NBA: 5 active NBA players surprisingly close to the Hall of Fame
By John Leat
Kyle Lowry
Career Accomplishments:
- 5-time All-Star
- 1-time All-NBA (3rd Team)
- 2019 NBA Champion
- 2016 Olympic Gold Medalist
How He Stacks Up:
Before writing this piece, I hadn’t realized how similar the Hall of Fame resumes of Kyle Lowry and Kevin Love are. Both have made five All-Star teams, both have one ring, and both have one Gold Medal. Hell, they even have the same initials (not that that matters for Hall of Fame voting as far as I know).
As I laid out when discussing Kevin Love and won’t delve back into here, the combination of five All-Star nods and a championship tends to be enough to earn induction into the Hall of Fame. Much like Kevin Love, Lowry’s case is somewhat hampered by the fact that he wasn’t the best (or perhaps even second-best with how Pascal Siakam played at times) player on his championship team.
Unlike Kevin Love, however, Lowry struggled very publicly and often humiliatingly in previous seasons in the playoffs before his team callously (and smartly) dumped their franchise cornerstone in DeMar DeRozan for a bona fide superstar in Kawhi Leonard. Does winning this ring heal all those old wounds to his legacy? Or will he be looked back on as the guy who needed the arrival of Kawhi and the departure of LeBron to avoid a purgatorial fate of perpetual Conference Finals eliminations?
My guess is that he’ll have to wait around on the Hall of Fame ballot for a decade or two to put some distance between himself and those old “Trash Bros” days with DeRozan and hope his championship performance shines through to earn him eventual induction.
Only time will tell how history remembers him, but either way, winning that ring puts Lowry firmly in the Hall of Fame conversation, which is a statement that would have seemed ludicrous even just a year ago.