The NBA playoffs are on and there are some truly elite series happening across the two conferences as the best players take on one another in a bid to grab an NBA title. The matchups are always interesting to look at in the playoffs as fans debate which team should be winning the series based on their personnel. These debates usually go to the next level when people start talking about all-time great players teaming up and battling one another.
Comparisons across eras are one of the NBA community’s favorite things to do while also being something that gets criticized constantly. That doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway and a fan recently shared an Instagram post with 2 stacked teams suggesting that a team of former greats would beat a team of today’s best players.
The team pitted Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Kobe Bryant against a team featuring Steph Curry, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, and Joel Embiid. And the fan thought that the former would beat the latter handily 10 out of 10 times. He received support from one of the players in the picture as well, with Shaquille O’Neal reposting it to his own story, seemingly agreeing with the fan.
“Bottom row is winning 10/10 times, no matter what.”
It’s hard to disagree with this take too, there are 5 undisputedly Top 10 players in NBA history on Shaq’s team, while LeBron James is arguably the only Top 10 all-time player on his team. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid are still developing their legacies too, it’s hard to have them in these conversations already.
It’s never easy to take a call in situations like this that can be considered objective or the right answer, but the teams in question here are quite lopsided. On top of that O’Neal has always had the supreme confidence that comes with being perhaps the most dominant player in NBA history, so it would be odd to see him picking against any team he was on.
