Nice discussion, although I feel like y’all talk past each other a little.
To your credit, I think it’s inarguable that the level in basketball (and many other sports) is higher today.
That said, I’m squeamish about dinging past players for this because it’s a matter of chronology. The pesky flow of time will nearly always (and I’d argue unduly) penalize players of yore.
Shohei Ohtani, for instance, is a better baseball player than Babe Ruth in absolute terms, but does that remain the case if you reverse their birth years? Impossible to say.
At the same time, league quality *does* still matter in baseball, so you also *can’t* just refer to their raw statistical output…there’s a reason only 2 players whose careers have occurred within the last 60 years are in the Top 15 in career baseball WAR.
Much harder to separate oneself from the historical pack today, precisely because LQ is higher.
With basketball it’s, IMO, a little murkier because while the quality of the league has improved, the statistical difference between top players and replacement-level players has barely shifted. Part of this is due to b-ball evolving into a more heliocentric sport, with team playbooks being more slanted toward squeezing every bit of juice from a teams star player…TL;DR - top players appear to be optimized better today. Unlike in baseball, the bulk of best all-time (per-possession) statistical seasons did not occur in the early years of the sport. There’s actually a pretty even statistical distribution.
As for the specific examples you cite, I can’t speak on Phelps as I have next-to-no knowledge of swimming but I know for certain that Magic was a pretty good shooter. He was deadeye from the line and had a very good long-two game. Much like with Jordan, there’s an inverse correlation between attempts and poor %’s from the arc, meaning the more he took the better he shot. If you teleport him to todays game, does he become an elite 3 point shooter? No, I don’t think so. But what if he were born in, say, 1990? Ultimately it’s unknowable. Same w the question of how, say, a ‘40-born Durant would fare in the 60’s. By the rules of the day, he’d get called for palming on every possession if he dribbled the same way.
