Olajuwon overwhelming the Clippers with smoothness- circa1994

Can't tell if you are trolling, being overly-cautious in your evaluation of Hakeem, or talking about Dominique Wilkins

 

Stanley Roberts.

 

Man, a couple of times there he was double teamed before he even got the ball, and he still received the entry pass and made his move. What a player, what a team.

 

I like your posts dude, but you should embed the videos

 

I have to say, and this is no knock on Dream, but some of the team defense was just horrible.

 

Dude, dream made his moves before the defenses get set

 

When you're as quick as The Dream, you make any defense look bad. As Tinman said, most of the time, Hakeem was 1 step ahead of the team defense and 2 steps ahead of his 1-on-1 defender. Even on some of those shots Hakeem hit where the defender was left flat footed, those are shots that very few centers are able to hit in practice drills.

 

Different times.

Illegal defense rules mandated that you can't double team guy who doesn't yet have the ball (Seattle used to play illegal defense against us the entire game and dare the officials to call it every time down, one of the reasons our championship team had trouble with them). That's why post ups were such a huge part of the game prior to the 2000s. The best players can always beat their man one-on-one if they go quickly enough.

You'll never see guys in their spot in today's NBA without the entire weak side shading over to help. Dream's baseline fadeaway would still be unstoppable but It would be very hard for him to make any move that ended up in the paint.

Howard is no where near Shaq/Dream in the post, but the deck is definitely stacked against him and the rest of this generations big men. Makes you wonder what a healthy Yao would have averaged in the 80s/90s.

 

What is amazing is how much "Illegal Defense" (no zone) helped open things up for post players. Imagine if today post players had that much room to operate.

 

Even knowing this, watching this clip makes it clear to me that either The Dream or 'Nique would slaughter teams in this era. There's a smoothness to their play that just doesn't exist nowadays. Watching Hakeem, though, man....there never has and never will be anything like his play. People ooh and ahh at a good fadeaway these days, but Hakeem scored ten to fifteen times a game with one as fluid as water itself.

 

Eh, they would probably still just jack up a bunch of 3's like they do already.

 

Hakeem could've done that in any era, but my god thats some terrible defense!

 

Don't forget hand checking. Dream had to battle that rule too

 

Then we should pull up videos of him doing the same things in the playoffs, where his averages usually rose, even against the likes of the Spurs and then the Knicks, who played a kind of defense largely unseen in our present era.

 

I'd say the opposite: he was so smart and creative that he could get the ball and change the moves/countermoves depending on the defense
what's more scary is that it seemed automatic which led you to say he already knows what move he will do

IMHO , only Jordan and Kobe have such crazy unpredictable moves

 

was it illegal or legal?

 

Was that video high definition?
Really, really clear!

 

one of the best low post defenders of all time...ALL TIME... Mr. David Robinson couldn't contain The Dream.

 

Don't forget Rodman was his frontcourt mate.

 

It is ironic Nique was one of the questionable candidates left off the 50 greatest players in NBA history list in 1996.