Before I answer this, I'll just clarify that I don't think it's unreasonable for Oscar to be discussed at #12. He isn't my pick, but he's not Bob Pettit (who I consider unworthy of being discussed in the top 50 or so players).
penbeast0 wrote:You keep referencing the 60s as a weak era. It wasn't. There wasn't as large a talent pool as today, but figuring 85% of the NBA is still US born, 30 teams X 85% is still spreading the talent over 25 teams rather than 8-12 in the 60s.
Well, I'm glad you agree the talent pool today is much larger. Fewer teams to spread the talent around doesn't matter if:
1) The talent is all being concentrated on a few teams.
2) The talent is vastly less anyway. Sure, fewer teams means talent concentration, but if the talent was overall much lower then it doesn't mean much. If I concentrate a low quality acid it can easily be less acidic than a lower concentration of a far higher grade acid.
Look at some of the teams Oscar's Royals were behind through his career, he was not just losing to the Celtics and Wilt here. A lot of the teams Oscar's Royals lagged behind were simply not good. Nor were Oscar's teammates all bad, he had numerous players who were highly regarded at the time. Jerry Lucas was supposed to be a megastar, and had multiple 20-20-ish seasons with Oscar.
There are also two other factors -- first, many great athletes chose baseball or football first or chose not to play competitive sports; more than today with the lower status of baseball. Still, looking at the percentage of baseball players over 6-5, you don't get that big a lessening of the talent pool; nor are there that many Bob Kurlands in the 60s where basketball was good paying profession unlike the 50s. So, figure, another 10% drop in talent pool.
You're right that this was a big issue, but 10% is a made up number. Obviously any number would be made up, but I think you understate the problem. You have to understand, this isn't merely a matter of players opting out of the sport once they had finished college. This is a matter of kids not getting trained in the first place through school, and never realising they'd have had the talent to be ball players. Imagine what this years draft class would have been like if 80% of them never played basketball until they were 18. That's what happens when basketball isn't a truly national sport, and is in its infancy. Very few schools have coaches or programs to help players develop, or identify talented players early on, and that crushes player development. Today we have player development and school coaching that is incalculably bigger than it was during Oscar's school years, so a lot of the players who might have become rivals to Oscar never existed. And, of course, this problem is far worse because a) there were no internationals in the talent pool, and b) the infrastructure and incentives for black kids were far worse (and by 1970 they played 61% of the minutes in the NBA, today it's even higher). I doubt they were getting 10% of the talent base that they attract today. That is not to say guys who were transcendent in the early to mid 60's weren't still amazing players, but it's hard to overstate how much worse talent base was.
Finally, there is the racial issue -- which is real. In the early 60s, the NBA was still a predominantly white league but among the top talent, the level of black players v. white is more similar. Black basketball was huge in most inner cities though less prevalent than today in rural areas. I'm not convinced that today you lose a lot of the white talent to the idea that basketball is a black game -- 85% of the US population is not black; but the great majority of US born NBA talent is -- is natural talent race based or is there a cultural bias favoring black players today (a dangerous question but one that has to come up in that debate). Maybe the racial talent pool was more naturally balanced in the 60s but even if not, it's hard to believe that less than 1/3 of the great athletes over 6'5 (average NBA height in the 60s was over 6-5) hadn't considered or been recruited for basketball. IT doesn't jibe with the anecdotal evidence of the day. So, in sum, the talent pool for the 60s was not "weak sauce" but highly concentrated, especially compared to the mass expansion eras like the 70s.
Things had improved a lot by 1970, and Oscar showed he'd have been a great player in any time, but I stand by my assessment of the NBA as being very weak in the 60's. The only time it was weaker was prior to the 60's (the 50's were basically an outright joke compared to today).
I am also concerned by the misleading depictions of Oscar in Milwaukee, which are not comparable to KG's Celtics situation at all. KG went to Boston to be their best player, and while they were a very good team without him, they were clearly worse by a large margin. Oscar went to Milwaukee to be Kareem's sidekick, and it wasn't even close, and while Oscar helped the team win it's clear to me that the Bucks would have won the 1971 title without him anyway. Oscar made it easier to win, but there is a large amount of evidence telling me the Bucks were a 60 win team without him anyway.
The other point you keep making it that NBA defense was less complex then. . . . except when you want to denigrate a 60 player's defense in which case you point out that NBA offense was less complex. Well, if both the offense and defense were simpler, maybe that cancels out or you need to show that one or the other was more dominant to discount the greatness of the relatively few standout 60s players. There were really only 6 -- Russell, Wilt, West, Oscar, plus Pettit and Baylor to a lesser degree -- these players dominated the 60s and were head and shoulders over their peers, particularly the first 4 plus Pettit was more dominant in the 50s as was Baylor in the shorter time he played in that era. Some new talent came in right at the end.
But no, you keep repeating this and I don't find your arguments convincing on it.
I've spent little to no time on this point actually (discussing D v.s O). I could, but it's not necessary yet. I will take a moment to point out that Pettit and (to a lesser extent) Baylor are the odd men out in that grouping of 6 players. Pettit was not transcendent in his era, and his era was over by 1965 (while the others played a considerably longer time). Pettit's team and individual success do not stack up with those others at all.
Pettit was a 6-9, 205 pound forward whose numbers do not look good once you adjust for pace (his FG% is embarrassingly poor). His big claim to fame is winning a title the year Russell got hurt, doing it in 1958 (when the league was far weaker than even 1965) on an all-white team (the year after Russell did it with an all-white team, himself excluded). The Hawks were not an especially great team during Pettit's time there, they had sub-500. win %'s in his first 3 years there, missed the playoffs altogether in 1962, and had only 2 seasons where they played at a 50 win pace. When Pettit missed 30 games in his final season the Hawks were fine without him. The following 2 years the Hawks made the 2nd round of the playoffs with no Pettit, thanks to Zelmo Beatty, and in their 3rd year post Pettit they won 56 games (more than any year with Pettit). I seriously question if Pettit was even better than Zelmo, whose raw numbers and impact look bigger to me.
