The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame

Detlef Schrempf and Ricky Pierce

Detlef Schrempf rose gradually through some very deep depth charts in late-80s Dallas. Then he won back-to-back Sixth Man of the Year Awards in Indiana. Then he became a cult hero in Seattle, and even played a significant role on the Portland Trail Blazers that nearly stalled the ascent of Shaq and Kobe and the NBA dress code.

Band of Horses even named a song on their 2007 album Cease to Begin after him. He was an All-NBA selection once, having been named to the Third Team in 1995. Those mid-90s Sonics teams are either overrated or underrated, depending on how sentimental and nostalgic a person is about flannel and skateboards and bands that matter less as time moves on.

Ricky Pierce is older than Detlef Schrempf, and as far as I know, no bands have written a song inspired by his NBA career. However, like Schrempf, he is also a two-time Sixth Man of the Year Award, and like Scrhempf, he won his two awards playing in the middle of the United States, in Milwaukee to be exact.

The second time he won the award, he did so by averaging 23.0 points per game off the bench. In both the 1989 and 1990 NBA playoffs, he averaged 22.3 points per game off the bench for the Bucks, but the team suffered a second-round sweep to the Bad Boy Pistons in ’89 and a first-round loss to Jordan’s Bulls in ’90.

Sidney Moncrief was the team’s best player throughout most of the 80s, a decade in which only the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics compiled higher winning percentages. But the closest any of those Moncrief Milwaukee teams came to the Promised Land was the Eastern Conference Finals (three different times), which is actually as close as one can get to the Promised Land without settling in it. As the decade rolled along, several Bucks players picked up the slack for Moncrief, including Pierce, who led the team in win shares during the 1986-87 season.

Where Schrempf made three All-Star appearances, Pierce made only one. Their paths crossed in Seattle. The 1994 season in which the Sonics won 63 games only to wither at the foot of Mount Mutombo coincided with Schrempf’s first professional season in the Greater Northwest and Pierce’s last.

During his first two seasons in Seattle, Pierce would play the role of a starter for really the first time in his career. In doing so, he led the team in scoring and helped the franchise transition from the Xavier McDaniel era to the Shawn Kemp era. With Pierce as its leading scorer, the Sonics even dared advance to the Western Conference Finals in 1993. Then, in that devastating Denver series a year later, he averaged only 8.0 points in 14.8 minutes per game.

Perhaps if the two ever meet again they can listen to Band of Horses — or any other band, really, that’s fond of recalling forgotten names.