Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and the instinct to protect legacy (Ball Don’t Lie)

If you combined the best of LeBron James and Stephen Curry, you'd have the perfect basketball player. But you can't, because this is real life, and doctors haven't figured out how to morph two uber-athletes with completely different — often dichotomic — and equally brilliant skill sets. Yet. So, we're left with the all-time greats of yesteryear somewhat sadly protecting the legacies they've already set in stone by trying to knock down a peg the accomplishments of two players with six MVPs between them — and counting. [ Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball] We'll tackle a few instances here, just for fun, starting with Magic Johnson, whose Twitter takes these days are about as hot as (spoiler alert) that iceberg-y water Rose let Jack sink into at the end of "Titanic." It started with Draymond Green taking a reasoned approach to a question about whether his Golden State Warriors are the best team ever: "I think it's all subjective. To say we're better than the Showtime Lakers, how can you say it? We can never play them." And then Klay Thompson jumped in with a joke . "We were better than the Showtime Lakers," kidded Klay, whose...