| I LOVED Mark Price, but I dunno if he should be on this list. What about Ralph Sampson or Maurice Lucas? Sure they've got their own flaws, but they played (and sometimes starred) in a much better and tougher era of basketball than the pre-60s players like Zaslofsky, Fulks and Yardley. The problem with comparing these players with modern ones is that the game was so utterly different back then (whereas in baseball the game has remained fairly unchanged enough since the end of the dead-ball era that certain players can be accurately compared head-to-head) that there's no fair way to compare them. Mikan, by all accounts was less mobile than a street lamp and basically stood directly beneath the basket on every play. There was no shot clock so games could degrade into grinding slugfests (that's right, they actually fought like hockey players). And when they did implement the shot clock, teams started hoisting shots like they were gonna be made illegal, which in turn inflated a lot of numbers for the players. Then, and I think this is the most important point, once the league caught onto the fact that athletic bigs like Russell, Chamberlain and Baylor were custom-built to destroy their opponents, the day of the stiff white guy died. A few players like Schayes, Arizin, Heinsohn and Pettit, etc., were able to adapt and thrive, but most fell by the wayside. So even though they were good for their era, their era wasn't good. Just my thoughts. |
MLB Teams 
NBA Teams 
Division-I Basketball
