Quote:
Originally Posted by Orgazmo
This is ridiculous. UCLA 67-69 with Lew Alcindor is the best team ever. Period. They lost a close game to the great Elvin Hayes Houston team (arguably the 2nd greatest ever) in 1968 when Alcindor was injured and couldn't shoot, but then beat that team by 40 in the semi-finals.
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It's really hard to compare back in that era. In fact, you could say the Walton UCLA teams were better teams as they followed up their undefeated championship season with another. There were way fewer teams playing for it all back then as well. And if you had a dominant player, that was all it took. Now, that almost never happens. Last I can recall was 1988 when Danny Manning caught fire in the tourney and that one kind of came out of nowhere as it had not happened for quite a while since then. Even then a team with two good players were better than one dominant then, see the North Carolina win over Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas and Cincy's back to back over Ohio State. Additionally there were no at large teams for the longest fucking team in the tournament. So, suppose you did have Wilt and he misses a few games with injury and those are losses, you don't go to the tournament even when you're clearly the best team when he's there.
Seem to me the golden age started when Indiana started stockpiling players to have great teams. This lasted until around the late 1990s when the best players out of high school started skipping college altogether. It wasn't nowhere as common for players to come out early. It was unusual for Johnson to leave MSU after his sophomore season. The older timers say Moses Malone skipping completely was just fucking crazy. But I'm really not sure how all of that worked back then, I'm really confused on how Boston drafted Bird after 1978, then Bird goes back to Indiana State for 1979 and retains his rights.
Anyway, that UNLV team would have demolished Alcinder's UCLA team if there was some sort of time travel. They punked the Georgetown team that had Mourning and Mutumbo on it. The Carolina team with Jordan, Perkins, Worthy, Daughtrey would have wiped the floor with those UCLA teams. What would've been cool would be to watch Alcinder's UCLA teams go up against David Robinson's Navy teams. That would've been a better comparison. The game changed way too much in the 15-20 years after Alcinder went pro.