The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson: The NBA and WNBA Legends History Forgot

The Athletic's Marcus Thompson II joins Hoopsology to discuss his new book, "Game Changers: The GOATs Who Revolutionized Basketball," and delivers one of the most emotionally resonant conversations about the sport's history you'll hear this year. Marcus explains how the book grew out of his 2021 book "Dynasties," where he realized basketball's greatest eras weren't siloed off from each other but deeply interconnected — you don't get the Warriors without Red Auerbach's Celtics first proving the value of getting from defense to offense faster.

Applying that same "family tree" lens to individual players proved far harder, he admits, forcing him to build a strict rubric: not simply the best players, but the ones who fundamentally shifted how we think about the game. Steph Curry anchors that thesis — a player who averaged four threes a game as a rookie and normalized volume three-point shooting for everyone who came after him — but Marcus goes deeper, revealing the uncomfortable truth underneath most "revolutionary" moments: the resistance pioneers had to fight through.

Dirk Nowitzki was told by everyone to stop shooting and get into the paint. Steph Curry himself was forced by his high school coach to take five shots a quarter because he didn't want to be seen as a ball hog — the same battle Don Nelson once fought with Steve Nash.

And Allen Iverson, Marcus explains with real personal weight as someone who grew up in Oakland, didn't just play differently — he brought an entire culture to the mainstream that the league had spent years trying to airbrush away, literally erasing his tattoos from magazine covers before he made that look the norm. The conversation turns to one of the book's most difficult truths: the WNBA's near-total absence from basketball's collective memory.

Marcus speaks with real frustration about players like Tina Thompson, Lauren Jackson, and Ticha Penicheiro — a genuine golden-era Houston Comets dynasty that, in his words, anyone who was actually there knows was special, yet gets dismissed by people who weren't. He connects this to a broader idea he calls "live context" — the impossible-to-translate weight of actually being present for a moment, from waiting all day for a Michael Jordan highlight before the internet existed, to the tension in the building when the Celtics reportedly cut the AC on the Lakers, to the Houston Comets playing on through the grief of teammate Kim Perrot's death.

Marcus shares that writing the Candace Parker and Hakeem Olajuwon chapters affected him the most personally, reconnecting him with just how pioneering they both were — Parker as a generational do-it-all talent he'd genuinely forgotten the magnitude of, and Olajuwon as a figure whose story of Muslim identity in America carries a cultural weight rarely discussed in basketball history. Underneath it all is Marcus's real hope for the book: not ending debates about who's the best, but restoring reverence for the players — across the NBA, WNBA, college, high school, and streetball courts alike — whose fights made everything that came after possible. 🏀 Subscribe to Hoopsology Podcast for in-depth NBA and WNBA conversations, author interviews, and breaking news breakdowns you won't find anywhere else. 👉 Follow Marcus Thompson II: @ThompsonScribe across social media, and pick up "Game Changers: The GOATs Who Revolutionized Basketball" — available now, ideally from your local independent bookstore. 👉 Drop a comment: Which player do you think got left out of basketball's "family tree" who shouldn't have been? #MarcusThompson #GameChangers #Hoopsology #NBA #WNBA Learn more about your ad choices.

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