Old Guys Having Trouble With Newfangled NBA

The NBA has changed since the halcyon days of the 1990s and some former players and coaches are having trouble digesting those changes.

Honestly, it’s gotten sort of embarrassing.

Not a week goes by without someone from my generation blasting the current state of play in the NBA.

Charles Barkley was the latest, going on ESPN’s Mike & Mike last week and blasting away at the league.

You can hear his comments in the video below:

He says he’s “not no old guy hating,” but it sure sounds an awful lot like, “The game is different from when I was a superstar, so that makes it bad” to my ears.

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On Saturday, columnist Bernie Lincicome of the Chicago Tribune doubled down on all the recent hate, declaring, “The 3-point shot was created for people who couldn’t play basketball.”

Seriously?

I’m willing to give Oscar Robertson a pass on his recent criticism of the game. He was a member of the most underappreciated generation of superstars in NBA history, playing in the early 1960s, an era perceived by most of today’s fans as a time when 5-foot-9 substitute teachers ruled the NBA.

Never mind that when Robertson came into the league out of the University of Cincinnati in 1960, the NBA consisted of eight teams with 10-man rosters, meaning the NBA had a whopping 80 players.

That’s a pretty small percentage of the population (the 1960 U.S. Census placed the population at more than 179 million, meaning NBA players comprised 0.000000446 percent of that population).

So I’m guessing the game was a lot less watered down than, say, in the early 1970s, when between the NBA and ABA there were 29 teams with rosters of 11 or 12 players—two decades before anyone from outside the United States began to matriculate to professional basketball in North America.

But we revere the New York Knicks of the 1970s and dismiss the feats of Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and his contemporaries. Makes perfect sense.

One of the things Barkley is decrying is a lack of competitive balance, that there are only “four or five teams” worth watching right now.

This is different from the 1980s and 1990s how … exactly? Those eras were dominated by a handful of teams.

I’m almost 50 years old (it’s true, my birth certificate has the yellowing to prove it), but I can’t subscribe to the “it was better back in my day” chants that so many former players and so many media members are throwing around right now.

About 20 years ago, I made a discovery that has shaped much of my life as I transitioned from mere adulthood into this dreaded ground people refer to as “middle age.” That discovery? For most people, there is one simple rule: All change is always bad, always.

Is the NBA game different now than it was 20 years ago? Unquestionably. Is it worse? Not that I’ve noticed.

It’s just, well, different.

That happens to be the same thing noticed 20 years ago, when the game was unquestionably different than it had been 20 years earlier.

The stars of the 1980s and 1990s are perhaps the most revered group in the history of the game. Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Barkley and others stand as monoliths to what was best and brightest about NBA basketball.

I was raised on the fast pace and off-ball movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Offenses were beautiful, flowing works of motion and ball reversal and teams such as the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers and the early Bird-era Celtics were masters of the fast break, turning rebounds and turnovers into rapid-fire points at the other end.

But as the 1980s waned and the 1990s dawned, something had changed. The Lakers and Celtics got older and the runout opportunities were less frequent. In Detroit, Chuck Daly slowed the pace of play to a crawl with a new style of offense that I once described as “one guy dribbling, one guy setting a pick, three guys checking out chicks over in a far corner.”

As the ‘90s progressed, Pat Riley went from Showtime with the Lakers to slow time with the New York Knicks and across the league possessions seemed to last 23.998 seconds each.

It was different from what I grew up with. Not worse; just different.

The past several seasons have seen an explosion in 3-point attempts, prompting old hands such as Lincicome to decry how commonplace the shot has become.

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If there is one aspect of the 3-pointer I would change, it would be to simply widen the floor enough to allow for the 3-point line to be a uniform 23 feet, 9 inches all the way around—the idea that a 22-point shot from the top of the key is worth two points and the same distance from the corner is worth three still defies logic to me.

(And spare me the “visual effect” being different in the corner argument—22 feet is 22 feet. I know this because once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I took shots from both places.)

Honestly, as a member of the same generation as Barkley and perhaps only a bit younger than Lincicome, it’s sort of embarrassing to keep hearing this talk. They are engaging in the same “get the hell off my lawn” mentality we all swore we would never subscribe to.

I loved the NBA in the 1970s. Then it changed in the 1990s and I still loved it.

Now it’s 2016 and for at least one of us old heads, it’s not worse.

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It’s just different … and that’s OK.