
As Cooper Flagg moves on into his NBA career, it’s been clear for a long time that his idol is Larry Bird. It’s a very old school choice for a guy who has a lot of old school elements in his game.
We’re not sure if anyone ever asked Kon Knueppel if he had a similar figure in mind, but we can think of two guys he could point to: Chris Mullin and John Havlicek.
Both guys were about the same size - 6-6 for Mullin and 6-5 for Havlicek. Mullin refined his game to an insane degree and became a scoring, basketball
machine.
Havlicek was the bridge between the Bill Russell-era Celtics and the future. When you watch him, it might be pretty easy to see that he never stops moving or playing hard. What might be harder to realize at first glance is what a superb athlete he was. It’s very possible that he had the greatest endurance of anyone who ever played. Havlicek literally never stopped moving.
In this video, Havlicek periodically does a brilliant job on Julius Erving, just tying him in knots and making him appear much more mortal than most defenders could.
Havlicek retired in 1978, the year before Larry Bird joined the Celtics. At one point he said if he had know how good Bird was going to be, he would have played longer.
He was 37 in this video, 38 when he retired, and The Sporting News thought he was still better than 80 percent of the players in the league.
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