The 95-96 Chicago Bulls would be the worst team in the league nowadays

If the game was officiated the same today, the Bulls would still win the Championship.

Listen to Tim Grover, the boys back then used metal, not bands. Far stronger men, less skill perhaps and maybe not as well conditioned - but players were absolutely tougher. #weneverdonewiththe90s

Also, cherry picking old clips is super lazy.

Watch all of 97 or 98 finals game and you will understand why it should still be considered the height of basketball.

At the top end, there are obviously equivalent athletes between the 90's and now. Even in earlier decades, Wilt Chamberlain is probably still the best pure athlete to ever play.

Even at the end of the bench though, I think athletically players would match up better than you think. Reason is even in the 90's, basketball was popular and well paid enough, that if you were tall, you'd probably give it a shot. So the 90's and today are pulling from the same pool of tall guys. Maybe today you have the europeans also, but even in the 90's, a guy like Olajuwon, a 7 ft soccer player in Africa, didn't escape NBA scouts.

Professors and coaches always told me that skills/software programs/languages/etc could be learned, but how you think, perceive, and see situations is more important.

it’s why art and creativity are more important early in for an architect than being good at math or construction. The latter are easier to learn.

players like Jordan and Pippen would adapt to the skill and 3-point shooting stuff. They had crazy athleticism and an incredible ability to read the game.

The high jump and long jump world records are from the early 90’s. People aren’t better jumpers these days, they’re just focusing on different skills from an early age. The human body hasn’t changed too much in 25-30 yrs.

basically, Jordan and pippen and Rodman would be very top tier athletes now as they were then.

watch some late 80's early 90's ball and get back to me--ie. the Pistons and the Knicks D that the Bulls had to run through every season to get to the Finals...sure the NBA is more athletic now, but a hard foul back then would be a flagrant 1 and a suspension! hand checking was also allowed until about 2003, which really opened up the game--to compare eras now 30 years apart is a challenge, but to say that the Bulls would suffer in today's game is just silly...

This is a great take. Apparently the US Olympic team wanted Dennis Rodman to try to qualify in the 400. They thought he had massive potential over that distance.

I'm absolutely tired of this nonsense. 90s basketball is highly unskilled, it wasn't hard to score in the paint, it wasn't more physical (5'3 Muggsy Bogues was working your GOAT), and the players were not better.

Go watch a game like the one I linked here, It's low level basketball. Nobody is getting double teamed, there is not a single shot contested from the perimeter, John Stockton is getting open looks 12 ft from the basket because the defenders are too slow and lazy to close out and contest him. Seriously, go in and watch it. For example, multiple times players you've never heard of like Greg Ostertag would set an abysmal screen and Hakeem and Clyde Dexter (You're favorite 90s players) would look at each other lost and drag off John Stockton and he'd get a WIDE open jumper... Go play defense, I thought this was physical basketball... Why is John Stockton getting open jumpers, why can he run to the baseline every possession, why is the big man not switching onto him to contest the shot after the screen (He's 5'11 why are you not snatch-blocking him).

I'm dead serious, WATCH THE GAME, every single player on the floor is terrible at basketball. There is absolutely no argument to what I'm saying, if you actually watched and analyzed these games like an actual basketball fan (instead of brainwashed fanboy that listens to everything ESPN tells them) you'd recognize the truth. Every single modern NBA player is better than MJ. Jalen Green would drop 90 points a night in the 90s. Jalen Green, Amen Thompson, and Alperen Şengün would win the 1996-97 NBA title 3 on 5. I'm not trolling, this is not a joke, I'm dead serious. It's basketball, the objective is to put the ball into the basket, in 30 years people have gotten 10x better at doing that. Why on earth do you think that after 3 decades of practices, studying, and improving on the game of basketball that players are somehow worse? It's nonsense, it's a myth, sorry buddy Wilt didn't run 4.4, he didn't high jump 7', and he didn't score 100 points. It's a lie, it's propaganda. I'm tired of people repeating the same MJ narratives without even bothering to WATCH and ANALYZE the games. BE YOUR OWN PERSON, don't let mega-corporations that are trying to sell clothing and shoes made by child slaves tell you what to think.

This is basically my ballpark too.

And let's add these

- take all rights away from defenders (hand-checking gone in '04)

- don't call a) illegal screens b) carrying the dribble c) travelling d) double dribbles

I have zero interest in watching combined 260 point regular season NBA games - the NBA isn't a basketball league anymore, it's some weird basketball derivative the league office cooked up in order to "compete" with the NFL and "excite" fans. Except it's all backfired - Adam Silver is living off "social media engagements" as some sort of idiotic success KPI - as if watching Curry hit a circus 3 from halfcourt on instagram is the same as sitting down and watching the entire game. They just came off the biggest abomination in NBA history with the 2024 "All-Star" game and I'm sorry when Karl-Anthony Towns can score 62 points in a game we have a serious problem.

The league has better scoring because it's easy to create the environment for that. Is it more talented? Do the players have better "skills"? No.

I found this thread really interesting — I’ve always been a proponent of Jordan as the goat / late 90s the pinnacle of basketball, but got linked a couple full games from the Jazz / Bulls championship series and ended up going through and watching them all. Super interesting stuff, and left me with some general thoughts:

(1) Players now are physically better — yeah, guys from the 90s sometimes had bigger muscles, but dudes who play today are perfectly optimized for the game. They’re the best in a truly global talent pool, and you’ve got plenty of players spending 6+ figs a year on health/trainers/body maintenance.

(2) The game has evolved a lot. Guards weren’t getting picked up at the perimeter in the 90s. Dribbling was completely different pre- and post-Iverson, and it’s only gotten better. Offenses are orders of magnitude smoother and more strategic. Defenses are fluid and methodical. Analytics also played a roll — teams now are built to optimize efficiency. The game is also much, much faster — for better or worse, Nash and D’Antoni laid the framework in the 2000s, and it’s just accelerated from there.

(3) Average player quality is much higher. Every era has its stars, but the bench players switching onto Bron, Steph, Jokic, etc. are very different from the bench players getting cooked by Jordan et al.

96-97 bulls are the greatest team ever. Feel free to dig into my old posts here — you’ll see I’m a Chicago fan through and through, and Jordan’s two threepeats are the greatest accomplishment in basketball history. But put them against the 2017 warriors and they’re getting cooked. Put them against the 2014 spurs and it’s not close. 2013 heat take them apart too. It’s fundamentally a different game, and…well, athletes now are just better. Just like they are in pretty much every other sport.

Superstars could succeed in any era, but the sort of gap that existed between Jordan and his contemporaries just can’t really exist in the modern age — both the floor and the median are so much higher.

90s bulls are demolishing the 2024 wizards though, they’ve got possibly the most unserious team in NBA history.

How many of those shots were contested? How often was the shooter doubled teamed? Kerr was left open on the Bulls because defenses were focused on stopping two of the most skilled offensive players of all time.

OTOH, Curry shots a similar percentage with the defense specifically designed to deny him the 3 point shot.

It is impossible to compare because rules are different.

The rules were changed to allow more drives to the basket and more 3s because those are exciting.

Alan

The real questions is, how will Kerr play on the Bulls AND coach the Warriors?

Offenses are not more strategic. Players today are not smart enough to run the triangle (which is admittedly outdated with rule changes) which Jackson had to scrap nor do they have the IQ for a Princeton variation. The Europeans play a much more sophisticated style and often school NBA players. The NBA is mostly 4 or 5 out with a pick and a drive or pass to the corner or just iso ball. The only team that uses a variation of a high post passing offense is the team with the least athletic yet brightest player. Jokic is showing us that you don't have to be mega athletic to dominate.

The rules were changed, and it was actually stated when they were changed, to create more driving to the basket. The thinking is that the most exciting play in basketball is someone like MJ or Dr. J beating his man and going one on one with Olajuwon or Walton at the rim.

Problem is, paradoxically, removing contact on the perimeter actually served to free up the three point shooters. A guy like Kevin Durant is unguardable with todays rules. Too tall, too high a release, he is just going to shoot it in your face. If you could put a hand on him though, the guy weighs like 98 lbs so any little nudge or bump as he sets for his shot and a 3 pointer, at least, probably isn't going in.

So, once teams figured it out, the rule change did the opposite of what was intended. It led to more outside shots.

A side note is it is interesting that guys like Dr. J, Jordan and Dominique Wilkins had notably flat shots. I don't think this was intentional but was because their game was going to the hoop in traffic and out jumping guys to get their shot off. The less arc on the shot, the less travel time and the less adjustments you have to make to compensate for any drifting. So a flat shot helps these guys score but probably hurts them at the free throw line or on open shots. So I bet, for example, if Jordan developed his game with today's rules, he would have had more arc on his shot and been a higher percentage free throw and 3 point shooter.

Jordan was an 83% free throw shooter, only 30+ guys in the NBA today have a better percentage.

Strongly disagree with a lot of the sentiment here. I love FIBA ball — it’s in many ways a better product than the NBA — but a US team whose best player was maybe fringe top 10 in the NBA, and whose second best player was fringe top 25, ended up 4th in last year’s World Cup. The best players on Germany and Serbia (who went 1-2) play in the NBA. Of the last 5 Euroleague MVPs, the only one who isn’t an NBA bench player (or out of the NBA entirely) is Luka…who won Euroleague MVP at 17.

Quantitative / analytics oriented approaches have dramatically changed offenses. The 2014 spurs completely redefined what a fluid offensive scheme looks like. The 2014-15 and 15-16 warriors led to a revolution in spacing, off-ball movement, and screening. 2017 rockets and Moreyball completely restructured modern shot selection to optimize scoring efficiency. The modern PnR is only loosely related to what passed as a PnR in 1995. Defensive schemes have adapted accordingly — helped along by thousands of hours of game tape that all the best players in the league watch.

Spacing, off ball movement and screening sounds like basketball of 50+ years ago. The Spurs (with their Europeans and a 4 year college player) and Warriors played beautiful basketball atypical of the era because most AAU/one and dones aren't able to play this type of style.

78-79 Rodgers would be our best now.