The best players have to be centers, but the best player ever is Magic Johnson.

Scottie Pippen was the best player of the second 3-peat, but he was not as good as Vince Carter.

Scottie Pippen needed Michael Jordan to score for him, and players who can score are generally better. But Scottie Pippen was better than MJ.

Michael Jordan might be the greatest player ever, but only because you liked him growing up.

Scoring is the most important stat, but Lebron is likely better than Jordan.

Wilt Chamberlain was a better passer than any modern guard.

If you think a modern player is better than a player from the '50s, it's because you think humans have evolved in the last few decades. That is the only reason.

Magic Johnson guarded all five positions and didn't shoot a push shot that looked like a teenage girl.

By better do you mean they matched or exceeded AI's finals appearances?

Iverson was definitely better than Kyrie and it's incorrect to say the team got better when he got traded. They won three less games that year than the year before. Let me know when Kyrie gets a team to the Finals without anyone else on the team averaging 15 ppg. Iverson had to be selfish to give his team a chance.

I know a lot of guys don't agree with JORR and LTG's assessments of some modern players, and I'm wondering if this disagreement is not about the merits of the players themselves but rather just an experiential thing. Let me give you an example: I was in middle school and HS when Vince Carter entered the league and set it on fire with his amazing dunks. It was the best time to be a fan for me in retrospect because I wasn't as cynical as I am now and my youthfulness generally made everything appear to be fantastic. Nowadays I've got punk teenagers coming up to me talking about Zach Levine or someone else being the best dunker ever or whatever, and invariably my response goes something like "well, do you know Vince Carter, blah blah blah" like some old man yelling at cloud bitch I thought I'd never be.

I get it. Those punk teens are the new crop of middle/high schoolers thinking the players in front of them right now and here are the shit, and they don't care about guys who were balling before they were born or while they were still in diapers. And even as they get older I'm sure their perspective will become more balanced but that still won't erase the peak fan experiences they've had as youngsters watching Zach Levine or something dunking on the rest of the league. It's a sort of presentist bias that leads them to hold onto certain truths that become more rigid over time as they inevitably move away from being a full-time fan, or at least as rabid of a fan as they were when they were young.

The short way of saying this is I wondering if in, let's say, 30 years me or FF or LYK or whomever will be the new JORR/LTG/etc of this board trying to tell someone born in 2030 that there's no way some small forward born in 2025 is better than Dirk or LBJ or KD or whomever because of blah blah blah, while that person replies that LBJ, KD, etc., weren't shit, and that they were old and slow and decrepit and couldn't do this or that, etc.

Just when I think I have read everything around here, I see a case that Kyrie is better than Iverson and Carter is better than Pippen?

Holy Hell. Some of you need to step away for awhile.

I know a lot of guys don't agree with JORR and LTG's assessments of some modern players, and I'm wondering if this disagreement is not about the merits of the players themselves but rather just an experiential thing. Let me give you an example: I was in middle school and HS when Vince Carter entered the league and set it on fire with his amazing dunks. It was the best time to be a fan for me in retrospect because I wasn't as cynical as I am now and my youthfulness generally made everything appear to be fantastic. Nowadays I've got punk teenagers coming up to me talking about Zach Levine or someone else being the best dunker ever or whatever, and invariably my response goes something like "well, do you know Vince Carter, blah blah blah" like some old man yelling at cloud bitch I thought I'd never be.

I get it. Those punk teens are the new crop of middle/high schoolers thinking the players in front of them right now and here are the shit, and they don't care about guys who were balling before they were born or while they were still in diapers. And even as they get older I'm sure their perspective will become more balanced but that still won't erase the peak fan experiences they've had as youngsters watching Zach Levine or something dunking on the rest of the league. It's a sort of presentist bias that leads them to hold onto certain truths that become more rigid over time as they inevitably move away from being a full-time fan, or at least as rabid of a fan as they were when they were young.

The short way of saying this is I wondering if in, let's say, 30 years me or FF or LYK or whomever will be the new JORR/LTG/etc of this board trying to tell someone born in 2030 that there's no way some small forward born in 2025 is better than Dirk or LBJ or KD or whomever because of blah blah blah, while that person replies that LBJ, KD, etc., weren't shit, and that they were old and slow and decrepit and couldn't do this or that, etc.