OT (Kinda): Hate for the enthusiastic unathletic looking white guy
Larry Bird was pretty much worshipped by America's sporting press. Even announcers for opposing teams slobbered his nutz. What Thomas said was that if Bird were white he'd be regarded as just another player. The comment was bullshit--and Thomas was universally slammed for it. I do agree the Bird hype was pretty over the top at the time though not with that comment.
If Bird were black he would be regarded as just another player
Whoops--yes! Good catch. Larry Bird is white!
deserves his own list, mGrowOld. Guy could only jump two inches off the floor. But he was tough as nails under the boards and on D, and did that pick and pop for 3 like a machine. Made you pay big time when you drove the lane - his fouls were legit. Huge overachiever. Heart of the Bad Boys, in my opinion.
loved Laimbeer as a player, but what he did as a businessman was just disgusting. I don't know if he ever ended up paying, but at one point he closed his box company and stiffed his employees out of their last 2 weeks pay.
and do pretty well?
EDIT: can you imagine lambeer doing his best 'field of dreams' speech, trying to reign in his temper, " there's no crying in basketball!!'
field of dreams...
my bad
As a 43-year old UM/Pistons fan, that warms my heart to know that. Thank you.
I have to admit, I would have hated Laimbeer's guts if he'd played for anybody else. (And that's without him going to Notre Dame.) Had I been a neutral observer, I would have thought he was a real prick.
But he was our prick, so that made it OK.
I met him in 2006, when he was coaching the Shock. He was a perfectly nice, pleasant guy - and his wife was gorgeous and charming. So I guess being a designated villain pays off.
But he was our dick, and you are supposed to like your own dick
Too many folks have the 'Dark Side' running through their veins and look to release that negative competitive emotional response.
I hate them.
Well, I don't think they were all hated for the same reasons. As much as people hated Craft, I can't recall anyone saying anything bad about him personally. People hated him because announcers fawned over him nonstop. Grayson Allen has played dirty and has looked like a whiny kid.
Also, a lot of people hate Duke, so that compounds things with Allen. I don't remember Tyler Hansbrough getting a lot of hate, but I could definitely be wrong about that since I don't watch that much basketball.
trips, hits, and i can only imagine the trash talk. has absolutely zero to do with how much melanin is in his skin. i have no doubt he will have some serious troubles in his adult life, whether its in or out of the NBA.
as for bird, he was one of the two or three best basketball players ever. what he lacked in flat out athletic talent like jordan had, he made up for it with his court intelligence and unflappable heart.
Bird's problem then is that he wasn't a very good defensive player. Magic may have been a Spartan, but he was better at most phases of the game. Bird was an excellent player--maybe top ten all time, but certainly not top 5. He was better than Isiah Thomas--got to give him that.
Ugh, people always say this but it simply isn't true--basketball teams have always played defense and valued defense and players who were good at it. I was around and watching games then. I made these criticisms of Larry Bird in the 80s. Then as now, people didn't play d in all-star games, but other than that, you got guarded, shoved, and knocked down if you fucked around in the paint against a vet. The difference is in the caliber of the athletes. Guys then just couldn't move like players today. The athleticism today is off the charts.
Sorry, but it's true. Games were much higher-scoring back then, even though few people took 3-pointers. Playoff games routinely would go into the 120s.
Defense was a lower priority than offense in most peoples' minds back then. You watch clips from the '80s and guys get open much more easily than today. They didn't have to use the off-arm and all the other little tricks to get separation. There would be the odd defensive specialist here and there but most guys had awful technique.
The Bad Boy Pistons really brought about a paradigm shift. It's not that NBA players suddenly became way more athletic in the span of a few years. Chuck Daly's Pistons basically Moneyballed the rest of the league, putting a lot more emphasis on that end of the court (and using physicality to throw teams off their game, too).
Defense wasn't as effective because the athletes weren't as good as they are today--that's why games were higher scoring. Also, the Pistons were known as the 'Bad Boys' because took a lot of cheap shots at people and played dirty. And yes, they were a great defensive team--but just because this is true doesn't mean that other teams prior to them hadn't played, practiced, worked on defense. They were just exceptionally good and unusally dedicated to d, to the point of starting a rebounding specialist who couldn't score at all--that was new. But prior to them, teams did...play...defense. Hell, I remember one of the complaints about basketball in the 90s was that college teams were focusing more on recruiting athletes than players with scoring skills and that was degrading the level of offense in the NBA. And yeah, at the time, I marveled at the way guys like Jordan, Drexler, Olajuwon, and Ewing (before the bad knees) heralded a new wave of big athletes who moved like small athletes, rather than the mechanical man ways of dudes like Russell, McHale, Parrish, Laimbeer.
Pound for pound, I'd take Zeke. Chuck Daly said if Isaiah was 6'5" he'd be best in the world. Dr J also called him the best little man in the game.
bird was way better than magic at the most important thing in basketball...shooting.
Is the best shooter on the team always the best player? Not at all. Magic played the most important position on the floor--point gurd. He played point guard at 6'9". He could also slide to forward and easily dominate there--he ended his career as a power foward. In one championship, after Kareem went down, he flipped to center and kicked ass. Magic was the best of his era. Again, too bad he was a Spartan.
Larry Bird was great and is a legit hall of famer, but he was never a top three basketball player all time.
I never hated Grayson Allen until I heard about the dirty play stuff. Granted I never watched him play that much...