The received wisdom of David Robinson’s NBA career reads as the perils of being too book smart for a children’s playground game.
Robinson supposedly was an overly sensitive player who over thought matters on the court and couldn’t lead his team to the title. Even the most popular YouTube “highlight” clip of Robinson is “Olajuwon Dominates Robinson,” a syrupy six-minute montage of Hakeem Olajuwan carrying the Houston Rockets past Robinson’s San Antonio Spurs in the 1995 Western Conference Finals.
In his Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons rated Robinson the 28th greatest player of all-time behind peers such as John Stockton, Scottie Pippen, Kevin Garnett and Charles Barkley. Robinson even ranked behind Bill Walton, someone who played a total of 468 games, or 5 1/2 full seasons, his entire NBA career.
Simmons concluded that Robinson “failed to dominate the NBA despite having every conceivable tool you’d want for a center.”
Yet such sky-high expectations cloud Robinson’s very real accomplishment, namely that he got dog meat teams to win a preposterous number of regular season games.
* In Robinson’s first four seasons the Spurs won 56 games (after winning 21 the year before), 55 games, 47 games, and 48 games.
* In Robinson’s fifth season, ’93-’94, the Spurs went 55-27 despite the fact that “The Admiral” not only lead the league in scoring but lead his team in assists. That fact is not too astounding considering that the Spurs back court that year was Willie Anderson, an unspectacular role player rendered yet more unspectacular through a series of injuries, and journeyman extraordinaire Vinny Del Negro. The Spur’s 2nd best scorer in ’94 was Dale Ellis, who was five years removed from his all-star form and probably should have been relegated to a 6th man scoring role.
Besides Robinson, that Spurs team had just one other above average player, Dennis Rodman. That sounds cool in 2013, but the truth is that Rodman was a major distraction and a huge offensive liability, seriously mitigating his transcendent rebounding and awesome, but slightly overrated at that point, defense. I’d guess that the ’94 Spurs would have swapped Rodman for, say, Charles Oakley, Horrace Grant or Otis Thorpe in a heartbeat.
* In 94-95, the “Olajuwan dominates Robinson” year, the Spurs legitimately improved their team by acquiring Sean Elliot and Avery Johnson (who had both been on the ’93 Spurs). San Antonio won 62 games with Elliot, not Ellis, as their 2nd best offensive player and Johnson as a major PG upgrade over Vinny D.N. who shifted over to SG. But the team was increasingly distracted by Rodman, who missed a bunch of games.
Despite relying on the likes of a 70 year-old Terry Cumming and J.R. Reid as “Worm insurance,” the Spurs finished with the best regular season record and Robinson cruised to the regular season MVP.
Then, after dispatching of the Nuggets and Lakers, the Western Conference Finals happened. But despite the “Olajuwan-dream shakes-Robinson-into-submission” lore, the series was really close. Both teams won two road games to knot the series at 2-2. The Spurs lost in six, partly, yes, because Olajuwan clearly outplayed Robinson. But also partly because Rodman self-combusted.
Also: Houston had a better supporting cast. The Spurs supporting cast of Johnson, Elliot, and a yes-he’s-here-no-wait-he’s-not Rodman was pretty good. But Clyde Drexler, Robert Horry, and Sam Cassell were better. Plus players like Kenny Smith and Mario Ellie consistently came through for the Rockets in that playoff run. Unless Chuck Person did something that spring that totally escapes me, the Spurs had no equivalent valuable supporting players.
* In 95-96, the Spurs won 59 games after they traded Rodman for….Will Perdue (A subject for another day is how overrated Rodman is, at least, post-Bad Boys Pistons Rodman. The Worm was traded twice in his prime: Once for Sean Elliot and once for Will Perdue. Both the Pistons and Spurs decided he wasn’t worth the trouble.)
Then in 96-97 Robinson got injured, the Spurs tanked, and they amazingly won the draft lottery in the year that Tim Duncan came into the league. (Tangent: I was sure the league was gonna fix that lottery for the Celtics, who had their own pick, plus Dallas’s and Rick Pitino coming on as Coach/GM. I think Pitino was sure of that too. Oops!).
Returning from injury, Robinson was never quite the player he was. The Spurs won two titles with Robinson on the team. But those were Duncan-lead teams so the conclusion remained the same: Robinson lacked the testicular fortitude (I swear testicular fortitude was actually an accepted phrase of 90’s sportswriting, which I guess is a really good wake-up call about being at all wistful for 90’s sportswriting) to lead his team to the title.
This seems like totally the wrong conclusion, as it basically renders everyone of Robinson’s era a loser unless they were Michael Jordan or Olajuwan. But even if you accept that logic — not being the top player on a champion means some kind of failure — Robinson was still underrated, specifically at least by Simmons.
* Barkley, an incredibly dumb clutch player (another subject for another time), could not carry the Suns to the title even though he played with an all-star back court of Kevin Johnson and Dan Majerle plus a seemingly endless list of gifted small forwards (Cedric Ceballos, Richard Dumas, Danny Manning, Tom Chambers).
* Garnett, of course, carried the T’Wolves out of the first round exactly one time with supporting casts very similar to Robinson’s. Robinson lead the Spurs out of the first round four times…in ’90, ’93, ’95 and ’96…in the pre-Duncan era. Garnett has much greater longevity than Robinson to the point where he might deserve to be considered the greater all-time player. But it seems like Robinson would have been quite suited to have played Garnett’s role on the Celtics: a defensive ace, spiritual leader, and on-again-off-again offensive focal point.
* Stockton’s Jazz had about the same success as Robinson’s Spurs in the 90’s and, oh yeah, Stockton played with Karl Malone (The Jazz also always had a borderline all-star shooting guard, Jeff Malone or Jeff Hornaceck.)
* Pippen had a marvelous ’93-’94 himself, the first full year of Jordan’s retirement. Like the Spurs that year, the Bulls won 55 games with Pippen doing everything. But even Scottie had Horace Grant, B.J. Armstrong decent role players like Scott Williams and Steve Kerr and Phil Jackson as coach. Plus’s Pippen’s awesome stats 22 ppg, 8.7 rpg, 5.6 apg aren’t as awesome as Robinson’s 29.8 ppg, 10.7 rpg, and 4.8 apg. (Robinson’s rebound numbers were higher before Rodman joined the team. Rodman spent his Spurs seasons focused on getting attention and leading the league in rebounds at all costs.) (Also the Spur’s coach that year was John Lucas.)
Again, it seems to be the CW now to criticize Robinson as somehow lacking the killer drive to play his best when it counted the most. The less psychologically sexy explanation, though, is that in the playoffs, when everyone plays their absolute hardest, the Spurs simply didn’t have the talent to beat the Rockets or even the Jazz or Suns.
If anything, perhaps Robinson’s intelligence helped the Spurs, or at least his unerring dedication and commitment to getting some astoundingly blah teams into the Western Conference’s elite.
If I were to rank the greatest players of all time, I would put Robinson closer to #20 and consider him a dominant player who never had the right circumstances to lead his team to a title.