Rajon Rondo is a great example of a modern player who has above average athleticism for his position but would not likely be able to perform at anything near his current level without his extraordinary hands. They give him the control to pull off certain ball fakes that most players are either not physically capable of (at least not without significant risk of losing the ball), as well as increasing his control on passes and when finishing around the rim.

With this in mind, spend a few minutes watching just the most famous highlights of the three players I mentioned, and you'll quickly see that hands are more important than hangtime in nearly all of their signature moves. Combine that with elite athleticism (and the mind to effectively coordinate all of their abilities) in Jordan and Erving's cases and you have a clearer picture of why they so often seemed superhuman. Travis Outlaw is one of the most insane leapers I've ever seen on a basketball court, but he doesn't have the rest of the tools to use that ability to anything resembling its full potential. Even if future generations somehow made MJ, Dr. J, and Rondo look slow and earthbound by comparison, they'd still have that rare, era transcending gift of huge hands to set them apart. ;^)

Agreed. There's certainly no way to make this an exact science. I'm just trying to think of methods that might make things quantitatively more defensible.

The era-specific HOF percentages Neil introduced are quite interesting, especially when compared to the relatively flat slope when you look at similar figures for baseball, but it's hard to argue that it captures anything super substantive.

But, to go back to the point about efficiency, I've always wondered what to make of the astronomical increase in player heights over the years. Since 1960, 20-40 year-old American male heights have increased, what, maybe 1 or 1.5 inches tops? Compared to NBA players who were are now, on average, maybe 4 or 5 inches taller. To say nothing of the tremendous crowding at the right tail, with maybe 15-20% of players now 7 feet or above. This is clearly unexplained by demographic changes, and if you agree that all other things equal the taller the better, then you're left with some form of efficiency argument, that some relatively significant fraction of potential players in the 1960s were doing something else with their lives.

I'd be curious to see how the height distribution has changed over the years, with a hunch that means have increased steadily and perhaps discontinuously since the big jump in the '60s and that std. deviations have probably decreased.

To engage the question more concretely, the point I make about aesthetic (rather than athletic) changes is also to revisit an argument made in an earlier post, that basketball is a sufficiently complex game that athleticism alone (narrowly-defined) isn't nearly enough to confer superiority to today's players. LBJ, Howard, and D-Wade may be stronger and more powerful than guys in previous generations, but are they also quicker than a Dennis Rodman? Are they more flexible and agile on their feet than MJ? Do they have better court vision than Stockton or Magic? Better hand-eye coordination than Bird? Better box-out skills than Charles Barkey? Etc, etc, the point being that better off-the-court training and technology do not necessarily translate into better basketball.

Slightly less prosaic, I'd also argue that citing today's superior training, technology, methodologies, etc, is unfair to previous generations' players, because they didn't have access to these things and the odds are high that, if they did, they'd be just as big, strong, and "athletic" as the current crop of NBA talent. And, I think this is particularly true of superstars like MJ, Bird, Magic, Kareem, etc, who were so relentlessly competitive that they were often adapting, even in their own careers, to changes in the game.

As I see it, the strongest argument for the superiority of today's players (or stars) is essentially a matter of demographics and efficiency. This being the fact that the ratio of available players to actual NBA players is higher than ever. Demographically, available players now live in a more populated U.S. and are being drawn from an increasingly large percentage of the world's growing population. Efficiency-wise, there's the point that the growing popularity of NBA basketball, and the growing desire among kids to make the NBA, is decreasing the gap between potential basketball players and actual players. In a totally efficient market, all of the best basketball players would be playing basketball and competing to make the NBA. While obviously an unreachable ideal, it's probably the case that we're getting closer, especially compared to eras like the 1970s--bball's commercial nadir--when potential basketball players were more likely than today to go into another sport like baseball or football. (The late '60s/early 70's also has the ABA problem, which created horrible dilution for the NBA.)

A final point, I'm reminded of Stephen Jay Gould's famous argument for progress in baseball, advanced in his book Full House. He cites the decline of the .400 hitter, but the idea is that a major sign of progress is when the standard deviation between players and teams declines--because everyone will be clumped together at the right tail. This would make for an interesting, and relatively easy, study. Anyone know how the std. dev. of team's winning percentages has changed? Or, better, what about the std. dev. of individual player fg% or minutes? I would also be interested in the mean changes in free throw %--which is about as objective a statistic as exists in sports.

And to sort of define what I meant by saying LeBron is more athletic than Jordan (if I said it in those words), I would include size as a physical attribute rather than a basketball-specific skill and classify it as part of athleticism rather than skillset in those terms. It is a significant advantage to be bigger, taller, and stronger particularly when it doesn't come at the expense of speed and explosiveness.