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Originally Posted by SABR42
Yeah, like all 5 of them? How many international players are in the NBA today? And prime Sabonis never played in the NBA, so no, all the best international players were not playing in the NBA. Sabonis would probably be what Jokic is today (an all-NBA center).
Bro. The argument was that this elite European talent wasn't even being found by NBA scouts in the 80's/90's because they weren't looking. Sabonis
was drafted by the NBA in 1986. He had a serious injury the next year. He chose to stay in Europe. He later came to the NBA in '95. Are you even fact checking anything?
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Actually, a more top-heavy league suggests that the average player is worse, because it's easier to dominate a weaker league than a stronger one.
The league wasn't "top heavy", as I proved by giving a sample listing of the average league starter that year. The top was elite (
clearly better than 2008-09, no matter what other people keep chirping about; like just look at the list of players), the middle was good (as good or better than 08-09, the years in question), and I don't know about the bottom because that doesn't matter b/c those guys weren't playing much and they certainly weren't guarding Jordan/LeBron.
i.e. the league was stacked in the late 80's and definitely better at the top and on average (remember, the talent was diluted in '88 compared to '09 as there were ~30% more roster spots; so this counterbalances the increased popularity in Europe) than in '09. These are the years in question because the claim was LeBron's stats suffered relative to Jordan because the league was "
an order of magnitude better". That claim was wrong. It was hilariously wrong. Not only was the "order of magnitude" claim wrong, it was wrong in the entirely opposite direction.