Malone's entire game was 10-18ft. Thats midrange. At his height Malone played around 270-275. People say he was 6-10 and not 6-9. I dunna know. Larry was a lot closer to 6-10 and standing next to one another Larry and Malone were the exact same height.
Do you have a source on that playing weight for Malone? Everything I've seen says otherwise. The guy was an absolute maniac with training, and from everything I've read he was as obsessed with MJ at maintaining a very precise playing weight in the mid-250s. In fact, even now he's apparently still at his playing weight:
Utah Jazz legend Karl Malone going strong at 50 years old.
NBA height measurements are notoriously unreliable, so it's true that we have a hard time knowing this stuff. Luckily, for this generation of players we have the 1992 Olympics, which is how we learned that pretty much everyone was overstating their height by at least an inch. It's all pretty well detailed here:
BARCELONA: BASKETBALL; Dream Team Reaching New Heights
Malone wasn't mentioned in this article, but he came in at 6'8", vs. a listed height of 6'9". If it seems that he and Bird were the same height, it's because they were: they're both 6'8". LeBron, FWIW, measured 6'8" in the 2012 Olympics. If there's a height difference between them, it's a very small one.
LeBron, btw, weighed 240 when he came into the league in 2003 looking like this:
I think it goes without saying that he's added at least 10-15 pounds since then.
I think he needs to lose the weight and focus on defending the 3 and help on the perimeter. Hes still quick enough.
Just for starters, I'd say I disagree. Why should he? He carries his 250+ pounds about as well as anyone ever has. But that aside, he did lose 20 pounds last offseason, I doubt he can reasonably lose any more without becoming less effective as a player. He's lost a step or three since 2010, independent of weight. That's what happens to guys who have played as many minutes as he has.
Barring injury, LeBron's going to pass Kobe in career minutes next year (
NBA & ABA Career Playoff Leaders and Records for Minutes Played | Basketball-Reference.com). People really underestimate how much mileage he has on him. That he carries it as well as he does is really just a testament to how hard he works at maintaining his body. Apparently he's a near Brady-level freak when it comes to body maintenance.
Rodman benefited from similar spacing with DET and CHI. With that said he is neven close to having Rodman's athleticism and instincts.
He didn't, but only because there was nothing like Golden State's spacing in the 80s and 90s. It didn't really exist.
Barkley was a pretty good leaper but he used his body as leverage to gain position better than anyone I have ever seen.
Agreed, he was my favorite non-Celtic of that era, in part because of that. It was crazy to watch him consistently outrebound guys 6+ inches taller than him.
Green does a nice job carving out space outside of the hashs and has excellent quickness and is tenacious. He pulls down almost 10 boards a game so hes doing something right.
I totally agree with that first part. As much as I dislike Draymond, he's a hell of a player. But to kinda restate my previous post, he pulls almost 10 boards a game because all the other stuff that he (and the rest of the team) does forces teams to pull their centers and try to match up to him with ****ty end-of-bench forwards instead. On the rare occasions that he goes up against a team whose bigs can defend to the 3 point line, he struggles on the boards.
That's not to discredit him at all, just further evidence that he's the perfect big for this GS team. In the 90s, that would not be the case, because no team had the overall shooting that GS has, and therefore they didn't have to let Draymond dictate their substitution patterns. They would leave their bigs in, dare Draymond's team to seek out the open corner 3 rather than the iso, and dominate the boards in the mean time.
Superstars will defer if they have crap shots. Larry deferred a handful of times but it was only if he had absolutely zip for a shot. Same with MJ. Same with Magic later in his career. Kobe as well. My belief is that Lebron defers too much.
Magic in particular deferred a lot more than I think you're giving him credit for. And as Letekro pointed out, LeBron has been far more reliable in the final 10 seconds of close postseason games than Kobe ever was. We remember the shots that Kobe made, but he missed a lot more. He is not the model for what I want in the last 10 seconds of a close game. What I like about LeBron and Durant both is that they look for the team's best shot, even if they're not taking it. I just don't see it as a negative in the same way that you do, and I think the results vindicate LeBron's approach. He isn't as good as Jordan was, so he'll inevitably fail that comparison, and he isn't specifically the clutch shooter that Bird was (but really, who is?). But I would take him over Kobe in the last 10 seconds for sure, and I think he has a lot more in common with Magic than you're accounting for.
