The great NBA players

The best players in the NBA this season were three very big men from three different countries, Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Janis Adetokunmpo, and even they can be recognized as the best player in the world when the playoffs start this weekend. is Kevin Durant.

But there is something strange about the biggest stars of the game: their games are not alike.

They happen to be at the same height, but at no other time in NBA history have 7-feet been so remarkably different. Even the stories of how they got to the league have little in common. Durant was the greatest American player of his era. Embiid was a volleyball player from Cameroon. Jokic was a fluffy child from Serbia and Adetokunmpo was a skinny teenager from Greece.

But together, these four players cast a long shadow over the league. They are still the most dominant forces in a sport where simply being bigger than everyone else is no longer enough to dominate.

At a time when the big man is at risk of becoming an endangered species, Jokic, Embiid, Durant and Adetokunmpo make Darwin proud as living proof of his adaptation to basketball.

“I believe in evolution,” says NBA legend Bill Walton. “These truly amazing players who capitalized on and used every possible advantage that today’s athletes have in terms of training, conditioning and nutrition, science, medicine and equipment, court surface and ball quality and technology. Everything that makes today better than yesterday. I believe in all these things. ”

It would be difficult to watch the NBA and believe otherwise.

The first thing everyone sees when they look at these players is their size, but the most striking part about today’s great men is their collection of skills. The mobility, agility and flexibility they flaunt every night are nothing short of mind-boggling for the few people on the planet who see them face to face.

“I come from an era that was unheard of,” said Alaa Abdelnabi, an NBA player in the 1990s who now has a foothold in the embassy theaters as a Philadelphia 76ers television cameraman. “This package was beyond anyone’s understanding when I was in the league.”

Even basketball statistics these days are subject to inflation, but their numbers this season have been staggering. Jokic recorded the highest player performance rating of all time, surpassing the rating previously set by Adetokunmpo, who also broke his own record. Meanwhile, Embid became the first center since Shaquille O’Neal to win the title in 2000.

Which of these international stars deserves the MVP award is the battlefield of NBA podcasts, but much more interesting than the marginal discrepancies in their statistical cases are the huge differences in the way they do their job.

Their ancestors today may complain about big men, but the game has never required more than their breed. They need to cover more land. They need to keep more positions. Like so many jobs in today’s economy, they have to do more than just about anything.

“There’s no one in my group who likes this style of basketball,” said Bill Cartwright, a 7-foot-1 center who won three championships with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. “It simply came to our notice then. And it will continue to evolve into something else later. “

Embiid is the closest thing to a traditional big man, but there’s nothing traditional about anyone of his size who gracefully handles the ball, is comfortable behind the 3-point arc and productive on the free throw line. The only 7 feet to ever receive an average of more free kicks than Embiid this season were Wilt Chamberlain and O’Neill, but Chamberlain’s career record on the line was 61% and O’Neill made 51% in the year he made most free kicks. Embiid is 81% shooter.

There’s someone a few thousand miles away doing things no one has seen before. Jokic led the Nuggets in points, fights, assists, thefts and blockades, while acting as Denver’s center, guard point and basically every position between them. The whole team would fall apart without him. In fact, the Nuggets won Jokic’s minutes with 8.4 points per 100 possessions and lost the minutes he was on the bench with 7.9 points. This difference in net rating was easily the biggest difference in the league.