Welcome to LWOS Basketball department “NBA Time Traveler Series,” the column that imagines which retired player from an NBA franchise one would most want to travel back in time to see them play again in their prime. The LWOS Basketball department will review each of the 30 NBA franchises and which retired player would be their “NBA Time Traveler Player.”
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Time Travel to See Mark Price Play for the Cleveland Cavs
Mark Price was an unfortunate casualty of NBA happenstance. Like so many other players who played in the late-’80s and ‘90s, the winning Mark Price and his teammates were capable of was capped by virtue of playing at the same time Michael Jordan did (or Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets during Jordan’s first retirement, and in Price’s case, the New York Knicks). In any case, Mark Price was (unfortunately) seen as some sort of NBA villain, standing in the way of Jordan’s superhero act. Price was not a villain. He was just a great – and under-appreciated – basketball player.
The other aspect of happenstance that worked against Price was that he came along too early for his skill-set to properly be evaluated. When he played, he was seen as a dead-eye shooter who made the most of his ability – which he was, and did do. However, if he played today, advanced metrics would put into context how efficient he was. Now a fundamental part of the basketball vocabulary, “efficiency” is a relatively new term as far as player evaluation, and Price’s career would have benefited from it.
Watching some highlights from Price’s career, his smooth, shifty style may make one think they’re watching a precursor to a style of play that Steph Curry has now perfected. Price was sort of a Chuck Berry to Curry’s Beatles. Which is to say: he was great in his own right, but his influence on future players might get lost among the more casual fans.
Price was named to four All-Star games. He averaged 15.2 points per contest over his twelve-year career, but that’s a bit misleading. His last few (injury-plagued) seasons brought all of his averages down considerably. In his nine seasons playing for the Cavaliers, his rookie year was his only year he averaged below 15.8 points a game. For his career, he shot a couple decimal points over 40% from three-point range, and 90.4% from the free throw line – which is second all-time (barely), behind only Steve Nash. Just for good measure, throw in Price’s career average of 6.7 assists per game, to go along with his incredible ball handling.
Unfortunately, the injuries he suffered during his prime and late in his career led to a bit of a premature retirement, and made his career a bit lopsided; his peak was early and short-lived, lasting about five seasons and change. So despite his remarkable numbers, there’s still a what-could-have-been element to Price’s career. He was never an elite athlete by NBA standards, but a bad knee took away from what athleticism he had.
When this exercise of bending the time/space continuum to go back in time and watch a retired player in his prime for each NBA franchise is reprised in twenty years, Price won’t receive any consideration when the Cavs edition is written, for obvious reasons. But that sort of fits in line with Price’s career, anyway. Even as it stands, he might not be the best former-Cavs player, but little is remembered of a player whose style fit better thirty years after his prime than it did during. His Cleveland teams gave Jordan’s Bulls all they could handle on several occasions in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Cleveland is historically (and famously) known as a city that hasn’t had much in the way of success in professional athletics, but the Cavs of the early-’90s offered a bit of a resurgence in Cleveland (to go along with the some pretty stellar Indians during that time, as well).
Mark Price won’t make the Hall of Fame, in part because of his lack of career longevity, but he’s not all that short of a Hall of Fame career; it should be several tiers above forgettable. Unfortunately, as time goes on, Mark Price’s playing days might get increasingly overshadowed by the new, and by the greatest he went up against. It would be nice to time travel to see Mark Price play for the Cleveland Cavs again, and give his career some of the respect it missed out on. Viewing an old career through a new lens would do just that. After retiring, Price worked as a consultant for several NBA teams, then went into coaching. Currently, Price is the head coach of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte 49ers of Conference USA.
