By better do you mean they matched or exceeded AI's finals appearances?

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Successful calls:

Kyrie Irving will never win anything as a team's alpha: check
T.rubisky is a bust: check
Ben Simmons is a liability: check
The Fields Cult is dumb: double check

2013 CSFMB ROY

Iverson was definitely better than Kyrie and it's incorrect to say the team got better when he got traded. They won three less games that year than the year before. Let me know when Kyrie gets a team to the Finals without anyone else on the team averaging 15 ppg. Iverson had to be selfish to give his team a chance.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

You really can't get an idea from that old footage. Do you think Ruth took those little baby steps? Film degrades. Cousy was almost certainly better than Pippen.

It's a conceit of younger people like Boilermaker Rick to think everything is always on the improve. Man did not change as a species over forty years. He ate better and took more drugs.

Let me make the point this way. In the 70s a horse came on the scene in New York named Big Towner. Now, keep in mind that a generation for a horse is 3-4 years rather than 18-30 for a man. The sire of Big Towner was a horse named Gene Abbe who was born in 1944. Thirty years or ten generations of purposeful breeding had passed by the time Big Towner was born. (If you find old videos from horses in the 50s they look like the equivalent of Cousy compared to a modern race.) How could Big Towner possibly compete against the modern fashionably bred pedigrees of the time? Well, he beat everything in New York on the regular. There just isn't this drastic physical difference, though it may seem that way because of outside things like improved nutrition and drugs.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Selfish? Have you ever looked at that bunch of bums he nearly carried to a championship? He probably should have been even more "selfish".

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Freedom is our Strength.

You're conflating physical traits with skills. The guys in the league today have devoted their entire lives solely to becoming better at playing basketball. Basketball is as much a skill game as a game of physical dominance. I'm not saying Pippen is better than Cousy was because he's a more evolved athlete(although he's certainly a better athlete), im saying he's better because he almost certainly put in a lot more hours to it and it shows in nearly every facet. You want to turn this into an old vs young debate because you know on its merits you're arguing a ridiculous case. I'm not saying Austin Rivers is better than cousy so you can stop with that red herring.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

The thing I love about these era discussions is that there are no ultimate right answers as video games are the only arena where current players can match up against former players. It also includes a generation gap face-off.

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God is the uncaused cause of the universe. He had no beginning and has no end. He is not bound by the laws of the universe he created.

Don't forget the talent pool today is probably 500 times larger than when Cousy played.

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But the hours of practice are circumstantial as well. It's not Cousy's fault that he had to sell insurance in the summer to makes ends meet while Scottie lifted weights and dribbled while being fed testosterone by Tim Grover. If Cousy were playing in the 90s he would have done those things too. You can only compare them by looking at what they did in the times they played and then looking at who was better. And in this case, it's clearly Cousy.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I know a lot of guys don't agree with JORR and LTG's assessments of some modern players, and I'm wondering if this disagreement is not about the merits of the players themselves but rather just an experiential thing. Let me give you an example: I was in middle school and HS when Vince Carter entered the league and set it on fire with his amazing dunks. It was the best time to be a fan for me in retrospect because I wasn't as cynical as I am now and my youthfulness generally made everything appear to be fantastic. Nowadays I've got punk teenagers coming up to me talking about Zach Levine or someone else being the best dunker ever or whatever, and invariably my response goes something like "well, do you know Vince Carter, blah blah blah" like some old man yelling at cloud bitch I thought I'd never be.

I get it. Those punk teens are the new crop of middle/high schoolers thinking the players in front of them right now and here are the shit, and they don't care about guys who were balling before they were born or while they were still in diapers. And even as they get older I'm sure their perspective will become more balanced but that still won't erase the peak fan experiences they've had as youngsters watching Zach Levine or something dunking on the rest of the league. It's a sort of presentist bias that leads them to hold onto certain truths that become more rigid over time as they inevitably move away from being a full-time fan, or at least as rabid of a fan as they were when they were young.

The short way of saying this is I wondering if in, let's say, 30 years me or FF or LYK or whomever will be the new JORR/LTG/etc of this board trying to tell someone born in 2030 that there's no way some small forward born in 2025 is better than Dirk or LBJ or KD or whomever because of blah blah blah, while that person replies that LBJ, KD, etc., weren't shit, and that they were old and slow and decrepit and couldn't do this or that, etc.

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Successful calls:

Kyrie Irving will never win anything as a team's alpha: check
T.rubisky is a bust: check
Ben Simmons is a liability: check
The Fields Cult is dumb: double check

2013 CSFMB ROY

Although 500 times is grossly overstating it, this is a legitimate argument. But one that works in reverse when discussing baseball- even in the pre-Robinson era, and especially afterward during the 50s and 60s- when every athlete in America was trying to play professional baseball.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Are you nuts? I might have beat this guy one on one in my prime. Look at him.....Sheeesh!

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

No, at some point you can compare how good they actually are. Because if you take your thinking to its logical end point then the best player in 1945 is as good as Magic Johnson/Jordan/LeBron. It's just ridiculous. At a certain point it's not disrespectful to watch two guys play, even from different eras, and say yeah ok this guy is clearly better, regardless of circumstance.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Jim Thorpe

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It's already happening. How can it be that players "evolved" so that a comparison of Cousy and Pippen is absurd (in favor of Pippen) but that evolution abruptly stopped so that LeBron James could never be as good as Michael Jordan?

Also, thank you for bringing up Vince Carter, another guy who was better than Scottie Pippen.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Yukan Moose Cholak

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

It probably plays a role but I think there are times when you can be somewhat objective. Kobe is my favorite player of all time (despite being a rapist) but I would never argue that he's better than Jordan now. If you tell me LeBron is better than Kobe I won't listen to you even though he probably is.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

If someone shows me clips of LeBron at his best I can justifiably counter with Jordan clips that are equally impressive. You can't do the same if me and you want to start posting videos of Cousy and Pippen. And like a fat middle aged newscaster you blame the camera

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
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Because guys like Ruth and Jordan are that special that they transcend any era.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Nah. Even I, as the author of that shitty list, can't go there. I thought guys who criticized me should at least credit me for having the sense to not place the following guys on that list of players better than Pippen:

VC
Paul Pierce
Iverson
Webber
Ming
Kemp
Penny
Dwight Howard

_________________
Successful calls:

Kyrie Irving will never win anything as a team's alpha: check
T.rubisky is a bust: check
Ben Simmons is a liability: check
The Fields Cult is dumb: double check

2013 CSFMB ROY

Penny would have been and I can't complain if you say Iverson.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

You wanted credit for not saying Dwight Howard is better than Pippen? Do you also wish to be given credit for tying your shoes and stopping your car at a red light?

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Okay, let's try it like this. Cousy averaged 13 playing with Havlicek who averaged 16 playing with Bernard King who averaged 28 playing with Gary Payton who averaged 15 while playing with LeBron. It only seems like the old guys couldn't compete.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Dwight Howard was no joke for like five years in this league. Had he kept it up he would have been better than Pippen.

_________________
Successful calls:

Kyrie Irving will never win anything as a team's alpha: check
T.rubisky is a bust: check
Ben Simmons is a liability: check
The Fields Cult is dumb: double check

2013 CSFMB ROY

Right. Because Jordan isn't on film. He's on tape that doesn't degrade the same way.

Why did this evolution stop with Michael Jordan?

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Freedom is our Strength.

He was great for like two years. Really just the one.

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I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Best combination of dunker/3-point shooter in NBA history.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I haven't really mentioned evolution at all. That's not my argument on why Pippen is better than Cousy. I've never once claimed that all players are better than the previous eras players. That's a strawman you go to often, not sure why.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Well, what is it then? Pippen clearly isn't better on the numbers.

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Freedom is our Strength.

He's obviously a vastly superior defender and rebounder, much better shooter, obviously a more explosive athlete. Ball handling and passing ability don't favor Cousy as much as they would need to in order to make up for all the other facets that favor Pippen. It's really not close.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

OMG. Vince Carter was so bad on defense, it shouldn't even be discussed. I just threw up a little.

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