John Stockton was awesome

NBA Obsessed takes you into the hit and run game of NBA Basketball.

John Stockton is going into the basketball Hall of Fame on Friday and these are just some of my recollections of his career.

For your intrepid author it was a rare treat to see John Stockton play basketball with Karl Malone. It was always Stockton and Malone, Stockton and Malone, those two were inseparable and they made the Utah Jazz. The Jazz at times seemed like an afterthought in the Western Conference of the NBA and there was always a team that was just slightly better to nose ahead of them. This still did not stop me from watching the Jazz whenever they were on TV, which was not very often from my perch in Michigan.

Stockton would always find Malone on a fast break or pick and roll play multiple times a game and it showed in the final stats for the National Basketball Association assists leaders. Every year it was a given that Stockton would be at or near the top of that list and when all was said and done he was the out right leader with 15,806 assists. In case you were wondering, John Stockton also scored 19,711, so he was not just a one option wonder.

Stockton owns five of the top six assist seasons in NBA history, holds the record for most seasons and most consecutive games played for one team and he’s third behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parish in total games played.

In 19 grueling NBA regular-season marathons, he missed only 22 of 1,526 games, 18 of those in a single year when doctors told him he needed knee surgery, but Stockton chose merely to sit out a few weeks and returned to finish out the schedule.

“He worked harder than you,” said Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. “That was his secret.

“He’s one of the most unique players you’ll ever run across. You can talk about all the things he tried to do. But first of all, you’ve got to look at his stature. He’s not a very big guy. And yet he played as strong and tough as anybody could.”
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John Stockton and Karl Malone

The vision of Stockton and Malone working together on the floor is a special kind of athletic poetry. There may have been more rewards for them if they had only had one or two more talented players to allow them to compete with the Lakers and other great teams, but my reward was to watch John Stockton play.

Image: Zuma Press

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As always, any NBA Basketball related comments are welcome.

More blogs about basketball.