The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame

Derrick McKey and Dale Davis

Derrick McKey and Dale Davis both rank the top 10 for most career playoff wins without an NBA title. They both played on the 2000 Indiana Pacers team that lost in six games to the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. In the two seasons before that, they each made significant contributions to Pacer teams that lost in the Eastern Conference Finals. They were also both on the 1995 Pacers squad that lost in the conference finals.

Beyond that, Derrick McKey played for the 1993 Seattle SuperSonics when they lost the Western Conference Finals in seven games to Charles Barkley’s Phoenix Suns, and Dale Davis followed up his Indiana years by playing significant minutes for a Portland squad that could not make it out of the first round. That’s a lot of losing, but it’s also a lot of winning.

McKey and Davis hitched their efforts to the likes of Xavier McDaniel, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, Reggie Miller and Rasheed Wallace. These forces were both explosive and unstable. They were coached by the likes of Larry Bird, Larry Brown, George Karl and Mike Dunleavy, Sr.

These were all capable men, but prone to leaving a team in midstream. They were the kind of men who were all for urban renewal, but then walked away as the wrecking ball swung. McKey and Davis were unwavering through all the changes in stars and coaches and locations. They almost always produced and, for the most part, there’s not much else to ask from members of a supporting cast.

On that 2000 Indiana team, Davis ranked behind Reggie Miller and Jalen Rose and just ahead of Mark Jackson in terms of VORP. His win shares place him in the company of Charles Oakley, David West, Clifford Robinson, Antawn Jamison, Sam Perkins, Paul Milsap and A.C. Green. Playoff runs are built on the backs of his ilk.

McKey was the more offensively gifted of the two players. An offense could run through him for brief phases in a game. His peers included Anthony Mason, Jamal Mashburn and, to an extent, the likes of Scottie Pippen and Grant Hill. He fell somewhere in a quiet hush between Mason’s haircuts and Pippen’s ringz in terms of both legacy and talent, but these were all players inching their ways toward the all-around skill-sets that would come to dominate the 21st century.

Both Davis and McKey played at a time when the size of the market mattered in determining the stature of the player, and maybe that’s why so many of their counterparts are more familiar, especially as those deep Indiana Pacer squads were swallowed up by Reggie Miller. Maybe, at least in hindsight and with a bit of imagination, that’s why he was always giving the choke signal.

Davis and McKey have one All-Star appearance between the two of them, but they dictated the results in too many games to count.