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Originally Posted by RainMaker

Longley was not above-average. Not in a league with so many quality Centers.

These centers were quality in large part because the Hall of Famers were going against stiffs (it should be common sense that with the explosion in basketball's international popularity, America does not have a monopoly on growing seven-footers and without guys like Gobert, Adams, Capela, Embiid, the Gasols, Jokic, Nurkic, and Thompson we'd be looking at starting Cs like Miles Plumlee, Kendrick Perkins, and Spencer Hawes who players like Cousins, Davis, and Towns would have even more of a field day against) and because with the defensive rules as they were, you could go one-on-one in the post. Patrick Ewing's offensive game would be seen as severely lacking today with all the different ways defenses can double team the post.

Since you like BPM, it would be interesting to note that in 1992-93 35-year-old Bill Laimbeer and 39-year-old Robert Parish were top-10 centers with a mighty BPM of 0.8 and 0.7 respectively. It was a very low bar to cross those days to be an above-average center. Horace Grant had a BPM of 3.7 that year; Patrick Ewing's was 2.2. Nostalgia's a hell of a drug I guess. It turns out that we don't see as many 'great' centers because trying to score 20+ points a game on straight post-ups is not the most efficient way to score and that a player who does what Rudy Gobert does provides much more value to his team than any of the 90s centers outside of Hakeem, the Admiral, and Shaq did at their very best (yes, even before he got fat Shaq had some years where he wasn't engaged on defense and was less impactful overall than Gobert was this year).

For all these great role players that made up the Bulls, isn't it strange that none of them went on to be successful anywhere else outside of Horace?

From the 2nd three-peat, Pippen was the best player on a Blazers team that almost beat the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, Kerr was a very good role player on championship Spurs teams, Kukoc was solid player for many years after the Bulls: in 2001 he got traded to the Hawks and averaged 20-6-5 for the rest of the season. Ron Harper played the last 2 years of his career as the starting PG for the championship Lakers. That would be everyone else in the rotation besides Rodman (who just checked out mentally) and Longley (who was old and had acquitted himself well enough during Jordan's first retirement).

From the first three-peat, the team won 55 games the year after Jordan retired and lost a close 7-game series to a team that lost the Finals in a close 7-game series. BJ Armstrong was an All-Star. It's not like they even signed a big name to replace Jordan; their starting SG was literally some guy who had been playing overseas and averaged 8 points a game for them. Pippen and Grant were 2nd and 10th in the league in BPM (in other words, had people had the tools to better analyze the game back then you'd have heard a lot of complaints the previous years about how the Bulls are a stacked superteam with 2 of the top 5/3 of the top 10-15 players and how boring and unfair it is for fans of other teams) and the Bulls still won 55 games even though Pippen missed 10, Grant missed 12, and Jordan missed 82; meanwhile, the Cavs are 4-18 over the past 3 seasons when LeBron doesn't play. You really thought this was going to be some trick question, huh? It takes a very minimal amount of brainpower to understand that if a team wins 3 straight championships and then wins 55 games after its best player retires, it's not at all strange when the team doesn't want those remaining players to go "anywhere else" in the first place.

You really want to compare that to how the Heat basically traded LeBron and 38-year-old Ray Allen for Luol Deng, Josh McRoberts, and Whiteside (and at midseason traded multiple 1st rounders to upgrade the PG position with Dragic) yet still couldn't crack the playoffs in the weak East? Or how the Cavaliers, despite winning multiple draft lotteries, were hot garbage until LeBron decided to come back?

Bosh was incredible his last few years in Toronto. A legitimate top-10 player who you could run your offense through. It's not a knock on Horace who is a very good player. Just that if you were given an NBA franchise and given your choice of building around Horace Grant or Chris Bosh, you'd take Chris Bosh in a heartbeat.

Once again, a player's early career is irrelevant to what they do when older, especially in today's game where there's much more movement and you can count the number of guys capable of playing at an All-Star level at age 30+ on one hand.

If you had LeBron James or Michael Jordan to build around, you'd take Horace Grant as his teammate in a heartbeat. Same with Pippen over Wade. It's not LeBron's fault he had to brute-force his way to a decent team rather than having a better one built for him. If I were forced to build around Toronto Chris Bosh, I'd trade for multiple young players and try to draft someone better than him because otherwise my team is going to be mediocre at best.

I understand a lot of players saw their stats decline when joining up with Lebron earlier in his career. But perhaps there's a constant in that scenario instead of assuming players were zapped of talent over a 5-month offseason.

First, why would one penalize LeBron for being good enough to be an NBA star at an age when Jordan was losing in the Sweet Sixteen? I also don't understand how you don't think old, injury-prone players decline quickly. We are less than a week removed from wondering whether Boston would be better off trading a 2nd team all-NBA player rather than signing him to a big contract next year that takes him into his 30s. Thinking LeBron doesn't make his teammates better is literally the most ludicrous criticism one could invent for him. Have you looked at the 2007 Cavs roster lately?

That late 90's Pacers team was really good. Better than anyone Lebron has faced since the 2010-2011 Bulls team. The 90's Knicks teams were good too. Putting these recent Raptors or Pacers teams anywhere near those teams is silly. That 92-93 Knicks team had an SRS 3 points higher than those that you are mentioning. Same with that 97-98 Pacers team.

If you are able to find out what SRS is, work a little harder and think of how good the Raptors or Wizards would look if there were 4 new expansion teams they got to play against 10+ times a year (538 uses an Elo-based system and the peak rating achieved by teams like the Hawks, Raptors, Pacers, and Celtics in recent years is equal to or greater than the peak rating the Knicks and Pacers achieved in the 90s). Again, the only teams LeBron has lost to in the last 6 years are teams with a much higher SRS than those Knicks/Pacers teams (even the Spurs who don't give a crap about the regular season) and the teams he's beaten have been such thorough beatdowns that a much better team would have just lost in 5-6 games. Also note that I said 'average' Knicks or Pacers team. When you want to build them up in your head, you think of each team or player at their best, but in reality most of them had only 1 good year; just as good or better were the Bulls were the year Rose won MVP or the Pacers when Lance Stephenson and Roy Hibbert hadn't melted down or the Raptors were last year with Lowry healthy the whole season. Just as LeBron didn't play a Bulls team that simultaneously had MVP Rose and 2nd-team all-NBA Noah and healthy Deng and Pau Gasol, these random 90s teams didn't have everyone firing at all cylinders (Patrick Ewing did not simultaneously score like he did in the 80s and defend like he did in the 90s).

This also overlooks that a team has to have a "LeBron stopper" to even have a chance. You can make a team with 4 All-Stars, one that wins 60 games in the regular season, and if the best option you have for stopping LeBron is the guy in your starting lineup who is merely good rather than an All-Star/All-Defensive player, you end up swept by the Cavs even when Love and Irving are injured. Players like Paul George, PJ Tucker, DeMarre Carroll, Jae Crowder all have good reputations as a wing defender, yet all of them have repeatedly been steamrolled by LeBron in the playoffs.