No snark, it’s funny when kids get hurt

Breaking ankles and jawbones. That is a powerful crossover.

+1 Tiiiiiiiny Fists Of Fury

If I was standing in a field wearing nothing but full battle armor (a hat and jean shorts) I could hold my ground and defeat a wave of at least one million children of a similar size. If you think differently you are wrong. One million and one of those children and I might succumb to their sheer numbers.

She was actually awarded no points for the kicks. She got three points for just embarrassing that other kid. It’s a moral victory.

Kickboxing children? What year is it? Did I fall asleep for 3 years and wake up mid-Trump Presidency?

Ref: “No kicks to the face”
Child: Immediately kicks the other child in the face.
Ref: “Three points!”

If you plot offensive efficiency (points per possession) your hypothesis basically holds: the league bottomed out in the late 1990s and recovered to historical norms about five years later. There are a bunch of reasons for this (eliminating hand-checks is a major change), but one that’s overlooked is the historical…

“there is no hand-checking on the perimeter”

What do you mean by soft?

They might have been more physical in the 80's and 90's, but I think defenses are actually much better now than they were then.

Well yes, if you’re going to compare it to the era where a rugby game would suddenly break out as soon as somebody got into the paint, sure, the era is soft.

In the modern NBA big guys have to be capable of moving their feet on pick and rolls and switch onto smaller guards. Back then, they just had to sit under the rim and hack anyone who came into the paint.

Among retired Boston sports stars, Bird is the anti-Schilling. Long derided by many local media as some sort of hoop-shootin’ submoron (“the Hick from French Lick” — in large part due to his dialect I expect), Bird has regularly shown himself to be pretty sharp since his retirement. Schilling, meanwhile, always…

I agree, anyone who isn’t ready to take a punch during a sporting event is a straight up pussy. BRB, gonna go post an NBA/NHL comparison meme....

Or they just started enforcing the rules that were on the books that the Pistons took more advantage of. it’s mind boggling how people think that the bad boys were good basketball. They were solid Rugby maybe.

This is a bad take and is completely wrong as points per game aren’t any different than Jordan’s heyday, and are far lower than the 1980s and early 90s. If offense was so much easier now as you claim, this wouldn’t be the case.

It’s funny, the guys from the Celtics teams that are still involved in the game like Bird, Ainge, McHale and Heinsohn are the most level headed about the game’s maturation.

Mechanics Fall Apart

Jesus Wept: My Life in the NFL