90s physicality is not a myth, fans who watched at least one season of 90s hoops come verify

[Klayforspicy]

Im not gonna post the clips because we’ve all seen them here in there isolated situations but i just completed the 98 season and good god..

You could literally walk up to a dude and grip his neck in a strangulation motion and the ref would come up and slap the guys ass and tell them to carry on playing

no tech, no foul. It looked like WWE at times..

[Dutchball97]

Huh? The top 5 in technical fouls are Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, Rasheed Wallace, Gary Payton and Dennis Rodman. All of them played a significant portion of their careers in the 90s with Wallace being the only who didn't spend the majority of his career in the 90s.

You're sure those cases you're talking about isn't because they were already handing out so many techs they had to let some things slide or risk suspending too many star players?

[Klayforspicy]

Huh? The top 5 in technical fouls are Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, Rasheed Wallace, Gary Payton and Dennis Rodman. All of them played a significant portion of their careers in the 90s with Wallace being the only who didn't spend the majority of his career in the 90s.

You're sure those cases you're talking about isn't because they were already handing out so many techs they had to let some things slide or risk suspending too many star players?

I wasn’t saying there wasn’t any techs or suspension, i mean in this particular incident there wasn’t any overreaction in contrast to what would happen today . And there was a lot like that one

I think what you’re saying factors into it

[dacrusha]

Skill level of players was still very low at the time - you saw the same with the NHL where knuckleheads were still able to participate on the 80s and 90s, but their kind got phased out once the skilled players made their Cro-Magnon ways obsolete.

Refs whistles also blew with the times - NBA and NHL was more of a beer league in the 60s and 70s and tough guys were allowed to intimidate with little repercussion.

Once the NBA realized the brutal play was hurting their skilled players (the money makers that were now responsible for the HUGE TV deals and $$$) refs adjusted their calling accordingly and today, even the worst players can (see Brian Scalabrine et al ) have a decent enough skill set that would've have broken basketballs' yesteryear.

BTW, not to say today's game isn't physical - back in the 70-80s it was as much an intimation tactic as anything else; today's game has an enormous amount of physicality built right into the game: Jokic just brutally punishes his opponents left and right PLUS, he has the mad skills of a PG.

[Dirk]

Im not gonna post the clips because we’ve all seen them here

Post clips. Not everyone has vivid memories from 1998.

[LuDux1]

You could shoot player with machete

[dhsilv2]

Was there more contact? Well yeah, they were posting up. Were there some pretty idiotic violent hits here and there? Yes. Did 98 sorta have some hand checking near the 3 point line that impacted some guards? Sure. Was it some kind of era of WWE level wrestling vs today? good god no. It was slow, it had more iso basketball, more posting up, and you did have guys on the floor just to foul, and they called a LOT more fouls per play then than now. But when you have guys who's only real skill is fouling the other team...what do you expect? There was also a lot more standing around, guys were actively resting on some offensive plays vs today. Even on defense you might just be standing in the corner with your man.

[Klayforspicy]

Im not gonna post the clips because we’ve all seen them here

Post clips. Not everyone has vivid memories from 1998.

but Youtube only has the worst of the worst uploaded, where the refs have to intervene.

Watch on YouTube

[dhsilv2]

FYI just wanted to add that 1998 is an outlier, not as much as 99 but that's a whole other topic, from the 90's. 98 was the first year the league's PPG dropped under 100 I believe. There's little to no similarities in the overall league play style from the early 90's to that season. ~97-04 or something along those lines was a night and day more defensive focused era than say 88-93.

The point being if you "just watched one season" and it was 91 instead of 98, you'd come away with completely different views on what the "90's" play style was.

[Klayforspicy]

FYI just wanted to add that 1998 is an outlier, not as much as 99 but that's a whole other topic, from the 90's. 98 was the first year the league's PPG dropped under 100 I believe. There's little to no similarities in the overall league play style from the early 90's to that season. ~97-04 or something along those lines was a night and day more defensive focused era than say 88-93.

The point being if you "just watched one season" and it was 91 instead of 98, you'd come away with completely different views on what the "90's" play style was.

I get it.

[Fencer reregistered]

I think of the greatest physicality as being in the post or at the rim, almost regardless of era. Cleveland Shaq laid out Rajon Rondo so hard that Rondo almost never attacked the rim again. And LA Shaq banged in the post just as hard as 1980s guys did.

That said, there have been some changes. Elbows, for example, are more under control now than they used to be. (David Stern's line about Mutombo: "He was every inch a gentleman, except for his elbows.) More generally, true safety issues (hits to the head, landing areas from jump shots) are policed more now than they used to be.

[CharityStripe34]

Never understood the semantics of arguing about the physicality of the game. Everyone knows the NBA (like the other major sports) geared their game toward a cleaner, more offensive game with the elimination of illegal defense and hand-checking. The same way in the NFL you can't touch the quarterback. Doesn't mean today's players are worse, it just opened up the game.

For whatever it's worth, the NBA in the 60s and 80s (two other decades with a major influx of talent) the games were incredibly fast-paced with some bonkers box-scores. In the 90s the talent was diluted with so much expansion.

[Klayforspicy]

Some people say “ The game opened up” but a lot of the time it looks like you’re not allowed to touch certain players who are deemed “stars” but for other lesser known guys you can rough them up as if it were actually the 90s

Ironically this superstar treatment seems to have started in the late 90s.
Tbf star players can also be subjected to game fixing, and thats in any era.

[KembaWalker]

now we have a bunch of guys that can all do every move in the book and shoot 40% on 10 attempts per game from 3 because all the drills they run them through starting in preschool, but they are frail and break down before 30 because of ligament/tendon/cartilage overuse

[XTC]

These videos makes me laugh every. single. time.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

Video is clearly for the **** and giggles, so let's not get butt hurt now. I wish we could show this to the old heads like Stephen A, Skip, and some of the players from the 90's.

[Tor_Raps]

If the refs kept reffing the way they were to start the year, it would have been perfect. Instead they reverted back to calling all these unnatural BS calls. Clearly it must have been mandated from the top for them to switch back so fast.

[dhsilv2]

Some people say “ The game opened up” but a lot of the time it looks like you’re not allowed to touch certain players who are deemed “stars” but for other lesser known guys you can rough them up as if it were actually the 90s

Ironically this superstar treatment seems to have started in the late 90s.
Tbf star players can also be subjected to game fixing, and thats in any era.

The game can be opened up and the extreme foul issue could be true too. Today's game is played over a LOT more of the court when a team is in the half court. That opens the game up. It leads to more running, more sprinting, and more injuries on offense. Some guys also get fouls too easily for some fans while anyone trying to post up today is getting hacked harder than they were in the 90's on average. The game favors ball handlers attacking the basket and strongly discourages post play.

[druggas]

Some people say “ The game opened up” but a lot of the time it looks like you’re not allowed to touch certain players who are deemed “stars” but for other lesser known guys you can rough them up as if it were actually the 90s

Ironically this superstar treatment seems to have started in the late 90s.
Tbf star players can also be subjected to game fixing, and thats in any era.

It started way before then.

[Ritzo]

It was so physical, you can bit someone's ear and get away with it. Mike Tyson would've been a bball star in that era.

[HotelVitale]

Never understood the semantics of arguing about the physicality of the game. Everyone knows the NBA (like the other major sports) geared their game toward a cleaner, more offensive game with the elimination of illegal defense and hand-checking. The same way in the NFL you can't touch the quarterback. Doesn't mean today's players are worse, it just opened up the game. .

If this is the commonly accepted story, though, it seems like bad history. I don't think hand-checking has had almost any effect at all--you could never put any pressure on players and perimeter defense never relied on that--and allowing zones and non 1-on-1 defense benefits the defense, not the offense. (The restricted circle is the most impactful rule change I've seen in my bball-watching life though the 10 years after it came into effect were some of the sloggiest basketball ever.)

New skills have allowed the offensive game to change to a strategy about spacing, plain and simple. At this point a majority of players are dangerous from up to about 28-30ft from the basket, while in the 90s virtually no one was guarded that far out. The offensive sets were also simpler and were designed to get players into position to iso or post-up (or maybe take lightly contested mid-rangers, which was like half the game in the 90s). New offensive are designed to get people to use space and gaps to get clean 3s or clean lanes to the cup. That didn't happen all at once and it's still very much ongoing, the game in another 10 years will look quite different.

Without going too deep into it, I'd say that the rules had almost no impact on changing the game in that way and the slow evolution of skill and offensive strategies was at least like 95% responsible for the change in play style. But then the NBA also has seen this happening and tried to encourage it along the way, and made some changes to help it along.