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Dennis Scott + Reggie Miller want the olds to lay off Steph Curry
As the Golden State Warriors mow their way across the NBA, league followers have heard a disturbing number of older basketball legends attempting to put the defending champions in their place.
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Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson and Clyde Frazier are gobsmacked as to why opposing defenses just don’t try to, y’know, guard Stephen Curry. Charles Barkley doesn’t understand how anyone could compare Curry’s work in a hand check-less environment to that of Michael Jordan. Everyone with a bit of gray in their temple wants a shot at the champs, and it’s been a little uneasy to behold.
Dennis Scott and Reggie Miller weren’t contemporaries with Oscar and Clyde, and while their careers did cross over Barkley’s, Scott and Miller are a little younger than the Chuckster. This is part of the reason both came out in Curry’s defense recently, in the wake of all the cold water that came from the Hall of Famers.
Scott, who was one of the league’s first dedicated three-point marksmen and at one time owned the NBA’s all-time record in threes made in a season (267, back in 1995-96), told CSN Bay Area’s Monte Poole that a bit of jealously likely goes into any dismissal of Curry’s brilliance:
“They couldn’t do it,” Dennis Scott said Tuesday. “It’s just that simple.
“That’s why we shooters are not mad at him.”
Scott then went on to discuss the hypocrites who railed at the supposed lack of shooting over the last decade and a half (when, in fact, three-point percentages had been steadily improving, prior to dropping off slightly as teams take more and more threes over the last few years), and how they seem to be unhappy and quick with criticism no matter what:
“We used to say the art of shooting has gone away,” Scott said. “Steph is bringing the jump shot back. Michael Jordan had everybody trying to jump to the rim. The And-1 era had everybody dribbling too much. The point of the game is to put the ball in the hole. And Steph is bringing that back.”
Some would say he already brought it back. It’s likely that Reggie Miller is one of those people.
Miller, who has respectfully watched and admired as his own unofficial title of the NBA’s pre-eminent marksman has been usurped by both Ray Allen and Curry, spoke of as much with Charles Curtis at For the Win:
“As old time guys and former players, we have to embrace change. It’s hard for old players to embrace change because whether you played in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, [we all had] different rules. Basketball has evolved and it has changed,” he said. “Change is good and we’ve got to embrace Steph and what he’s doing.”
[…]
“You’ve got a team that shoots a lot of threes that’s almost as brash as those Bulls teams and we don’t want to accept that. We’ve got to let that go,” Miller said. “We don’t want to let go of Michael Jordan. It’s okay! He will still be great. We will still view him and that team as the greatest ever. It’s just that there’s a new kid on the block.”
“It’s okay.” Good point.
In no way are Stephen Curry and his fantastic Warriors taking anything away from the brutal yet cerebral efficiency of Oscar Robertson’s work in Cincinnati and Milwaukee. It doesn’t make Clyde Frazier’s two-time New York champions look like chumps, and it does nothing to deter from just how dominant Michael Jordan and his Bulls were. These teams live on different planets, with different climates, and comparing them (as we did on Tuesday in the face of hundreds of humorless Warrior fans) is an absolute joke.
(We excuse Phil Jackson from this list, for once, because his comparison of Curry’s game to that of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s was absolutely spot on. Curry has far more in common with Abdul-Rauf than he does Reggie Miller, Ray Allen, or any of the classic point guards listed above. It doesn’t matter that Mahmoud’s percentages were nowhere near Curry’s, this was an apt comparison.)
Oscar, Clyde and Chuck weren’t exactly cutting down the Warriors as pretenders, either. These guys aren’t that batty.
Robertson saved his most embarrassing invective for NBA coaches, essentially calling them dingbats for not guarding Stephen Curry closer to the three-point line, or pressuring him half-court. It’s unstudied “analysis,” to be sure, but he didn’t rip on Curry.
Frazier copped to preferring to let Curry have essentially what would be a 50-point game if it meant he’d hit 25 two-pointers, somehow enjoying that outcome over what would have been (these are his words, mind you) a 39-point game filled with 13 three-pointers.
Barkley was just looking out for his former, sadly since estranged, golfing buddy in Jordan. And he’s not wrong: Michael Jordan in a hand check-less society would have been something else entirely.
Then there’s Miller’s (oh god am I actually saying this) second cogent point of the day, from FTW:
“It’s not fair to put a microphone in front of Oscar Robertson and ask him, ‘Well, how do you think you would have fared against Steph?’ What made Isiah [Thomas], Oscar, Magic [Johnson Hall of Famers was their competitive edge. It’s not fair to ask, ‘Do you think you could stop Steph?’ So when they ask me, am I going to say, ‘No, I can’t shoot it against Steph?'”
There’s just no bridge-building, here, even if we’re only going back a decade or two. It would be fun to consider Von Miller sizing up Jim Brown, or Dick Butkus chasing down Cam Newton. Clayton Kershaw staring at Harmon Killebrew would be something else.
Pro basketball is different. That’s not to say Oscar, Clyde, Jerry West or any of their ilk wouldn’t have thrived in the modern NBA, far from it. Context matters – how you grew up approaching the game, what the rules were, where the lines were at, presuming there were even lines at all … the list could go on for days.
Just as the arguments have. We’ll let Dennis Scott have the final word:
“If you want to compare eras,” he said, “go to the barber shop.”
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
