Whatever the blue-collar legitimacy of basketball, whatever its connections to barbershops and neighborhood blacktop, the culture has proven hostile to at least one category of ordinary people: plumbers. A few years ago, fans on YouTube and his TikTok began uploading grainy footage of star players from past decades, often featuring defenders in short shorts, long mustaches, and little muscle definition. I zoomed in on the non-white players. After these players were centered and filmed in freeze frame, a voiceover mocked them as “plumbers.” Like, “Michael Jordan played against a plumber.”
Basketball fans love to debate the evolution of the game and whether yesterday’s superstars had it easier. Meme creators’ disdain for the vendors aside, they’re right. Today’s professionals appear more athletic and skilled than their predecessors. But then again, today’s fans are immersed in the game’s current visual style, which has changed over the past few decades. We may be underestimating former players’ explosiveness, fluidity, and accuracy.
I set out to find out if NBA gameplay was actually getting more difficult, and I didn’t like what I found. Like many basketball fans in their early 40s, I’m desperately nostalgic for Hakeem Olajuwon’s slippery play in the 90s NBA. footworkand penny hardaway is beautiful Indoor passage. However, after reviewing the data and consulting with league officials, I have to conclude that today’s game was actually much tougher.
Much evidence suggests that NBA players are more explosive than in previous eras, even though they are not big themselves. The league’s average height peaked at 6 feet, 7 inches in 1987, and since then, only (relatively) diminutive point guards have grown in height as a group. Tall players like centers and forwards actually shrank a little. NBA players were gaining weight all the way up until 2011, but have been losing weight since then. That evolution can also be seen throughout an individual’s career. LeBron James is keen to get in shape every offseason and has transitioned to a slimmer physique in recent years.
To measure how these (slightly) tiny bodies move, some NBA teams are turning to a company called P3. The company said more than two-thirds of the players on the professional roster when the season opened earlier this week trained at P3 facilities. The player is equipped with over 20 sensors from head to toe. They are asked to perform intense vertical and horizontal movements on a special platform equipped with sensors. Their every twitch is recorded by his motion capture camera. Marcus Elliott, founder and director of P3, says his system measures raw force production, power, overall movement, and speed, all of which are compared to “the average NBA athlete of today. “He’s 4 to 7 percent better than NBA athletes.” This is the average NBA athlete from over 10 years ago. ”
When Elliott first started evaluating players about 15 years ago, many players were only performing 75 to 80 percent of their athletic potential. They didn’t have as much trajectory as today’s players, but they still managed to get by on skill. In contrast, most of today’s players are over 90% optimized when they first access their P3. Elliott compared them to F1 cars, saying, “They accelerate faster to higher speeds and change direction faster.” I asked him about his all-timers. What cars did they remind him of? “They weren’t Hondas, but they were probably somewhere in between,” he said. You can decide who’s to blame: the Honda or the plumber.
Basketball is the most global sport ever. This season, the team has a record 125 international players on its roster. But before NBA general managers discovered the best players around the world, some tall players basically lived off their height. There were also outliers. Bill Walton regularly threw no-look passes from the center position. Magic Johnson was 6 feet 9 inches and played point guard. Jack Sikma (6-foot-11) and Sam Perkins (6-foot-9) both took strokes from beyond the arc. However, their fellow bigs were clumsy with the ball and tended not to take shots outside the key. Shooting and passing ability is now the prerogative of almost every player. The center has nearly 30% more assists than he did 10 years ago. One of them, 6-foot-11 Nikola Jokic, may have the best court vision in the NBA. The center also four times He hit as many 3-pointers as he did 10 years ago. The power forward also became a long-range bomber. A whopping 40% of their shot attempts are his 3-pointers.
NBA gameplay has been changed by these sharp-shooting big men. “It used to be that there were always guys on the court who weren’t shooting specialists,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said. Usually this person is a pure rebounder or rim protector. By guarding such players, teams could rest their star players or create defensive schemes to keep the ball out of the hands of non-shooters. Currently, each team has five shooters on the floor, Cuban explained. He said, “The players have to work harder on defense. They have to scramble more.”
Ever since Stephen Curry and his imitators started shooting from the logo zone well beyond the 3-point line nearly a decade ago, defenders have had to scramble in even more space. More than half of these ultra-deep shot attempts fail, and many crash hard off the rim, leading to long rebounds and quick transitions. Thanks to this change and the NBA’s previous decision to reduce the amount of time teams must advance to half court after possessing the ball, the pace of the league has increased dramatically.
This speed also has its drawbacks. When describing today’s players as his F1 cars, Elliott wasn’t just emphasizing acceleration. “The thing about those cars is that they’re dangerous to drive,” he says. And in recent years, debris has been piling up on NBA sidelines. Players are missing more games due to injury than in previous eras. NBA teams have never been more obsessed with the physical health of their players, so this increase in injuries, primarily ankle sprains and hamstring and calf strains, is somewhat puzzling. (It’s not that this concern stems from pure altruism; it’s just that most NBA contracts are guaranteed.)
In the past, NBA franchises relied on two or three staff members to take care of players’ physical care. Most players now have at least his eight-person training staff, and many also have their own personal trainers and nutritionists. Asheesh Bedi, chief medical officer of the National Basketball Players Association, said that in the past, “treatment in the weight room was often limited to ice and ‘stimulation,’ short for muscle stimulation.” The team is now equipped with his gleaming SF facility, which includes a whole-body cryotherapy chamber, a special pool for underwater therapy, an anti-gravity treadmill, and ultrasound equipment for advanced imaging. The team also conducts private flights so they can time their takeoffs to match the players’ sleep cycles. If a player sustains a soft tissue injury, team medical staff can administer platelet-rich plasma to speed healing. In addition to these efforts, the league shortened its preseason to minimize back-to-back games and cross-border flights.
Such luxuries may seem to imply that today’s players are having it easy. Still, the injuries continue to persist, and everyone around the league is trying to understand why. One theory is that today’s players have been playing in year-round travel leagues since their adolescence, if not earlier, and are therefore more prone to injuries once they reach the NBA. Research has shown that Little Leaguers and cricket players may be more susceptible to certain injuries if they pitch or bowl too many times during their formative years, but so far the same has not been shown to be true for young basketball players. There’s no evidence that it’s happening.
Perhaps the increase in injuries is a function of the new physical demands of the professional game. In 2018, researchers measured A study of the movements of Barcelona’s professional basketball players during games revealed that out of the approximately 1,000 movements players perform during games, there are certain movements that are especially taxing on the body. The jump was clearly intense. As even the average hooper knows, a rough landing can lead to an ankle sprain. The same was true for acceleration and sprinting. Slow down. Elliott said the latter is most likely to cause trauma and wear and tear on athletes, especially if they have to suddenly slow down.
“If Luka Doncic comes at you hard and then he backs off, you have to slow down out of nowhere and then try to accelerate in a different direction,” Elliott said. “These transitions are very difficult for the human body,” especially if the athlete already has tension or asymmetries that bias one leg over the other. The spacing of today’s games and the ubiquity of good shooters requires players to constantly accelerate and decelerate on defense, and doing so over an 82-game season puts players within the limits of the human body. There is a possibility that it will be stored away. Teams have begun strategically benching their best players, forcing the NBA to crack down with new rules aimed at keeping star players on the field. Some pundits have suggested a shortened season, but that is unlikely as the NBA is expected to negotiate a new TV contract soon.
There is a certain type of fan who believes that the NBA reached its physical, if not competitive, zenith in the 1990s. They correctly point out that the rules at the time allowed for a more violent style of play. To get to the hoop, Jordan had to jump into a ferocious gauntlet of heavyweight bigs like Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, and Bill Laimbeer, all of whom threw spectacularly violent fouls.
But it’s just a type of physicality. Today’s playing environments place different demands on players’ bodies. They may not have to avoid elbows and clotheslines like they used to in the paint, but that doesn’t mean their game isn’t dangerous. That’s not to say Jordan can’t succeed in today’s NBA, though. However, it would have been much more difficult. That would have required more from him. It may not have been so easy for him to earn all those rings.
