Yesterday's NBA vs.Today's NBA

A common myth–Today’s NBA is so much better/more athletic/insert BS term here, than the '80s and early '90s

You hear it all the time. Usually you hear it from people who only stand to profit if the masses buy into the idea that today’s NBA is better than the NBA of yesterday. In Jemele Hill’s disastrous train wreck article written two years ago, where she said that Kobe Bryant was better than Michael Jordan, her opinions on today’s NBA struck me as particularly blind.

For those who haven’t read Hill’s article, she basically concludes that Kobe Bryant is better than Michael Jordan, dismisses all empirical or objective indicators in favor of Jordan (MVPs, winning, statistics), makes a bunch of dumbfounding assertions, and then backs all of this up with:

Her opinion and pure speculation (“Jordan would have struggled to coexist with Shaq”—when she basically has no way of knowing that)

In that article, she also blindly asserts that today’s NBA is superior to the one that Jordan played in. This argument needs to be settled separate of any Kobe v. Jordan debate, because it’s so tired and thoroughly indefensible, it’s disgusting.

Let’s take a look at Jemele Hill’s disaster and compare the 06-07 NBA to the 89-90 NBA.

Jemele Hill’s “argument” and the counter-argument

“There was definitely a difference in the level of competition during Jordan's heyday compared to now.

Yesterday's NBA player certainly was more fundamentally sound, but there's no question that today's player is bigger, stronger and faster.”

First, isn’t being more fundamentally sound a huge thing?

The 02-03 Chicago Bulls were bigger, stronger and jumped higher than just about any team from the 1980s, but they lost 52 games because Tyson Chandler, Eddy Curry and Eddie Robinson couldn’t do very basic things that Tom Coverdale and Dane Fife probably mastered by the third grade. Robinson is 6’9” with a vertical well over 40”, but he was always hurt, and really had no basketball “skill” whatsoever. Curry and Chandler have gone on to become at least competent to below average, but at that point, they would have made Chris Washburn wince.

What you’ve seen is a league where a player like Steve Nash can win an MVP by doing things that guards in the '80s who “didn’t suck” could do rather easily. John Stockton was old by 1997, when Nash was a rookie, and Nash struggled. Nobody watched him then and thought that he was fundamentally where John Stockton ever was. But that is how low expectations have become.

Expectations have become so low that Kirk Hinrich gets the star treatment in Chicago for doing basic things well and almost nothing spectacularly.

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