Milwaukee Bucks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (BEST)
Saying that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a great basketball player is like saying The Beatles were a good band. It wasn’t just about how good the man formerly known as Lew Alcindor was; it was the consistency and duration in which he was that good. From 1971 to 1980, Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA MVP awards, and some believe he was robbed of one of them.
For the first seven years of his career, he averaged 30 points, 16 rebounds, and five assists per game. He played over 65,000 minutes of basketball. And just as importantly as any of those stats, he won six NBA Championships between 1971 (as a member of the Milwaukee Bucks) and 1988.
Milwaukee Bucks: Yi Jianlian (WORST)
After seeing the potential of guys like Yao Ming, NBA front offices all headed to the Far East to try and unearth more basketball talents. The Milwaukee Bucks clearly thought they might’ve found such a player in Yi Jianlian, a five-time Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) champion and three-time CBA Finals MVP.
But the fact that Jianlian didn’t hold any workouts for any teams leading up to the 2007 NBA Draft, and the fact that his most famous pre-draft workout came with him playing against a folding chair, should’ve been major red flags. One year after drafting him, the Bucks traded him away.