Vince Carter has seen some stuff during his time in the NBA. Carter was drafted in the 1998 draft, and despite the fact that he’s played on seven different teams, he has spent each of the last 19 season being a person who plays professional basketball in the best league in the world for a living.
This has meant that Carter has seen just about everything over the course of his NBA career, especially when it comes to the way basketball has changed. He came into the league at a time where teams played a slower, more physical game, and is now around as pacing and spacing are the keys to success in the league.
But even beyond that, Carer has had a front row seat to watching some of the other ways that basketball is just different now, both from a style and rules perspective, and he broke them down in an absolutely tremendous three-minute video.
https://streamable.com/xnapm
“Illegal defense,” Carter said. “I was a part of the old style where you could bump a guy running through the paint. Zone’s now in the game, you have guys now playing the 2, 3, 4 that are now 6’10, 6’11. You have shooting fives now.”
Carter continued to break down the way players can be a certain size and not be confined to what you’d expect for their position. He mentioned guards who rebound, along with players the size of Kevin Durant and Ben Simmons who are nearly seven feet tall but bring the ball up the floor.
There are just so many interesting things in here from the perspective of someone who has seen it all during their tenure in the league. Even something as simple as how the act of playing basketball takes a toll on your body now is different in Carter’s experience.
“Back then, they were allowed to put their hands on you, you were allowed to get chucked, you were allowed to get hit,” Carter said. “And what is considered flagrant now was common then, so it’s like, hey, get up and keep playing. Or sometimes you’d get hit, you’d look at the ref, he’s like ‘play ball.’ So it’s just a different game and I think a lot of guys mentally couldn’t take the physical beating throughout the course of an 82-game season, and it got worse in playoffs. There was such thing as regular season basketball and playoff basketball. When you get to the playoffs, that’s when you sit after the end of the season, after a playoff series, maybe that you lost, you’re like ‘I need a month just to recover from the beating.’”
Basketball has always found a way to evolve, and it’s really interesting hearing how that’s happened from someone whose NBA career began in the late-90s.
