Man, I hope he doesn't stay there long. Nothing against Thibs personally, but unless he's learnt from past mistakes, he's going to run those young guys into the ground.
Seeing Luol Deng, Joakim Noah, Derrick Rose and even to an extent Jimmy Butler get ground down by Thibs' insistence they play near 40 minutes has always made me a bit sad about the waste.
Such a crazy notion to expect a player to play most of a game. It’s not like they are elite athletes or anything. I guess expecting them to play more than 75% of a game is a stretch.
I could understand easing up on the second of a B2B or watching minutes for someone 35 years old, but I hate the idea that a young player playing more than 33mpg is abuse. Just 10-15 years ago playing upwards of 40 a night was normal for stars.
There's a reason 10-15 years ago player's primes were shorter.
I bet all of them would rather play right now too
Oh definitely! Not only would their careers be longer, they would have a much, much easier time scoring in today's NBA. Guys like Magic, Bird, McHale, MJ, Barkley, Olajuwon, Reggie Miller, etc. would have been devastating in today's league.
Those guys were made for the modern NBA game. Instead many of them spent half their prime hobbling around and retired early from all the physical pounding their bodies got in the old days.