Young Shaq was so fast, so quick and so strong for a 7 footer that I think he would have been fine. And Prime Shaq was such a monster that I can’t think of anyone in the league today who could even come close to slowing him down much less knocking him off his averages. He would have owned the boards and Jesus Christ himself would have been scared to go down the lane while Shaq patrolled the paint. Sure the free-throws would have been an issue but they were always an issue so no big loss there. It’s important to remember that the NBA started to allow zone defense specifically to try and slow Shaq down…and it didn’t really work.
Jordan has often said that Dumars was his greatest challenge and once he figured out how to get the best of Joe the rest of the league didn’t stand a chance.
Basketball as a pro sports is much younger than the other big ones, and so we are just beginning to have an ancient history of it, for want of a better term. Baseball fans stil ltalk about Babe Ruth in their greatest-ever discussions; Ruth retired 13 years before the NBA existed. When Ruth was born most people didn’t even know what basketball was, unless they were regulars at a YMCA in the eastern USA, and Ruth wasn’t even a figure in the early days of baseball; he debuted in 1914, at which point baseball had been an important professional sport for decades. The NFL and NHL started around the same time Ruth’s career began, so while not as old as baseball, they are older than the NBA, and were well established sports, of course, prior to the formation of those leagues.
I am 48, and I am a white guy who grew up in a small Canadian city, but even then we knew who Kareem and Dr. J were. When Jordan arrived he was a sensation. I doubt, though, that 1% of my peers knew who Bill Russell was or could tell you anything about him. Kids have a sense of the now, not history, and they carry those impressions with them the rest of their lives. Those impressions are not only of what figures were important, but of the STYLE of play. I tend to think of the way pro sports were played in my formative years of the 1980s as being the baseline against which the sports are measured; baseball had way more basestealing and 20-game winners, hockey had way more scoring, football was more conservative in the running/passing mix, and we’ve discussed 1980s basketball, which was rougher and 3-point shooting wasn’t important.
I mean, will we ever see a low post man like Jordan again? A force of nature like Shaq? Maybe not. That’s true of all sports; if you watch hockey for the next 200 years you might never see a guy with the behind the net play like Gretzky. You might never see a linebacker revolutionize the NFL like Lawrence Taylor did. You’ll see something else cool though. As long as world-class athletes are competing for the riches and glory the NBA offers, SOMETHING amazing is going to happen.
I will say this; even if someone becomes a better player than Jordan, his importance in the game’s history will likely never be surpassed. Jordan had impacts on the NBA and popular culture far beyond his playing ability. He is in that regard similar to Gretzky and Ruth in a way Bill Russell, Magic Johnson and LeBron James cannot be.
As an aside I would like to take my hat off to all of the Canadians who have embraced the Raptors and the NBA in general. It looks like it took a decade or two for things to really get rolling and even longer to put yourselves in the championship conversation but you guys finally have a team that is worthy of the fan support that they have received for a good while now. Truly a well run organization and I love how you make a home for a lot of the international players in ways that most other organizations (not named San Antonio) don’t.
I bet that ring last year felt really good and it was well deserved.
Of course, this is all assuming you’re a Raps fan…if not then please pass along my sentiments.
The team has always been very, very well supported. The arrival of Vince Carter pretty much coincided with the “new expansion team” glow wearing off, so that was well timed.
100% agree with this, which is why I acknowledged in my first post that Jordan is the GOAT. The disagreements have been about who’s better, and I have yet to find a Jordan backer in the MJ vs. LBJ debate who has changed his or her mind about that. I do think the tide will turn after LeBron has retired and more people have had a chance to fully reflect on both careers.
I am a baseball fan first and foremost, but I will be the first to say that a live NBA game is a sports experience that must be experienced to be believed. If offered free tickets to a Raptors game or a Blue Jays game, I’ll take the Raptors tickets every single time (and that’s assuming no arbitrage; obviously, Raptors tickets are more expensive, so if you can resell it’s the only logical choice but never mind that.) The energy is simply out of this world. The Leafs don’t generate that kind of energy. Not even close. Anyone who hasn’t been to an NBA game must, at least once in their lives, invest in really good seats and go experience it.
Anyway, the Raptor is a part of it and everyone loves him. When they chose “Raptors” as the team nickname they were rightfully mocked for basically riding off “Jurassic Park” but in retrospect, they’re made the best of it - they actually make the exterior fan area “Jurassic Park,” and use the dinosaur theme in a lot of cool ways.
(Both MJ and LBJ would destroy these teams, regardless of rule set.)
Guys, I still feel that if you took 12 1993-era MJ’s and 12 2013-era LBJ’s in a best of 7, MJ’s would win.
I also still think the MJ vs LBJ discussion wasn’t what was asked by the OP. And if I had to rank quality of opponents, I would say that MJ had the worse of it at the beginning of his career (started amazingly difficult and got easier into the late 90s) and LBJ had the worse of it nearing the end of his career (started off relatively easy, but then got worse when Durant, Westbrook, Curry, etc improved).
One thing in LBJ’s favor: he dominated in far more different eras than MJ did. LBJ went from the hand-check ISO ball era of Iverson and early Bryant to the “lob it from 30 feet and fuxk the midrange shot” era of Thompson and Curry. MJ did not.
Though, again, Jordan purposely went 6-6 from the arc in a first half of a Finals game, so the man could make threes if that’s what the style of the game… or his thirst for vengeance… demanded.
Today’s version of the NBA is a superior version of the game than it was when Jordan was playing. Don’t get me wrong: the individual one-on-one game was more entertaining, and the rivalries and physical intensity during the playoffs were must-see TV. It’s strictly my opinion based on memory, which is admittedly fading, but it seemed that teams like the Knicks, Heat, Pacers, and others just started copying what the Pistons did, and it just made for a bad product in terms of fundamentals. The game devolved into hard fouls and dunking, but the perimeter shooting and passing was just crap.
Consider the example of the Lakers and Kings during their rivalry. Going back to the early 2000s, the Sacramento Kings nearly defeated the Lakers twice during their championship run. The Kings were not really cut out to compete in the more physical late 1990s version of basketball, and yet they still pushed the Lakers to a decisive game 5 in their first round playoff series. Two years later, with the introduction of the zone, the Kings nearly defeated the two-time champion Lakers in a controversial 7-game series that went into overtime, and some observers felt that had there been different referees on the court, the Kings might have actually won that contest. Those Lakers were in their prime, and yet they really struggled to keep up with a team that frankly didn’t have any real superstars but instead had good players at each position who were skilled in the fundamentals and knew how to move the ball. When I look at the Kings-Lakers match-up, I can’t help but think that a team like the Warriors from 2015-19 would have torched L.A.
And if I had to rank quality of opponents, I would say that MJ had the worse of it at the beginning of his career (started amazingly difficult and got easier into the late 90s) and LBJ had the worse of it nearing the end of his career (started off relatively easy, but then got worse when Durant, Westbrook, Curry, etc improved).