The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame

Otis Thorpe

Otis Thorpe played until he was 38. He made one All-Star team. He also won one championship.

On that championship team, he was the second-leading scorer and rebounder. He logged the second-most minutes. He started more games than anyone. He was second on the team in win shares and VORP. Statistically, he would look, at least on paper, like a key building block for the team’s future. When the team he played for won the title, he was the same age as its best player.

That team would repeat as champions, but Thorpe would no longer be on the roster. Thirty-six games into the repeat effort, he was traded. Thorpe wasn’t so much any worse than he had been, but everyone else was better. He was expendable and being expendable after having been valuable leads to being underrated.

The Houston Rockets had a knack for winning by the thinnest of margins, and trading Thorpe for Clyde Drexler was a way of trying to increase that margin for error. A cardiac team needed a jumpstart, but over the years, people either remember the team relying solely on Hakeem Olajuwon or mistakenly believe Drexler was somehow there for both years.

Furthermore, Kenny Smith never names any of his teammates by name; he just refers to everyone who played for the Rockets as “we,” as if Otis Thorpe and Clyde Drexler and himself were all the same person.

And, for a time, maybe they were.