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. Continue reading “Was David Robinson Actually Underrated?”