I'd like to see one replay of Jordan getting touched on a drive to the basket without a foul being called.
Some of my junior high school friends thought Earl Monroe carried the ball a lot. I didn't care; it was fun to watch.
KD, Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, Porzingis, now (almost) Holmgren, and the French prospect Victor Wembanyama....think of all the skilled 7-footers not to mention how many guys 6'8-6'10ish that can play like guards....I agree it is an army of freaks out there today. It used to be KG and Grant Hill were freaks, now there's dozens of them
There definitely are some good centers out there, although not at the level of Kareem, Shaq, Wilt and some others. However, they are from other countries.
Way back in the time of Wilt and Kareem the game was dominated by US players. Sabonis in his prime was of that caliber and played on the Soviet team. Not Russian, BTW. Lithuanian and was on the Lithuanian bronze medal team in Barcelona when the Dream Team won the gold. I still have two tee shirts produced by the Grateful Dead promoting that team to even be able to travel to the Olympics. A Lithuanian player (Marciulionis sp?) played on Golden State so it became a Bay Area thing. We only got to see him in the NBA late in his career with shot knees and was still good enough. The game is now international so of course there will be a lot of international players at the top of the game. Yes, Anthony David was a generational talent at UK. It was a joy to see him play anyone but the Gators.
My brother spent two years in Thailand during the Vietnam war in the Air Force. NBA was kind of a big thing there for some reason. Earl Monroe was called the thai word for "black pearl" on TV. LOL. That is the story he told me. Even if it isn't true it is pretty good.
I only called a carry once in a pick up game. I didn't mind when guys took the ball from below to get a little extra on it when going the other way because I could see it and react it it. That is pretty much standard operating procedure now. The time I called it the guy palmed the ball, went to his left and then back to his right. That was just too much. He didn't argue.
I watched Jordan plenty, and, yes, he had to play in a lot of physical games. I'd still like to see a video showing him get fouled on a drive with it not being called. Seemed like he got a lot of phantom calls to me - to go along with the legitimate fouls. That's what I took to mean "Jordan Rules" back in the day, although I hear other definitions now. Today's game doesn't generally have the hard message-sending fouls of yore, because you can't get away with it these days and stay in the game. But it's not like those hard fouls back then were constantly happening during a game. That's why team's had "enforcers" - to send the "message" right back. And, if another hard foul occurred, there'd often be a fight. Fights happened, but not all the time. It was news when fights happened because they didn't happen all the time.
