SI.com recently unveiled its list of the 20 best players in NBA history without a league championship - and former Arkansas Razorback Sidney Moncrief made the cut. Well deserved but kind of surprising, in my book. That's because while Super Sid was definitely super for most of his time with the Milwaukee Bucks, his NBA career was relatively short, and during his last few seasons in the league, a bum knee rendered him a shell of his former All-Star self. It's good to see that the folks at Sports Illustrated remember what a monster Moncrief was when he was healthy.
Here's what SI.com had to say about Moncrief:
The two-time Defensive Player of the Year won division titles in his first seven years with Milwaukee but that regular-season success never translated into a single Finals berth.
This isn't exactly breaking news, but Moncrief also received no shortage of praise in "The Book of Basketball," a 2009 book by ESPN's Bill Simmons, also known as "The Sports Guy." In a mere 715 pages, Simmons offers his take on all sorts of NBA debates and also reveals his list of the 96 greatest players in NBA history. Moncrief comes in at No. 73. Here's part of what Simmons had to say about Sidney:
Moncrief was one of the defining what-if guys. If not for chronic knee problems that eventually derailed his career, Moncrief would have been the best all-around guard of the eighties and one of [Simmon's top 45 players]. Before the days of arthroscopic surgery and ligaments that could be transferred from corpses, you were never the same after an ACL tear and that was that.