How the game has changed with Mike Prada | Thinking Basketball podcast  

This is such a great podcast. I've become convinced that getting rid of illegal defense was the most important thing that happened in the modern history of basketball. It fundamentally changed the game, just took a while for defenses to understand how to do it right, which then forced the offenses to adapt, etc. As Mike says, basketball is incredibly complex now and a big part of that is that defenses can do so much stuff

Amazing point! A players position should be determined by the role they play within the given moment not their size. And this isn’t a positionless era, it’s a multi-positional era. Beautiful

What an episode, my godness this is GOLD.

I like what D'Antoni said That we take 3s to open up the key That podcast with him was very insightful 🧠 Steve Nash, James Harden and Steph Curry have done wonders for basketball O

22:32 Oh so that’s why the center is called pivot in Spanish, the term was used in English! Also the power forward is call ala-pivot, which means “wing-pivot” in Spanish which also makes sense.

Great work fellas per usual

Thanks for this. Bought the book and loving it!

This is a great topic! I’ve been having to explain to casuals or youngings how much the game has changed in just the past 10 years and why it changed!

Keep up the great content

Mike, audiobook version please

The baseball shift analysis is pretty poor because bunting and hitting to places was a lot more emphasized. The players of today just can’t handle a shift as well because power hitting is such a focus rather than directional hitting. There was also very little if any analytics because it would take a lot of human capital to actually keep track of it. This means there we’re probably a lot of hitters the shift would be effective against in the past but there was just any easy way to quickly draw who those hitters were outside of stereotypical assumptions. I think it’s true with basketball as well the players skills are just emphasized in different directions that produce a status quo. Think of the bill Russel era, the Celtics won 11 rings with bill because he was just the best defensive anchor in the league. That’s how you had to win it was the only proven formula. So running a 1960s Dirk out there would probably not work by any means and there were also no players who practiced Dirk like abilities. This didn’t really change until the modern era. Every single championship team had dominant bigs who could play defense and rebound basically from the 70s to the 90s. Jordan never had a dominate big but instead just ran a new kind of defense and offense that allowed them to have these stretch bigs. You had all kinds of difference offenses but it really didn’t change until you had a Scottie pippin who could do a bit of everything in ways a Wilt, Kareem, Parish, Lambier couldn’t. The players have to evolve before the coaches in basketball. If not you just end up with gimmicks that die on the vine like hyper iso rockets. Not to say they won’t find wins but rather they just can’t win a championship.

I hope you are having………………………….a great day.

Mike Prada sounds like someone mocking Mike Prada's voice.