NBA: 5 active NBA players surprisingly close to the Hall of Fame

Blake Griffin

Career Accomplishments:

• 6-time All-Star
• 5-time All-NBA (three 2nd Team, two 3rd Team)

How He Stacks Up:

Blake Griffin has had a strange career. He came into the league as an unrefined gemstone of a player. He was the kind of guy who could dunk while jumping over a car but could barely crack 60 percent from the free-throw line.

Then injuries began to take their toll. Some were leg injuries that are sadly predictable for a man with his size and athleticism; others were less predictable (Remember when Blake Griffin missed over a month of the season with a broken hand he got from punching an equipment manager? How was that even a real thing that actually happened?!). To add insult to literal injury, this rash of ailments was accompanied by several disappointing playoff runs, including some high-profile collapses.

By the time he signed his massive five-year contract with the Clippers in July of 2017, he was an aging, injury-riddled big man whose game relied too much on athleticism and who was a shell of the high-flying, rim-rattling Nephilim who was a perennial All-Star in his early days with the Clippers.

However, Griffin had a bounce-back year in a major way in the 2018-19 season. He improved his shooting enough to become a legitimate threat from deep and enhanced his already above-average passing skills to make up for that lost athleticism. He became the inverse of his younger self: the kind of guy who could probably barely dunk over a bicycle but could average five and a half assists per game while shooting 36 percent from 3 on seven attempts per game.

In doing so, he also greatly revitalized his Hall of Fame chances. He sits now at six All-Star selections to go along with five All-NBA nods. I explained before how five All-Star selections is kind of a tipping point toward Hall of Fame induction, and as you might suspect, having six All-Star selections continues that trend. Of the 17 Hall-eligible players with exactly six All-Star appearances, 12 are in the Hall of Fame (70.6%).

Of the five who are not yet enshrined in the Hall, the greatest number of All-NBA selections for any of them is three (both Jermaine O’Neal and Shawn Kemp). In other words, no player has ever had six or more All-Star selections as well as five or more All-NBA selections and NOT made the Hall of Fame.

To add further to his case, Griffin finished 3rd in MVP voting in 2014. The entire list of HoF-eligible players who have finished in the top-3 in MVP voting who are not in the Hall of Fame? Penny Hardaway and Jermaine O’Neal (who it turns out also probably has a better case to be there than you originally thought), and that’s it.

Griffin is a guy whose style has often caused people to overlook the underlying substance within his game. A casual fan might scoff at the notion of him being a Hall of Famer, at least without having a couple more seasons like last season.

Obviously, another year or two at that level would boost him into ironclad-lock territory, but even if injuries get the better of him yet again (knock on wood), I’d argue that his achievements up to this point in his career give him a great chance and a much better case than one might assume.