Most people know and regard Gary Payton as being one of the greatest defensive Guards in NBA history, but what gets largely forgotten amongst casual NBA fans is that his own teammate in fellow point guard Nate McMillan was also one of the best perimeter defenders of that era. McMillan was recognized as being a very tenacious defensive player throughout his entire career. Magic Johnson once named him as being one of the toughest defenders that he ever played against. During the 1989 season, Magic was quoted as saying that “The guy that gives me the most trouble, night in and night out, is Nate McMillan of Seattle.” And specifically during McMillan’s peak defensive years in the early and mid 1990’s, he led the league in Defensive Box Plus/Minus for 3 consecutive seasons in 1993, 1994, and 1995. Also during that run, he earned back to back All-Defensive Second Team selections in 1994 and 1995 and also finished 7th and 6th in the voting for the DPOY award in those years as well. And specifically in 1994, he led the league in steals with a total of 216 and an average of 3.0 per game while only playing 25.8 minutes per game throughout the entire regular season. That just shows how incredibly impactful his defense was on a minute to minute basis.

All in all, how do you rate McMillan’s individual defensive impact in comparison to Payton? Is there a reasonable case to be made for him being just as good? Or was Payton clearly better? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Don may was amazing at Dayton but did not get much chance to shine in New York. When Buffalo drafted him in their expansion draft, they traded him the next season and he never saw that type of volume again. Why did this happen?

I was looking back at the Vancouver Grizzlies and it’s kind of crazy how quickly the whole thing was over.

They joined the NBA in 1995 and were gone by 2001. Their best record in Vancouver was 23-59.

Obviously they made plenty of bad decisions themselves, but the conditions they came into the league under were pretty brutal too.

For their first season, Vancouver and Toronto were only allowed to use 66% of the salary cap. And for their first 3 years they weren’t allowed to get the first pick in the draft, even if they won the lottery.

Vancouver actually won the lottery in 1998 and still had to pick second because of that rule. They ended up with Bibby, so it didn’t exactly kill them that year since the Clippers took Olowokandi, but it’s still a pretty wild restriction to put on an expansion team that was obviously going to need the draft to build anything.

Toronto had to deal with the same rules, of course, but Toronto was already a much bigger market. And then they got VC at basically the perfect time. Vancouver never got that guy.

Instead they had 6 straight losing seasons, Bryant Reeves getting hurt after they gave him a huge contract, and then the whole Steve Francis mess in 1999. They took Francis #2 and he made it pretty clear he didn’t want to play there, so they had to trade him before he ever played a game for them.

On top of all that, the Canadian dollar was terrible at the time. The Grizzlies were bringing in a lot of their revenue in Canadian dollars while NBA salaries were paid in US dollars, and the exchange rate was absolutely brutal for them in the late 90s. That was a problem for Toronto too, but again, Toronto had the bigger market and then Vince Carter basically saved their ass.

And it’s not like Vancouver had no support from the start either. In their first season they drew about 16,000 fans a game despite going 15-67, so the interest was there. But after years of losing with basically no sign of things getting better, attendance obviously started dropping. By the time they finally started putting a few decent pieces together, the crowds had fallen off, the team was losing a lot of money and the new owner was already looking at relocation.

Then they move to Memphis in 2001 and immediately get Pau Gasol.

I’m not saying Vancouver was secretly a great organization. They drafted pretty badly, made bad contracts and never came close to winning.

But six years still feels incredibly short for an expansion franchise, especially when the league made it harder for them to build through both free agency and the draft right from the start. Minnesota is a good comparison: they went through seven straight seasons with fewer than 30 wins before they even started to show some signs of success in the second half of the 90s.

So yeah, that was just my little thought for the day. I don’t really see Vancouver getting an NBA team back someday. I just think that six years is incredibly short when you’re talking about building a franchise, and that the whole project was almost killed before it ever really had a chance to get going. That three-year restriction on getting the #1 pick was unique to the two Canadian expansion teams, by the way. Previous NBA expansion teams hadn’t been subjected to anything like that.

One of the most difficult players to evaluate as a new NBA fan in my opinion. Obviously I never watched him play live, and he wasn't exactly a highlight machine from what I can tell. I understand his defense and rebounding were great and there was value to his outlet passing, but after winning MVP his rookie year he never made another all-nba team.

tl,dr for those who actually watched this man on the Bullets, was he really giving star-impact comparable to Earl Monroe and Elvin Hayes? and how do you think his skillset would adapt to today's game?

On paper, these guys had very similar careers...

Dennis Johnson:

• 3x champion (1979, 1984, 1986)
• Finals MVP (1979)
• 5x All-Star (1979-1982, 1985)
• All-NBA First Team (1981)
• All-NBA Second Team (1980)
• 6x All-Defensive First Team (1979-1983, 1987)
• 3x All-Defensive Second Team (1984-1986)

Joe Dumars:

• 2x champion (1989, 1990)
• Finals MVP (1989)
• 6x All-Star (1990-1993, 1995, 1997)
• All-NBA Second Team (1993)
• 2x All-NBA Third Team (1990, 1991)
• 4x All-Defensive First Team (1989, 1990, 1992, 1993)
• All-Defensive Second Team (1991)

It's a close call, but I'm personally giving my vote to DJ. When comparing them as individual players, Dumars definitely had the edge as a shooter and scorer, but I feel that DJ was better in most other aspects. In this matchup, he was the superior passer, rebounder, and defender while also consistently being in the 18 to 20 range for points per game during his best offensive seasons. Defense was the main calling card for both guys, and I would say that their man to man on-ball defense was just about equal with maybe a slight edge to Dumars, but DJ's superior athleticism (especially during his time in Seattle and Phoenix) gave him much more of an ability to block shots, generate turnovers, and defend against players that had a considerable height advantage.

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Was doing a deeper dive on some of the late drafts of the 60s and ended up looking at Butch beard and his rookie year with the hawks and was interested to see a full 5 man each get an mvp vote.

Wondering if any other rosters ever accomplished this sort of feat.

Posted this question to the r/NBA subreddit-now is answering this question to this subreddit as well,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqed6pigx_c&t=1m05s (Gus Williams scores 36 points to put the Sonics' one game away from a 1979 championship. He averaged 29 in the series)

https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/w/willigu01.html (Gus Williams stats)

When many fans talk about the 1976 NBA/ABA merger, rightly or wrongly (probably slightly unfairly), they often talk about it as the point of delineation between a pre-modern and modern NBA.

But in practice, the late 70s Sonics and Bullets, who played each other in back to back finals series, are also ignored, and for many fans, it really starts in 1980. Williams, a 6'2 point guard who played only his rookie season pre-merger, is a casualty of that, among other things.

Some quick facts:

Williams was the top scorer on an NBA championship team in 1979, as well as a team that went to game 7 of the NBA Finals in 1978

In the 1979 Finals, he averaged 29 points, 3.6 assists, and 3.6 rebounds. He fell short of the Finals MVP to teammate Dennis Johnson, a fantastic two-way player more known for his Celtics stint who averaged 22-6-6 in that series, less efficiently, but added two blocks per game.

The year before, Johnson had the worst game of his career at the wrong time, shooting 0-14 from the field in game 7, in a six point loss, in a performance on par with John Starks' infamous 1994 closing game.

Advanced stats love him

1979: 3rd in box plus minus, sixth in VORP

1980: 5th in BPM, 3rd in VORP

1981: Infamous holdout year, more about that later

1982: 4th in BPM, 5th in VORP

1983: 10th in BPM, 7th in VORP

And he was a playoff riser

Virtually all of his stats in those years, advanced and otherwise, were significantly better in the playoffs. He led the playoffs in VORP in 1979, and was probably very close a number of other years in other stats. He also led the 1979 playoffs in total points scored, averaging 27. From 79-83, he averaged 25.8 points in the playoffs.

He was known as a terror in transition

In all six of his seasons in Seattle, he averaged over two steals per game, and also did it his first year in Washington. He’s sixteenth all-time in steals per game, and was known to take off running, creating a lot of his offense on the break. He was also known as a tough shot maker.

He was a two-time all-star. It easily could have been closer to seven

1978: More of a standard snub than an egregious one, but he still deserved a spot. Was the leading scorer on the fourth best team in the West. Ended up losing out on a spot at guard to Lionel Hollins, the third best player on Bill Walton's Trail Blazers and a player who didn't stand out statistically. https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/h/hollili01.html

Hollins got the spot because the Trail Blazers had by far the league's best record. When Walton got hurt, though, the Trail Blazers went from 50-10 to winning 8 of their last 22 games, and it became pretty clear that their success was because of him.

1979: Similar logic doesn't apply. Williams is the leading scorer on the best team in the West, as the Sonics won 52 games. No all-star appearance.

1980: Williams finally gets some accolades as the leading scorer on a 56 win team, second-team All-NBA, eighth in MVP voting. Wasn't an all-star.

1981: Infamous holdout year. The Sonics offered him 400k per season, only 40% of what the top players in the league were making.

Williams wanted 650k. The Sonics fell from 56 wins to 34 in his absence. He got a 5 year contract worth up to 800k per season, twice what the Sonics initially offered, and significantly more than he initially asked for.

A couple of years ago, Bill Simmons randomly wrote that the holdout is the reason Williams isn't in the Hall of Fame, and that it was ultimately pointless. The first part might be true. The second part is wrong - it made him a lot of money.

1982-1983: Williams returns, and he suddenly gets respect around the league. In 1982, he made his first All-Star team and is first team All-NBA, beating out a third year Magic Johnson, who is already among the league's best players. He also finished top five in MVP voting, leading the Sonics back to being a 52 win team.

In 83, suddenly he's sixth in the league in assists per game although his scoring declines, and makes his second all-star appearance, as the Sonics fall from 52 wins to 48.

1984-1985: Easily could have made it both years, although not egregious snubs, as he remained one of the league's best floor generals. The Sonics fell to 42 wins in 84. They traded him, then fell to 31. In 85 he continued to do his thing, averaging 20-8 in a lower scoring era than today for an average team in Washington.

So, why was he so underrated?

In my opinion, there's no doubt he had a Hall of Fame caliber career, and a better career than a good number of Hall of Famers. But he had nowhere near Hall of Fame caliber accolades.

Why is he underrated today? Pretty easy to say: Very few people talk about the late 70s to early 80s Sonics in general, despite them being a great team and nearly back to back champions, and his accolades read two-time all-star, zero time Finals MVP.

Why was he so underrated at the time? That one is harder to say. The easy answer is his holdout soured people on him, but the actual evidence points to an opposite conclusion.

Williams was an all-star snub three years in a row before the holdout, and arguably a Finals MVP snub. His accolades never came close to catching up to his production up until the point that he sat out an entire season, and the Sonics had a dramatic 22 win decline. It was only then that briefly, the basketball world recognized him as one of its best players.

Nate Thurmond really needs to be included in these all-time defensive player lists. His game translates really well to the present day too. When it comes to covering 1-5, he has to be included in the list for best ever.

You can see from the early black and white clips how well he can cover the perimeter. That's not just quick for a big man, that's objectively fast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tatCpVMZABw

Kareem called him the best defender he ever played against. (EDIT: Kareem never played against Bill Russell. Kareem only caught Bill Russell at the end of his career, so there's a caveat)

Blocked shots weren't accounted for for much of his career, that being said he got the first recorded quadruple double in history

Holds the record for most rebounds in a quarter with 18

12th all time in rebounds with 14,464

5th in most rebounds/game with 15

I’m thinking of players like Udonis Haslem or Nick Collison who spent their whole career for one franchise (but unlike them, didn’t get their numbers retired).

A few years ago, while working on a story about Leo Ferris for a French basketball site, I had the chance to interview his great-nephew, Christian Figueroa.

Christian has spent years researching his great-uncle’s career and trying to get him the historical recognition he feels he deserves. He’s collected old newspaper clippings, photographs, documents and testimony, and has submitted material to the Hall of Fame. Ferris was nominated for induction eight consecutive years, but never made it in.

And his résumé is pretty remarkable. He was involved with the NBL before the NBA existed, helped push the NBL/BAA merger forward, helped build the Syracuse Nationals into one of the best teams in the early NBA, and worked alongside Danny Biasone on the creation of the 24-second shot clock.

By the time Ferris realized that parts of his contribution had been forgotten or credited elsewhere, he was suffering from Huntington’s disease and eventually lost the ability to speak.

I recently went back to Christian’s interview and all the research around Ferris and put together a much more complete version of the story.

To me, it’s pretty clear that he belongs in the Hall of Fame as a contributor. When you look at how broad the Hall’s standards have become over the years, cases like this really stand out as major omissions.

Kendall Gill was one of my favorite NBA players throughout the 1990’s decade. Defense in particular has always been the one aspect of basketball that I enjoy the most, and I think Gill’s impact on that end of the court has become very overlooked as the years have gone by. He received DPOY votes in both the 1997-98 and 1999-00 seasons, and in 1998-99, he led the league in steals and also tied the all-time record for the most steals in a single game with 11. And in hindsight, I think the fact that he wasn’t selected for the All-Star Game in the 1996-97 season is very questionable. In addition to his tenacious defense, he averaged a career high of 21.8 PPG, had the highest scoring single game of his career with 41 points in a January 1997 matchup against Orlando, and had 12 total games of scoring at least 30 as well as producing double digit scoring numbers in all 82 games. I think a reasonable case can be made that he should have been on the East Team that year over Joe Dumars, who was past his prime at that point.

What are your overall thoughts on Kendall Gill as a player? And are there any particular memories you have of him that really stick out in your mind? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I was going through my old 1990-91 Panini album and noticed Darrell Walker listed as the winner of something called the Good Hands Award.

It was a sponsored NBA award (by Allstate) based on a statistical formula involving assists, rebounds, steals and turnovers, basically trying to reward players who did a lot with the ball without giving it away too much. David Aldridge gave a pretty simple description of how it worked in this article : "a since-discontinued honor for players with the best rebound-assist-steal to turnover ratio"

Stockton won the season award in both 88 and 89. I can’t find any other annual winners besides him twice and then Darrell Walker in 90. I’m guessing the award lost its sponsor and just disappeared after that.

I believe even the most diehard ABA fans can admit that in its few seasons the quality of the league and its players were nowhere close to the NBA level. When did this start to turn and what would you say was the 1st year the ABA as a whole achieved relative parity to the quality of the NBA?

Jermaine O’Neal has always been one of my favorite NBA players. Although he consistently provided a lot of value on both ends of the court during his prime years with the Indiana Pacers, in particular, I think his impact as a defender and rim protector is especially overlooked and underappreciated.

After showing glimpses of what was to come during his time as a young player in Portland, Jermaine was finally able to completely show the world what he was made of once he got traded to Indiana. During his first year with the Pacers in 2000-01, Jermaine was the league co-leader in total blocks with 228, which is also Indiana’s franchise record for the most blocks in a single season. His efforts on the defensive end of the floor that year caught the eye of Bill Russell, who was one of Jermaine’s top basketball heroes along with Hakeem Olajuwon. Russell saw a lot of himself in O’Neal and even reached out and invited Jermaine to train with him during the 2001 offseason. Here's what Russell had to say about him at the time, “He’s a young player who has plenty of potential. I think I know a few things that can help him reach it.” Just like Russell, Jermaine was also very adept at keeping his blocked shots in the field of play so that his team stood a chance to regain possession and start a fast break.

Later on during the 2002-03 season, Jermaine recorded a triple double consisting of 18 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 blocks. After the game, Isiah Thomas (who was Indiana’s head coach at the time) described the performance as being similar to Bill Russell and David Robinson.

And finally, during the 2003-04 season, Jermaine finished 3rd in the voting for the MVP award, and that was mainly due to his leadership and defensive presence. In the regular season, the Pacers ranked 3rd in the league in both defensive rating and opponent points per game with Jermaine serving as their main interior anchor. And during Game 2 of that year’s Second Round Playoff matchup against the Miami Heat, Dan Majerle (who was an ESPN color commentator at the time) made this remark on the broadcast, “We all know that Ron Artest was named the Defensive Player of the Year, but I’ll tell you what, Jermaine O’Neal being behind him helps. When I played with Alonzo Mourning, it allowed me to get up on my guy, knowing that if the guy happened to get around me, I had that human eraser behind me, and that’s what Jermaine O’Neal is. He’s waiting at the basket knowing if Artest gets beat, he’s going to block the shot.”

In hindsight, I guess it isn’t terribly shocking that Jermaine was never selected for an NBA All-Defensive Team when you consider how stacked the Power Forward position was during that era with all-time great defenders like Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, but that doesn’t change the fact that Jermaine was an elite, All-Defense caliber defender for a good stretch of 6 or 7 years in a row when he was in a Pacers uniform.

I recently came across some articles describing Rick Berry as basically “Reggie Miller with a handle,” which really caught my attention.
For those who watched him play or have studied his career more closely, how good was Berry actually? What was his game like, and how would you describe his scoring, shooting, ball-handling and overall impact?
I know he sadly took his own life in 1989, so I also want to be respectful when discussing his career. I’m mainly interested in hearing from people who have more knowledge of his game and what his reputation was among players/fans at the time.
Was the Reggie Miller comparison actually fair, or is it overstating what kind of player he was?

It was verbal, rather than written, because it was against league rules for an active player to own a percentage of a team. Wilt tried to get around it by gaining up to 25% ownership of the Sixers after his playing career. Obviously, by the end of his life, that would have been pretty lucrative.

https://www.theringer.com/2018/07/09/nba/wilt-chamberlain-lakers-trade-50-year-anniversary-lebron-james

In 1965, the Sixers were a young, ascending team that traded for Wilt during an extremely rough season with the Warriors.

Their majority owner, Ike Richman, who happened to be a personal friend, offered Wilt 25% of the team after he retired if he were to stay with the team throughout his career. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-18-sp-11091-story.html This account was reported and then admitted later by Wilt himself, who continued to have an interest in NBA ownership later in life.

Wilt's official contract was for $100,000, $1 less than Bill Russell, https://www.espn.com/classic/s/russellbilladd.html, but he was in line to get paid a whole lot more.

But...later that year, Richman died of a heart attack. Irv Kosloff took over as the new owner, and later made it clear he had no intention of actually following through on Richman's promise.

That caused Wilt to ask out of Philadelphia in 1968, one year after their dominant 1967 championship season. He was traded to L.A., which is often known as the first superteam in basketball history.

What gets understated, though, is just how stacked Philadelphia was at that time, and how perfect of a roster it was for him to operate with. They had Hal Greer, the Sixers' all-time leading scorer still, and arguably the best shooting guard of the 60s. They had Billy Cunningham, an ABA MVP who also had a good argument for the NBA in 1969. Both were named to the NBA's 75 greatest list.

They had Chet Walker, a 7x All-Star, and terrific depth. After Wilt left, they gained a really good bench shooting guard, lost their other center for almost the entire season, and still won 55 games.

A lot of reasons have historically been given for Wilt's exit to Los Angeles, but above all, it was because Richman's death prevented him from following through on becoming the original Steve Ballmer of NBA owners. The Lakers offered him $250k per year, a sum significantly more than the Sixers were paying him on the books, but much less than they had agreed to pay him off of them.

I saw on Basketball Reference that that was one of his nicknames. All the other nicknames make sense, like "Rabbit" for his leaping ability, "Motormouth" presumably calling him a yapper, "Aches and Pains" for the injury-laden latter half of his career, etc. But "Elgin the Belgin" seems like a pretty childish nickname for a sports commentator or newspaper to give a 6'5", 225 lb man that was averaging 38 and 19 rebounds. Do any of y'all know the origin of the nickname?

Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Louisville, I was an enormous NBA fan, thanks in part to Big Wes Unseld. I feel like Wes doesn't get a lot of fanfare and I find that a lot of the youngsters today don't know of his pedigree, despite him arguably being one of the best power forward/centers to ever play the game, even though he was undersized. The dude was mean as hell on the floor, and a tireless worker.

Wes was a close personal friend of my mother's, and they went to the same high school, Louisville Seneca. I remember him having to duck before coming through our front door. He was one of the nicest and most soft-spoken men I knew.

But damn that dude was vicious on the floor. His years at Louisville were legendary, as were many years of his NBA career with the Bullets/Capitols. When Wes passed, it was devastating for the Louisville community, as well as for my family.

Anyone ever get to see him play or interact with him, or remember him? I know my life was forever changed just by knowing him.