Using statistics can be a tricky thing when evaluating basketball players and/or teams. They can be a very useful tool but they can also be wildly misleading. Look no further than last year's Celtics for example. In the regular season, they coasted and the odds were highly stacked against them to even make it to The Finals, let alone win the championship especially without home court advantage. It can get even trickier when it comes to relying too much on stats for evaluating/grading/assessing individual players.
The one thing that Rick Pitino and Bill Belichick seem to share is that they both feel statistics are for "losers." Personally I think there is definitely a place for them in the basketball world. I think team statistics are far more important than individual stats, unless you're sweating on who to select in the 8th round of your fantasy basketball team. That's why I find it amusing that Bran Scalabrine was recently crowned as the "worst Celtic of all time" by Tom Haberstroh of ESPN.com and Hoopdata.com.
I've used stats before in some posts and in some random arguments. We've all done it. Mark Cuban even came up with some magical formulathat justified his trade for a fossilized Jason Kidd. It was a stat that only he understood and it supposedly showed how awesome Kidd is, ranking second in the NBA only to LeBron James. Great, how have the Mavs done in the playoffs since they acquired him?
At any rate, if were going on stats alone, then sure Scal may have been the worst Celtic ever. I'm not going to sit here and lecture you of how wrong this is. But I am going to tell you that for my money, there was no worse Celtic than Mark Blount. For a true seven-footer, the guy was the worst rebounder I could remember watching day in and day out. Worse than Acie Earl, Eric Montross, Stojko Vrankovic, Vitaly Potapenko, Travis Knight, Andre DeClercq, Brett Szabo, Kedrick Brown, Mark Acres, Steve Hamer, Pervis Ellison, Jerome Moiso, Thomas Hamilton, Junior Burrough, Dwayne Schintzius, Joseph Forte, Michael Olowokandi, Bruno Sundov and Marty Conlon combined.
Blount was the epitome of slacker. Mr. Strickland, Marty McFly's principal from Back to the Future, would have a field day with Blount. The one game that sealed it for me wasn't even when he was a Celtic. It's when he was a member of the Timberwolves, had a big game against the Celtics in Minnesota, and proceeded to hop and skip up and down the court in an attempt to show up his former team that actually made him richer than he would have ever dreamed to be (one of Danny Ainge's worst signings, but we'll just delete that note from the hard drive in our brains). Ricky Davis (who was traded along with Blount) drilled the game winning jumper to extend the Celtics' all-time record losing streak to (gulp) 18 games.
Blount did however provide what might be the best
Miracle Johan - I Swear to God Mark Blount
(ok it's not really him singing/rapping but it absolutely sounds like what he WOULD sound like if it were him). Mr. Blount, you are funky, without a doubt.