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Is there any place in paris that will be showing the ncaa college basketball tournament?

NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men's): Would top college teams today beat teams from the 1980s?

  • In the 1980s, eventual pros played 3-4 years of college ball.  Though today's players are bigger and faster, could they have beaten say, the 1982 UNC team with Jordan, Perkins and Worthy; or the Pat Ewing Georgetown teams; or the Berry-Mullin-Mark Jackson-Wennington St. John's teams; or the UCLA teams of the 1960s and 70s; or the Laettner-Hill Duke teams; or even the UNLV teams with LJ and Anthony; It just seems like the quality of play in the tournament is so poor this year - no one can shoot, no one makes free throws, everything is sloppy.  My hunch is those teams above (and others) would be very competitive with today's best college b-ball teams.  What say YOU?

  • Answer:

    Probably. The cool thing about nostalgia in sports is that it makes events in our memories seem far more vivid and spectacular than they really were. The bad thing about nostalgia is that it colors our perspective towards putting heroes of the past on a pedestal that's not realistic and not deserved. For example, one of the common (and incorrect) assumptions about the NBA now vs "back then", or "when Bird and Magic were kings of the league" or "when there were more white guys", is that shooters were better back then. That somehow modern basketball players have lost the ability to shoot. This can be debunked thoroughly by anybody willing to put a few minutes into comparing fixed-shot comparisons such as three pointers and free throws, and that would settle the debate that shooting hasn't regressed, but that wouldn't give the whole picture. Shooters and shooting in general is likely much better now. Although comparisons of the flat percentages would show some parity, they wouldn't account for the significant progressions in the modern player's understanding of help defense and how to measure whether a player is effective at performing critical "help" tasks that don't show up in a box score. Those shooters weren't any better than shooters today, they just seemed that way because it was 30 years ago and defense sucked. On the subject of defense sucking, guys like Chris Mullin, Christian Laettner, and Casey Jacobsen (one of my favorite college players!) were barely adequate defenders in the college game and dismal in the NBA. Today. guys like Michael Kidd Gilchrist come into the NBA having been better at defense in college than any player named in details other than perhaps Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan, coincidentally of the same draft class. The idea that fundamentals were better back then is a flawed assumption because basketball at every level was fundamentally inferior, and not by a little. The straw man argument is "but hand checks were allowed!". Which is precisely why there weren't more drive and kicks, but doesn't impact wide open off ball shooting percentages. Is there a possibility that college ball was better because guys were playing 3-4 years? Possibly, but that argument starts to look silly when you consider how basketball talent has improved around the world and how many international players are now playing college ball who wouldn't have 30 years ago. Also, guys who would have gone football or baseball are now selecting basketball so we're getting a richer American talent pool. As much as coaches deride AAU ball because it emphasizes a sub-optimal skill set for NBA role players, AAU has undoubtedly had a positive effect on scouting and filtering talent for big name college programs. The effects of organized recruiting in middle school has made it so that by college an average player has had the benefit of college-level instruction since turning 13. It's also interesting that one of the major teams not mentioned here is the Fab Five team from Michigan, undoubtedly one of the most successful and heralded teams from college ball's glory days. It's instructive to remember that those Michigan teams were freshman and then sophomores and beat the crap out of every other team coast to coast, and came within one bad timeout of winning the whole damn thing. Were they not as good because they were only sophomores? No, they were plenty good. As a final point, it's interesting to think of Jordan as a great college player who was also a good shooter. Michael Jordan was not a great shooter in his early years and in contrast to somebody like LeBron James, wasn't as good from mid-range or from three, although he was better at free throws. To put that in perspective, LeBron was a better shooter as an 18 year old NBA rookie than Michael Jordan was as a 21 year old with 4 years of college. And that was the weakest part of LeBron's game. I'll take the bigger, stronger, faster, more fit modern teams with AAU players who've been studying pro-style sets since they got their first chin hair who've been going to Dwyane Wade camps every summer and are occasionally being flown to EUR to play against pro teams filled with NBA-ready talent. Give me whatever the modern version of Fab Five is.

Jonathan Brill at Quora Visit the source

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I think this would be like a real-life version of the movie Hoosiers, only with a smaller athletic mismatch. In the film, a bunch of scrawny guys from the tiny town of Hickory manage to win the Indiana state championship against a much bigger, more athletic crew because they have one great player who can score (Jimmy Chitwood) and they play great team ball. In general, I hate romanticizing early eras of sport. I was one who suggested that the 1970s Dolphins, for example, would absolutely get spanked by a modern college time because it could literally run and stomp all over them. But basketball, interestingly enough, while being a tremendously physical game, still has the same 10-foot rim and 15-foot free-throw line -- as Gene Hackman reminds his team when they see the giant arena where the state championship will be played. "Now imagine if we had Michael Jordan or Patrick Ewing, eh?" The bottom line is that NCAA basketball, 2013-style is pretty awful. There are some great plays and some great players. And, goodness, every once in a while you see something that makes you smile. We pressed rewind on the DVR a few times yesterday to watch an offensive set with 8 passes or a great no-look or ball fake. But few teams have any continuity, many shooters, an ability to consistently knock down free throws, the ability to hold onto the ball. Those teams from the 1980s like Michael Jordan's or Patrick Ewing's (even the one that got upset by Villanova shooting lights out one night...) were fantastic. If you ever get to see the Magic vs. Bird final -- which predates the 3-point line, just watch how many buckets would have been 3s. It's something around 15, even though they weren't trying to shoot 3s. A young Jordan was every bit the athlete of today's players. A bit smaller? Yes. But as spectacular in the air as anyone. Ditto Walter Berry. Chris Mullin was a ridiculous shooter and passer who made everyone better. Ewing was a shot blocker with skill greater than Jeff Withey and athleticism Withey could only fantasize about. Players like Christian Laettner -- all skill, not a ton of athleticism -- abound at the Gonzagas of the NCAA today. But Laettner was just better than these guys. He shot better, passed better and consistently played with more of the same guys than the "one and done" teams are used to having. Oh, and his teammates -- on average -- were more skilled than the guys on, say, Gonzaga. I think the 10 best teams from the 1980s and 1990s would be top-5 seeds in this tournament, if not better. And I suspect one of them would win.

Mark Rogowsky

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