Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and the instinct to protect legacy
If you combined the best of LeBron James and Stephen Curry, you’d have the perfect basketball player.
But you can’t, because this is real life, and doctors haven’t figured out how to morph two uber-athletes with completely different — often dichotomic — and equally brilliant skill sets. Yet. So, we’re left with the all-time greats of yesteryear somewhat sadly protecting the legacies they’ve already set in stone by trying to knock down a peg the accomplishments of two players with six MVPs between them — and counting.
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We’ll tackle a few instances here, just for fun, starting with Magic Johnson, whose Twitter takes these days are about as hot as (spoiler alert) that iceberg-y water Rose let Jack sink into at the end of “Titanic.”
It started with Draymond Green taking a reasoned approach to a question about whether his Golden State Warriors are the best team ever: “I think it’s all subjective. To say we’re better than the Showtime Lakers, how can you say it? We can never play them.” And then Klay Thompson jumped in with a joke.
“We were better than the Showtime Lakers,” kidded Klay, whose father was a member of that team.
To his credit, Mychal Thompson agreed with his son in a take you won’t often hear from his generation.
“Golden State would outscore us 50-15 on 3’s, so how are we supposed to win?” he told ESPN Radio in Los Angeles. “So, I agree with Klay. I think they would beat us. We couldn’t keep up with them offensively because of the way they can score so quickly. …
“I am a man secure in my legacy, secure in my accomplishments. I don’t have to be all, ‘Oh, we’re better than them.’ I’m not that grumpy old man, even though I sound like that many a time, but I can admit when the new era is better than something else or that’s changed from the time I played. The way they play, we would have a hard time keeping up, because our game wasn’t shooting 3’s, which theirs are. And 3 beats 2. Doesn’t it [Mike] Trudell? You went to Northwestern, you were a math major. Doesn’t that add up? …
“I’m not going sit up there and say, ‘We’re so great, we could be anybody,'” The elder Thompson continued. “No, of course we could lose to these Warriors or lose to Michael Jordan’s Bulls when Kareem was playing. Of course we can. It’s called sports. If we played the Warriors in a seven-game series, I wouldn’t be shocked if they beat us.
“I moved my feet very well for a big man, as I compliment myself, but when I think about switching out on Steph Curry, I break out in hives. I grew up on an island, talk about being isolated on an island, stuck out there with him as he does his little dance. I’d hate that.”
Now that’s a thoughtful answer, not just — as Mychal Thompson suggests — an old man telling the kids to get off his lawn from the comfort of a rocking chair on his front porch. Then there’s Magic Johnson.
OK, cool, man. I think I’ll concur with Green here: How can you say that? You can never play them. Then again, neither can Mychal Thompson, but at least he explains his reasoning beyond a cold Twitter take.
Of course, there’s reasoning that takes into account the evolution of the game, and then there’s Shaquille O’Neal, who believes his 2001 Lakers would beat these Warriors because of rule changes that allow for more free-flowing offenses, as if superstars never used to get calls and Hack-A-Shaq isn’t still a thing.
“If you’re using those rules, we’d win,” O’Neal told the Associated Press. “Now we use these rules these days, we’d still win, because you wouldn’t be allowed to touch me, you wouldn’t be allowed to touch Kobe,” O’Neal said. “So yeah, that’s how I always look at it.”
Well, obviously that’s how he looks at it, because then he’s free to rewrite his legacy any which way he chooses, rather than accept the Warriors won 73 games and his team didn’t. Records are made to be broken, until they’re not. Ironically, it was Larry Bird — a man you might consider a curmudgeon — who chooses to appreciate the current state of basketball rather than imagine how much better he’d be in it.
“It’s funny how the game has changed,” Bird, whose 1986 Boston Celtics are among the teams most often mentioned in that Greatest Team Ever conversation, told The New Yorker a few weeks back. “And my thinking about it. I was really worried—back sixteen, seventeen years ago—that the little guy didn’t have a spot in the N.B.A. anymore: it was just going to be the big guards like Magic Johnson. But then players started shooting more threes and spacing the court, and everyone wants small guards now. Watching these kids play now, I’m like everybody else: Wow, man. They can really shoot! They have more freedom to get to the basket. The ball moves a little better. These kids are shooting from farther, with more accuracy. Now some teams shoot up around thirty threes a game. My era, you always think that’s the greatest era. But I’m not so sure anymore.”
It was refreshing to hear one of the game’s legends speak with such perspective on today’s game, without having to even the score or tip the scales in his favor, like, say, Oscar Robertson. Maybe it’s an L.A. thing? After all, that’s where shiny things are the make of a man, or at least so says Shaq.
“For us, our legacy is if we don’t win championships,” O’Neal told USA Today on Monday. “How many did I win? Four. LeBron won two, that’s good. But I think the talk now is if Steph [Curry] wins, okay, Steph has two, LeBron has two, whose league is it now?
“If LeBron wins his third and Steph is down at one, LeBron can hold the title as the best player in the league for at least two or three more years. Now if Steph ties him and Steph and them are playing incredible and he’s younger and cuter, everyone’s going to start to go over to Steph’s side. And then they’ll say, ‘LeBron, you’ve been there six times, you’ve only won twice.’ That’s what people measure you by, how many championships you have.”
If ever there was a way to simplify the discussion, this is it. Using that logic, Bill Russell is the greatest player to ever live — a notion that actually isn’t ridiculous until you realize seven other Celtics would be the next best, along with Robert Horry, whose seven rings must make him better than O’Neal, right?
It’s a tiresome argument, comparing players based on something as arbitrary as Larry O’Brien trophies, without having to actually analyze the divergent skills that make James and Curry great in their own right or their roles on entirely different teams. Are LeBron’s accomplishments on a flawed Cleveland Cavaliers roster actually less impressive than Curry’s on a masterfully constructed Warriors team, just because Golden State leads their NBA Finals series, 2-0? How could we ever pretend to answer that question?
Yet, that doesn’t stop New York Knicks president Phil Jackson, who coached both Jordan in Chicago and Shaq in L.A., from comparing James to Jordan based on the ol’ “Who wants it more?” theory, all while ignoring the fact that LeBron is going up against a Warriors team that just broke his 1996 Bulls’ record.
“It did something to Michael Jordan,” Jackson told a corporate crowd in New York City, according to the New York Daily News, about the time Jordan responded to media criticism regarding a trip to Atlantic City while his Bulls similarly trailed the 1993 Eastern Conference finals, 2-0. “You learned something about pulling the cape of Superman. It’s not a good idea. He was a man possessed after that. I think it’s going to take something for LeBron to step into that. Put his cape on and say, ‘I’m going to have to take over a lot of this series, doing the things beyond my level or my normal capacity.’ He’s been a team player up until this point but I think he’s going to have to step beyond that.”
Except:
And while the ’93 Knicks were a 60-win squad featuring Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, they weren’t a team two games from officially joining the Greatest Team Ever conversation, like LeBron’s current foe. And here I go comparing teams from different eras based on their record. I’ve fallen into my own trap, haven’t I?
That’s why it’s always best to add a little perspective, as LeBron did in reponse to Jackson’s comments.
“What does that actually mean?” he responded to a query about being a man possessed. “I mean, I think for me to go out and be who I am and play as true to the game and as hard as I can and try to lead this team, that’s who I am. Not anybody else. I’m not Michael. I’m not Ali. I’m not nobody else that’s done so many great things for sport. I am who I am, and if I’m able to go out and put together a game like that, it wasn’t because I was possessed. It’s because I worked on my craft all season long and that’s the result of it.”
Mychal Thompson was right. It’s called sports. This is what we do. We argue over which team and which player was better, and for the most part we’ll always believe the one we liked more was the best. Which is why I probably think this current crop of superstars has a perspective that Magic and Shaq failed to illustrate this week. People evolve. Basketball evolves. The world evolves. It’s better to evolve with it.
Someday, we may be able to create a hybrid of the two best living basketball players, but that day isn’t now, so we’ll just have to accept Stephen Curry and LeBron James are great for different reasons.
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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
