Ask any NBA player or fan who the best ball-handler in the game is today and they’ll invariably say Kyrie Irving. Kyrie is frequently cited as the most skillful player not only in the game today, but ever. Shannon Sharpe is a big fan of Kyrie, but on the latest episode of Nightcap, he told everybody not to forget about Isiah Thomas.
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Sharpe and Chad Johnson were taking listener questions near the end of the episode, and one came up asking Sharpe to name his favorite Isiah Thomas memory since he’d spoken glowingly of him before.
That was all Sharpe needed, as he used the opportunity to launch into an Isiah lovefest. “Before we saw Kyrie and Rod Strickland, nobody could handle the ball like Zeke,” he said. “People don’t realize how good Isiah Thomas was.”
Sharpe didn’t even give a specific highlight, he just remembered how much he enjoyed watching Thomas bring the ball up the court. He then mentioned how as a sophomore, Thomas led his Indiana Hoosiers to a national championship, a title which just so happened to come against Dean Smith and Michael Jordan.
It’s easy to forget the greats of the past, but Isiah Thomas really did have one of the great NBA careers. He won two titles and a Finals MVP with the Bad Boy Pistons. He also made 12 All-Star teams and five All-NBA teams and was named to the NBA’s 50th and 75th-anniversary teams.
Sharpe then shared that he had just spoken to Thomas recently, and the living legend had agreed to come on the podcast sometime during the NBA playoffs.
Isiah Thomas was one of the greatest to ever do it
Though he’s sometimes overlooked when talking about the greatest point guards in basketball history, real ones know that Isiah Thomas had the goods.
Jamal Crawford once admitted that the reason he wore No. 11 was because of his admiration for Thomas, and he got to tell Thomas to his face how much he loved his game when Thomas was a guest on The NBA on TNT a couple of years ago.
“I saw you handling the basketball, and I said, ‘I wanna handle the ball like that dude.’ It was mesmerizing.”
Crawford said that Thomas’ game was so ahead of its time that it seemed futuristic, “like a spaceship coming down the road.”
It’s all well and good to appreciate guys like Kyrie and Ja Morant and all of the other uber-talented ball-handlers today, but don’t forget the ones who did it first, like Isiah Thomas.
