BEST OF THE BEST
Before you close the door on the GOAT discussion, consider this
Feb 9, 2021, 12:24 pm
Football is a team sport. Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images.
The final seconds of Super Bowl LV were still ticking when the coronation began.
Tom Brady is the GOAT, the greatest football player of all time. Don't stop there, Tom Brady is the greatest player in a team sport of all time. Aw, why not just say Tom Brady is the greatest athlete of all time, period?
Wouldn't it be fairer and more accurate to leave it at Tom Brady is the most successful football player of all time? There's no arguing seven Super Bowls and five Super Bowl MVP Awards.
Brady was 21 for 29 with three touchdowns and no interceptions, an excellent game for sure. He also threw a pick that was called back because of a defensive holding call.
Because the "P" in MVP is a singular noun, Brady got the trophy. But really, wasn't it the Tampa Bay defense that won the Super Bowl?
Football is a team sport, so any argument of "the greatest" is subjective with many factors involved that have nothing or little to do with individual skill. Brady won his seventh Super Bowl this year, but the 2021 MVP went to Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Three players received votes for MVP this season and Brady wasn't one of them. The others were quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes of the Chiefs and Josh Allen of the Bills.
Often the argument of "The Greatest" comes down to championship rings, and there's no argument that Brady has seven of them. You hear about rings when Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James is debated. MJ has six, while LeBron has "only" four, so that makes Jordan the GOAT, right? Well, Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics dynasty teams has 11 rings. So he's the greatest. But wasn't Russ outplayed individually by Wilt Chamberlain most of the time in their head-to-head battles? You can look it up.
Russell and Chamberlain played in an era when basketball wasn't nearly the dynamic international sport it is today. So let's leave those two statistical and physical giants aside.
Robert Horry played from 1992 to 2007, years overlapping both Jordan and James' careers, so apples to apples. Horry has seven championship rings. So maybe number of titles isn't the best criterion for the greatest of all time.
It's odd that championship rings are front and center in GOAT arguments for basketball and football, but titles rarely are mentioned when debating the greatest baseball player ever. The consensus best player today is Mike Trout. He's played 10 seasons in the big leagues and won three MVP Awards. But his team has made the playoffs only once, back in 2014, and the Angels were swept 3-0 in the first round.
The baseball player with the most World Series titles is Yogi Berra, a great Yankees catcher, Hall of Famer, three MVP Awards. He played on 10 World Series winners. It used to be, if you played on the Yankees, especially during the '30s (5 titles), '40s (4) and '50s (6), you won a lot of jewelry.
It's much easier, and no more accurate, to find the greatest athlete of all time in individual sports. Historically, whoever won the Olympics decathlon was pronounced the greatest athlete in the world. You know how that started? In 1912, the Olympics were held in Stockholm and Jim Thorpe won the decathlon. King Gustav V told Thorpe, "You are the world's greatest athlete." It stuck. That Gustav V could coin a phrase.
I dare American sports fans to name the winner of the 2016 decathlon. It was Ashton Eaton, and he happens to be an American. He also won the decathlon gold medal in 2012.
That's Ashton Eaton, the world's greatest athlete, not Adam Eaton of the Washington Nationals who's probably better known around here for his devastating home run against the Astros in Game 6 of the 2019 World Series.
It's hard to argue against Michael Phelps as the greatest athlete of all time, unless you don't take swimming seriously as a major sport. True, it's hard to find swimming on TV unless it's the Olympics every four years. Phelps has won 23 Olympic gold medals. Nobody's close. The next gold collectors are Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina, Finnish long distance runner Paavo Nurmi, American swimmer Mark Spitz and American track star Carl Lewis. They each have nine gold medals.
How about tennis superstar Serena Williams with 23 Grand Slam singles titles and counting? She looks in terrific form at the Australian Open currently underway in Melbourne. If Serena wins she will tie Margaret Court for the all-time record. But this is America, and tennis ain't football, basketball or baseball.
The real problem with debating who's the greatest athlete of all time is … does being great at one sport mean you're the single most talented athlete all things considered? Tom Brady doesn't look like a basketball player. He's too slow to survive in the NBA. Michael Jordan might be the basketball GOAT, but he batted .202 in his one year of minor league baseball.
If you're looking for multiple excellence on the highest level of professional sports, Bo Jackson is your man. He is the only player to play in an NFL Pro Bowl and a baseball All-Star Game. He could hit a 475-foot home run and climb the center field wall to rob an opponent's homer. In high school, he was the Alabama state decathlon champion. He won a Heisman Trophy while at Auburn.
Deion Sanders played 14 years in the NFL and nine years in Major League Baseball. Nobody but Prime Time has played in a Super Bowl and World Series.
You know, back in the '70s ABC Sports had a gimmick series called Superstars, where pro athletes competed head-to-head against each other in a range of contests that proved absolutely nothing. The events included bowling, bicycle racing (on a 3-speed Columbia bike from Kmart), ping-pong, swimming and hitting a baseball off a batting tee. Joe Frazier almost drowned in the swimming pool – he neglected to tell producers that he couldn't swim. Pete Maravich won the bowling competition with a 168 game.
The Superstars series ran in various forms from 1973 to 1990. Among the winners: soccer player Kyle Rote Jr., decathlete Dave Johnson, football receiver Willie Gault, running back Herschel Walker and defensive back Jason Sehorn. The series proved nothing except you might not want to enter a swimming race if you don't know how to swim.
My pick for the greatest athlete of all time? Or let's make that most talented athlete ever, taking into account speed, strength, eye-hand coordination, making instant decisions and pure guts.
It's whoever plays third base for a big league baseball team. A third baseman has to charge the plate to catch a bunt with one hand while bent over and throw out a speedy runner, grab a screeching line drive backhanded down the line, crash into the stands trying to catch a foul ball, then come to bat and try to hit a 105-mph fastball that could be coming right at his head. And then you have to answer Julia Morales' questions after the game. Those things are hard to do.
Or it's LeBron James.
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The Celtics are on pace to join the 2018-19 Rockets and 2020-21 Jazz. Photo by Alex Slitz/Getty Images.
The NBA is on the cusp of accomplishing something that it hasn't seen before. The jury's still out on whether it's a good thing.
With about seven weeks left in the season, 2-point shots are accounting for 49% of scoring. And if that stat holds up — there's no indication that it won't — this will be the first season in which 2-pointers make up less than half of the league's point production.
The current breakdown: a record-low 49% of scoring comes from 2-pointers, a record-high 36% comes from 3-pointers, and a near-record-low 15% comes from the foul line. Those numbers are just more proof of how the 3-point shot continues permeating the game, and that's why plenty of people are wondering aloud if the league has a real problem on its hands.
“I don’t have any problem with guys and teams shooting a lot of 3s,” said Golden State's Stephen Curry, the league's all-time leader in 3-pointers and someone closing in on 4,000 such makes for his regular-season career. “Obviously, that’s the way that I play, and I love that factor in the game. But you’ve also got to put the work in behind the scenes to take full advantage of it.”
This isn't a new phenomenon.
Barring some sort of major shift in how the game is played over the next seven weeks, the league is on pace to break the record for 3-pointers in a season (it’ll be the 15th consecutive season in which the 3s-per-game record falls) and 3-pointers attempted in a season (a new mark will be set there for the 19th time in the last 22 seasons).
Boston is leading the 3-point assault this year, though the Celtics are hardly the only 3-happy team. But the defending NBA champions are clearly more reliant on the shot than anyone else, with 46% of their points this season coming from beyond the arc. They'll almost certainly become only the third team in NBA history to finish a season with more points from 3s than 2s, joining the 2018-19 Houston Rockets and 2020-21 Utah Jazz.
“Everybody can’t play the same way," Celtics All-Star forward and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jayson Tatum said. "You've got to have the right personnel. But, you know, the way we play works for us. So, we play to our strengths.”
The Celtics are the only franchise in NBA history to have eight different players make 100 3s in a season; they've done it in each of the last two seasons and are on pace to do it again this year. For them, the 3-pointer is the golden ticket; they're 33-6 this season when they make at least 17 3s, and just 8-10 when they don't make that many.
They had five 3-point shooters on the floor together last season and the result was an NBA championship. It was, at times, impossible to guard. Golden State rode the brilliance of Curry and Klay Thompson to four NBA titles in their years as the Warriors' “Splash Brothers," a duo that helped usher in a new era of 3-point reliance. And the math is simple: shooting 40% on 3s gets you more points per attempt than shooting 50% on 2s does.
“Right now, I think the defense has to catch up and maybe NBA teams will shoot less 3s,” San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama said at the All-Star break, before he was shut down for the year with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder. “But analytics back it up, so it makes sense.”
Wembanyama was averaging 8.8 3-point tries per game this season, the most of any center in the league, and his 403 attempts on the season from beyond the arc is still more entering this week than some of the game's best shooters — a list of players that includes Phoenix's Devin Booker, the Los Angeles Lakers' Austin Reaves and Miami's Duncan Robinson.
But the numbers say it's a good shot. So, Wembanyama took them. A lot of them. The Spurs, for years, were a team that didn't prioritize the 3-pointer. And now, it's a weapon for them and everyone else in the league.
“The game has evolved,” said Golden State coach Steve Kerr, an elite shooter in his playing days.
It keeps evolving. Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this month that he listened to an off-the-record conversation between Kerr and broadcaster Bob Costas at the tech summit during All-Star weekend, the keynote address of sorts for those who were invited to that event. Silver later shared that Kerr conceded there may be a bit too much 3-point shooting in today's NBA, but that he liked the current state of the game and wouldn't recommend any changes.
Silver thinks it's all cyclical. He said when the All-Star weekend last came to the Bay Area in 2000, “many people were saying it was too physical, we were too dependent on the dunk, that players weren’t sufficiently skilled as they were than in the old days.”
It's all very different now.
“The fact now that you can’t play in this league unless you can shoot, that even 7-footers have to be able to shoot these days and have to be able to shoot at long range, I actually think that’s a beautiful thing,” Silver said.