Gary Payton is one of a dozen people being enshrined as part of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend in Springfield, Mass. Along the way he’s made some noteworthy comments and there’s been a lot of reflection between his era and today’s game. Payton says not only was his era tougher but he and Shawn Kemp were the original Lob City before Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. Read more after the jump.
“I like my era better,” Payton told reporters.
“Every time I went against a point guard, we just played tough,” Payton continued. “You had the Tim Hardaways, the Kevin Johnsons; a lot of them guys. I always thought about. I always liked my era because we can hand check, we can do a lot of stuff; we can control our teams. We didn’t have to score 25-26. We could get 17, 10 dimes and three or four steals.”
“When people say Lob City or stuff like that, we were the original Lob City,” Payton said. “We don’t want to call it Lob City, we just called it Reign Man and the Glove.”
Funny Payton should say so because that’s exactly what I wrote yesterday when I posted a highlight reel of he and Shawn Kemp’s best alley-oops.
