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 return stints that ended up connecting different eras.

There have been several distinct eras in NBA history. When it comes to discussing those different eras, I don’t believe we take the full picture into account. I’m not just talking about the whole “plumbers and dentists” rhetoric that’s used to diminish the past, though that certainly is part of it. Beyond overlooking and downplaying the level of skill in past eras though, it’s also frequently forgotten – or indeed, ignored – just how much that the eras actually overlap. We can distinguish what can be called an era and devise labels accordingly, but not draw hard lines between them.

To that point, players that we consider as being from different eras have often been contemporaries, if only very briefly. Players with lengthy careers will often end up being a link between eras, both for their team specifically and the league in general. Take Don Chaney, for instance. As a rookie on the 1969 Celtics who was also on the 1980 squad, he’s the only player to have been teammates with both Bill Russell and Larry Bird. Furthermore, it only happened because Chaney returned to the Celtics in 1977, following stints in the ABA and with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s not the only player whose return stint connected past and present, as these examples demonstrate.

1. Maurice Lucas Playing With Clyde Drexler

As I often like to do, let’s begin with the example that inspired this topic! While I was messing around with NBA 2K9 to set up some screenshots of historical scenarios, I was reminded that Maurice Lucas had a return stint with the Portland Trail Blazers in 1988. The Enforcer is generally thought of as a player from the 70s; understandably so as he debuted in the ABA, won a title with Bill Walton in Portland in 1977, and had his best statistical years during that decade. Mind you, Mo was still in his late 20s as the 70s drew to a close, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise that a little over half of his career – 598 regular season games, 54 Playoff games – actually took place in the 80s!

This offers a prime example of how while players’ primes may not always overlap, their eras still can. Sure, Lucas had been gone from Portland for three years when the Blazers drafted Clyde Drexler, but he was a starter for the Phoenix Suns and a year removed from his final All-Star appearance during The Glide’s rookie season. For that matter, Bill Walton was still in the league too, making them both contemporaries of Drexler while also representing an earlier era in the NBA (and in Lucas’ case, the ABA). At any rate, by returning to Portland for a second stint in the 1988 season, Mo connected the championship team with Walton to Drexler’s contenders on the rise.

2. Scottie Pippen Links The Last Dance & The Baby Bulls

Trivia time: which player (or players) ended up being the last vestige of the 1998 NBA Champion Chicago Bulls? There are two potentially correct answers here. If the question is referring to the last player(s) from the 1998 Bulls still with the team before the roster was entirely turned over with no remaining connections to The Last Dance, then that would be Dickey Simpkins and Randy Brown in 2000. However, if we’re talking about the last player from the Bulls’ sixth title to ever suit up for the team, then that would be Scottie Pippen, who returned for the 2004 season. As such, it’s the kind of trivia question that requires some careful and precise wording in order to be fair!

Both answers are interesting trivia for Bulls fans of course, but Pip’s return is easily the more noteworthy. After all, he’s the star player who didn’t leave on the friendliest of terms, unexpectedly rejoining the team for another stint. Moreover, he ended up being a link between the championship years of the 90s, and the Baby Bulls of the early to mid 2000s. To that end, it’s important to note that Pippen was expected to contribute when the Bulls signed him in 2003; it wasn’t just a sentimental move. His knee had other plans though, so rather than veteran leadership helping a young team to succeed, Pip’s second Bulls stint was a career footnote that connected two eras.

3. Artis Gilmore Briefly Teams With Michael Jordan

Whether you’re making an all-time team mod, or using the squads that have been in the games since NBA 2K18, Artis Gilmore is the obvious choice for the Bulls’ man in the middle. That means you’ll have a lineup featuring A-Train alongside Michael Jordan, combining two different eras in club history. Except, those eras did intersect back in the 80s! It’s natural to think of Artis Gilmore being before Michael Jordan’s time, seeing as how he began his pro career with the Kentucky Colonels in the ABA, and played his last game for the Bulls just a few weeks after MJ hit the game-winning jumper to capture the 1982 NCAA Championship for North Carolina as a freshman.

Once again though, it’s easy to forget how eras overlap. Gilmore was in his mid 30s, still in the league and playing for the San Antonio Spurs, when Jordan made his NBA debut. His career was undoubtedly winding down, but they were contemporaries in the same way that MJ’s career would later intersect with Kobe Bryant’s. Not only that, but the two were briefly teammates when the Bulls signed an aging Gilmore in 1987. A-Train started 23 of the 24 games he played for Chicago that year, but saw a huge drop in his minutes from the previous season with the Spurs. He was cut in December and finished the year in Boston, but nevertheless ended up being a link between eras.

4. Jason Kidd Becomes the Only “J” to Win in Dallas

The 90s weren’t kind to the Dallas Mavericks. After some impressive runs in the 80s that included taking the champion Los Angeles Lakers to the limit in 1988, the Mavs bottomed out for the next decade with three 60-loss seasons, a 71-loss season, and no postseason appearances. There were glimmers of hope, though. In consecutive years, the team drafted Jim Jackson, Jamal Mashburn, and Jason Kidd, a young trio that was dubbed The Three Js. Though talented and full of potential, they played a grand total of 111 games together; a tenure riddled by injuries, infighting, and mismanagement before they were all traded away one-by-one during the course of the 1997 season.

Come 2008, The Three Js were a distant memory during the Dirk Era, but a reunion was on the horizon. With the Mavs seeking that final piece and the New Jersey Nets looking to move on having clearly peaked, the teams swapped Devin Harris and Jason Kidd. Though the deal was mocked at the time – as you’ll see if you dig through our Forum archives – Kidd provided veteran playmaking and additional shooting, and was a key player as the Mavericks defeated the Miami Heat for the title in 2011. Kidd may not have been the future of the team in the way pundits predicted when Dallas drafted him in 1994, but his return stint not only connected eras, but brought them success.

5. Kevin Garnett & The New Kid In Towns

What do Kevin Garnett and Karl-Anthony Towns have in common? Well, they’re both talented big men who helped redefine the roles and style of their positions. They both gave their all to the Minnesota Timberwolves before moving on to an Eastern Conference team that hadn’t won a championship in decades, where they helped break that title drought soon after arriving. Oh, and they were also teammates for a season in 2016! After KG became a familiar face back in a familiar place the previous year, he played just five games for a Timberwolves team that finished 16-66. On the bright side, it landed them the top pick in the 2015 Draft, and in turn, Karl-Anthony Towns.

Garnett returned to play his 21st season alongside Towns, but a lengthy career had taken its toll on the player once nicknamed The Kid. Though he started all 38 games that he appeared in, he was playing less than 15 mpg as a veteran mentor passing the torch, and ended up missing the second half of the season with knee problems. All the same, by virtue of playing as long as he did and returning to the team where his NBA career began, KG became the connection between the Timberwolves’ first taste of success and the dawning of their return to relevancy. Funnily enough, Sam Mitchell – his old teammate and then coach in Minnesota – was also a link between those eras.

Do you remember these return stints that ended up connecting different eras in team and NBA history? What are some other notable examples that you can think of? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.