Chauncey Billups
(BBR: #65)
Chauncey Billups has been one of the most successful playoff players in modern years, leading his team to the Conference Finals in 7 straight years, a streak that has only been matched by two players in the past 30 years, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He may not have ever been considered a superstar, but he has been a star player for nearly a decade now, and a winner for most of that time.
On six of those 7 Conference Final teams, Billups was one of the top 3 players on his team, first for the Pistons teams that kept making deep playoff runs, then for Denver after a trade took him out west. Here are his stats for those seasons in the regular season and the playoffs.
Billups (Regular Season) - 17.1 pts, 3.3 reb, 6.4 ast
Billups (Playoffs) - 18.0 pts, 3.5 reb, 6.0 ast
You can see that he kicked it up one notch in the playoffs, but others have made more impressive jumps. When the Pistons won the NBA Finals, Billups was voted the MVP, even though Rip Hamilton was probably a better player throughout those playoffs, as you can see from these numbers:
Billups - 16.4 pts, 3.0 reb, 5.9 ast
Hamilton - 21.5 pts, 4.6 reb, 4.2 ast
Billups was definitely the best player for Detroit in their return trip to the Finals the next year, when he bumped those averages up to 18.7 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 6.5 assists, but Detroit lost to the Spurs, costing him a chance at consecutive Finals MVP's.
Billups is also one of the best free throw shooters of all time, with a career average of .894, which places him in fifth place in NBA history, behind only Steve Nash, Rick Barry, Mark Price, and Peja Stojakovic. His clutch free throw shooting has been a very important reason for his success, because his team was able to keep one of its best players on the floor at the most important times.
It's hard to argue that Billups was a better player than Jones, especially when you look at the comparison in the chart above. We also know that both were top 3 players on some of the best teams during their prime years, but Jones was able to make the NBA Finals a lot more often than Billups. One major difference that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact that the NBA Finals was only the second or third round of the playoffs during the Celtics' glory years, which Jones was a part of. Today, the Conference Finals is the third round of the playoffs, so Billups' run of playoff success is just as impressive as Jones', and Billups has the added bonus of saying he was the best player on a Finals team, which Jones never was.
No comments:
Post a Comment