Two of the Portland Trail Blazers’ all-time greatest players were selected with the 24th overall pick in the NBA draft: Arvydas Sabonis and Terry Porter.
On Sunday, we wrote about a couple of odds and ends related to the upcoming NBA draft and the Portland Trail Blazers. In that piece, we included a list of notable players drafted with the 24th overall pick.
If Twitter is any indication — and seriously, when is Twitter not an indication of something; of what, we don’t know — a lot of Trail Blazers fans aren’t all that excited about having the 24th pick in the draft.
24th Overall Picks
But some pretty prominent — and even excellent — players have come to the NBA via the 24th pick. Just take a look at some of the names on that list we posted Sunday: Shabazz Napier; Kyle Lowry; Derek Fisher; Latrell Sprewell.
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OK, sure — none of those guys are bona fide superstars — although one could make a case for Sprewell. (Of course, he did assault his head coach.)
Point is, there are diamonds in the rough all over the NBA draft board. Great players taken with the first pick sometimes don’t amount to diddly-squat. And overlooked players — or those drafted late in the draft — can become great.
Let’s have a quick peak at some Blazers who were chosen 24th overall.
Spoiler alert: Two of them were pretty darn great.
Blazers at No. 24
Keith Herron
The first time the Portland Trail Blazers had the No. 24 pick in the NBA draft was 1978. That year, they chose 6-foot-6 forward Keith Herron out of Villanova. Back then, the draft had 10 rounds — pretty ridiculous considering the league only had 22 teams at the time. Thus, the 24th pick in 1978 (out of 202 players drafted) was actually in the second round.
Herron left ‘Nova as that school’s all-time leading scorer (since surpassed by Kerry Kittles and Scottie Reynolds). But he never played a regular season game with Portland. He later had a decent year with the Detroit Pistons (1980-1981) when he averaged 13.7 points over 80 games. But he was out of the league altogether by 1982.
Incidentally, Portland had 11 picks in the 1978 draft, including the No.1 overall pick, which they used to select Mychal Thompson out of Minnesota. He did have a good career — and his Twitter game is strong.
https://twitter.com/MattGeorgeMoore/status/1007800059683958784
Terry Porter
Now we’re talkin’.
Although only the most informed Blazers fans will remember Herron, every Blazers fan should know about Terry Porter.
Taken in the first round of the 1985 draft (the first “lottery” draft), Porter, a 6-foot-3 point guard out of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, went on to help lead Blazers squads to the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992. He also was a two-time NBA All-Star.
As we wrote in a story about the Blazers and their All-Star history:
"Porter played 10 seasons in Rip City. A solid and savvy point guard, Porter is all over Portland’s leaderboard. He’s the Trail Blazers’ all-time assists leader with 5,319 and is third on the franchise’s career points list with 11,330. In fact, Porter is second only to Clyde Drexler on a number of Portland’s all-time lists, including minutes played, free throws made, free throws attempted, steals and win shares. … In 17 NBA seasons with four different teams, Porter helped lead his squads to the playoffs 16 times. The Trail Blazers retired Porter’s number 30 jersey in 2008."
Not bad for the 24th pick. (Porter is also the only NBA or ABA player ever to come out of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.)
Arvydas Sabonis
That’s really all you need to know about the last player chosen by the Blazers with the 24th overall pick.
But we’ll fill in the details anyway.
Portland picked Arvydas Sabonis in the first round of the 1986 NBA draft. A 7-foot-3 center, Sabonis hailed from Kaunas, Lithuania.
As his entry on the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame website states:
"In the summer of 1986, the Portland Trail Blazers drafted a relatively unknown center named Arvydas Sabonis. … Sabonis was tall and strong with soft hands, terrific timing, and great vision. He was the best player outside of the United States at that time."
And he lived up to the hype, despite not suiting up for the Trail Blazers until 1995, when he was in his early 30s. Fellow Portland legend Bill Walton once said that Sabonis “played like a 7-3 Larry Bird,” and that he “was the second greatest young player I ever saw after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”
By the time Sabonis got to Portland — his path to the NBA was hella complicated — he was arguably past his prime. But he still managed to put together several solid seasons.
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Perhaps his best year came in 1997-1998, when he was arguably an All-Star; he averaged 16 points, 10 rebounds, three assists per game while shooting 49 percent from the field.
His final season in Portland was in 2002-2003 (after taking a year off). He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2011.
Will the Blazers draft another legend in 2018?