NBA: Charles Barkley Continues Crusade Against Small-Ball

It’s mid-July! Do you know what this means? As the stream of legitimate basketball news slows to a trickle and the pool of NBA neophytes slowly dries up under the Las Vegas summer sun, it’s time for us to engage in everyone’s favorite seasonal pastime by playing a rousing round of “Things Former NBA Players Said at a Recent Charity Golf Tournament.”

This week’s contestant is none other than Sir Charles Barkley and his sweeping dismissal of non-big man oriented play centered around smaller, interchangeable players and outside shooting. Or, you know, the style of play that just won the Golden State Warriors the 2015 NBA title.

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The Barkley-as-basketball-Luddite bit has already been burnt to a crisp, but every now and then, just when hoops academics have turned their attention elsewhere, he bites the head off another chicken by claiming everything we just witnessed was some kind of mirage.

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle interview, Barkley, headed to Lake Tahoe to participate in the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament, held firm in his much-maligned viewpoints on the evolution of the NBA game at large.

In an era where backpedaling and endless spin often follow any controversial statement, it’s actually sort of refreshing to hear someone take a stance, stick to it, take a break, then stick to it some more even in the face of devastating statistical and anecdotal evidence. Good on you Charles:

"‘I think that’s really unfair,’ said Barkley, who is going to Lake Tahoe this week to play in the American Century Championship, a celebrity golf tournament held at Edgewood. ‘I’ve been doing basketball (analysis) for 16 years. I’ve always said I don’t think that you can have success with that style. My philosophy hasn’t changed. I still think you need big guys.’Fair enough. But didn’t the Warriors’ just disprove that theory?‘When you have shooters like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, you have a chance to hold that up,’ said Barkley. ‘How many teams are going to have two shooters like that?’Not many. And even fewer will have the kind of defense the Warriors played all season. Fundamentally, that’s where Sir Charles’ theory breaks down. The Warriors didn’t win on jump shots, alone. They were the No. 1-ranked defensive team in the NBA. And they had some muscle, too, with Andrew Bogut and Draymond Green laying the wood in the paint.But let’s not let the facts get in the way of this discussion. Barkley’s point of view is shared by many in the NBA. Just look at who the Spurs went after this offseason. LaMarcus Aldridge and David West are frontcourt players. And going big looks like Gregg Popovich’s strategy to counter the Splash Brothers’ sharpshooting next season.‘The Spurs realize that big teams still win,’ said Barkley. ‘It’ll always be a big man’s game. The Spurs didn’t go out and get a bunch of small guys. I fundamentally believe it’s still a big man’s game.’We get the picture, Charles. Big, big, big. But isn’t there a little part of you that sees a new game emerging? The wide-open style championed by the Warriors (literally) has to mean something.‘Congratulations to the Warriors on the win,’ said Barkley. ‘But I would love to see what would’ve happened if the Cavs had Love and Irving.’"

So much to unpack here. Before backhandedly undermining their championship, Barkley actually makes a fair point about the fact that what the Warriors have in Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson is almost impossible to replicate.

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As Saracevic notes, not many teams are going to have access to that kind of dynamic perimeter play, and will thus have to find alternative ways to construct rosters and systems that can be successful in the modern NBA.

The point about the Spurs is where, even when Barkley stumbles into being right, he finds a way to be wrong.

Sure, the Spurs had an offseason for the ages in nabbing both LaMarcus Aldridge and David West—both frontcourt players—to bolster their already strong core of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard, but claiming that San Antonio’s roster moves this summer indicate some kind of nod back to the NBA’s hulking orthodoxy of the ’80s and ’90s would all but define intellectual dishonesty.

Whether you’re looking at the Spurs team that narrowly lost to the Heat in 2013, the team that won it all in 2014 or the squad that got bounced in the first round this season, San Antonio has been a jump shooting team for some time now.

Yes, many still hail Tim Duncan as the sun of the Spurs solar system, and that distinction is well earned, but it hasn’t been accurate to claim that their offense revolves around the Big Fundamental’s post up game for at least five seasons.

The Spurs evolved into an offensive juggernaut due to their pristine spacing, relentless ball movement, and yes, long range accuracy—Per ESPN Stats, San Antonio hasn’t finished outside of the top six in three-point percentage since 2010.

On top of all that, despite being power forwards with excellent post-up games, both West and Aldridge primarily make their living as mid-range jump shooters, not back-to-the-basket bruisers.

Many of the NBA’s stylistic tendencies, including the league’s current dearth of dominant big men, are cyclical. The trend toward smaller, more versatile players may yield more instances of the popularly titled “market inefficiencies” in areas like post defense and rebounding that eventually lead to a change in philosophy.

If a playoff series was starting to hinge on a team’s 6’6” center getting brutalized by a truly gifted and efficient post player, said team would be forced to re-evaluate its strategy, obviously. The same is true for league-wide trends over longer periods of time.

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As for the Warriors, the idea that they can’t “have success with that style” has been thoroughly debunked. While it may be premature to proclaim the Dubs as the new blueprint for long term success in the analytically minded new era of NBA basketball, they did, by definition, just achieve the very success Sir Charles is referring to.

Basketball at the professional level is a living, breathing, evolving organism. Every instance of overzealous saturation of capital in one area could eventually lead to a paucity of assets in another.

That never-ending search for balance is part of what makes NBA team building such a fascinating exercise to behold and criticize – it’s an outlandishly expensive game of whack-a-mole from year to year. Those attempting to foist rigid stylistic and positional boundaries upon something as fluid as basketball are missing half the fun.

Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time, coaching staffs will have a figured out this wild n’ crazy new wave of three pointers and pick and rolls. Maybe we’re only a few seasons away from the behemoths of yesteryear making a triumphant return to the hardwood to stamp out the Lilliputians flitting about their hallowed turf.

While that isn’t likely, I hope for entertainment’s sake that lovable curmudgeons like Charles Barkley don’t stop crowing about the good ol’ days, the way we were and how things oughta be, otherwise we’re in for a long summer.

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NBA: Charles Barkley Continues His Crusade Against Small-Ball

By Jameson Miller | Jul 15, 2015

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