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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five players and their short-lived stints that nevertheless became iconic.
Even when a player has had stints with multiple teams, there’s usually one that stands out as their most famous or memorable. Interestingly, it isn’t always the team that they spent the bulk of their career with. Sometimes, it’s the short-lived stints that produce the most success or notoriety, so they’re the ones that are best remembered and often talked about. Personal nostalgia also comes into play here. I’d suggest that we tend to associate players with the teams they played for when we first started watching and taking a keen interest in basketball, or at least very early on in our fandom.
To that point, our perception of time also changes as we age. A player having a three or four-year stint seemed like a long tenure back when I was a teenage hoop head, but now that I’m older, it’s over in a blink! Looking back, I’ve realised that there are quite a few Hall of Fame players whose most iconic stints were actually rather short-lived. Despite that brevity however, those are the jerseys that we tend to picture them in. As such, it’s interesting to reflect on how long those stints actually lasted, and why they became so iconic to the point of eclipsing longer tenures. With that in mind, here are five all-time greats, and their iconic short-lived stints that I tend to remember best.
