San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Linked across eras: Barry expounds on Wilt, Curry
As Stephen Curry closes in on Wilt Chamberlain’s record for the most points scored in a Warriors uniform, there couldn’t be a better source of perspective than Rick Barry.
At a vibrant 77, Barry still follows the NBA with a passion, often harsh in his criticism but remembering Golden State’s championship run as “one of my favorite alltime teams to watch,” he said in a telephone conversation Friday, “because of Curry, and because they played the game the right way.”
Barry got so familiar with Chamberlain in his playing days, he speaks of the man’s talent in reverential terms. “There will
never be anyone like Wilt, ever again,” he said. “But I think of Curry that way as well. They are both anomalies in league history. If you play a position the way nobody else has ever played it — both of them have done that.”
Suffice it to say that when Curry takes ownership of that record — after scoring 38 points against Houston on Saturday night, he is 18 points behind Chamberlain’s 17,783 — he’ll deserve every tribute that comes his way. Now imagine a mythical group photo of the Warriors’ alltime greats, with Curry standing next to Wilt. The juxtaposition would be comical, Curry appearing like some wideeyed kid, but it would speak to a radical difference in eras.
Chamberlain laid statistical waste to a landscape of behemoths, going against Bill Russell, Walt Bellamy, Willis Reed, Nate Thurmond, Wes Unseld and, near the end, Kareem AbdulJabbar and Bob Lanier. No man was safe from his ferocious dunks, but he also had a nice little fingerroll and a fallaway bank shot from close range. Based on a simple premise dating to the sport’s invention — the taller, the better — everything revolved around getting close to the basket.
“And now it’s all about how far you can get away from the basket,” said Barry, who ranks third on the Warriors’ scoring list with 16,447 points. “It gets a little ridiculous sometimes, but the 3point shot (not adopted in the NBA until 1979) is a heck of a weapon. And this is why you can’t even begin to compare Steph with Wilt. Just view them both in the context of their time.”
The Warriors franchise was based in Philadelphia when Chamberlain entered the league, astonishing the basketball world with a leagueleading 37.6 points per game in 195960, but the show was just beginning. He averaged a preposterous 50.4 in 196162, the team’s last season in Philadelphia before moving to San Francisco.
“You struggle to comprehend what that means,” Barry said. “Seriously, 50 points a game? Wilt was an amazing athlete who could really run and jump and was unbelievably strong. People still talk about his feats of strength, and the things he did are beyond comparison. Shaq did a lot of dominating in his day, and you heard people saying he was better than Wilt. Come on. I mean, no.”
Barry just missed being a teammate of Chamberlain’s, breaking into the league for the 196566 season only months after Wilt was traded to a new franchise, the Philadelphia 76ers, for Connie Dierking, Paul Neumann, Lee Shaffer and cash. Hardly a shining moment for Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli, but Chamberlain wanted out, he had a huge contract ($75,000, big money in those days), the team drew paltry crowds, and Thurmond (playing out of position at forward) was ready to take over at center.
Barry was a fullblown star by his second season, leading the league at 35.6 points per game, and he was on a collision course with Chamberlain. When people talk about historic confrontations on the postseason stage — the likes of RussellChamberlain, Jerry WestJohn Havlicek, Bill WaltonJulius Erving, Isiah ThomasBernard King and Magic JohnsonLarry Bird — they usually forget about the 1967 Finals. Chamberlain was a changed man that season, toning down his scoring (to 24.1 ppg) for the sake of the 76ers, a team often called the greatest in league history. In the riveting sixgame Finals, won by the 76ers 42, Barry averaged 40.8 points in San Francisco’s losing cause, scoring 55 in Game 3.
Those were Currylike numbers, although without the benefit of a 3point shot, and Barry was a 6foot7 forward. “Nobody at Steph’s size ever played the way he does,” Barry said. “I’ve been shocked to learn what the analytics people have come up with — like, one season he averaged 48% shooting from 28 feet and beyond. That’s insane! Nobody even shot the ball from 28 feet before, unless the shot clock was running out and you happened to be that far from the basket.
“But the thing about Steph, he’s a scorer. Not just the distance and the accuracy, but he can shoot the midrange shot, he can drive to the hoop with either hand, and you can’t really defend him. When I hear announcers on TV, some of them former players, calling someone a ‘lockdown defender’ — there’s no such thing against a true scorer. In my career it was West and Wilt and Oscar (Robertson) and my boyhood hero, Elgin Baylor. So I go nuts when I hear that stuff. I know I never met a ‘lockdown defender’ in my life,” Barry said, laughing.
Would there be a place for Chamberlain in today’s game, where postup play is becoming extinct and centers are expected to be deadly 3point shooters? “Oh, God, yes,” Barry said. “If you talked to any coach, people who know the game, if you could have an inside force like that, why would you not want to be an insideout team? You’d be almost guaranteed to score inside, frequently, and once people try to defend that, it opens up the perimeter game. If you’ve got great shooters out there, how do you defend that? Pretty impossible.”
So we drift into mythical scenarios, the very best Warriors suiting up together, and there’s Barry hitting a 20footer off the dribble. Chris Mullin trading gamechanging shots with Kevin Durant. Thurmond getting a taste. Curry kicking it in to big Wilt, with a world of possibilities. When Curry breaks that record and the two of them are linked together in history, all dreams are in play.