The all "injuries killed/messed up my career" team

#1
Here's mine:

PG: Terrel Brandon
SG: Penny
SF: Hill
PF: C Webb
C: Walton?

not sure if Penny would play PG or SG.

bench

Kenyon Martin
Antonio McDyess
TMac
Camby

I'm struggling to think of another PG. Suggestions?
 
#3
Here's mine:

PG: Terrel Brandon
SG: Penny
SF: Hill
PF: C Webb
C: Walton?

not sure if Penny would play PG or SG.

bench

Kenyon Martin
Antonio McDyess
TMac
Camby

I'm struggling to think of another PG. Suggestions?
Pretty good list. Bobby Hurley or Jay Williams could be backup PG, although who knows whether either of them would have panned out. Ralph Sampson could be backup center, possibly the greatest college player ever but debilitated in the NBA.
 
#8
What position did he play and how good was he?

edit: and what happened to him?
6'7, averaged 17+ rebounds a game. Played for this franchise (the Royals) Hit his head on the floor during the last game of the season. Fell into a coma and was paralyzed.
 

Bricklayer

Don't Make Me Use The Bat
#9
Maybe Bernard King? Came back finally, but never the same.

Also maybe Rudy T, although that was obviously something else.

Jayson Williams, before becoming a yapping poster for gun control, also had his career scuttled by injury. Maybe not a major enough player for this list though.
 
#13
Definitely Ralph Sampson at Center. I know I'm a rockets homer but that guy was giving you 20 and 10 playing as a 7 foot 4 power forward. (olajuwon was the center back then) Oh and sometimes they'd make Sampson play as the point guard and run fast breaks and what not. If his knees hadn't died that 1-2 combo of olajuwon and sampson would've been unstoppable.

Also, how bout Len Bias. The guy obviously died before he could play because of a cocaine overdose but he was a beast in college and his death single-handedly destroyed the celtics franchise to which they still never have really recovered from.
 
#19
Sorry, didn't get back to this thread until now. Maurice Stokes was the Royals 1955 draft pick at #2. He played forward (6'7"). It really is a sad story, altho it appears that he bore his condition with grace, courage and humor. I've only posted part of the article below.

http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/stokes_maurice.html

Stokes made an immediate impact, getting 32 points, 20 rebounds and eight assists in his NBA debut. He went on to average 16.8 points in 1955-56 and a league-best 16.3 rebounds, snatching a franchise-record 38 in one game, and was voted the NBA's Rookie of the Year.

"The first great, athletic power forward," Bob Cousy said years later. "He was Karl Malone with more finesse."


In Stokes' second season, he set an NBA record by grabbing 1,256 rebounds (17.4 per game), ranked third in the league in assists with 331 (4.6 average) and scored 15.6 points a game.

The Royals moved to Cincinnati before the 1957-58 season, and Stokes finished second in rebounding average (18.1) to Bill Russell, third again in assists (6.4), behind only guards Cousy and Dick McGuire, and scored 16.9 points a game.


Competitive, hard-nosed, tough," former NBA player and coach Gene Shue described Stokes in 1992. "He was a coach's dream."

The dream career ended tragically on March 12, 1958 in Minneapolis when Stokes drove to the basket against the Lakers, drew contact and fell awkwardly to the floor, hitting his head. Knocked out for several minutes, he was revived with smelling salts and returned to the game.

Three days later, the Royals lost their playoff opener at Detroit, and after a 12-point, 15-rebound performance, Stokes became ill on the team's flight back to Cincinnati. "I feel like I'm going to die," he told a teammate.

When the plane landed, he was taken to a nearby hospital in Covington, Ky., where he remained unconscious for weeks, a quadriplegic. He later was moved to a Cincinnati hospital, his home for six years.