WashPost on Ralph Sampson

OK. Apparently, I've been sleeping on Webber. My bad.

From Wiki: Webber was ranked #64 in SLAM Magazine's Top 75 NBA Players of all time in 2003. He was ranked #11 in an ESPN.com experts poll of the top power forwards of all time in 2008 and ranked #72 on a list of the Top 96 NBA Players of all time in Bill Simmons' bestseller The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy published in 2009.

I do believe he's a Hall of Famer given his entire college/NBA career. Definitely slept on his NBA body of work, though.

Carry on.

 

I think he gets in. The Michigan scandal will hurt him, as will the fact that at least two teams traded him away (I'm not counting Orlando) because they thought he was a pain in the ass. He didn't exactly win too many fans with some of the crap he pulled in Philly either. I think what he did, mostly in Sacramento, will be enough to get him in eventually.

 

I'm not sure he was a bust at all. The problem is that the bar of expectation was placed so high that anything short of that was going to label him a bust.

He absolutely terrorized the ACC for four years. Jim Valvano pieced together a triangle-and-two defense ... with the two put in charge of trying to slow down Ralph. Other schools were faced with the much more daunting task of trying to devote more resources to countering him, knowing that was just going to make life really easy for Othell Wilson, Ricky Stokes, Jeff Jones, Jeff Lamp and friends?

Also disagree with old_tony. Sampson had his own skill set ... to call them small-man skills is a bit of a blanket statement, paints it unnecessarily negative and implies that he was afraid to mix up inside. He wasn't built as sturdily as Patrick Ewing, which John Thompson took full advantage and had him playing a much more classic center position. Terry Holland knew what he had in Charlottesville and the last thing he was going to do was marginalize the skills he had.

While it's probably unfair to say that Sampson was set up to fail, the bar was set so impossibly high that it was going to be exceedingly difficult to label him a success by those guidelines (people made it sound as if he had failed because Holland and UVa didn't emerge with multiple national titles, that the Rockets, led the Twin Towers, didn't completely dominate for a decade and change the strategy of the game for generations).

And how many times have we seen knee problem fell a big man?

 

So Kareem came out in 1985?

Any discussion about college basketball without Bird and Magic is not much of a discussion.

 

Kareem wasn't on his list.

 

The modern era of basketball started with Bird vs. Magic. Leaving those two out of the discussion is like talking Super Bowls and leaving out Lombardi's Packers.

 

LeBron James was on the SI cover as a high school junior, which was before the nationwide tour and before his team appeared on ESPN five times or whatever. So at that point, I don't imagine that many people outside Northeast Ohio had seen him play.

You could argue the SI cover story had a lot to do with building the LeBron expectations and "hype" you're speaking of. It's certainly the first time I ever heard of him.

And regarding the hype comparison with Sampson, Ewing and others ... Don't you think if those guys had come along in an era when high school players could freely enter the NBA draft, they'd have been hyped through the roof at 17 as well?

People forget that before 1995, guys didn't go straight from high school to the pros, though Sampson, Ewing, Sam Bowie and numerous others certainly were talented enough to have done so. Kevin Garnett changed all that.

 

The discussion was expectations of No. 1 overall picks over the last 30 years. That list doesn't include Magic or Kareem (Alcindor). And Larry Bird wasn't a top overall pick.

Why did he choose the last 30 years instead of 35? Or 40? Or all of them? Ask him.

 

Sampson was the No. 1 pick 30 years ago.

 

There ya go. And it comes full circle!

 

I said "freely enter the draft."

Malone went to the ABA first, and the NBA saw no sense keeping him out after the merger. And Dawkins was a financial "hardship" case who had to make a special appeal to be considered.

 

There's no question LeBron was better than Kobe coming out of high school.

It's not even close. Most teams didn't have him on their radar in 1995, which is why he was drafted where he was and why he was dealt for Vlade Divac.

LeBron may have been the most hyped player to ever come out of high school, or even the best player to ever come out of high school, but to say he was the most hyped player to ever be drafted is a bit of a reach. He's up there, there's no question about that, but to say the expectations for him were higher than they were for Ewing and Shaq, and maybe Duncan and Olajuwon is debatable at best.