The Unique Greatness of Moses Malone

for as much resentment as the younger generation holds toward the old guard of basketball there is still a level of respect where the legends of the game are acknowledged and talked about on a regular basis however there are exceptions and none more egregious from that of Moses Malone most fans under the age of 20 don't even know who he was and all that comes up in any modern discussion is attend are his rebounds in the 1983 Sixers just ask yourself did you know that Moses was a three-time MVP or a 13 time all-star or that he played for nine different franchises in 21 total seasons and before that was the first ever player to jump straight from high school to the pros your answer is probably no because Moses Malone has unfortunately slipped through the cracks of history despite being one of the greatest players the game has ever seen and beyond that he achieved a success in a way that was truly unique to him my name is Daniel winger this is Moses Malone any conversation about Moses has to start with this legendary offensive rebounding just take a look at the all-time leaderboard and you can see how great of a gap exists between Moses and every other player in NBA history when it comes to offensive rebounding however there is a major caveat in that the NBA didn't begin tracking offensive rebounding until 1974 when both Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell had retired and considering that they're the only two players in NBA history to finish their careers of over 20,000 rebounds it's pretty safe to assume that they probably grab more oak boards than Moses but what made Moses different was that offensive rebounding wasn't just something he was good at it was his primary method of scoring on offense you know how guys like Marvin Bagley and Zion Williamson are praised for how quick their second and third jumps are well most Malone was like that except he kicked into Maximum Overdrive just watch how quick he is repeatedly getting off the floor here against Cedric Maxwell and on slow-mo how quickly he slides his feet to tip in his own mess he wasn't an explosive high end vertical athlete as you can see in these finishes where he struggles to even get the ball over the basket but he didn't need to be because his feet were simply so quick that he could either perform deft swim moves to get around other big men or simply beat them to the ball off the glass because his feet left the ground a half second before theirs did however his go-to rebounding move was his most memorable and devastating tactic seen here huh Malone slides around Kareem to get between him and the basket giving Moses all the advantage he needs to tip the ball in once more Moses pulls this trick off against Robert Parish and you can see right here that as soon as he senses a shot is going up his feet slide toward the baseline while parish remains flat-footed and the result is another bucket for moe a lot of guys know how to fight for good position but it was Moses's innate sense of when to slide into the board that made him such a rebound longer he knows that as soon as his teammate gets the ball this close to the basket the shot is going up and he instinctively slides around rick roby for the tip in keep an eye here on Moses near the bottom of the paint and how easily he dislodges his opponent and it becomes clear that as awkward as it sounds Moses had a very powerful posterior if you want a better example just look at what he did to Kurt Rambis in Game two of the 1983 finals which was so degrading that it should be taken off YouTube in order to preserve the Rambis family name he starts by moving Rambis underneath the basket of a simple power dribble as his body is just too strong from the waist down for Kurt he then follows that up with a body blow on this post up and it's already clear that Moses has no interest in post moves but it's all about asserting his strength over Rambis Moses then makes a textbook ceylon Rambis once again bullying his weaker opponent though notice his lack of athletic pop as he can't even really dunk this Moses breaks out a quick jump hook a very rare move for him showing just how confident he is in his ownership of randiss and poor Kurt just can't catch a break as Moses fails to properly time his butt slamming move but has the ball fall to him anyway at this point it's pretty clear that Moses Malone was the greatest offensive rebounder of all time but the question still remains why did he do this why did he relies so much on an aspect of the game that has long been considered more novelties and substantial and is even advised against by modern basketball theory in favor of transition defense to put it simply Moses just wasn't that good at the other parts of basketball now don't get me wrong Moses wasn't some stiff that would have been out of the league if he didn't have his offensive rebounding gifts but he just wasn't very proficient in the traditional way the center is if he couldn't overpower an opponent in the post he was pretty much stuck his hook shot lack touch making these desperation heaves highly inaccurate though being Moses he follows his own mess of a board any attempts that complicated footwork usually resulted an incredibly awkward shot attempts like this one here he loses his balance while trying to make a move on Mahorn and gets bailed out by an if he call he was never truly a reliable shooter often failing to get proper elevation on turnarounds as you can see here where he gets stuffed by McHale he wasn't an incompetent bricklayer and for his career actually shot a respectable 76 percent from the free-throw line but even on this make you can see that he stops his follow-through and does not fully extend his right arm and this is likely what led to his inconsistent results on mid-range jumpers and in case you're wondering Moses never extended out to three-point range with this heave during the final season of his career being the only long distance shot he ever made but it's important to note that Moses did get better at shooting face-up jumpers as he got older and couldn't rely as much on his pure athletic ability in his first two years as a pro in the ABA it became clear that he was unpolished in the post often traveling and miss handling his footwork and though he improved as his career progressed it was understood that back to the basket scoring was never going to be his thing and his finishing around the rim could be so bad that he was sometimes accused of purposefully missing shots so that he could pad rebound stats which seemed silly until you see him blow open layups like this one really the limited go to scoring ability of Moses all derived from and stop me if you've heard this before his quick feet as he would use them to turn and flip his hips toward the basket before his defender here earning free throws against the Lakers and scoring a basket against Patrick Ewing in the Knicks and this explosive drop step of his which is something that not a lot of defenders could handle again leading to free throws here if he was in the mid post area he could face up and rip through like a guard in the perimeter for an easy drive though even on this play you can see his overall lack of hand-eye coordination with this wacky shot attempt though a younger Moses is more capable of using this quickness on post ups here freezing a defender with this up fake however there's one last unfortunate part of Malone's offensive game which we have to address and that would be his passing he only averaged 1 point 3 assists per game for his career and really just didn't know how to pass here forcing dr. J to come all the way over to get the ball despite the past already being open on several occasions knowing this teams often doubled him in the post and you can see here that despite having a wide open teammate cutting down the lane and another open on the perimeter Moses is frozen by the double and gets easily picked by Norm Nixon though credit to Moses for hustling back to get the rebound and start a fast break the other way and if you thought that one was bad take a look at this one where he literally can't do anything against the double and forces his team to take a shot clock violation though the Sixers didn't do anything to help him out there if their spacing this time he tries to score on the double with his rip to remove but loses it out of bounds and here's a play where a good post passer immediately flicks that ball one-handed dr. J underneath the basket but Moses still gets the assist because Andrew Tony was a boss and even though that's not a great play by Moses it still signifies that he had some creation equity as his presence down low drew double teams that created openings for his teammates here giving Bobby Jones an open 15 footer that he unfortunately misses but who really cares when you have the greatest offensive rebounder ever on your team your own passing is the most common way to play make for your team but the gravity you draw an off ball action can also serve this purpose just like how these two defenders follow Steph because of how much he terrifies them and here Moses has a similar effect as he draws both defenders after setting the pin down but Mike Dunleavy just isn't good enough to use this and that advantage goes to waste which was an unfortunate theme throughout Moses's tenure of the Rockets so no Moses wasn't usually tossing out dimes that helped boost his teammate stats but that's not to say he didn't make his team's better he had to in order to drag a 40 and 42 Rockets team whose second and third best players were Billy pulse and six-man Calvin Murphy to the 1981 NBA Finals and the one season of his five-year prime that coincided with him having above-average teammates resulted in one of the most dominant single-season championship runs ever defensively Moses could be inattentive off ball not turning his head to see the drive here and he probably wouldn't have translated well to the modern day as you can see here where he doesn't follow his man out to the ball screen and this refusal to leave the paint was something he often did on defense and perhaps the strangest thing about Moses was that he didn't pursue defensive rebounds nearly as passionately as he did offensive one as you can see here where he doesn't even think about boxing out fellow Hall of Fame center Patrick Ewing and just lets the big man rumble into the paint for an easy board since 1974 he's still fifth in the all time defensive rebound list as playing in the league for 20-plus years will get you anywhere near most of those records but just take a look at that last column and how great a discrepancy there is between Moses and his peers in terms of what percentage of the rebounds came on the defensive end my theory is that Moses just found rebounding on defense far less entertaining than on offense centers were expected to just sit near the rim and aggrandize rebound numbers on defense without having to exert themselves whereas offensive rebounding allowed most uses quick feet and strategize how he would maneuver around the swath of opponents for his next put back it's speaking of his quick feet they helped him compensate for his overall lack of engagement on defense this play right here is pretty incredible as an older Moses in his bullets days is able to come over and block the first shot then recover in time to contest the putback even after he ventures outside the paint and gets caught reaching by Isaiah Thomas he's able to block this shot and looking closely you can see the Adrian Dantley had already elevated while Moses was still on the ground but its ability to leave his feet quickly as unsurpassed and he's able to beat Dantley to the punch for his career he averaged an okay but not great 1.3 blocks per game he didn't have great length or a high end vertical which made it hard for him to truly protect the rim but from time to time he could use his quickness to surprise opponents and get to the ball in the air before it had gone up too high similar to the offensive end of the floor Moses succeeded as a post defender usually due to his lower body strength as you can see here where Kareem is unable to gain leverage over Moses while backing him down and forced to settle for an off-balance skyhook although one thing I'm honestly surprised by is Moses only averaging 2.5 fouls per 36 minutes for his career as he was very handsy and willing to jab at the ball and this weird show begins Laimbeer on the perimeter was not a one-time occurrence I spent a significant portion of this video pointing out the things that Moses couldn't do and that might lead one to believe that I think he was overrated and would be a stiff in the modern NBA there's certainly a case for that but I don't think that's true nor do I think it should be the major takeaway here Moses Malone was given two gifts that he didn't have to work for he grew to be six foot ten and he had naturally quick feet that's about it he didn't have a great vertical he didn't have soft touch and deft hand eye coordination for pete's sake his hands were so small but they were reported to be the average size of a five foot nine persons hands making it impossible for him to palm a basketball not to mention that Moses had to deal with the really horrible stereotype that he was stupid and couldn't read or write due to the way he talked even being nicknamed mumbles at one point when the truth was that the high school education system failed him not the other way around I mean I don't think a stupid person could literally invent new tactics for grabbing rebounds and constantly outsmart his physically superior opponents in order to get the ball before they did just take a look at a guy like Dwight Howard who possessed many advantages over Moses physically with his only similar deficiency being that lack of natural touch sure Dwight had his days but he spent too much time trying to be what he wasn't insisting that he post up and be the focal point of the offense when he just wasn't skilled enough to do that Moses never worried about the things he couldn't do he knew that he could do one thing and that he could do it better than anyone grabbed offensive rebounds he embraced who he was Evette he achieved everything possibly could have in the NBA with the talent he was given he got more from less I wanted to make this video because it was so sad to me that no one ever talked about Moses this legend of the game it makes sense why it happened kids don't grow up wanting to be centers with baby hands that only ever got the ball of their teammates missed but that doesn't make what's happened right Moses Malone was one of the best players to ever play this game and he did it in a way that had never been done before nor will be replicated anytime in the future he's a truly unique figure in basketball history and one that I hope never gets forgotten hey guys thank you so much for watching this video if you enjoyed it please subscribe to this channel and leave a like down below it means a lot if you want to check out any of my other work you can read me at Liberty ballers calm or inside a new calm and you can follow me on twitter at dan underscore olinger or i'm always dropping great NBA content and yeah that's gonna do it for now I hope you all had a great time watching this video and please for me don't forget about Moses Malone

Channel: Daniel Olinger

Views: 44,263

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Id: GPPxikFq3gg

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020