James Worthy, NBA Hall of Famer, does not like what he sees from the game today.
Worthy spoke with the “Stoney & Jansen Show” on 97.1 The Ticket and voiced is frustrations with modern professional basketball, saying the “rush” of players spending less time in college is hurting the sport at the next level.
“I mean, Kareem had four years with John Wooden, Michael Jordan and I had three years with Dean Smith, Isiah [Thomas] had some years with Bobby Knight,” Worthy explained.
“So you learned the fundamentals,” Worthy said. “Not only that, you learned how to live. You learned how to balance your freaking checkbook in college, there’s a lot of things. When you don’t get that, guys are coming to the NBA who are not fundamentally sound. All they do is practice threes, lift weights, get tattoos, tweet and go on social media. That’s it.”
Missing is fundamental soundness, the 61-year-old Worthy continued.
“So you don’t have that sound player; you have an athletic player. And that’s what’s happening to the game. It’s a lot of ISO and looking for mismatches. Bill Russell told me one time, they had five options off of one play. You don’t see that anymore,” Worthy lamented.
Also in the interview, Worthy was asked to diagnose the issues with the Lakers — where he spent his whole career, from 1982 through 1994 — and talked about their impatience with old-fashioned team building.
“The Lakers, I think they have refused to build over the years,” Worthy explained. “We’ve had some good players: [Brandon] Ingram, (Julius) Randle, [Lonzo] Ball. We have tried to win quickly. In Kobe’s last few years, we brought in [Steve] Nash who was a little bit older, Dwight Howard came in with a back injury. We traded away draft picks to try to win immediately and I think they’re going to have really think about how they need to build.
“You look at Memphis, you look at the way Boston is playing right now, you look at the way Milwaukee has built a team over time. We need to create players that have cohesiveness. We had it a couple years ago and we traded it all away to try to win, to try to match what Brooklyn was doing and what other teams were doing with their Big Three players.
“I think that’s going to go away. That’s an illusion, having the Big Three. You see what happened in Brooklyn, you see what happened with the Lakers. Even though everyone experienced injuries, you still should be playing better and you should definitely be in the playoffs. So the Lakers — it’s embarrassing and it’s unacceptable.”