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Rick Barry has never been an easy person to deal with. He has extraordinarily high standards and was a perfectionist. He also has a substantial ego and the combination alienated many people over the years.
At one point, he complained that he couldn't get into coaching, where he might have had a lot to offer, but no one would hire him. If you ever saw Field of Dreams, Barry is kind of like that great line about Ty Cobb: “Ty Cobb wanted to play…but none of us could stand [him] when we were alive, so we told him to stick it!”
However, whatever you may think of Barry as a person, no one can question his basketball intelligence, so this video is really interesting to listen to.
Barry talks here about how he picks the GOAT (he does it by position, so there’s a flock of GOATS), his take on who the greatest international player was (Arvydas Sabonis and it’s not close), and the greatest regret of his professional career.
He makes a brilliant point about his GOAT team and something most people probably never thought about: Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell on the same team.
As he says, there would have been no scoring inside.