Think the NBA is soft? One former player compares today to football
Remember the good old days in basketball, when a foul was a foul, men were men, and players on opposite teams absolutely hated each other?
So goes the nostalgia-tinted legend of the NBA in the 1980s and 1990s, anyway. Thirty years ago, we had the "Bad Boys". In 2016, we have players dancing in front of opponents' benches with no repercussions. In the old days, Steph Curry would pay the price for his antics, right?
Maybe not, depending on how far back we're talking. According to one of the NBA's original players, Gino Sovran, that rough-and-tumble era of play is actually the outlier — not today's "soft" game (via NBPA.com):
“In those days, I could go any place I wanted on the floor, and the person guarding me got behind me and there was essentially no contact, or it would be a foul. If you compared that to the NBA today, that’s a football game.”
That's kind of hilarious, though, when you take a look at a poster from the very first NBA game ever, which promises thrills and spills to those in attendance:
If you couldn't touch the players on the floor, just how were there going to be spills? Did the original NBA players not know how to run and stay upright? Is that why it took so long for someone to develop a consistent jump shot?
That last one isn't a rhetorical question, by the way; Sovran, who's one of four surviving members of the original BAA (the predecessor to the NBA), admits in the interview that most of his points came on hook shots in the paint and off of tips. Outside shooting simply wasn't yet a thing in the 1940s, according to Sovran.
And you can see how soft the original NBA was in this clip of the first basket scored in the league. There's absolutely zero defense played outside of getting one's hands up. Trying to protect the rim? Forget about it:
However, while it might be true that by the 1940s, basketball had mellowed out, that wasn't always the case. Before the BAA and NBA, the game was often played in literal cages made of mesh wire, and players were known to check one another into the wire to cause injury and slow opponents. The sport has gone in cycles, and what's considered violent — or casual, for that matter — today is either goonish or cowardly, depending on the game you're used to.
It's all well and good if Sovran wants to compare today's game to that of yesteryear. Looking at that video, he has a point. But come on; that doesn't change the fact that today's NBA includes events like Carmelo Anthony "throwing a punch" and running away, or the aforementioned Curry celebration from Monday night that went unpunished.
In fact, you could make an entire mixtape out of times the Warriors have taunted opponents this season and gotten away with it. Fortunately for Curry & Co., the NBA isn't exactly the toughest sport on the planet. And apparently, it rarely has been.