Yahoo Sports 
Metta World Peace on the modern NBA: 'It's not really a man's game anymore'
The NBA is a relatively young league. Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Bob Costas won’t likely be shuffling into any documentaries touting the brilliance of Xavier McDaniel any time soon, and to many that’s what makes the league so appealing. No sepia-tone, here.
[Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
That doesn’t mean, as one generational shift folds into another, that we won’t hear any instances of old men lamenting the difference between the Old Days and the New Breed. One of those old men, Metta World Peace (all of 35 years old, same as yours truly), couldn’t help but fret at the difference between the league he entered all the way back in the last century, and the league he’s currently attempting to rejoin in 2015.
From a talk with Eric Pincus from the Los Angeles Times:
"I remember I came into the NBA in 1999, the game was a little bit more rough. The game now is more for kids. It's not really a man's game anymore," World Peace said. "The parents are really protective of their children. They cry to their AAU coaches. They cry to the refs, 'That's a foul. That's a foul.'
"Sometimes I wish those parents would just stay home, don't come to the game, and now translated, these same AAU kids whose parents came to the game, 'That's a foul.' These kids are in the NBA. So now we have a problem. You've got a bunch of babies professionally around the world."
World Peace wasn't quite done.
"It's no longer a man's game," he said. "It's a baby's game. There's softies everywhere. Everybody's soft. Nobody's hard no more. So, you just deal with it, you adjust and that's it."
Well, MWP, I kind of came up around the fin de siècle as you did. I had League Pass, watched as many games as a college schedule would allow, and wrote about the NBA on an inter-net web-site. The game featured far more contact back then, I’ll submit.
The game was pretty awful. Not just because the NBA of 1999-00 was emerging from the previous year’s lockout, and not just because Michael Jordan had left. The game, mostly, was terrible to watch.
You may not have noticed in between sips of cognac, but the NBA put out a mostly-lacking product during your first few years. There was clutching, there was grabbing, and there were winning scores of 87 points. Sometimes it seemed as if they only way a team could break 120 points was by ejecting a player then known as Ron Artest, and extending the game by 10 extra minutes.
Of course, there is always the chance that Dr. World Peace could have been speaking with tongue placed firmly within cheek, in this instance.
[Yahoo Fantasy Basketball: Sign up for a league today]
Metta is working on an unguaranteed contract, attempting to make a rather terrible Laker team after spending 2014-15 outside of the NBA. He’s going to have to convince a Los Angeles front office – one that seems quite happy with ceremonial hires – that his grabby ways are a fit at backup-backup-backup power forward.
Part of that means trumping your style of basketball – a hip here, a handcheck there. Another part of that pitch means trumping up the guy you’d likely be charged with mentoring, second-year (if that, sadly) forward Julius Randle:
"His ceiling is as high as destiny. We don't know because he's only 19. I don't want to predict the future because so many great things are going to happen from now until he's like 30."
(As Pincus noted, Randle will turn 21 next month.)
We love Metta World Peace back in the scene, acting the crank, pretending like the NBA hasn’t evolved into something far more palatable since the league cut out hand-checking and physical play starting in 2004-05. We also genuinely hope that MWP makes the Lakers, and that he keeps talking on record.
Let’s not pretend that the NBA of World Peace’s rookie year, though, wasn’t a calamitous thing to watch.
- - - - - - -
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
