Stark
The Winds of Winter
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I've been working on making my top-50 players of all-time list, and I've noticed that I'm going to end up having a bunch of things that are different from the average fan, so I figured we could have this thread to throw our crazy and off-the-wall opinions out there. Here are some of mine:
Feel free to rip me apart or give your own unpopular opinions.
- Chris Paul is far superior to John Stockton; not a knock on Stockton, but just goes to show how highly I regard CP3.
- David Robinson, Karl Malone, and Moses Malone are all top-15 players in NBA history. David Robinson is consistently criminally underrated.
- Tim Duncan was a better and more impactful player than Kobe Bryant.
- Larry Bird was a better and more impactful player than Magic Johnson. Johnson, despite all his length and ability to play "positionless" basketball, was an average defender on his best day. He was a better playmaker than Bird of course, but Bird had him in overall scoring, shooting, post play, defense, and leadership.
- VERY few players considered stars pre-1980 would still be considered a star in today's NBA. A few notable exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are guys like Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Lanier, Elgin Baylor, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I feel like guys like Bob Cousy, Paul Arizin, and Gail Goodrich would be average NBA starters at best.
- On the contrary, I feel that your typical upper-level rotation player in today's NBA (mostly big men), would be superstars back in the 1960s/70s. Guys like Andre Drummond, Hassan Whiteside, and DeAndre Jordan would average 25/25/5 with relative ease in that era.
- Bill Russell is the most overrated player in NBA history and would be no more than Ben Wallace was should he have played in the 21st century. I'll be surprised if I have him anywhere near my top-40/45 players. He was a winner and a great leader, but he would be as run of the mill as can be in today's NBA.
- The top-end talent among each era is incredibly comparable (guys like Wilt vs. Shaq, Jordan vs. LeBron, and Bird vs. Durant), however, the average talent of a roster in 2018 is far higher than that of a roster in 1988. A lot of that has to do with international players being integrated into today's game.
Feel free to rip me apart or give your own unpopular opinions.
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