Zach Lowe’s Grantland article today is about whether Chris Webber should be in the Hall of Fame. Lowe sets the tone with some self-awareness saying that it’s difficult, even for him — someone who loses readers with semi-scientific breakdowns of why DeMarcus Cousins is bad on defense, to emotionlessly evaluate Webber’s Hall of Fame credentials.
But then he actually almost does that, even going so far as comparing Webber to Elton Brand, someone I truly don’t have any feelings toward (the quirkiest thing about Brand is that when the Bulls drafted him then GM Jerry Krause insisted Brand was taller than he really was because he had a really stout neck and necks somehow equaled superfluous height).
There are a couple of problems here with Lowe’s approach.
The first is that applying analytic rigor to a column about whether Player X should be in the basketball hall of fame is folly. There is no discernible standard to being in the hall of fame. Sometimes useful championship team role players Jamaal Wilkes and K.C. Jones are in the hall of fame. Sometimes healthy scoring small forwards Bernard King and Chris Mullin are in the hall of fame.
Ralph Sampson, a human being whose life is synonymous with such burdensome concepts as disappointment, the unmet promise of youth, the inability to adopt to one’s environment, and plain misfortune — a man whose melancholy mustachioed face and barely defined limbs scream “FRAGILE” — is in the Hall of Fame.
I mean, you talk about “star crossed” — compared to Sampson, Webber is Tim Duncan.
So I feel like the H of F is too arbitrary in its prior selections for any “serious” discussion of Webber’s credentials.
The “Does Webber belong in the H of F’ is, of course, a starting point for the more interesting discussion of evaluating Webber’s basketball career and place in basketball history.
This leads to the second problem: Chris Webber, like so many anti-heroes of “that generation” is someone who evokes a great deal of emotion for any basketball fan whose formative years were the early 90’s (other examples: Larry Johnson, Shawn Kemp, Penny Hardaway, even Kenny Anderson for a few left-handed weirdos). His career is defined by a few memories and a few professional relationships with coaches and players, not anything that can be analyzed too precisely.
Here are the talking points of Webber’s career:
* He was the undisputed #1 high school player in the country in 1991
* He was clearly the best player on the “Fab Five.” The Fab Five saw and raised the celebrity of the Larry Johnson UNLV teams. I feel about both of those teams the way aesthetically boring people feel about pictures of a young Bob Dylan.
* He was the no. 1 overall pick in ’93, traded for Penny Hardaway, and named rookie of the year. In his rookie season he played on a 50-win team democratically co-lead by himself, Latrell Sprewell, Billy Owens…and a sometimes healthy Chris Mullin. (YES: democratically co-lead by Billy Owens. Owens was about more than a few racing stripes as a Syracuse freshmen and immense disappointment. His first three years in the league were good before Golden State traded him to Miami for (?) Rony Selikaly.)
* He demanded a trade and got traded to lowly Washington where he reunited with Juwan Howard, got injured a lot and made the playoffs once on a really underachieving team.
* A weary Washington traded him to Sacramento for Otis Thorpe and Mitch Richmond.
* On his fourth team, if you include Orlando — the team that drafted him, Webber finally became a star. He made one all-NBA first team and three second-teams. He was the best player on a very good and deep team.
* He was the best player on the 2002 Kings. The 2002 Kings would have won the NBA title if the league didn’t fix game 6 of the conference finals.
* That bears repeating. He was the best player on a team that lost a title because the league either fixed a game for the Lakers or the game was just so poorly officiated that the Kings were unintentionally robbed. Webber had 26 points, 13 rebounds, and 8 assists in that game. If the Kings win, as they rightfully should have, that means they win the series and almost certainly go on to trounce New Jersey (who the Lakers swept. the Nets 2nd best player that year after Kidd was Kenyon Martin. Along with 2007 Cleveland, the worst NBA Finals team of the last 25 years).
Webber was also the best player on the 2003 Kings, a team that, I can only retroactively meekly assert, were the favorites to win the 2003 title….before Webber got injured in the 2nd Round against Dallas. I think they beat San Antonio that year if they had Webber.
* Webber’s career ended with a thud in Philly and finally, finally Detroit, his hometown team, where he was a bit player for a team that underachieved in the 2007 playoffs.
So Webber is not fondly remembered in Golden State, Washington, Philadelphia and Detroit and fondly, but with caveats about his failure to win a title, remembered in Sacramento. Arguably, he is not fondly remembered in Michigan, because his acceptance of under the table money put the school on probation.
I think, though, that Webber is ultimately really fondly remembered by a lot of fans of that era for his intelligence and association with a great and memorable college team, where it was the personalities of the players — instead of the aura surrounding an autocratic coach — that defined the team. At both Michigan and Sacramento, Webber was clearly the best player on his team. But he was very much part of that team. His skills and personality were part of a greater whole, meshing first with Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard and later in Sacramento with players like Vlade Divac, Mike Bibby, Peja Stojakovic, and Doug Christie.
In other words, he was not the dominating, singular star like Jordan or Olajuwan. This lead to criticism that Webber did not take over playoff games like Jordan or Olajuwan did in their primes.
I mean obviously this is true to an extent. Webber certainly lacked the ability to singularly steer a team to playoff victory, though that makes him like Malone or Barkley or even Garnett.
But part of what made Webber alluring is that he excelled best not as a solo act but the leader of a cohesive and memorable unit. And no matter the perjury shit from his taking cash at Michigan (in weighing in on the ethics of that, it might be worth estimating, if such a task is possible to do, how much cash Webber generated for Michigan in merchandise, TV etc.), the feud with Don Nelson in Golden State, the underachieving in Washington, and the countless, countless injuries, Webber is MOST defined by his failure to take the 1993 Michigan team and 2002 Sacramento team to the title.
Despite the noble efforts of Lowe, Kevin Pelton, and the new crop of basketball writers, evaluating basketball players is the most subjective of activities, much more subjective than evaluating baseball players.
King is in the hall of fame because his best years were in the New York media market. Mullin is in the hall of fame because he was a college star at St. John’s when Big East basketball was king, and peaked professionally just when they were selecting the Dream Team. Sampson is in the hall of fame, because enough writers chose to remember his on-paper college accomplishments and chose to forget the unrelenting torrent of criticism he got through his brief professional career. Wilkes and Jones are in the hall of fame because they played for the Lakers and Celtics.
Webber is thought of one way now and he would have been thought of an entirely different way if exactly one or two different things happen to the 2002 Kings, or he didn’t call timeout in ’93. The pain of those losses — the pain of being so close to something that you dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve — is why I relate to Webber. The camaraderie and purpose that he shared with his teammates in Michigan and Sacramento (and kinda for one year with G-State) is something I aspire toward.