100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 8 Apr \ on: Comparing athletes across generations mostly_harmless
Super cool post.
Another thing that gets muddled in here is: what are the ingredients to greatness? To take a trivial example, the ingredients for greatness for pro ballers in the 60s almost never included having to deal with constant scrutiny starting before you have pubes and then unfathomable wealth when you're still a teenager. Think whatever you like about the nature of those challenges, the skills to successfully circumvent them (or perhaps, take advantage of them) are different from the equivalent challenges 60 years ago. There's no reason to expect that people optimized to succeed now would have been the same as the ones optimized for it then.
The more interesting question, to me, is to go full science fiction: what if Michael Jordan were transported through time, into the current era? Or maybe Allen Iverson? Setting aside the differences in training, nutrition, recovery, everything known about sports science and psychology -- if you just had those guys suit up on a modern team, how would they do? I can think about that for hours at a time.
I think if we transported them from the day they were drafted and let them play out their full careers they would both do well. MJ would be like Kobe and AI would be like Kyrie/Curry. My favorite young player right now, Anthony Edwards, plays a bit like MJ/Kobe and he is doing very well.
If we took them from their prime and let them play one season, I also think they would do well. Not sure either of them would be front runners for MVP, though. Though you never know. When MJ played PG for a few games pretty sure he averaged a triple double.
One other thing - people will say MJ played against plumbers but forget that means he played with plumbers as well. Who knows what he would do with the current stock of talent in the NBA on his team.
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