http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iFhNi9t4L4

“He’d be the least athletic SF in the league today. And he might be the best.”

I think that means we have a poor definition of what an athlete is. It means devaluing things like reaction time, vision, hand-eye cordination, stamina etc. Those skills allowed him to do things that tons of other “athletes” in the league could never do. Bird averaged 10 rebounds a game for his career and 1.7 steals a game. How many forwards or centers averaged more steals than that for a career? 2.

Remember that famous shot where missed a 20 footer and then caught his rebound behind the backboard and in the air switched hands and scooped it in with left? How many players could make that shot? In the History of the NBA? 3-4 maybe? Red Auerbach said it was the greatest play he’d ever seen. That move seems to me to be amazing athletic play, but that’s not the thing that gets talked about when you talk about “athletes.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN5Gf4O9OiY

Bird’s greatest athletic ability seemed to be the ability to experience what everyone on the court was doing and to be able to see things almost in slow motion. I bet if you could test that somehow he and Wayne Gretzky would be similarly talented that way. That famous play where he steals the inbound pass from Isiah Thomas and hits DJ with the Pass? If you just see the slow mo highlights, you don’t see his full greatness. Watch that play in real time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_RJ5XN8TK8

The ball goes out of bounds and there’s no time outs, everyone’s scrambling on the court, Danny Ainge is just climbing back from the stand. It’s basically chaos. Watch Bird. First he runs to cover an open man at the right of the foul line and then BAM, he readjusts, and all of sudden he’s in front of Laimbeer on the left baseline. He closes chest to chest on the first guy he covered, but he’s only there for a millisecond and he sees where the play is going. Most athletes would not have even seen Laimbeer was open, let alone make the close and get a clean steal and be able to throw the pass. Awesome play by DJ too on that play.

It’s funny, due to the low quality of the YouTube clip, if you pause it, when Bird running to guard the second man, Bird is literally a blur.

MJ is the god of basketball, and no one will ever take that a way from him. Bird is a nice player, and he dominated the game in everyway possible, but he would never take out Jordan’s team, not when Jordan was on those crazy 3-peat runs. Too much fire in Jordan to lose to a guy like bird. And I’m glad Zeke got his ass served in 1991, he deserved it, and if Jordan didn’t change his game from a scoring machine to the most complete player of all time, the Det-Chi 1991 series could have went to 6-7 games.

also, when bird lined up for a foul shot with no line up in the 2nd half, one of the announcers is talking about someone called “Ronnie Ronstein”. hahaa

@ kevin k
if you took mj and bird and switched generations, bird would be considered twice as good as he was, and mj would have been like t-mac, just another above average player in a league full of them. no disrespect to mj, its just the way i feel.