A sports blog by and for Midwest Sports Fans
I just received this text message from our very own Jon Washburn:
please post the video I just tweeted up on MSF…the greatest basketball video I have ever seen.
Whoa.
Coming from Jon, a certified basketball fanatic, saying it’s “the greatest basketball video” he’s “ever seen” is quite high praise. I was thoroughly intrigued to watch the video and am posting it on MSF, so it must be pretty good.
And it is.
As I am wont to do, I took a quick peek today at the Reddit sports page while consuming my usual lunch of water and a Healthy Choice frozen meal (pro tip: they’re tastier than you might expect). I saw a title that said “One of the classiest send-offs of all-time” and felt compelled to click.
Said click led me to a YouTube video of Reggie Miller’s final game as an Indiana Pacer. The year was 2005 and the occasion was the East Conference semifinals against the Detroit Pistons — yes, the very same Pistons that the Pacers had their infamous brawl with the year before.
And after watching the video I had two thoughts: 1) this was indeed one of the classiest send-offs of all-time; and 2) there was a great amount of irony in Miller’s final seconds going as these did.
More on #2 in a second. First, enjoy the video:
Editor’s note: We are currently preparing an article in which a number of MSF writers submitted their top 20 NBA players of all-time. The goal is to see where Dirk falls in the top 20, or if he even makes it at all. Evan decided to narrow his scope a bit and go with the top 20 players of his lifetime. So we are posting his article first, with the mega top 20 article to come. Stay tuned…
Also note that Evan is 22 and says that he really started watching the NBA during the 1997-98 season.
It’s top-20 NBA Players mania around here right now, all thanks to Dirk Nowitzki’s superstar performance in earning his first ring this month. Everyone from announcers to journalists to bloggers are saying Dirk has hit legendary status, maybe even top 20 of all time. I think that sounds a tad high for Dirk, but he now has some serious hardware to reasonably back up the claim to a top-20 spot.
For my own part, I have always thought that the NBA MVP award was the most meaningful of any of the four major sports. Scan the list and you’ll notice every single winner is a Hall of Famer or well on his way to being enshrined. Dirk has his MVP award, he has his Finals MVP award, and most importantly he has his ring.
But is he on par with Larry Bird? Or is that just the most racially convenient historical comparison bandied by most experts?
Honestly, I don’t really know because I never actually saw Larry Bird play. But I have seen plenty of other great players, so for my Top-20 NBA Players list, I decided to restrict myself to those guys I’ve actually seen play. Here is my list with some highly subjective choices, some no doubters, and perhaps one begrudgingly included sharpshooter who burned my New York Knicks many years ago.
While watching Dirk’s evisceration of the Thunder last night, I had a revelation:
Dirk Nowitzki’s fadeaway is the single most unstoppable individual move since The Sky Hook.
Now before you get carried away, just listen to the qualifications. I’m talking about a single, individual move that is just impossible to stop.
Obviously, there have been much better scorers. When Jordan got the ball on the wing, he could do any one of eight different things — and do all of them well — in order to get points for his team.
Kevin McHale may have had more post moves than anyone in history. His combination of jab steps, head fakes, and duck-unders was nearly unguardable when he had his jump shot going.
But there have been a few guys in history that had a go-to move that you just couldn’t stop – even when you knew it was coming.
When you really love somebody, you tend to overlook that person’s flaws. You know what I’m talking about. Sometimes, you purposefully overlook a girl’s terrible personality just because she is so incredibly hot. Other times, you are so infatuated with them that you are just completely blind to their faults.
Please don’t think that’s what I’m doing here. This is not a blind defense of Reggie Miller.
Am I a die-hard Pacers fan? Yes. Is Reggie Miller my favorite player of all time? Absolutely. Do I think he was the greatest player of all time? Absolutely not.
However, I am firmly convinced of one thing: Reggie Miller is the greatest SHOOTER of all time.
I remember it like it was yesterday – the first time I realized that life wasn’t always fair.
Reggie Miller had helped me experience the highs and lows of sports just a few months earlier. I remember him exploding in The Garden in the fourth quarter against the Knicks in the playoffs, and his 8 points in nine seconds is permanently ingrained in my mind.
Reggie was my hero, he embodied everything I loved about basketball, and he had turned me into a diehard sports fan.
I recently blogged on the topic of Pistons GM Joe Dumars, a former guard for Detroit, and the perception that he is a genius. This got me to thinking about his partner in the backcourt for those Pistons championship teams of the late eighties….the great Isiah Thomas.
As you know, in October of this year Isiah Thomas was taken to a New York hospital after being founded unconcious in his home. The incident was ruled as a “accidental overdose of a prescription sleeping pill”. This was just another scar on the post NBA career for Thomas. The real surprise in this particular incident is 
that he insinuated that his 17 year old daughter was actually the patient. Why he would try to throw his 17 year old daughter under the bus when it could easily be proven otherwise? Furthermore…what the hell happened to Isiah Thomas?
Isiah Thomas has some staggering statistics as a player. He attended Indiana University for two years under Bob Knight. He was on the 1981 National Championship team and was named the Most Outstanding Player for the NCAA tournament that year. He then left and was drafted with second pick of the 1981 NBA draft by the Detroit Pistons. He was a force right away as he made the NBA all rookie team. He continued to dominate at the point throughout his career and even lead the Bash Brothers teams to two championships in the 1988-’89 and 1989-’90 seasons. Here is a rundown of some of his statistics from Basketball-Reference.com:
- NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player (1981)
- NBA All Rookie Team (1982)
- 12x NBA All Star (every year from 1982-1993)
- 3x All-NBA First Team (1984-1986)
- 2x NBA SEcond Team (1983,1987)
- 2x NBA Champion (1989,1990)
- NBA Finals MVP (1990)
- U.S. Olympian (1980…never played because of the boycoot, but, was named to the team)
- J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award (1987)
He also scored 18,822 points had 9,061 (9.3 pg) Assists and 1,861 Steals in his career. He is the Pistons career leader in the following categories: games played, points, steals and assists. He is fourth all-time NBA in assists.
These are staggering statistics that led to him being chosen as one of the top 50 players of all time for the 50th anniversary team. He was also named to the Basketball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
He retired as a player in 1994. This was when his career did a 180 and took a turn for the worse.
First, he bought in to the expansion Toronto Raptors franchise becoming a part owner and VP. He was run out of town over disagreements with management. He then tried a forray into broadcasting.
The real trouble started when he bought the CBA in 1998. The league later went into bankruptcy and no longer exists. Isiah Thomas has been given a lot of the blame for the leagues demise. The big reason for this is that he turned down a profitable offer from the NBA to turn the CBA into a development league for the NBA. Thomas declined. The NBA later created the NBDL as a farm system for the NBA which basically made the CBA obsolete.
Thomas was then hired on to replace Larry Bird as the head coach for the the Indiana Pacers. This was Isiah’s first try at head coaching and he was given a stacked team. The Pacers had just won the Eastern Conference title and were poised for more success. But, Isiah never got them out of the first round of the playoffs. They had the talent, but Isiah just wasn’t experienced enough for head coaching. It’s hard
to believe that he couldn’t get a team with young talent in Ron Artest and Brad Miller and a veteran leader in sharp shooter Reggie Miller out of the first round of the playoffs. This led to him being replaced in Indiana as head coach.
In 2003, he moved on to destroy the New York Knicks franchise, where he was named President of Basketball operations. He also became head coach in 2006. By the time he became head coach in New York he had helped them amass the highest payroll in the entire NBA…..and the 2nd worse record. On top of that, there were allegations of sexual harrasment and racism by a Madison Square Garden employee.
To me, not many have fallen harder than Isiah Thomas after his career as a player ended. I think bad decision after bad decision may have finally taken its toll. He has won chamionships as a player, dazzled fans with his insane ball-handling abilities and could get to the hoop like no other point guard of his time. But, he fell from an NBA All Star (and personally one of my favorite players) to the the brink of death.
He ripped apart franchises and even destroyed an entire league. All of this finally culminated this Fall with him throwing his 17 year old daughter under the bus for his “accidental overdose”. This is a tragic epilogue to an exciting and dominating NBA career, and it should be a warning sign to current NBA players to not bite off more than you can chew when your playing career is over.
[tags]isiah thomas, nba[/tags]
