Cue your "old man yells at cloud" memes because yet another older NBA legend has fired off a take that doesn't exactly paint the modern game in the best light. Former Philadelphia 76ers forward Julius Erving appeared on Chris Haynes' Posted Up Podcast and picked his all-time team, and, unsurprisingly, leaned heavily on players from previous generations.
His first team consisted of Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. All five of those players retired by 1974, when Erving was still in the ABA. His second team gets slightly more modern, but not by much: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Malone lasted the longest out of that group as he retired in 2004.
You might have noticed one rather conspicuous absence: At no point did Erving list Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James. To that, he offered a somewhat perplexing explanation.
"When you look at LeBron and anybody he sort of picks with him ... he played with so many guys. He's the guy who has led the charge in terms of superteams being put together. When he put together the team in Miami, he put together that team in Cleveland as well and put together a team in Los Angeles. So he can pick his own team, I'm not going to pick his team. I'm not saying nothing bad about LeBron."
James was a pioneer in the player empowerment era, but to suggest that he alone led the charge on the creation of superteams is simply inaccurate. Ignoring the fact that James built his Miami roster to oppose another one that had been built in Boston three years earlier, it could be argued that Erving himself played for a superteam in Philadelphia. His 1981-82 76ers reached the NBA Finals, and then, in the very next offseason, they signed reigning MVP Moses Malone in free agency. That gave the 76ers four All-Stars in Erving, Malone, Maurice Cheeks and Andrew Toney. Bobby Jones was nearing the end of his career, but he was also a Hall of Famer. That team won 65 games and went 12-1 in the playoffs to win the championship. Whether a superteam is defined by success, talent or how its best players were acquired, those 76ers check practically every box.
But older legends frequently leave James off of lists like this. Even some of his former contemporaries have as well. Paul Pierce did when he shared his all-time team in 2020. It is practically an inevitability at this point. But seeing Jordan relegated to second-team status is new, and Malone, with no championships to his name, rarely draws this kind of recognition. Erving apparently holds a great deal of respect for the players who came before him. That's the simplest possible explanation for some of these bizarre choices.
