Ball Don’t Five: Top 5 players who’ve never been to the NBA playoffs
As we continue to work our way through the endless summer between the Finals and Opening Night, we’ll pause each Friday to briefly consider and count down some NBA-related topic of note. We like starting lineups and round numbers, so we’ll run through a handful of items each week. With a nod to our friends at Dr. Saturday, welcome to Ball Don’t Five.
This week’s installment: The Top Five Players Who’ve Never Been to the Postseason.
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NOTE: Seeing as how we love the number five so much here, I’m going to limit this list to players who have played five or more NBA seasons without suiting up later than mid-April. Rest easy, young’uns, and here’s hoping (for your sakes) we don’t see you next year, Ricky Rubio, Tobias Harris, Brandon Knight, Morris twins, et al.
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5. Popeye Jones and Jason Thompson (tie): Shouts out to my underappreciated rebounding power forwards!
After twice earning Ohio Valley Conference Player of the Year honors during his illustrious collegiate career at Murray State, Ronald Jerome Jones — who got his nickname from the cartoon his brother was watching when his newborn baby bro came home from the hospital (“David […] noticed that baby Ronnie had the same funny ears as that sailor guy on TV”) — became a dirty-work dude in the pros, kicking around to six teams in 11 NBA seasons (including two stints with the Dallas Mavericks) and working to make a difference wherever he went by pounding the glass.
Popeye finished in the league’s top 10 in offensive rebounds every year between 1993 and 1997, and led the league in the 1994-95 season. He twice averaged double-doubles for the Dallas Mavericks, and became a valued veteran voice for the Toronto Raptors, Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets and Washington Wizards before finishing his playing career with a pair of brief stays back in Dallas and with the Golden State Warriors. He’s since transitioned to a different spot on the bench, spending three years with the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets and joining Frank Vogel’s staff with the Indiana Pacers in 2013.
The Sacramento Kings have not been very good over the past decade, which has resulted in Thompson largely toiling in obscurity; the team rolled up a combined record of 173-385 during his seven years in California’s capital city. He was a pretty solid performer during that time, though, averaging about 9.5 points and seven rebounds per game, making right around half his shots from the floor, working hard defensively at both the four and five spots, and generally operating as a very decent “stays within himself” rotational big man who could be a valuable small-doses contributor on the kind of good team the Kings haven’t had since Rick Adelman left town.
In a related story, Thompson recently joined the defending champion Warriors, meaning his placement on this list is likely to be blessedly short-lived.
4. Anthony Morrow: It took a spate of injuries to stars and a wild-as-hell Anthony Davis buzzer-beater last season to keep Morrow on this list, but hey, the West is brutal, so here we are. Undrafted out of Georgia Tech, the 6-foot-5 sniper has carved out a niche as one of the league’s premier long-range designated hitters, making 42.9 percent of his 3-pointers over the course of his seven-year career — fifth-best among active players, ninth-best in NBA history.
His game might skew closer to one-dimensional than multifaceted, but that one dimension’s among the most important there are in the contemporary NBA game, and with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook both expected to be back and healthy in time for this season, Morrow could have more time, room and opportunity to bomb away than he’s ever seen in his career … and, if everyone stays back and healthy, a first opportunity to hoist away come the postseason.
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3. Greg Monroe: The Georgetown product didn’t turn into the franchise-tilting talent that the Detroit Pistons hoped he’d be when they selected him No. 7 overall in 2010, but it’s not like it’s all Moose’s fault that a Pistons team that has featured malfunctions in the front office (chiefly former GM Joe Dumars deciding to pay Ben Gordon, Charlie Villanueva and Josh Smith, all of whom later had to be sent packing), on the bench (Monroe played for five different head coaches in his five years in the Motor City) and in the locker room (who can forget the Great Player Mutiny of 2011?) for at least the last half-decade, and has only really had one (all-too-brief) period of sustained on-court success in the recent past. Even if Monroe isn’t the kind of singular star who can haul a bad team further than it’s supposed to go, he’s still pretty darn good.
The 25-year-old big man ranks among the league’s top rebounders, especially on the defensive glass, and can both bully his way to buckets on the block and make deft touch passes to cutters from the high post and elbows. He’s averaged a shade under 16 points and 10 rebounds per game since becoming a full-time starter four seasons ago — marks that have him sharing statistical space with the likes of Kevin Love, Tim Duncan, Anthony Davis, LaMarcus Aldridge, Al Jefferson, Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, Zach Randolph and DeMarcus Cousins — and, while he’s certainly not a rim protector like his now-former teammate Andre Drummond, he’s become a steadier and more capable defender, too.
Fresh off signing a three-year, $50 million deal to provide an interior scoring presence and half-court organizing principle for the Milwaukee Bucks — a team that had one of the NBA’s worst offenses last season, but returns a top-flight defense that should help mitigate Monroe’s failings on that end — the 6-foot-11 Monroe looks like yet another current young veteran who might not be long for this particular list.
2. Tom Van Arsdale: Per the great folks at the indispensable Basketball-Reference.com, no NBA player has played more games without a postseason appearance than the former Indiana Hoosiers swingman, whom the Pistons picked in the second round of the 1965 NBA draft. Something of a dubious honor, I’ll grant you, but that doesn’t take away from what Van Arsdale — whose twin brother, Dick, went off the board to the New York Knicks just one pick before him in the ’65 draft — was able to accomplish over the course of his 12-year NBA career.
After the Pistons shipped him to the Cincinnati Royals midway through the 1967-68 season, Van Arsdale began to flourish, stepping into major minutes and plenty of shots alongside legends Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas. He averaged 21.1 points and 5.5 rebounds per game over the next four seasons, shooting 45 percent from the field and 75 percent from the line, and making three straight All-Star Games in the process. In fact, both he and Dick made it in 1970 and ’71, making them the first brothers ever to suit up together in an All-Star Game, and the only ones to do it until Pau Gasol and Marc Gasol pulled off the same feat this past February.
When Van Arsdale wrapped up his career after a long season alongside brother Dick with the Phoenix Suns in 1976-77, he’d amassed more than 14,000 career points, 3,900 rebounds and 2,000 assists — 46 of the other 85 players to hit those career benchmarks are in the Hall of Fame, and at least a dozen active players who’ve gotten there are likely to join them … even if Van Arsdale himself isn’t.
1. DeMarcus Cousins: For all the criticism he’s received for his comportment on the court and his attitude off it, Cousins is undeniably one of the most gifted big men in the sport. He’s finished in the top 10 in the NBA in both points and rebounds per game in each of the last two seasons while also improving as a playmaker and the hub of the Kings’ defense.
When Boogie was on the court last season, Sacramento operated like a top-12 offense and a middle-of-the-pack defense; when he was off it, the Kings cratered to the bottom-third of the league, failing to offer anything more than token opposition to opponents. He’s one of the most consistently productive on-court forces in the NBA, capable of generating points efficiently even while commanding more than a third of Sacramento’s offensive possessions. He earned both his first All-Star berth and his first All-NBA nod last season.
Amid all the roiling chaos that has characterized the Kings’ operations during his time in Sacramento, Boogie has developed into a legitimate foundational star. The questions now surround whether Sacramento’s ownership has found a management team in which it feels comfortable enough to leave well enough alone to build for a bit, and whether the Vlade Divac-led front office made the right offseason moves (signing Kosta Koufos, Rajon Rondo, Marco Belinelli and Caron Butler, as well as drafting Willie Cauley-Stein) to give Cousins enough help to vault the Kings into the mix for a lower-reaches-of-the-bracket playoff seed. It won’t be easy — nothing ever is in the West — but, as Boogie once famously said, he believes he’s got broad enough shoulders to handle the responsibility:
Honorable mentions:
• Eddy Curry, an asterisk-y technicality — he actually won a ring as a member of the 2011-12 Miami Heat despite never seeing a second of postseason floor time — who led the league in field goal percentage in his second season with the Chicago Bulls and scored more than 6,800 career points in 11 NBA seasons before heart, weight and performance issues ended his career;
• Geoff Huston, a Brooklyn-born point guard who averaged a shade under nine points and just over five assists per game in his eight-year NBA career, and who dished 27 assists as a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers on Jan. 27, 1982, a performance still tied for sixth place on the NBA’s all-time single-game assist list;
• Otto Moore, a durable 6-foot-11 big man drafted No. 6 overall by the Detroit Pistons in 1968 who twice averaged double-doubles over the course of a full season, remained a prolific shot-blocker late into his career and averaged 8.2 points, 8.2 rebounds and 1.6 assists in 24.8 minutes per game in a nine-year, 682-game NBA career.
• Nikola Pekovic, a mauling interior scorer, rebounder and screen-setter who’s deft in the pick-and-roll and a savvier-than-you-might-think (albeit ground-bound) defender, but whose feet have betrayed him and who could find giving way to younger prospects like Gorgui Dieng and 2015 No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns as the revamped Minnesota Timberwolves look to build toward a more athletic, more versatile and more reliably available future.
OK — that’s my list. Who’d I miss? Let me know via Twitter or Facebook.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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