og15 wrote:One_and_Done wrote:Bird played in a league that was only garbage, not hot garbage, so him.
This does nothing to answer the question. The question wasn't which player had more advanced basketball skills.
The overall strength of the league you play in doesn't inherently make it easier to win unless you are the dominant team. The difficulty in winning is based on the relative strength of your team compared to the best opponent you face. Wilt was not on the Celtics.
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The Celtics were advantaged in a non reproducible way during the early era of the NBA that it isn't really rational to judge guys in the 60's based on championships the same way you might judge guys in different eras.
In general every evaluation of championship success requires us to look at era, player performance, strength of the players team and strength of opponents (of course hindsight has to be checked as best as possible when doing this too). Championships don't happen in a vacuum.
In the modern NBA, you can't even build and sustain the types of teams the early Celtics had since there was no salary cap until the mid 80's.
Then we have to take into account strategy during the onset of a sport at the professional level. When something is novel, everyone is in a sense guessing (hypothesizing), and we learn from data and trial and watching others and seeing what works and what doesn't or what is more effective vs less effective.
If you're an innovator in the early times of a sport, you will have a larger advantage than in later times, and in the late 50's and 60's you don't have thousands of people breaking down all this film so they can copy everything you do. Nowadays a high-school coach can watch, learn and implement professional coaching strategies using YouTube, not to talk of professional teams abilities to break things down.
So we have to understand what we are comparing when we are making the comparisons.
Yeh I just fundamentally disagree with you.
I'll say this though; a player can transcend their bad league. Bird would be a star today, and I generally rank him around 10th all-time. So I'm not down on Bird per se. He would translate.
Bird's league was still trash compared to today though, and I am not going to reward a guy for being born earlier, because then I'm punishing people for being born too late.
It's too speculative to imagine how someone would play if they grew up today, we can only give them the skillset they actually had. In Bird's case though this isn't much of a problem.