Does Size Really Matter?

[Switchman]

small ball.

This be the Tim Duncan era.

[Nathan Explosion]

FWIW, teams running the Triple Post offense won 9 championships over a 12-year period. The Bulls used traditional, non-athletic Bigs on their teams. Cartwright and Perdue were big plodding centers, as were Wennington and Longley during their 2nd triad of championships.

I discounted the Bulls because they didn't have a great big man, and they were the exception to the rule because they had the greatest player of all time.

Even then, that didn't make the Bulls a small team, as I pointed out in the cases of Jordan and Pippen. Both were playing men that were shorter than they were. During that era, Jordan was more of a SF in height, and Pippen was more of a PF in height, although he didn't have the girth to play that, so was a SF by body type. Pippen, the SF, was as tall as Rodman, the PF.

So while they didn't have dominating post play, they were still a big team at other positions.

[Solid D]

The article was silly. A back-to-the-basket post player does not necessarily equal success. The Triangle offense didn't derive it's success from dumping it into the post. The Pistons' offenses of the 80s and even in the mid 2000s weren't based on feeding the post. The dominant players and MVPs of the Pistons (Thomas, Dumars, Billups) and Bulls (Jordan) series' were guards. Championship teams don't need a back-to-the-basket dominant player. Yes, they had Bigs and didn't normally go "small" to win so the real burden of proof in the NBA still remains with teams like the Suns who try to win it all by going "small".