« Reply #72 on: May 27, 2020, 11:01:42 PM »
There are so many deserving players but I'd settle on the following for an all-time starting 5
Oscar Robinson
Michael Jordan
Larry Bird
Kevin Garnett
Bill Russell
Oscar Robinson would have been the GOAT! A hybrid of Oscar Robertson and David Robinson? That would have been special!
Gimme Bill Bird though. Bird's shooting/scoring and basketball IQ + Russell's athleticism, defense and unparalleled winning mentality. Just wow!
Michael Garnett please
Haha!
Looks like I'm yet another victim of auto-correct. I'm not even going to bother fixing my original post, it's too funny.
Yeah lol. This is my all-time hybrid starting 5:
Stephen Jordan
Michael Miller
Larry James
Kevin Nowitzki
Bill Abdul-Jabbar
Bill Abdul-Jabbar (the former Lewis Russell) is a totally unfair mash-up.
Combining 7-2 height, olympic-track-level jumping athleticism, super instinctual shot contention & team defense and unstoppable scoring touch from within 8 feet. Averages 30+ points, 25 rebounds, 6 assists, 10 blocks and 5 steals per game.
Do you mean Wilt Chamberlin?
No. Wilt was never Kareem level tall and he definitely did not have the offensive game Kareem did (high volume scoring on unrivaled efficiency + astute passing). He also lagged behind Russell a bit defensively.
Wilt led the league in assists one season (8.6 also had a 7.8 season). He led the league in FG% 9 times. Kareem led the league in FG% 1 time and obviously never led the league in assists (topped out at 5.4). Different eras so the game was different, but you are really underselling Wilt. And Wilt was 7'1' while Kareem was 7'2". Wilt is also by far the strongest player the league has ever seen. It isn't close. Wilt is an unrivaled physical specimen. It is one of the reasons he played 48.5 mpg one season (he missed like 25 minutes the entire season). Wilt was just an incredible athlete.
With plenty of Rondo assists inflating his assist tally, and FG% is a horrible metric to measure overall efficiency across eras. Admittedly Wilt had an amazing year where he balanced scoring and passing in '67 and broke rTS% while being the offensive figurehead of his squad (albeit that squad was incredibly stacked and likely inflated his box stats), but he immediately started assist hunting after that season (you can go check articles back then talking about his obsession with racking up assists after '67), he never truly found that scoring/passing equilibrium that other great offensive big men had. You're probably overrating Wilt way too much, he was amazing but Kareem was on a different level offensively, especially when you factor in how well their teams fared on offence.
He was playing with younger stars and he was past his prime when he became an assist machine. He is on the record saying that the team mattered not how many points he scored.
When the media said all he could do was score, he became an elite defender. They said he couldn't pass, he became an elite passer. When they said he only started passing because he couldn't score any more, he put on a blitz of scoring. The man was a freak which is why in his era he put up crazy numbers. Today he could probably avg the same. In the 90s though I feel his numbers would drop some. 90s had a ton of solid big men and players across each position were big and fast and more importantly were allowed more defensive liberties.
Not really, his 1967 campaign is regarded by many as his finest season. He did start to decline after that amazing year though.
And that just screams narrative to me, Wilt was a dominant defender from day one. He "couldn't" pass because he was never really could balance his scoring and passing except for 1967 (and even then it wasn't truly a perfect equilibrium) and he never really scored in bunches again after he made the shift into a Tyson Chandler/Rondo hybrid on steroids in his latter years (still an MVP calibre player though). You can always check the team results if you don't buy this, Wilt's early 60s teams were defensively dominant and they only started getting good when he went to a loaded Sixers team and found that balance under Hannum while the Lakers offences were powered by Jerry West.
Wilt scored early on because his coach asked him to. When he went to the Sixers and his coach asked to be more team oriented and pass more, he did exactly that. Wilt did what his coaches asked him to do, which was mostly based on the talent (or lack thereof) that he was playing with. There is a reason that when Wilt joined a team with real talent around him, they were the greatest team the league had seen to that point and blitzed the Celtics in 5 games.
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2023 Historical Draft - Brooklyn Nets - 9th pick
Bigs - Pau, Amar'e, Issel, McGinnis, Roundfield
Wings - Dantley, Bowen, J. Jackson
Guards - Cheeks, Petrovic, Buse, Rip