Wake Up With An NBA Countdown: David Thompson

Good morning everybody, happy Monday! I hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed yourselves, seeing as how August is just a few days away my brain has already started to get depressed about the winter that’s going to be here before we know it. Add in a nice little back at work depression and we’re off to a hot start! Anyways, the fun part (at least for me because I’m weird) about these blogs is they allow us all to not only celebrate awesome things like dunks and assists, but every once in a while go back and enjoy some of the dominant players in NBA history. Since there are a lot of younger stoolies that may be reading this blog and not paying attention to Social Studies or whatever, if a guy played before like 2005 you may have no idea who they are. And if you’re an older stoolie, it allows you to sit back, close your eyes, and remember the good old days before you had responsibilities and shit. So today I want to kick your Monday off with a guy who was the fucking shit back in the 70s for the Denver Nuggets: David Thompson

To give you a little background, David Thompson was a star at NC State in college winning a title in 1974, and the guy Michael Jordan said he looked up to growing up. He’s the only player to have his number retired there, and is one of the better college players in history. Then in 1975 he became the #1 pick of both the ABA (Virginia aka DEN) and the NBA (Hawks) in 1975. At this time guys didn’t really choose the ABA over the NBA, but in Thompson’s case he did. You want to know why? In his meeting with the Hawks they took him to McDonald’s which rubbed Thompson the wrong way. While you may enjoy a nice Big Mac or something, Thompson took it as the Hawks not even really being that interested (despite taking him #1) and he instead chose to play in the ABA. He was fairly dominant that one year in 1975, averaging 26/6.3/3.7 on 51% shooting. One the leagues merged and he became a Nugget starting in 1976, his production did not suffer one bit. As a ABA/Nugget Thompson averaged 24.1/4.3/3.4 on 51% shooting, was a 4x All Star, and 2x All NBA First Team member, and obviously benefited from playing in a league that actually allowed dunking. You may remember the famous Julius Irving FT line dunk in the 1976 All Star game, well he pulled that out facing Thompson in the finals (Thompson won the MVP of the actual game).

While he made another All Star team in 1982-83 as a Sonic, the end of his career wasn’t all that pretty as he dealt with injuries and substance abuse problems. His playing career totaled 592 games so it’s not as if he didn’t have a good run, but towards the end he was definitely a shell of his former self before calling it quits for good after the 1983-84 season.

Now that you’re all caught up on who David Thompson was as a player, it’s time to get to the goods. As always if there is ever a player or type of countdown you’d like to see to help jump start your day, just list it in the comments below. Otherwise, enjoy today’s video and have yourself a great Monday!