Stop if you’ve heard this before. A former NBA player whose heyday was the 1990s bemoans the current state of the game as soft. Today’s player is former New York Knicks defensive stalwart Charles Oakley. The former All-Defensive player says the game going global is a huge reason for the soft play. Isn’t this narrative getting played out now?
“I think the league made a change because they went more global, European. So when I played back in the ’80s and ’90s, you wanna talk about the glory days, you might have two percent European players, but now you got 33 percent, so the money value is global. That’s why they had to change the league, for the players who not physical. Guys like to shoot threes, so now the game is a three point game,” Oakley said on the “Tamron Hall” show.
Oakley’s Narrative About The League Being Soft Is Tired
Oakley’s entire position is lazy and disingenuous.
First, this is not the NFL or MMA. If Oakley and others want to see that kind of physicality those are the avenues to view that kind of physicality. No, players no longer get clotheslined driving to the rim or sucker punched after scoring on someone. That’s not basketball.
Today’s game is physical, it just looks different.
In Oakley’s day, all 10 players played inside the three-point arc and a large majority were in the paint and midrange pushing and shoving.
The game is played in space now. It’s easy to guard someone, when they have no room to operate. It’s much harder when you’re guarding an elite wing scorer and there is space all around. As a defender, you have to be smart, quick, strong, and be able to switch onto multiple players.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, teams could have defensive or offensive specialists. The game was played in a crowd, so your deficiencies on either end of the floor weren’t as magnified. That’s also because the average level of talent wasn’t as high then as it is in today’s game. That’s evolution.
We Don’t Have To Reject The Unfamiliar
In today’s game, a one-way player is extremely limited. Unless he is elite at that one way. Meaning he has to be among the best in the league at offense or defense. Even then, in the highest leverage games (playoffs), that weakness gets exposed. How many times in the playoffs have we seen a bad defender get targeted in pick and roll repeatedly? Or, how many times has a bad shooter been ignored so the defense can load up on the good offensive players?
Try telling Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Jrue Holiday or Marcus Smart that the game isn’t physical. To keep Oakley’s European theme going, has he ever watched Luka Doncic or Nikola Jokic play? Those players dish out a ton of physical punishment.
The NBA doesn’t look how it did when Oakley was a one-time All-Star and two-time All-Defensive player and that probably bothers him, as it does to fans who like to glorify that era as “real basketball.”
Today’s game is unfamiliar to Oakley and those fans. Our nature is to reject the unfamiliar. But our inability to accept something doesn’t mean that thing is wrong, bad, or worse than what we are familiar with.
