Top 50 NBA players from last 50 years: Sidney Moncrief ranks No. 44
Editor's Note: As part of a new series for his podcast, "What’s Wright with Nick Wright," FOX Sports commentator Nick Wright is ranking the 50 best NBA players of the last 50 years. The countdown continues today with player No. 44, Sidney Moncrief.
Sidney Moncrief’s career highlights:
- Five-time All-Star
- One-time first-team All-NBA, four-time second team
- Two-time Defensive Player of the Year
- Four-time All-Defensive first team, one-time second team
Only two NBA teams won more games in the 1980s than the Milwaukee Bucks. Only three teams represented the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals during that decade.
Sidney Moncrief is the primary reason for the former mark. He’s often underrated because of the latter.
"He has been oddly forgotten to history," Wright said.
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Two-time Defensive Player of the Year and four-time First Team All-Defense, former Milwaukee Bucks star Sidney Moncrief is No. 44 on Nick Wright's Top 50 NBA Players of the Last 50 Years. Moncrief led the Bucks to the third-best record of any team during the 1980s.
It’s an account that sometimes focuses more on what Moncrief’s teams didn’t do. But let the record show that the 6-foot-4 combo guard was one of the best perimeter defenders in history.
Moncrief won the league’s first two Defensive Player of the Year awards and remains the only guard to win it twice. That launched a five-year stretch in which he was All-Defense and an All-Star each season, as he averaged 21.0 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.7 assists while shooting 50.3%.
His Bucks would make three conference finals, only to lose to the eventual NBA Finals winner each time. In fact, an undermanned, Moncrief-led Milwaukee team fell to four world champions in the playoffs, six conference champions, and eight times in nine years to either the 76ers, Celtics or Pistons.
"People are like, ‘He never made the Finals,’" Wright said. "What was the year that he was supposed to? … Dr. J’s Sixers, Bird’s Celtics and the Bad Boy Pistons — those aren’t fair fights."
It wasn’t entirely a losing game for Moncrief and the Bucks, who won more than everyone but the Celtics and Lakers while he was in Milwaukee. The Bucks swept the 1983 Celtics, with their all-world defender averaging 23-7-4 and earning the praise of Bird in the process. Milwaukee ripped through the 1985 Bulls, as Moncrief frustrated a rookie Michael Jordan and averaged 27-5-5. The Bucks knocked out a Sixers squad still featuring Erving and a young Charles Barkley the following two years.
In 1987, after injuries had sidelined him for half the season, Moncrief scored playoff career highs of 33 and then 34 points in consecutive games to stave off elimination before falling to the Celtics in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Health would continue to be an issue for Moncrief in his early 30s, rendering his prime relatively brief and his entire career to just 11 seasons.
"You’re on a team in the ‘80s that’s relevant every single year and yet you’re not making the top-75 list? It’s just criminal," Wright said. "I think he was the second-most egregious omission."