On the Brink: Predicting the fates of 16 borderline NBA Hall of Famers
By Cal Durrett
1) Joe Johnson
Former NBA All-Star Joe Johnson has a sneaky case to make the Hall of Fame. Johnson played consistently well throughout his career, so much so that he scored more than 20,000 points and made a total of seven all-star teams as a member of the Atlanta Hawks and Brooklyn Nets.
Reaching those two benchmarks should make him a shoo-in but he has yet to be inducted and there may be a couple of reasons why. For one, his nickname is ISO Joe, which was a pejorative term used to describe his one-on-one game.
The other reason is that he signed a 6-year, $123 million contract with the Hawks, which was widely seen as one of the worst contracts in the NBA despite him being a good player. Both of those things negatively affected the perception of his game and led to him being underrated.
However, that ignores that during his peak in Atlanta, they made the playoffs five straight years and had some of their best success of the 21st century. His game may not have been the most appealing for basketball purists, but he did help his teams win games. Overall, he did enough to warrant making the Hall of Fame.