Mike Bibby as a rookie put up stats like 13 points a game, 6 assist, and 35 min. a game. To say Curry is going to put up those numbers is preposterous! Curry will be lucky if he even puts up half of those numbers, and besides he will not get 35 min a game. I compare him to Chris Duhon because look at his stats Curry will most likely put up similar numbers. Curry has a better j though. So there you go sam23 and Sleepy Freud! ; ) ps. Have a lovely night!

Good points … but I wouldn’t call any of those changes particularly “significant.”

They went from incompetence to excellence in coaching [Sanders, Cowens< Fitch].

Fitch was a pretty good coach — probably a lot better than Sanders/Cowens (whose incompetence I’ll have to take your word for, since I was a bit too young to pay attention to that kind of thing). Still: he never had any notable success when he wasn’t coaching Bird; and the Celtics were better after he left, with KC Jones at the helm. In any case, it’s rare that a Head Coach is as big a factor as people make it out to be.

The guard play improved, with Fitch making Archibald the lead. The season previous, Archibald was still recovering from a serious achilles injury in his first season with the team, and the coaches and Jo White (sent on to you know where) did not ease his transition. Also added at guard were the rookie G.Henderson, and later to boost the bench, Maravich.

Tiny was a bit healthier and better in 79/80 than in 78/79, but just a bit. Henderson was basically a non-factor his rookie season (14 minutes, 6.2 pts, 1.9 ast). Maravich shot lights out when he came on board (11.5 points in 17 minutes a game), but mustered a paltry 1.5 rebounds and 1.1 assists in that same timeframe; and only played 26 games. (I had actually forgotten that he was on that team, and I remember that season pretty well — it was the year I became a confirmed hoops nut).

And the league in its wisdom and benevolence put in a major rule change that boosted Bird’s impact, if not his career.

The three point rule that “boosted Bird’s impact” applied equally to every shooter in the league. And Bird only attempted 1.7 shots a game from beyond the arc.

Obviously there are a million little interrelated changes in any team from one year to the next that make the “Bird Effect” experiment impossible to control for with any degree of certainty. But the fact that the arrival of a rookie could add 32 wins to a team that had made otherwise incremental changes remains one of the more amazing hoops phenomena I’ve ever witnessed.

I agree that it’s dumb to attribute wisdom and intelligence to every choice Nellie and Co. make; at the same time, I think it’s overly cynical to attribute stupidity or crass PR concerns to everything they do. I prefer to take it case by case. In the case of Curry, what my eyes and the statistical trends tell me jibes very well with what Nellie’s saying.

The numbers players put up in preseason and college aren’t nearly as immaterial as you make them out to be. You feel free to “wait and see;” I can tell you right now that Curry’s a better passer than Monta, or that Tyreke Evans is a better rebounder than Jamal Crawford, that Blake Griffin and DaJuan Blair are better rebounders than Amare Stoudemire and Brandan Wright, etc.

And again: “Best Passer on the [Current] Warriors” is not that high of a bar to surmount. He’s competing with Monta and Jackson, not Magic and Stockton.

If we’re talking about a one-year contract with no possibility to renew, I’d personally take Garnett, Duncan, Wade and maybe Kobe over Paul … but just by a hair.

What about a six year max contract with yearly raises and a player option year?

What about with their current contracts?

We could end up with a lot of lists here. ; )

Whoa, we agree, Skep? Is it too late to change my ranking? ;-)