Former stars say their teams could beat Warriors

CLEVELAND » As the Golden State Warriors stampeded through these NBA playoffs, the stiffest resistance they’ve faced hasn’t been from their opponents. It’s been from great players of past eras.

From Magic Johnson to Julius Erving to Rasheed Wallace, former players have said that their respective teams would wipe the floor with the presumptive NBA champions.

All of them are wrong. And comically so.

This ridiculousness began with Johnson, now president of basketball operations for the Los Angeles Lakers, who opined at an event Monday that his Showtime Lakers teams would “probably sweep” the Warriors.

“We’re going to win,” Johnson said, seated next to his old coach, Pat Riley, at an event in Los Angeles. “We’d probably sweep them.”

When Johnson explained himself by saying, “They’re too small,” Riley added, “Try to put somebody on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” “Zaza?” Johnson asked, referencing Warriors starting center Zaza Pachulia. “I’m sorry.”

Johnson’s boasting was followed up by Erving going on the radio - also in Los Angeles (maybe it’s something in the water there?) - and insisted that, after praising the Warriors, his 1983 champion Philadelphia 76ers would be able to take down Golden State.

“This is a phenomenal team,” Erving said of the Warriors on ESPN LA 710. “They can put up points, and they do play team defense. They hustle, and they scrap.”

“But when you have a team with the makeup of our team that year? We could play slow, we could play fast . . . we had four centers, four guards and four forwards, so a lot of the parts were interchangeable,” Erving said.

“We would have figured out how to play against this team and how to beat this team.”

The most insane boast, though, came from Wallace, who declared his 2004 Detroit

Pistons would win against Golden State without a problem.

“Oh, we’d run through them,” Wallace said on the “Timeout with Taylor Rooks” podcast. “Not even close. “We play defense.” None of these claims hold up under scrutiny. Let’s go through them:

• Of Johnson’s Lakers teams, let’s use the 1987 edition, which beat the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals after winning 65 games. Sure, those Lakers were a tremendous team, with Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and a host of outstanding role players such as Byron Scott, A.C. Green and Michael Cooper - not to mention Riley.

But that group also attempted just 447 3-pointers - almost exactly half the number of 3s Golden State made this season (982).

No matter how much firepower the Lakers could throw out there in such a matchup, three points per shot always beats two.

• Erving’s Sixers were also a tremendous team, with Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney and Bobby Jones. But in 1983, Philadelphia was only fifth in the league in both offense and defense (the Warriors this season were first and second, respectively), and didn’t use the 3-point shot at all.

Philadelphia shot 25-for109 from three-point range that season. Stephen Curry alone made more than 300 3-pointers this season. Once again, it’s hard to see how the Sixers would manage to compete with a team with that much firepower.

• There’s little doubt that those Wallace-featured Pistons teams were fearsome defensively. With him and Ben Wallace anchoring the paint and Tayshaun Prince, Chauncey Billups and Richard Hamilton on the perimeter, Detroit made it to six straight Eastern Conference finals, reached two NBA Finals and won that 2004 title.

But those Detroit teams also couldn’t score. They were playing at what arguably was the most recent nadir of the league, in the early- to mid-2000s, when the NBA Finals became an annual slugfest with the goal of trying to reach 90 points (these Pistons averaged 90.1 points per game). They were the third-seeded team in the Eastern Conference heading into the playoffs. Good luck taking on this Warriors team with that kind of statistical résumé.