Arvydas Sabonis-Before Injuries 1986 (by TyusPro)
This is basketball gold, y’all. Imagine Dirk Nowitzki but taller, faster, and with better ball-handling skills. Sabonis shoots from everywhere on the court, and makes every one. And the blocks? Oh baby, the blocks.
Let’s play pretend for a few moments here. Sabonis was drafted by Portland in 1986, but Soviet authorities said he couldn’t play until 1989. Sabonis didn’t end up coming here until 1995. If he had come to play in ‘89, that was the year Portland made the finals, with a roster of Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Kevin “Double-Zero!” Duckworth, Buck Williams, Jerome Kersey, Cliff Robinson, and some foreign kid with bad hair named Drazen Petrovic. Not to mention they were headed by a young hotshot coach by the name of Rick Adelman. Throw in an impossibly-versitile big man like Sabonis with an NBA-ready game (did you see those skyhooks?!) and that’s an eight-man rotation that could’ve brought a banner to the rafters of the old Memorial Coliseum.
Also, apologies to Blazers fans for giving them yet another what-if scenario.
