RIP Jerry West
- Thread starter Telemachus
- Start date
Jerry West built the Showtime Lakers, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers and the Warriors and then proceeded to get paid a boatload of money by Steve Balmer to consult the team on big "tough" decisions like signing Kawhi in free agency and trading absolutely nothing to the Lakers for Ivica Zubac. Dude's fingerprints are on pretty much everything in the NBA.
Yeah, Lacob and Meyers got a lot of credit for building the team (for their part, they do deserve credit for finding a way to extend their relevancy after KD left) but Jerry West replaced Chris Mullen and the old front office, immediately identified Steph as the one to build around and brought in Klay, HB, Draymond, and rather controversially dumped Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut. He's as much responsible for those rings as he was for the Lakers rings.
I was mostly thinking about how Meyers is on ESPN acting like he's had 4+ decades of sustained success because he caught lightning in a bottle. While they did manage to sneak out one more win with the corpse of their dynasty team it's pretty clear choices were made that have left the franchise in a massive state of disrepair and instead of hanging around to right the ship he took off and now wants to tell everyone else that Denver/Boston/whoever will never be as good as his Dubs were.
Great player and competitor. I got to see him as a kid. In one playoff game at the Fabulous Forum I saw him bury a last second shot in a win over Chicago. They didn't call him Mr. Clutch for nothing. If a player got him mad then he really went off and scored and scored and scored. Grew up dirt poor and in fact played on a dirt "court." (That will improve your ball handling skills). When he was older I sometimes wondered what he thought of the coddled AAU crowd in the NBA.
If he had the medical care of today's group to prevent the hamstring injuries he suffered and if he played in the "no-contact" league of today instead of being hammered by the likes of Jerry Sloan and others of his ilk who knows how many scoring records he would have shattered.
By the way, his athleticism was vastly underrated by some, probably because of the hamstring injuries. In his early years he could hit the top of the square on the backboard, which for a 6'3" guy ain't bad.
If he had the medical care of today's group to prevent the hamstring injuries he suffered and if he played in the "no-contact" league of today instead of being hammered by the likes of Jerry Sloan and others of his ilk who knows how many scoring records he would have shattered.
By the way, his athleticism was vastly underrated by some, probably because of the hamstring injuries. In his early years he could hit the top of the square on the backboard, which for a 6'3" guy ain't bad.
