Top 100 NBA Players: #96

Walter Davis

(BBR: #179)

When Walter Davis entered the league in 1977, it looked like he was destined to be one of the all-time greats. Hw was named the Rookie of the Year and was named to the All-NBA 2nd team twice to begin his career, but only made 4 more All-Star appearances in the remaining 13 years of his career. So what happened that  kept him from reaching his potential? Why is he stuck at #96 on the all-time list? The answer is cocaine.

By looking at his scoring average early in his career, it's easy to see that something was wrong. Here are the scoring averages from his first five seasons:

1978 - 24.2 ppg
1979 - 23.6 ppg
1980 - 21.5 ppg
1981 - 18.0 ppg
1982 - 14.4 ppg

At this point Davis entered a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, and for a little while he started to bounce back, averaging 19.0 and 20.0 ppg in his next two seasons, but then he relapsed. He missed the majority of the 1984-1985 season battling back injuries and going through drug rehab again, then got caught up in the largest drug scandal in sports history up to that point in 1987, when he testified against 3 current teammates and 2 former teammates to avoid prosecution in a drug distribution trial. The Phoenix Suns, the team with which he had starred for over a decade, decided to cut ties with him and allowed him to walk away as a free agent to the Denver Nuggets after that season.

This chart makes it very easy to find the points in his career in which drugs had decreased his value. His final decline was thankfully due to old age rather than another relapse. Even after completing a disappointing career, there is no denying that he at least deserves mention as one of the all-time best players. For the first two seasons he was in the NBA, he was the sixth best player in the entire league, and had he maintained that level through his prime, he would be considered one of the top 30 players of all time.

 The greatness of his first two seasons alone still would not have been enough to get him on this list, but luckily he led the Suns on a run to the Western Conference Finals in 1984, while he was clean for a while. In those playoffs he averaged 24.9 points and 6.4 assists before they lost to the Lakers in 6 games. He makes it ahead of the players below him because none of them ever played at the level that Davis reached in his first 2 seasons, and he is now the cutoff man for guards making the all-time top 100.