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Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr
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He coached in the WNBA for a while too, and was actually very good - it seems he never got a regular NBA gig outside of an assistant job in Minnesota because the entire league hated him so much - but outside of the fact that he kept his nose clean, his personal life is… pretty much exactly what you’d expect Bill Laimbeer’s personal life to be.
Also, I have to say that Gilbert Arenas came out and kind of ripped into Laimbeer and the Bad Boys, saying that that brand of defense wouldn’t play in the modern league. I’m not sure that’s actually true in general - Thomas, Dumars, Rodman, and John Salley all strike me as guys who could play great defense in the modern game - but to Laimbeer in particular he just wasn’t that good of a defender. He liked to play dirty and commit hard fouls, which pissed a lot of players off, but with him in particular the hard fouls tended to come after guys beat him, which happened a pretty good amount. And for all the hard fouls, he absolutely was not an intimidating shot blocker at all.
I guess he was fine as a straight up post defender - not fantastic, not even close to the level of a Ewing or Admiral or Hakeem, but average - but back then a lot of teams tried to funnel penetrators in to try and finish against their big man and Laimbeer simply didn’t alter shots. I mean, again, he fouled those guys a lot, especially when he got big mad that they kept penetrating on him, but other than the cheap shots he didn’t actually discourage guys from driving on him.