Sam Cassell, at that time of the Milwaukee Bucks
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22 May 2001: Sam Cassell #10 of the Milwaukee Bucks talks to a referee in game one of the eastern conference finals against the Philadelphia 76ers at the First Union Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 76ers won 93-85. DIGITAL IMAGE. Mandatory Credit: Ezra O. Shaw/Allsport.
Between 1997 and 2004, split between the then-New Jersey Nets, Milwaukee Bucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, Sam Cassell put up one of the best seven-year stretches of play that no one really talks about.
Across that time period, Cassell played 473 games, and averaged 19.2 points, 7.4 assists, 3.7 rebounds and only 2.9 turnovers per game, while shooting a healthy 47.2% from the field. Those are good numbers in any era. But the context in which he put up those numbers matters – and the advance stats have seen them age to become even better.
In the NBA today, 19/7 is a Collin Sexton-esque stat line. Good, but not the kind of play that gets a fawning retrospective years down the road like this one. Scoring in the NBA was much lower back then; by way of example, Cassell’s 19.6 points per game average in the 1997-98 season ranked 22nd in the league, whereas last season, it would have only ranked 51st.
But perhaps it is also fair to say that, because of the manner in which he did it, Cassell’s game was never considered top-tier.
Cassell’s Underrated Excellence
A mid-range and post-up guard the likes of which the NBA no longer sees, neither Cassell’s contemporaries nor the voting media gave this stretch of play the credit it deserved, even at the time. He made no All-Star appearances across his first ten seasons in the league, and, with the exception of ranking tenth in the MVP voting in the last season of the streak, he appeared in no form of NBA award’s voting since a fourth-placed finish in the Sixth Man of the Year award voting all the way back in 1995-96, while still a member of the Houston Rockets.
Nonetheless, what made the streak even more impressive was the age at which Cassell was doing it. Born in November 1969, these were his age-28 through 34 seasons; Cassell already had four NBA seasons under his belt before stretch began, and improved throughout the years when most players start to decline, particularly small guards.
As mentioned above, the advanced stats serve only to flatter him. Discounting the 1998-99 season for a moment – in which he played only eight games due to injury – Cassell’s win share totals across those years were 8.3, 9.2, 8.5, 8.6, 9.6 and 12.1 respectively. To put that into some context, across the same span from 1997 to 2004, Allen Iverson’s annual Win Share totals read 9.0, 7.2, 6.9, 11.8, 6.9, 9.2 and 2.8.
No one, probably not even Sam Cassell, would say that they would take Sam Cassell over Allen Iverson. But the point here is, you know how good Allen Iverson was during that run. Did you know how good Sam Cassell was, too?
Wrong Team, Wrong Time
The majority of that stretch took place in Milwaukee. And at the time, the Bucks were in a rut. Despite having Ray Allen and Glenn Robinson as team mates, the Bucks only won more than 42 games and got out of the first round of the playoffs only once during the Sam Cassell era, when they made the Eastern Conference Finals in the 2000-01 season. (Perhaps fittingly, they lost there to Iverson’s Philadelphia 76ers.)
In a surrender of a trade, in the 2003 NBA offseason, the Bucks would trade Cassell to the Timberwolves along with Ervin Johnson in exchange for Anthony Peeler and Joe Smith. And it was only there that Cassell began to get some accolades for his play. Cassell’s lone All-Star season came in his first year in Minnesota, and it is no coincidence that the Timberwolves that season had by far and away the best season in franchise history. They won 58 games and made it out of the first round of the playoffs for the first time in the franchise’s history; for the first time since the excitement of the franchise’s foundation back in the late 1980s, the vibes around the Timberwolves were good.
“Vibes”, in the grand scheme of things, do not matter. They are not quantifiable in that sense. But what is quantifiable is production on a basketball court. And for his entire middle career, Sam Cassell was one of the best players in the NBA. Hand on heart – did you know that?