Bob Dandridge
Bill Simmons refers to Bob Dandridge as his "favorite lost great from the seventies." The reason that Dandridge is "lost" is that he was a great player but never the best on a good team. He spent the entire decade of the 70's as one of the league's best players, but he always had better or more famous teammates overshadowing him.
In Milwaukee, where he started his career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson took the spotlight. In Washington, where he had his career peak, people still paid more attention to Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld. The two seasons in which he took over as the best player on the Bucks turned out to be the two least successful seasons of his career, which says to me that he was better as a second banana.
Dandridge played in 4 NBA Finals during his career, winning the NBA championship twice. In each of those Finals appearances he raised his scoring average over the previous appearance, which is impressive since he was 23 the first time he reached the Finals and 31 the last time. Here are the playoff numbers from those seasons:
1971 - 19.2 pts, #3 player on champ
1974 - 19.3 pts, #3 player on runner-up
1978 - 21.2 pts, #2 player on champ
1979 - 23.1 pts, #2 player on runner-up
Not only did he play a major role on all 4 of those Finals teams, he actually scored the winning dunk in Game 7 of the 1978 NBA Finals, which is not a small feat. Even with that accomplishment, he has been forgotten by the majority of NBA fans, and he has also been left out of the Hall of Fame by voters for decades, who obviously have failed to recognize how big a contributor he was to some of the best teams of the 1970's. The least I can do is give him a little recognition today as one of the top 100 players of all time.
No comments:
Post a Comment