The 10 Weirdest Careers Among Current NBA Players
It would make sense there are four Sixers on this list.
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On the weekend Ricky, Spike made the point that Dwight Howard was in the midst of the weirdest career of any active NBA player. I've certainly thought about Sixers Weirdness a minimum of 90 minutes a day since the season started -- including my ongoing debate with Dan Olinger of Liberty Ballers this season is over who on the Sixers is the weirdest player, Danny Green (because he's a three-time champion Veteran Experience guy who can't dribble and whose brain turns to apple sauce at least once a game) or Ben Simmons (because he's such a weird player that he guarantees that every team he ever plays on will also be weird). But I hadn't really considered it from the career, longevity perspective.
I think Dwight and Danny both certainly rank in the top 10 for the current NBA's longest, strangest single-player trips. (No one else on the team has been quite long or well-traveled enough, with the possible exceptions of George Hill and Tobias Harris, who'd have interesting top 20 cases.) But do either contend for the top spot? I'm about as interested in talking about the most recent two Sixers games as I am in responding to yet another prompt tweet about the best fake bands or fake songs (you're sucking all the fun out of one of the most joyous things on the planet, people!!), so yeah, let's dive into this thing instead. Honorable mention to Blake Griffin, Lou Williams, Wayne Ellington, Jimmy Butler and my two 2021 non-Sixers favs, Julius Randle and DeMar DeRozan.
10. Kawhi Leonard
He's had too unambiguously successful a career for it to really be defined as "weird" first and foremost. Still, no denying the sheer unlikeliness of Kawhi Leonard -- the quiet man, the consummate Spur, the heir apparent to Tim Duncan -- ending up the guy who forced his way out of San Antonio, spent one championship-winning season in Toronto, then immediately headed to a Los Angeles franchise that so catered to his every whim and desire that it ended up cratering the team. He had his reasons, but they would not have been predictable in 2014, to say the least.
9. Brook Lopez
Hard to think of too many other guys in the NBA that basically ended up the photo negative version of themselves. In New Jersey and Brooklyn, Brook Lopez was the defensive liability who was prolific enough in the post and from mid-range that you could mostly forgive his plodding paint-boundess on both sides. Now, he's the highly adaptable defensive player of the year candidate (??) who's on pace to make over 100 threes for the fifth straight season -- after making just three triples total the first eight years of his career -- and posts up like twice a game, max. (Brother Robin has also been an impressive NBA weirdo in his own right, thriving for 13 seasons as a prototypical solid-enough pivot, before discovering an unseemly hook shot this season that's led to by far the best shooting numbers of his career.)
8. Victor Oladipo
I feel like we've never had a handle on who Victor Oladipo is for more than a season at once. Is he the bulldog defense-first prospect who can win will his way to a productive NBA career? The overpaid tweener with limited range who might be better suited for a sixth man role? The star two-guard who can turn around a franchise's fortunes virtually on his own? The ego-led gunner who wants to play in a big market? Is he still recovering from injuries? Was he never really that good in the first place? How many teams is this guy gonna play for in his career? Does anybody want to pay him this summer? Does anyone even remember that he's still technically on the Heat right now? I don't know the answer to any of this, I'm just glad it's not now and has never particularly been our problem.
7. Danny Green
More currently weird than historically, Danny Green has nonetheless is potentially headed for the most uniquely decorated career of a player that a) has never been an All-Star b) had a late-onset journeyman's career and c) was never that famous for being particularly clutch. Getting Danny Green his fourth ring on his fourth different team (and his third straight of each) certainly isn't No. 1 on the list why the Sixers should really make an effort to go and win the championship this year, but it's probably in the top five.
6. Thaddeus Young
Man, it is tough to be a consistently good NBA player for 14 years -- never bad, never great, never really even very good, but always good -- and only ever win one playoff series (which your team never should have won in the first place; if you're reading this blog you know the one I'm talking about). It's been a stunning career of conspicuously light productivity for Thad, who's been on five teams and made the playoffs eight times, and yet would not have been part of a single moment of real NBA consequence if not for that one Uncut Gems-ass Sixers run. He can't make a bad team good, and he can't make a good team great -- but he's made a career out of taking a team from 34 wins to 38, or from 42 to 46. He was a good pre-Process Sixer, and has done a good job rater in his career reinventing himself to stay relevant — but his ultimate NBA legacy might still be the Thaddeus Young Stat, a hilariously unconvincing contortion to make a historically unexceptional player seem like one of the greats.
5. Jrue Holiday
Jrue might not seem like he's had a particularly strange NBA career but he's sort of had the rich man's version of Thaddeus Young's career -- significantly more productive, and much more handsomely compensated, but nearly as lacking in individual accolades or team success. In his 12 seasons, he's only been an All-Star once (in 2013) and only won a playoff series twice (in 2012 and 2018) -- but the Milwaukee Bucks still spent three draft picks, two pick swaps and multiple rotation players last season to acquire him, and inked him to a four-year, $160 million extension not all that long thereafter. Everyone agrees at this point that he's one of the best two-way players in the league, though nobody seems to be able to explain why having both him and prime Anthony Davis in New Orleans was never enough to build a consistent winner around. And he's the primary difference-makers that the Bucks are pinning their championship hopes to this year, despite him averaging just one playoff game's worth of experience for each of his 30 years. And they might be right to do so! We'll see, but definitely weird.
4. Jeff Green
Not a lot of super-hyped prospects take until their early 30s to basically break even as NBA pros -- traditionally, you're either good at some point in your 20s or you don't hang around the league past that. But somehow, Jeff Green's production managed to be just tantalizing enough through his first 10 years and for teams great, good, fine and terrible alike to continue giving him chances, even after he'd provided a solid decade's worth of evidence that he was just not a player who contributed to winning in any meaningful capacity. Then, six teams into his career, he finally worked his way up to "decent enough," which was enough to make him one of LeBron's three most valuable teammates on his last finals run in Cleveland. Now he's settled into the role he was always meant to play: a complementary piece hitting open shots on the souped-up version of the Thunder team that traded him for Kendrick Perkins a decade ago, setting him on his wayward path. And oh yeah, he also missed a whole season once after getting heart surgery, long enough ago that it's no longer even a prominent part of his story. Pretty much the only guy on the Nets team besides Landry whose success doesn't piss me off at this point.
3. Dwight Howard
No doubt hard to believe there could be two NBA players with weirder careers than Dwight Howard, but here we are. Certainly Superman II remains a worthy contender for the throne, given his devolution from perennial MVP candidate and three-time defensive player of the year to overpaid nuisance in Houston and L.A., locker room cancer in Atlanta and Charlotte, and a straight-up fringe NBA player in Washington -- before resurrecting his image as a low-usage grinder in L.A. again, winning a championship, still getting treated as radioactive by the Lakers in the offseason, and now serving as Executive VP of Vibes and the world's youngest 35 year old backing up Joel Embiid in Philly. Hard to imagine where else his career could possibly go from here, though you have to imagine at least one season as a three-point specialist / stretch big off the bench awaits him before all is said and done, perhaps in Utah or Denver.
2. Russell Westbrook
Imagine if ten years ago, someone told you that in 2021, a player would comfortably average a triple-double for the whole season -- but not only would that player not be the automatic MVP, but the majority of the NBA-watching universe would routinely clown them and their contract for being terrible. That's Russell Westbrok for you: He accomplishes the unprecedented in all directions with such frequency that it barely even feels noteworthy anymore. Last night, he had a 14-21-24 stat line. The game before that, he had 42-10-9. At the beginning of the season, the Wizards were the laughing stock of the NBA for trading an unmovable deal for an even worse one; now, with the Wiz surging from cellar-dwellers to play-in tournament locks, we've got folks on Twitter suggesting Tommy Sheppard should get Executive of the Year consideration.
And it's all from a guy who came out of college viewed mostly as a defensive specialist, exploded as such a force in OKC that they essentially kept him over James Harden, made the finals, won the MVP, averaged a triple-double for three years straight (after no one had done it for even a single season in over half a century), and became such a give-and-take bargain as a player and leader that he turned into the NBA's most polarizing figure since Iverson. Whenever it seems like it's finally time to totally write him off as a player, he puts up TRL-era Backstreet Boys numbers for a month and suddenly you have to take him very, very seriously again -- then he comes up short again in the playoffs and you wonder if all the numbers are secretly meaningless, no matter how eye-gouging. No telling what'll happen with him next, but the NBA will be a richer, wilder place for it. As long as you stay off Twitter, anyway.
1. Rajon Rondo
I swear, this guy was washed six years ago. Six years ago! That's how long ago it was that Rondo got a midseason trade from Boston to Dallas, poisoning the Mavs' identity and chemistry on the way to a brutally decisive first-round exit, and leading to him signing in the NBA wasteland of Sacramento for the next season. Somehow, he survived that to become one of the pre-eminent clutch playoff performers of his generation -- consistently raising his game in the postseason to the point that his Chicago Bulls nearly upended the top-seeded Celtics in 2017, his New Orleans Pelicans really did sweep the higher-seeded Blazers in 2018, and his Lakers actually won the friggin' championship last year, all with playing a key role wildly disproportionate to his regular-season reliability. Now, he's poised to pull some version of the same trick for the Clippers this year, and for what feels like the 12th straight year, barely anybody saw it coming. It's remarkable.
What's really remarkable, though, is his fucking shooting. When he was a four-time All-Star with the Celtics, the unexpectedly powerful engine of those Big Three teams in Boston, he couldn't shoot a lick -- teams would routinely play 10 feet off him when the games mattered, giving him the Ben Simmons treatment. Can't do that no more: the 25% career three-point shooter in Boston gradually worked his way up to quasi-respectability from distance, and now he's a legitimate threat: He went an absolutely absurd 20-50 over L.A.'s championship run, hitting more threes than he did in any of his first seven full seasons as a Celtic. It's downright insulting for those of us who've watched him for a decade and a half -- a continuity error at worst, poor character development at best. Throw in him becoming the first player to win a championship with both the Celtics and Lakers, and it's pretty clear that even Dwight Howard can't compete with this guy's off-the-rails, late-season-Oz-caliber career narrative arc.