Once upon a time, when Jack Ramsay coached in Portland in the 1970s, his Trail Blazers could do virtually anything a team could be asked to do.
Lionel Hollins brought the speed, Bobby Gross had the intermediate and long-range jump shot, Maurice Lucas was the enforcer, and Dave Twardzik supplied punch off the bench.
But, above all, Ramsay had a bona fide, honest-to-goodness, back-to-the-basket threat in center Bill Walton, who passed and scored out of the low post, leading the Trail Blazers to the 1977 NBA title.
A generation later, Ramsay, now an NBA analyst for ESPN, looks around and sees an entirely different game from the one he coached. This year's playoffs, with the obvious exception of Shaquille O'Neal and the occasional inside contributions of Tim Duncan, are marked by the absence of a low-post presence, which has become as much a thing of the past as the wild hair style Walton wore back then.
"There are all kinds of ways to score, and, in fact, the old low-post game where players put it into the post and you had two guys cutting off, that got to be somewhat monotonous," Ramsay said. "Now, you have all kinds of ways to score. Guys can score from the outside; teams push the ball and pull up and shoot it deep or drive it to the basket. You have teams that post up their guards. You have a great versatility in the game that I think is good."
Versatility in the NBA game may be good, but for those who remember what it was like to throw the ball down to the low block to the likes of Walton, Moses Malone, Bill Russell, Willis Reed and Nate Thurmond to watch them score, recent NBA history has been found wanting.
Since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won his second scoring title in the 1971-72 season, a traditional low-post player has been the scoring champ only twice -O'Neal in 1995 and 2000 - following a period when centers ruled the league.
(Utah's Adrian Dantley was the league's top scorer in 1981 and 1984 as an undersized power forward who scored mostly close to the basket, and San Antonio's David Robinson won the scoring championship in 1994 with a mix of low-post shots and foul-line jumpers.)
The current roll call of classic low-post threats is pretty much limited to Cleveland's Zydrunas Ilgauskas and O'Neal, the dominant force in the Los Angeles Lakers' three-year title run, with occasional on-the-block appearances by Duncan.
