BLUM: Party like it's 2001

[FinalFourCy]

We can go back-and-forth on the schematic stuff all we want -- that is fun, but it does not really prove anything about the relative quality of the two teams.

This reminds me of the debate we had at some point between the 90s Bulls and the current Warriors. A tenet of the Bulls' side was that team and the game in general during that era was "tough," and it was certainly more physical and the officials allowed it to be, so the Warriors would see their finesse style roughhoused out of the gym.

You guys seem to be making a similar argument for the 2000 team.

I think the only fair comparisons you can make is relative quality between their peers of the same era through the computer rankings. I already posted the ones from Sports Reference above, and it says the two squads are shockingly close in their relative quality of offense, defense, and overall compared to the other teams in Division-1 out there.

I know everybody likes to talk about the toughness of the Fizer-Tinsely team, but I could just as easily bring up the fact that modern athletes are becoming larger, faster, and stronger every year. Comparison of heights for the starting fives...

6'1" Horton
6'1" Nurse
6'3" Tinsely
6'4" Johnson
6'9" Fizer

Compared to...

6'4" Horton-Tucker (and 240 as a "guard")
6'5" Haliburton
6'5" Weiler-Babb
6'6" Shayok
6'9" Jacobson

The 2019 team is collectively 12" taller than the 2000 team. All of those wings up there are long and disruptive on defense with their length, too. Shayok and Wigginton are pretty impressive athletes, and Lard has a heck of a lot of spring in him.

Shayok would be a mismatch, and Wigginton is still a next level athlete.

Even if the guys in the olden days were "tougher," they were still smaller, and I think the median athlete in college basketball now is much more athletic than the one circa 2000. This is the same reason modern NBA teams would smoke teams from the olden days -- the guys are just getting so much bigger and faster and stronger.

I hate that kind of comparison, though. I prefer to think of it as relative to their competition, where the computers are saying these two teams are very alike.

That’s quite the retreat.

Which team is better naturally goes to which team would win the matchup. Given what we’ve seen the last many years, those quality of play numbers tend to drop when facing a team of the ilk of that 1999-2000 team.

The current group best the Fizer team in the Kenpom regular season standings, but most of it’s actual losses would be to teams like the 1999-2000 group. We’ll see how we fare down the stretch on the court. The bar is high, but if this year finishes with the on-court success of that one, they’ll be in the conversation.

 

[Sigmapolis]

That Cyclone team was the smallest team in their league back then as well. But it still took 3 total overtimes to hand them their only two losses in Big 12 play.

The computers say the average Big 12 team now is 4.5 points better than the average Big 12 team in 2000 compared to the rest of the peer competition in Division-1.

They would be playing not just bigger teams, but statistically better ones, too.

 

[Sigmapolis]

That’s quite the retreat.

I do not think saying that trying to settle this through fun chalkboard X's and O's conversations about teams 20 years apart is impossible -- better to shift to something more objective, like the computer ratings, which put the two teams extremely close to each other, somehow equals a "retreat." It is more a, "How about we talk about something objective?"

The computers like our modern teams, Fizer and Tinsely played in a much weaker Big 12, and they definitely had their duds, too. I loved that team and cried after the Michigan State game (as a middle schooler), but we have built up a legend around them like they actually won a national title. We have to take them as they were -- they did not finish the deal.

The same thing is true with the bad luck of the Kane-Ejim-(hurt foot) Niang team.

 

[VeloClone]

The computers say the average Big 12 team now is 4.5 points better than the average Big 12 team in 2000 compared to the rest of the peer competition in Division-1.

They would be playing not just bigger teams, but statistically better ones, too.

So the rest of Div1 today is even worse? Well then that 99-00 team probably wouldn't lose any non-con games either.

 

[Sigmapolis]

So the rest of Div1 today is even worse? Well then that 99-00 team probably wouldn't lose any non-con games either.

The computers always rate the average team as zero.

But you knew that.

 

[CYdTracked]

Did you even watch that team play? Yeah, leave Horton wide open and see how that works out for you. The lack of numbers of threes from Kantrail (four attempts a game is not an insignificant number - we are not talking about a player who made a three once ever other game or so) had nothing to do with inability to make the shot or inability to handle the pressure. He absolutely drilled long threes in high pressure situations. He didn't need to take on a primary scoring role, but could when needed. If they were doubling Marcus off of him he would certainly make a team pay.

My exact thoughts when reading that too. Some of the younger people here should go search YouTube for that 99-00 team as you can find some full games vs UCLA and MSU I know from the tournament and some parts or highlights of other games that season too. There is one at KU from 2000 that 2 future 1st round NBA picks in Hinrich and Collison were in foul problems from trying to guard Fizer and Tinsley I came across. I think some may be under-selling some of the other players on that team too as Horton was a deadly 3 point shooter and a pretty good defender too. The one thing about Nurse and Horton was you had to guard them at least 5 feet out from the 3 point line at all times because both would not hesitate to pull up and drain a 3 on you from there if you gave them room to do so. I get it, different era and different style of play than today but that team could score and run the break too and cause teams today fits trying to guard them. They could go big and small at times too as it was not uncommon for Shirley or Rancik who are comparable in size and talent to Jacobson probably to be in the game at the same time as Fizer so now you'd have to worry about 2 solid bigmen crashing the boards or defending them in the paint. You could try to double Fizer but he usually wasn't bothered by that, he would just score over defenders anyways or get a foul, or find an open man and there were plenty of capable guys on that roster who were capable of making you pay for the double team.

Here's a quick bit of a game against CU that Tinsley did some crazy things with 2 or 3 defenders going at him and still made a play happen. Tinsley sometimes would make some bonehead mistakes with the ball but he also had such a knack for the game he could embarrass a defense with some ridiculous moves.

 

[FinalFourCy]

That Cyclone team was the smallest team in their league back then as well. But it still took 3 total overtimes to hand them their only two losses in Big 12 play.

Agree, it would be tough for this team to out small-ball the 1999-2000 team. That team inadvertently was built for handling small ball teams, defensively speaking, starting multiple lead guards and basically a guard at the four. They were ahead of their time.

What is an advantage for this current team would be mitigated. Would the 1999-2000 team find it tough on offense against another small-ball team? Perhaps, but we’ve struggled to keep some guards in front of us.

 

[stateofmind]

Not trying to get too off topic but the AOL Instant Messenger thing was a genius way to write this. I was going to school at that same time so that brought back some memories and oh the chaos we could cause with that program. We once created a fake AIM account and had a guy on our floor thinking some girl in the building had the hots for him as we were able to mess with him just enough to fall for the prank until we had to break the bad news to him. Sometimes would find that people that had their entire C: drive shared on the campus workgroup so you could find their AOL IM logs and sometimes you ran into some pretty juicy stuff like someone discussing their sex life. A lot of times when you found someone that had their PC completely shared like that you could also see their printer shared so we'd do the nice thing print a note to their printer that it might be a good idea to get one of their friends that knows something about computers to lock down their PC shares so people aren't able to see every file they have on it and we might paste one of their conversations on the note as an example why they need to do that.

What I take from this is to never trust @CYdTracked with anything.

 

[CYdTracked]

What I take from this is to never trust @CYdTracked with anything.

Ha! I don't know if the "file sharing" still goes on in the dorms at ISU or not like it was when I was going to school where everyone seemed to have some kind of folder shared with music, games, etc. I'm sure some here remember the days of StrangeSearch which was basically like a web version of Napster on the ISU campus. We just always found it amusing when you were browsing a share on the campus workgroup and found they literally had EVERYTHING shared on the computer. Imagine how much stuff some people could have been accidentally sharing if we had smart phones or other mobile devices that were synching up files such as camera photos back then. I never had any bad intentions when I ran across people that had everything shared, I usually tried to put a note on their desktop or print one letting them know they might want to lock down their PC a bit as they probably had no clue what they were doing.