Charles Oakley talks about Dwight Howard's mental toughness

[Sir Raven 12]

Lets remember the Nba is soft today.

[IronMaiden 43]

quote:

Originally posted by Ghost of Bison Dele:

quote:

Originally posted by Ramsde68:

If Dwight played in the old days of Oakley where they actually let them play physical the only player who could have stopped him would have been prime day Shaq. His mix of speed, strength, and athleticism would have destroyed the league.

 

And that is the same that could be said for most players of today. You put any of the elite level players of today and they would have destroyed the league only 20 years ago.

 

So, you don't think Olajuwan, Ewing, Mourning or Robinson could hang with Dwight??

Especially Olajuwan in his prime. That's insane.

 

Those would be obviously much tougher matchups for Dwight defensively, but he'd still be starting for someone and a great player.

[Catman Forever 0]

I'm a bit surprised that nobody has read between the lines here. Oak and Ewing remain close to this day...is it that far-fetched to think that Charles Oakley is acting as a mouthpiece for Ewing to vent his frustration regarding Dwight's lack of offensive progress?

 

Any chance of Ewing becoming a head coach in the league (which was minimal to begin with) has been hampered/destroyed by the fact that his star pupil has yet to develop a go-to offensive move.

[Blackhennie 0]

quote:

Originally posted by Ramsde68:

quote:

Originally posted by Ghost of Bison Dele:

quote:

Originally posted by Ramsde68:

If Dwight played in the old days of Oakley where they actually let them play physical the only player who could have stopped him would have been prime day Shaq. His mix of speed, strength, and athleticism would have destroyed the league.

 

And that is the same that could be said for most players of today. You put any of the elite level players of today and they would have destroyed the league only 20 years ago.

 

So, you don't think Olajuwan, Ewing, Mourning or Robinson could hang with Dwight??

Especially Olajuwan in his prime. That's insane.

 

Olajuwan and Robinson had no where close to the Strength that Dwight has. Ewing and Mourning nothing anywhere near his speed when it came to running the floor (and I'd say Dwight is easily stronger then them too). And none of those players could touch Dwight's athleticism, the only person who came anywhere close would have been prime Shawn Kemp.

 

And face it, they let the bigs get away with far more back in the day. What Ewing did on offense would have gotten him fouled out of almost every play in the current NBA. The same for Mourning on defense. If Dwight got to play in those days when the muzzle was off he would have lit the post up just off strength and athleticism alone, much like Shaq did.

 

lets not talk crazy... He would would be a good player but olajuwan would dream shake any one. He has more quickness and post moves then any center ever... Plus he was on of the best defensive centers ever... I dont agree... I like howard and think he would still be a very good center; better than mutumbo and close to robinson, but not the dream. sorry

[Secretly Space Jesus 670]

quote:

Originally posted by Ramsde68:

quote:

Originally posted by Ghost of Bison Dele:

quote:

Originally posted by Ramsde68:

If Dwight played in the old days of Oakley where they actually let them play physical the only player who could have stopped him would have been prime day Shaq. His mix of speed, strength, and athleticism would have destroyed the league.

 

And that is the same that could be said for most players of today. You put any of the elite level players of today and they would have destroyed the league only 20 years ago.

 

So, you don't think Olajuwan, Ewing, Mourning or Robinson could hang with Dwight??

Especially Olajuwan in his prime. That's insane.

 

Olajuwan and Robinson had no where close to the Strength that Dwight has. Ewing and Mourning nothing anywhere near his speed when it came to running the floor (and I'd say Dwight is easily stronger then them too). And none of those players could touch Dwight's athleticism, the only person who came anywhere close would have been prime Shawn Kemp.

 

And face it, they let the bigs get away with far more back in the day. What Ewing did on offense would have gotten him fouled out of almost every play in the current NBA. The same for Mourning on defense. If Dwight got to play in those days when the muzzle was off he would have lit the post up just off strength and athleticism alone, much like Shaq did.

 

Well, you're wrong on several counts.

 

First of all, Hakeem and David Robinson were both, at the very least, comparable to Dwight in terms of strength. Both were legitimately bigger than Dwight, and both were incredible physical specimens. Moses Malone and Shaq both talked at length about how incredibly strong Hakeem was, for instance. I mean, hell, Robinson, as a rookie, was 7 feet, 1 inch of THIS:

 

 

I mean, holy christ, those thigh muscles are the size of my waist.

 

Similarly, both Hakeem and The Admiral ran the floor like gazelles. I don't know if they were faster than Dwight is, but Hakeem was certainly quicker, and Robinson wasn't far off.

 

The bigger issues, though, are the fact that people tend to look at guys like The Admiral and Hakeem and assume they were always as good as they were in their mid-90s peaks for one, and that the era they played in was the norm for previous generations of NBA big men, rather than what it actually was, which is an astronomical anomaly.

 

Towards the first point: people think of Hakeem making Robinson look stupid in the WCF in '95, and tend to think of that as his entire career, but the truth is that there was an entire evolution of his game in the years preceding that. Hakeem started off as an incredibly limited offensive player who was able to score on athleticism and strength. His awesome post game was not something he was born with, nor did he enter the league with it. It's a process each off-season.

 

If a player has a sequence of, lets say, 3 post moves they like and maybe 2 more they can go to from time to time, that's a jaw dropping number of different individual sequences a player can utilize in the post.

 

That's really all Hakeem did: he simply came up with about 5-7 moves he was comfortable with, and learned over time how to chain them together and play one off the other. But that process took YEARS. There's a reason Hakeem's 4 year peak as an offensive player didn't start until his 9th season.

 

To the second point, people need to understand that the time period from 1984 through 1996 was a veritable ****ing golden age for big men, and stop acting like that period was the norm rather than a gigantic anomaly. In that 12 year period you had.

The first 12 years of Olajuwon, including his entire prime

The first 11 years of Ewing, including his entire prime

The first 7 years of Robinson, including his entire prime

The first 4 years of Shaq

The last year of Moses Malone's prime, followed by the years of his decline

The last years of Kareem

 

And that doesn't even include the second tier guys like Parish(entire prime), McHale(entire prime), Daugherty before he broke down, Sampson before HE broke down, Mt. Mutombo on defense, Mourning's first years, Seikaly(who could score, rebound, and fail utterly to adequately guard a parked car), and the last legs of Bill Walton.

 

In the preceding 12 years you had prime Kareem and Walton, obviously, you had the best years of Bob McAdoo(including the 3 year peak at the beginning of his career), you got the best years of Moses Malone, you got 1 year of Wilt, the NBA years of Artis Gilmore where he was an 18/10 player, Thurmond was basically done by then, Willis Reed was done, Unseld had seriously declined to the point that he was basically just a rebounder by that point, what was left of Spencer Haywood, and that is pretty much it.

 

So from '72-84, there were really only 4 elite big men: Kareem, Walton(for about 3 years before injuries crippled him), Moses and McAdoo, and McAdoo was more of a perimeter player, anyway, who peaked VERY early in that stretch.

 

Simply put, there was nothing normal about the 12 year period that saw Ewing, Hakeem, Drob and parts of Shaq, Moses and the end of Kareem. That was an unprecedented era for bigs, and then those guys retired or got old, and we've simply been a down-cycle since then.

 

But I mean, look at what we have now: Dwight, obviously, Yao(if he ever stays healthy[and if he doesn't, that's hardly a new problem for a big man, especially a really tall one]), Oden and Bynum both have all-star potential if they can stay healthy(and if Bynum can get to another team that will use him consistently), Brook Lopez has several-years-at-20/10 potential, Bogut is at least better than a guy like Seikaly was because his defense is so good, Duncan still has a few years left as a quality player(and he's a center, dammit), Bosh would've been a finesse center in most eras, so would Dirk, so would KG. And then you have guys like Al Jefferson(Rony Seikaly v.2). And what about the Gasols?

 

From there, you have to start considering how much league expansion effects the perception. If you had the same set of high level centers(and F/Cs) as exist now, but put them in a league with only 20 teams instead of 30, all of a sudden the perception of the league's big men shifts pretty radically from "this is a horrible era for big men" to "holy ****, that's a lot of quality big men". League rule changes may shift the style of play for bigs, but that doesn't change the fact that we're definitely on an uptick from the big man-ghost world that was the late 90s and early 00s where Dale Davis and Jamaal Magliore were all-stars. Things are looking up.

 

As far as the question of whether or not Dwight could play in the mid-90s, the answer is "Yes. Obviously. He's better than Rik Smits ever was,"

 

Would he be all-NBA first team? No. He might not have even made any all-NBA teams in that era, but that's not really a critique of Dwight; Shaq didn't make a first team until his 6th season('98), after the others had started declining.

 

What would've happened, though, is Dwight's block numbers would've gone way, way up. No 3 seconds combined with more physical play would've led to a LOT more no-calls on contested shots. We'll say he gets 30% more blocks per game in his normal minutes. He likely would've gotten more rebounds on both ends for the same reason, say 1 a game given his current minutes.

 

Similarly, on offense, he'd end up shooting fewer free throws, he'd commit fewer offense fouls, and he'd get a lot more shots at the basket. So given that Dwight currently plays 34.7mpg, I think if Dwight was dropped into a random center-needing team in 1994, his numbers would look something like:

 

22.4pts on about 14.5 FGAs and 8.5 FTAs per game, about 14.2 rebounds per game and about 3.6 blocks a game, with elite defense. Where would that put him?

 

Well, not as good as Hakeem, Shaq or Drob, clearly. He'd be better than any of the second tier guys, better than Mourning, better than Mutombo.

 

But Ewing? Ewing averaged 23.9/11/2 on noticeably worse efficiency than Dwight would likely put up(he shot just .503 that year). So Dwight would average slightly fewer points with more blocks, a LOT more rebounds, and at least comparable(likely better) defense given where Ewing was at that point in his career.

 

And those numbers are with Dwight playing far fewer minutes than Centers typically played in the mid90s.

 

So yeah: given that estimation, we can say that if Dwight was dropped into the best era for big men in league history, he'd be about the 4th best center in the league, I think Dwight's doing alright. But no, he's not better than prime Hakeem, prime Drob, etc.