Kobe Bryant historically, Hakeem Olajuwon versus Charles Barkley, 1981-82 Robert Parish, Marcel Dionne versus Guy Lafleur, turbocharged hockey

Tuesday 7/21/26

People really overrate Kobe Bryant. It's because of other things, like so many things. The persona--you know, the "Black Mamba" thing. A lack of understanding of the game. And its history. Bryant was a poor man's Michael Jordan. You'd have a hard time getting him into the top twenty players of all-time. He was too "me first and last," too high volume, too one-dimensional, not a leader, didn't make his teammates better. A rich man's Carmelo Anthony. Got credit for defense he stopped playing rather early in his career.

I saw where people were debating who was better, Hakeem Olajuwon or Charles Barkley. Both are top twenty players of all-time, but Barkley was better. People are increasingly incapable of knowing anything from before they were around. This has always been the norm for me. I was eight-years-old, I could have told you chapter and verse about Jimmie Foxx. I understood the times in which he played, how he stood relative to his peers, his style, the kind of hitter he was, even the kind of home runs he hit, etc., etc., etc., and I was not there watching Foxx in 1930.

People are also sufficiently small-brained that they see Barkley commenting like he does and they subconsciously view him as this guy who couldn't have been a world beater on the court, given that this talking head thing is his thing. And the manner in which he talks and the type of things he says. Barkley was dominant. Even more so than Olajuwon. Barkley was unique. He stood out on the court to a degree that few players, however great, ever have.

He played beyond his body, if you will. His athleticism was unreal. His leaping ability. A bull in the paint. Split defenders better than anyone. Sometimes they'd lock their arms around each others' backs to try and stop him from doing so. Barkley had bad timing in the championship sense. Just missed one with Philadelphia, and then you had the Celtics, Lakers, Pistons, Bulls, and that was it for Barkley's championship window because he wasn't the same player after then.

I'm unsure if Wemby is ever going to be as good as Robert Parish was in 1981-82. People have him penciled in as being all these things I just don't see nor envision. That may have been Parish's best all-around year. He was a beast. He played for so long and often had to take a backseat role because of the teams he was on, but those teams wouldn't have been those teams without him being as good as he was. Fierce physical presence, too.

Jokic isn't a player I'd have in the top twenty either. He's a regular season player. A fill-up-the-stat-sheet-on-a-Monday-in-November player. He isn't a "I'll carry us" player. Carry a team to some regular season wins. But he doesn't have the greatness of a Jordan, a Johnson, a Bird. They were epochal players; Jokic isn't.

Hockey Digest was a magazine around from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. It wasn't that good but worth flipping through. The best part of each issue was a "Who's Better" match-up between two players. It'd be between players who were somewhat similar. On offensive defenseman versus another, for instance, or a slot scorer versus a different slot scorer.

An argument that people like to make in hockey history discussions is that if the Montreal Canadiens had Marcel Dionne and the Los Angeles Kings had Guy Lafleur, then Montreal would have won the same amount of Cups with Dionne and the Kings wouldn't have fared any better with Lafleur.

There are flaws in this argument. Dionne was meant to be a high-volume regular season scorer on a bad team. That was his ideal role. His game lessened in the playoffs with his size and his play style. He was an in-season compiler, if that makes sense. Would the Canadiens have won Cups with him in this hypothetical scenario? Look at those teams. Sure they would have. They wouldn't have won that last Cup in 1978-79. They definitely needed Lafleur for that. He scored the game-winner against the Bruins. That's how he was--a rise-to-the-occasion type of player. He was great for a while, but, as Ken Dryden wrote in The Game, Lafleur's greatness wasn't meant to last. It was ephemeral. He was a torch burning bright that would go out before too long.

I don't believe Lafleur would have been a great player if he'd been on the Kings. He needed that culture in Montreal, the peer pressure of their star-laden system. The expectations of the fans, the pressure. It was if he had to rise to greatness or else be crushed.

Saw a post on Reddit of a clip from a 1980s Edmonton Oilers game of some tic-tac-toe passing between Wayne Gretzky, Paul Coffey, and Mark Messier that resulted in a goal with people mocking the quality of play, saying the game was so slow, etc. They don't factor in production values, or the lack thereof. With those old broadcasts, you usually don't get as good a sense as you do now with the speed of things on the ice. If you were at ice level, you'd think something different.

The fastest hockey--and the most intense--that you'll ever see was that played at the 1987 Canada Cup Final, especially the start of Game 2. Watch it. You won't see a better game of any kind either. Every player looks to be shot out of the proverbial cannon. During a pause in that early action, the announcers, who are themselves nearly breathless, ask of each other whether they've ever seen a faster pace of play. I'd direct any current day hockey fan who thinks the skill and speed level of today's game blows away that of any older games to check out this one. I think they'd be swiftly disabused of that notion, if they're capable of seeing things for what they are, which people rarely are. They see things through various lenses. The lens of agenda, the lens of recency bias, what have you.