Frank Rizzo wrote:


well karma may have caught up to him a bit. wasnt he injured while with
the spurs because a seat in the team plane came apart when he was
sitting in it.
missed a huge chunk of the season if i recall correctly.

lee

sv0f wrote:

I, too, am a Syracuse alumni - although I attended a bit before you did.
You can easily come up with an all-bust/under-achiever team of just
Syracuse players of the past 30 years. Is it Boeheim or just
coincidence? For every Rony Seikaly there were 2 Marty Byrnes. Maybe
'Melo will deliver the goods throughout his career...

All-bust/under-achiever Syracuse alumni:
(All 1st round picks)
SF Leo Rautins
PF LeRon Ellis
C Danny Schayes
PG Dwayne "Pearl" Washington
SG Dave Johnson

Honorable mention:
Marty Byrnes
John Wallace
Billy Owens (his career just wasn't as awful as the others)

-Dave

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:21:58 -0400, Dave Leskovac
<dleskovac@gmail.com> wrote:


Cant we put "Whoop De Damn Do" Coleman on this list? Derrick Coleman
to me was a bust and really had potential.... What about Sherman
Douglas the point guard??? Tony "RED' Bruin....
I can go back as well

************************************************** **
There are a good many who will be surprised by this
seasons NY Knicks. I think larry made a mistake and
how many would be surprised if the Knicks make the
playoffs and go to the second round?
************************************************** **

How about Micheal Ray Richardson, Phil Sellars, Butch Lee, and Ernie
DeGregorio.

--
Ed Smith"Why do drive-up ATM's have instructions in braille ?"
"Granville Waiters' Ghost" <x@x.x> wrote in message
news:x-83285F.02472307092006@news.west.earthlink.net...
Consider this the long-delayed sequel to the "Scrubs You Love" thread of
a couple years back . . .

I found myself lost in basketball-reference.com, pondering the Alton
Listers of the universe, when I came across the name of one of my
all-time favorite players: Lionel Simmons. He was a bubble-type lottery
pick but came into the NBA with just about everything a small forward
needs but a three point shot. He could drive, rebound, pass . . . a bit
like Bernard King, in a way, when Bernard King was still Bernard King.
Like Bernard King, Simmons blew out his knee and was never the same
player (never even a starter). His similarity scores by age are utterly
horrifying:

Age Most Similar Player
--- --------------------------------------
22 Vince Carter (926) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
23 Willie Anderson (931) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
24 Steve Smith (939) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
25 Jamal Mashburn (938) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
26 Brian Scalabrine (939) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10


I mean, holy hell, to go from being a Vince Carter at 22 to a Brian
Scalabrine at 26... A man's just got to shake his head at that. It's
like watching a film loop of a guy getting kicked in the scrotum for
hours and hours and hours on end.

So I was thinking -- who's your guy? Who's the guy that if he hadn't
gotten messed up on drugs, blew out a knee or wound up being the subject
of a bidding war by Jerry Krause (which always destroyed people, I will
one day urinate on the man but I have to admit that he had some powerful
mojo for people who turned down his money) -- would have been a
superstar?

It's early September, basketball isn't here yet, fantasy leagues haven't
started, I'm bored, so I put together a team.



PG: Fat Lever. One of my all-time favorite players. Fat was pretty much
at his peak when he went down -- he was 30, so he was hardly going to
get better -- but he was just an awesome cult figure of a player, like a
non-obnoxious Stevie Franchise. Doug Moe had like 12 players on the
Nuggets averaging in double-figures and the media had to make one of
them a star, and they always picked Alex English, for some reason. Fat,
though, was the shit. He damn near averaged a triple-double every single
season. He was kind of like Larry Hughes on defense -- not really a shut
down defender, but since Doug Moe didn't give a crap about defense, he
just gambled for steals and got 2 and a half to 3 a game.

But Moe giveth, and Mo taketh away. The Mavericks gave up a couple of
first round picks for him, and Fat went down the first week of the next
season. He did the Bernard King thing but he wasn't the same after that.


SG: Reggie Lewis. It's not because I faced the taunts of my cruel peers
for the huge-ass tongue on my Reverse Jam shoes that I say Reggie
doesn't even really belong on this team. I think it was the '92 playoffs
where he almost singlehandedly carried the Celtics into the semis. It's
amazing to look back and see that team with 50 wins, but watching Reggie
throw in something like 30 a game in the post-season was awesome. Reggie
could have gotten better, but he was already a star, in my eyes, after
that.

The thing I didn't really notice or appreciate at the time was how
little he turned the ball over. It's pretty amazing to be the #1 option
on a team and never commit more than 1.9 turnovers a game in a season.


C: This is a hard one. Center's like quarterback: you either overachieve
as a journeyman, suck, or are a star. I guess if you were to take a drug
case, it'd be Roy Tarpley. He wasn't the biggest guy in the paint but he
was a total beast and I loved watching him play. It was one of the cool
human interest stories in the NBA when he came back at the age of 30 and
was doing it all over again, but we know how that turned out. Again,
watching him in the playoffs when the Mavs took the Lakers to 7 games in
the conference finals, there wasn't much doubt about what he could do.
Granted, Kareem was ancient by that point but it's another story to
abuse him like I remember Tarpley doing.


PF: Lionel Simmons. He wasn't a power forward but I can't think of one,
and I have to give the SF slot to...


SF: Jay Vincent. Holy crap, if I could go back in time and make wagers
over what a bust this guy turned into, I wallpaper my house in foreign
currency. Other kids had to mention Benoit Benjamin as the inexplicable
bust that kept holding on; I was hip, though, I had to mention Jay
Vincent. Unlike Benoit, who could have been great but was merely
mediocre, Jay *was* actually great at one point. His rookie season was
spectacular, especially considering he was a 2nd round pick (although
with expansion he'd be a first-rounder today). But it was all downhill
from there, and I don't think I ever heard why. I know he was even
teamed back up with Magic at one point, and it still didn't do him any
good.

Bill Gates wrote:


I considered Coleman and Douglas but their career stats didn't seem bad
enough. I don't think Tony Bruin was drafted in the 1st round.

-Dave