rarely - typical turnover prone (and he got to the line a lot which correlates with TOs often too). see: Dwight Howard, Shawn Kemp, Amare Stoudemire, Pete Maravich, Kevin Durant, Bob McAdoo, Gilbert Arenas, Bernard King, George McGinnis, Moses Malone, Allen Iverson, Paul Pierce, Patrick Ewing. I bet he averaged over 5 TOs numerous times with that kind of pace in the 60s.