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[QUOTE="Knicks411, post: 2915065, member: 767"]
I'll buy this.  Would've love to see what Sabonis could've done if he came here as a 20 year old.  Guy averaged 18-11 per 36 with a 57% true shooting; great passer, even after his body was thrashed.

It's a pretty crazy what-if really, he was taken in the 86 draft.  The Blazers really broke through in 1990, making the finals, but they were pretty solid in 87 and 88 (49 and 53 wins) before that.  If you put Sabonis on those teams, do they challenge the Lakers?  It's hard to totally reverse engineer exactly what their team would've looked like, (and they did lose in the first round both of those years) but I don't think it's crazy at all to project Sabonis as an all star center in that era.    For instance, you look at the 88 all star game, the starting center for the West was Hakeem; ok, Sabonis is real good, he's probably not Hakeem.  The other 2 bigs were Kareem (he's Kareem, but he's also ancient) and James Donaldson.  Sabonis is probably pretty easily the second best big man in the West, right?  I think the Blazers could've made some noise a year or two earlier than they did if they had Sabonis.
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