It is extremely hard to compare two NBA teams from two completely different eras, but when you have one of the best teams in league history in the Golden State Warriors, that’s exactly what happens. Throughout the season, analysts and fans have been arguing over whether or not the Warriors would be good in other eras of the NBA. Charles Barkley thinks they would get crushed, but most recently, they are being compared to Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers team.
After their game 2 win in the NBA Finals, Draymond Green brought up this Lakers team. Draymond said that you’ll never know if they are better than the “Showtime” Lakers, but Klay Thompson quickly stepped in, saying, “We are better than the ‘Showtime’ Lakers.” Klay’s dad played on the team, so obviously he wants to say that he is better than his dad’s team.
After Klay said this, it sparked a debate on whether or not the Warriors are the better team. The Lakers headman, Magic Johnson, obviously had something to say about it:
I disagree with Mychal Thompson and his son Klay, my “Showtime” Lakers would beat the Warriors.
— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) June 7, 2016
He later went on ESPN’s First Take, and according to ESPN, he said:
“We’ve never seen two guys who can shoot like Steph [Curry] and Klay, and I give them that,” Johnson said Tuesday on First Take. “But they’ve never ran up against somebody like us. I’m telling you, whoever is going to dog me, I’m going to be wearing them down. I’m going to be wearing them out. James Worthy will be wearing them out, wearing them down. Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] is going to be wearing them out, wearing them down.”
“Klay’s dad, Mychal Thompson, is one of the smartest players I’ve ever played with in all of basketball,” Johnson added. “But the Warriors would have bad matchups against us. There’s no way they’re going to deal with Kareem. There’s no way they’re going to deal with James Worthy. The thing that we could do, that would affect them and cause some problems, is that we could set up and we could run on them on the fast break.”
Byron Scott, who played on the “Showtime” Lakers and coached against the Warriors, agrees with Magic on this topic:
“I’m not taking anything away from the Warriors. I love the way this team plays. They’re great, they’ve got great chemistry. They have two of the best shooters who have ever played this game. But who’s going to guard Kareem? Who’s going to guard Magic? Who’s going to guard James Worthy?”
Mychal Thompson also played on this team, but he thinks his son Klay is correct because the Warriors would outscore the Lakers from three:
“I am a man secure in my legacy, secure in my accomplishments,” Mychal Thompson said. “I don’t have to be all, ‘Oh, we’re better than them.’ I’m not that grumpy old man, even though I sound like that many a time. But I can admit when the new era is better than something else or that’s changed from the time I played. And the way they play, we would have a hard time keeping up ’cause, like I said, our game wasn’t shooting 3s, which theirs [is]. And 3 beats 2.”
We will never know who would win a seven game series between these two teams, but we can always debate. While Golden State can hit a lot of threes, they would struggle to match up with the Lakers on the other side. I think that the Lakers would give the Warriors similar problems that the Oklahoma City Thunder gave them during the Western Conference Finals, and could use size to defeat the Warriors.
