Wilt

Did he need to spread the floor or shot from distance? Why bother when averaging a mere 50 a night....

 

my dad said he had a little fadeaway outside the paint, and that was enough. and still would be, given his physical advantage. get the sense his frame was a bit more drob than shaq (though bigger base). but he could move at that size, too.

they've changed the rules again since him (due to shaq, another guy we'll see once a half-century in terms of bizarre physical gifts), so maybe he couldn't score 100 or average 50 anymore. or maybe he'd be the reason MDA had to retire.

 

Shaq probably had Wilt on lower body mass some but not sure how much because Wilt's might have seemed less than it really was without Frank Vogel calves. I think his butt was big enough.

But Wilt was super strong like Shaq. And a great athlete. He had the coordination to also high jump and play volleyball, though that seemed kinda unfair LOL. There definitely were other great centers in his time, it wasn't all 6" shorter dudes. Though the latter allowed him in addition to that fade away off one leg jumper short range .... a back handed over the rim finger roll. Never seen anyone else make that a staple. Seems with guys as tall as you and can jump, would not be that effective.

 

He was pretty fast but could be a little stiff at times. He had a little fadeaway but I never felt like it was a goto move, he could slip around or though people and had very long arms. He would do this little layups where he would just kind of stick his arm out, palm up, while palming the ball and then just kind of roll the ball off the end of his hand and drop it in the bucket. It was sneaky how he did that because, he would do this when a slam was harder to achieve due to positioning, but then he could kind of reach around, over or between guys with this move. It looked almost stupid but he could score tons with that. He was like Shaq at the Free throw line and had zero outside shot. That little fadeaway was typically from lower in the paint, not by the FT line. It was practically a layup for a guy that big. He absolutely operated in the paint, 99% of the time. He was kind of like Kobe in the sense that he got fed up with other players when they couldn't come through. He was a great passer and actually did lead the league in assists one year. But it is hard pass all the time when your odds of scoring are double what everyone elses were.

And as far as spreading the floor, I mean you have a point, in the rules back then, that guy could score at will but he still only won two rings so for all his skills, that is less than Shaq so he under achieved. People used to call him out for that back in the day. When he came to the Lakers, they had to talk him into taking a back seat and not trying to score all the time, they wanted a defensive specialist and he did that for us. It was weird seeing him do that but it worked. Of course he came to a team with Baylor, West and Goodrich who were all proven scorers in the league.

My comments about him not being able to spread the floor were thinking about how he would fit into todays game. If Wilt played today, guys like Davis and Lebron might have a bit of a problem playing with him because he totally clogs the lane on both ends. Nowadays, guys like Jokic are good because they can spend a good amount of time working the wings and 3 point line, as well as work in the middle. Back then none of the big guys did that. When a big guy can play outside sometimes it opens up the driving lanes and keeps the defensive big men tied up further away from the basket. You hardly ever saw that back in those days and even when you did, it was the occasional aberration. Teams rarely had to have an answer for it. On the other hand, if he had shooters like Curry and Thompson, that team would be scary good.

 

i guess my point is that the league has gone through multiple rounds of rules changes to prevent another wilt or shaq from happening, even if someone is lucky enough to be born with those genes. without the rule changes, wilt would dominate now, simply because there aren't people that big and agile. they don't exist. in the world anywhere.

 

If you put todays guys back into the old rules game, Wilt would make most of them look like college players.