Fifteen years ago... I was a diehard Los Angeles Lakers fan, Upper Deck dominated the NBA trading card market, MJ was preparing to win his final NBA Title, and on November 18th, 1997 A.C. Green tied Randy Smith's NBA record of playing in 906 consecutive games.
Talk about living in the past. These days... I don't watch basketball, Upper Deck doesn't have an NBA license, and MJ has been retired for a decade.
But Green still holds the NBA's Iron Man record. His streak ended at 1,192 games on April 18th, 2001 when he played the final regular season game of his career.
During his sixteen year NBA career, he played in an amazing 1,278 out of 1,281 games. Is that insane or what? Plus, it's been well documented that Green is one of the good guys. In 2011, he won the Bobby Jones Award for his character, leadership, and faith on the court, at home, and in the community.
They sure don't make them like they used to.
Congratulations Mr. Green. I may not support the current NBA regime, but I'll always be a fan of your game.
Happy Sunday and sayonara!
I checked out his stats because I didn't ever realize he was this prolific...and damn if the 1999-2000 Lakers weren't weird. First off, they won a championship. They did so with Green starting all 82 games at PF and contributing 5 points and 5.9 boards in 23.5 minutes a game. They also started Ron Harper at PG (he started 60 games there with DFish starting 22 off the bench when Kobe was hurt), Glen Rice at SF, and Kobe missed 16 games with injury. With that PG combo in particular, their highest assist guy was Kobe with 4.9 apg, and their second highest rebound total was also Kobe with 6.3 per game.
ReplyDeleteYet Shaq was insane that year and Kobe was Kobe, and with Rice chipping in 15.9 ppg that was somehow enough for a championship. Such a crazy team...really only 2.5 scorers with no real PG and poor rebounding.
Also neat...their 8th highest guy in regular season minutes per game was Tyronn Lue. Only 8 games though.
Great statistical breakdown... I totally remember that year. Shaq was a beast.
DeleteWhen the Rockets moved to Houston from San Diego I followed them for a few years. It was easy because as a student at The University of Houston we could get into the games (they played on our campus) for $1. There would be a couple of hundred folks there and you could interact with the players (meaning you could yell stuff at them and everyone in the place could hear you). Dale Schlueter of the Hawks gave me the finger once. LOL
ReplyDeleteI worked at the broadcast table keeping stats a few times for the ABC Game of the Week crew. Sat one seat away from Bill Russell. I was too scared to say a word to him.
These days I probably couldn't name 5 NBA players.
Wow... that's awesome. Stuff a lot of people only dream of.
DeleteFYI: You're not missing anything. From this point out... if I write about anything NBA related, it probably has to do with my 90's inserts ;-)
Yeah it's hard for me to be a fan w/o parity. When some teams have 60 to 80 percent of their starters being potentially all-stars... it takes the fun out of it.
ReplyDeleteI still might attend a Warriors game or two... but it's just because there aren't any Sharks games :(
Upon my return to the card hobby, I started watching the NBA again and i must say Ive really gotten back into it.. give a laker game a watch sometime and it may rekindle that basketball fire as they have been quite entertaining the past couple years and especially this season...Im a long time bulls fan so you can imagine my hopes for them to return to glory which almost happened last season had their star player derrick rose not got injured at the end of the season.
ReplyDeleteThat's great that you've gotten back into the sport... but I'm going in the opposite direction. It started with me falling out of love with the Lakers. I had been a fan of them since their Showtime era, but the past 6 or 7 years things have just gone sour.
DeleteI grew tired of their attempt to buy championships and realized that even when they won it all in 08/09 and 09/10, I really wasn't that excited. It sort of was expected.
Which is why I made the move to start supporting my local Golden State Warriors, which are always fun to watch. But watching the Lakers get Nash and Howard, while the Champions acquired Allen just proves that there's little to no hope for the lower budget teams.
I will support the Warriors from here on out, but if there's a Sharks, Seahawks, or Packers game on there's no way I'll be watching the hardcourt.