{"id":814321,"date":"2026-07-21T12:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/814321\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T12:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:13:11","slug":"youtube-gold-a-fresh-look-at-larry-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/814321\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube Gold: A Fresh Look At Larry Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _174s0un6 _174s0un5 _1mt21p01\">We\u2019ve talked a lot about Larry Bird in this space, largely because Bird had a genius for basketball that is exceedingly rare. A lot of people think that Bird was too slow and couldn\u2019t jump, and that he wouldn\u2019t be able to play today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">People like JJ Redick, for one, who really should know better (Redick said that he didn\u2019t think Bird was a top-five all-time three-point shooter).<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Redick was born in 1984, so he was too young to see Bird in his prime, and may not have watched him much in his later years either to understand why he was such a feared shooter. That\u2019s hard to know. However, the idea that Bird would struggle in today\u2019s game is ludicrous, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=hF1LelPq15g\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this video partially demonstrates why. <\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">You\u2019ll see several things repeated here. For one, Bird on several occasions is on the floor and nonetheless still delivers pinpoint, lethal passes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">You\u2019ll also see him make several passes to players behind him that he cannot possibly see. Nonetheless, he knows where they will be and delivers perfect passes for easy baskets, sometimes with 2-3 defenders in the way.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">You\u2019ll also see plays where he just touches the ball long enough to direct it to a teammate. It\u2019s not exactly a pass; it\u2019s more like a redirection.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">As the narrator notes, Bird has superb situational awareness, and perhaps the best hand-eye coordination in the history of the game. But he also played as hard as anyone, and with an amazing amount of self-confidence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">This is a guy who said that he knew, on his third day of practice as a rookie, that he would dominate the NBA.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">There are Larry Bird trash talking videos out there on the YouTubes, where he told his defenders exactly what he was going to do, and then did it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">And then there\u2019s this: Bird played in an era when guys sometimes tackled each other in the open court and pulled each other down like they were in WrestleMania, not the NBA.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">In this era, where you can\u2019t defend physically as you could in the 1980\u2019s, no one could have stopped Bird. He might have averaged 40 points in the modern NBA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019ve talked a lot about Larry Bird in this space, largely because Bird had a genius for basketball&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,7432,590,85],"class_list":["post-814321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-main","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}