Sedale Threatt wrote:KrAzY3 wrote:70sFan wrote:No, he didn't.
Sometimes it seems like people don't understand how hard it was to make the NBA. There were way less teams, and still a robust high school and college basketball scene. Sure they played a different style, they were coached differently and they trained differently. But the truth is guys like Wilt have athletic abilities that translate to any era. He'd just have different coaching and better training, but there's absolutely no proof that a guy like Wilt wouldn't be dominant in this era.
Wilt held his own against Kareem, Kareem held his own against Hakeem, Hakeem held his own against Shaq and Shaq won a championship after LeBron started playing in the NBA. So we can go all the way back to Wilt's time and demonstrate that there was no enormous jump in ability. I wish Shaq had dominated Hakeem for instance, but it didn't happen...
Having done a ton of reading on Wilt, I do think there's a significant amount of exaggeration when it comes to his physical abilities, much of it coming from him. Like the tale about how he dunked the ball so hard through the rim it broke Red Kerr's toe; that one came from Kerr himself, but you could have 1,000 people corroborate that and I still wouldn't believe it.
For me, personally, the guy I think who gets constantly underrated for being the ultimate NBA freak of nature is Shaq. The human race has never produced a physical specimen like that, a 7-1, 350-pound dude with a proportional body and power, explosiveness, speed, quickness and agility to burn. Wilt might have been better from a track perspective, but on the court Shaq was in a class entirely of his own IMO. (Honorable mention to David Robinson.)
All of that said, I do think it's weird that so many NBA fans seem to bend over backwards to disrespect the game's history, something I rarely see with baseball and football. Obviously somebody like George Mikan would struggle in today's game, to the point that he might not even be able to play given the demands on defending in space and spacing the floor. And so what? He played when he played, he did what he did, and he served an integral role in helping establish the NBA as a permanent fixture in US pro sports.
And Wilt ... I see the same slight lack of fluidity and explosiveness that some other posters do (which is nitpicking), but if you can't also see the speed and sheer mobility of a guy that huge, you're being willfully ignorant. An athlete of his caliber coming along in the 50s must have been like seeing an alien land on the White House lawn. And 10 years later, only a couple of months removed from returning from a catastrophic knee injury at 33, he dropped 45/27 on Willis Reed in a Finals game -- most assuredly not a plumber or mechanic.
So bottom line, Wilt was decades ahead of his time, and he would
absolutely translate to the modern game, especially if you consider advances in coaching/training/tactics. Hell, he was probably one of the first athletes to really get into weight lifting, at a point that was almost entirely a football thing. He'd also have coaches in his ear from Day 1 telling him to dunk every chance he got instead of settling for fadeaways and finger rolls, so his entire mentality would be different.
