Elton Brand
(BBR: #102)
Elton Brand was one of the best players of the past decade, but he has been ignored and forgotten by most fans for two main reasons. He spent the majority of two recent seasons on the injured list, and he's almost always played on horrible teams. But there is a good reason to put him on this list.
Over the first eight seasons of his career, during which time he was generally healthy, he put up some of the strongest numbers in the entire league. Here are his overall averages from 1999-2007:
Brand - 20.3 pts, 10.2 reb, 2.7 ast, 2.1 blk, .505 FG%
He stayed pretty close to those averages every year, except in 2006, when he exploded, making the All-NBA Second Team and leading the Clippers to their best season in decades, which lasted into the second round of the playoffs, a huge accomplishment for the franchise. Here are his numbers from that season:
Brand - 24.7 pts, 10.0 reb, 2.6 ast, 2.5 blk, .527 FG%
Just one season later, Brand's career took a nosedive thanks to his first major injury, a ruptured Achilles' tendon that limited him to just 8 games that year. He left the Clippers for the 76ers that summer, then missed most of the following season due to an unrelated injury, a shoulder dislocation. At this point he was pushed to the back of most people's minds, but he did see a nice resurgence in 2011, when he averaged 15.0 points and 8.3 rebounds while making just the second playoff appearance of his career. It's unlikely that he will make it back to his previous level, but he was pretty good before injuries took over his career.
Looking at the chart of Brand compared to Johnson, it's easy to see that Johnson was a bit better early on in his career, but that injuries slowed him down much earlier, at the exact same point when Brand hit his peak, which was significantly higher than Johnson's. The lack of playoff success doesn't hurt Brand much in this matchup, because Johnson only had 3 significant playoff runs in his career, and he was only the best player on one of those teams.
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