Thinking Basketball Podcast, Podcast, Welcome back to episode number five of the top 40 career series that we've been running here.

And today we're going to get into all kinds of wild territory involving some very tall springy basketball players.

I'm wondering can you make an argument that Julius Irving has one of the

greatest peaks in NBA history or maybe technically

ABA history. How does he stack up as a score? Can you make a case he He's a better score than Kevin Durant. Where does Kevin Durant stack up all time as a score?

And of course, one of the reasons why we wanted to do these guys together is because there's some similarities but they're very different in

style and in terms of the way they skin the cat out on the court.

Yeah, I think that's the cool part of the pairing because you bring up like their builds, but I think when we actually get down to it, I think in most ways you can't get really two more diametrically opposed offensive or even defensive player.

So I'm excited to get into the granular details with them.

When it comes to Dr. J, we've been able to, at least I have been able to get some access

to some additional ABA games, some other 1970s

when he was in Philadelphia, and even in some in the

in Philadelphia and you and I have watched some of those

in the last year or two.

So let's start there because I actually think for me

looking at Julius Irving, there's always been this question in my

mind of like what happened when he went from the ABA to the NBA. If you look at the 1977 finals, I mean they were up

to nothing against the Portland Trail Blazers. Dr. Jay still kind of looks like Dr. Jay He might very well be the biggest draw in all of professional basketball in the middle of the 70s,

just this extraordinarily exciting player, really, really big hands, incredible body control,

you know, 6-7, 6-8, big vertical leap and obviously the famous free throw line dunk during the during the dunk contest and things like that in the 77 finals

he dunks on Walton too many times to to keep track of so you might say like Ben, what are you talking about? You know, what do you mean the difference from the ABA to the NBA? So let's take a step back and just frame this context and why it's always been such a challenging problem for me

and certain other people. Irving won the 1974 NBA MVP with New York and they won

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