Greg Oden is a big one for me, maybe the biggest. He's not in the same category as the players you've named, since he never even got a shot; but he sure was an intriguing player.
Brandon Roy.
Not really the same, exactly, but how good was prime Arvydas Sabonis? Those years were in Europe, but the guy seemed like a god.
I wasn't really following basketball during the Brandon Roy years, but it sounds like he was pretty extraordinary and then his career was just completely over.
Sabonis is a good call. His legacy was probably hurt by coming to the NBA at all. He had so much hype to live up to and his body was pretty much shot. A lot of us just think of him as a huge slow guy, because that's all we got to see.
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His legacy was probably hurt by coming to the NBA at all. He had so much hype to live up to and his body was pretty much shot.
That's what I remember, too (the giant lumbering ruined body) but it had the opposite effect on me: the guy was still, even as a husk, a substantial player. It made me think, jfc, if he's still somehow this good, how good was he a decade ago?
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That's a much more mature attitude than I had. I remember really liking everyone else on that team and he was just sort of there.
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