skbucks1985 wrote:All athletes are products of their eras and if you're going to compare athletes across eras you should do it based on what they did in their eras. What makes this conversation so weird to me is that I think people can do this with football. Art Shell is one of the greatest Offensive Tackles in NFL history, Myles Garrett would also probably use him as a tackling dummy. I don't think a lot of people view either statement as particularly controversial or contradictory. For various reasons people seem to use the teleportation device argument a lot more frequently when talking about basketball.
It's because basketball from the 50's and now is 2 different games and football remains football.
Football players would not have as hard of a time with the time machine argument. Knowledge gap for sure but when I watch football from 60's it still looks like football to me, can swap players across eras and don't have to do backflips with your brain to justify a player ranking