Clyde Drexler said Sunday he's flattered that LeBron James mentioned him as part of one of the first Big Threes, but the Hall of Famer said superteams began long before his 1995-96 Houston Rockets.
Earlier this month on the "Road Trippin'" podcast, James pointed to the 2002-03 Los Angeles Lakers (Karl Malone, Gary Payton, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant) and 1995-96 Rockets (Drexler, Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon) as the original superteams.
James was responding to Draymond Green's declaration at the Golden State Warriors' victory parade that James had "started the superteam" with the Miami Heat, a few days after James had said he never played on a superteam.
Drexler, in Brooklyn, New York, on Sunday for the beginning of the BIG3 League, where he is a coach, told ESPN's Coley Harvey that the first superteams were the Boston Celtics of Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Bob Cousy and Sam Jones in the 1960s, the Lakers' trio of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Magic Johnson in the 1980s and their rival, the Celtics squad that included Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Cedric Maxwell, Kevin McHale and Dennis Johnson.
"You know, I love LeBron and anything he says is gold. But I'd really like to give you a different opinion," Drexler told ESPN on Sunday. "The Big Three was Kareem, Worthy and Magic, way before Bird, Parish, Maxwell and McHale and D.J. Those great teams always had four, five great players. Not only three, they had four to five great players.
"The early Celtics from the '60s with Bill Russell, Havlicek, Cousy and Sam Jones, that was the first Big Three. So it goes further back from that.
"To LeBron, I appreciate the comment, but it went further back than Phi Slama Jama or the Houston Rockets."
