LaMarcus Aldridge's NBA career has come to an unfortunate end. Thursday morning he announced his sudden retirement after being hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat.
— LaMarcus Aldridge (@aldridge_12) April 15, 2021
While Aldridge's career has come to an unexpected end, he should not be remembered for his play over the last couple of years. When you incapsulate his entire career, Aldridge has a legitimate case to make the Hall of Fame when he is eligible.
Basketball Reference lists LaMarcus Aldridge as having a 50.89% chance of getting into the Hall of Fame, which is around the same probability that Blake Griffin and Klay Thompson have to be enshrined.
The 7-time All-Star averaged 19.4 points on nearly 50 percent shooting from the field while also shooting 81.1% from the free-throw line. He racked up 8.3 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.1 blocks on average throughout his career as well.
Aldridge is a very talented offensive player, and with the three-point revolution happening during the prime of his career, Aldridge still made his money from the midrange and dominated in a way that has become a lost art.
His midrange game aged beautifully as Aldridge got older, and it became the staple of his offensive game.
It's not normal for a big man in his mid-30s to be scoring with the ease that Aldridge does in these clips.
He wasn't as good a midrange shooter as fellow All-Star forward Dirk Nowitzki, but when discussing which basketball player dominated from midrange the most, Aldridge has to at least be in the conversation.
That signature move along with Aldridge's bag of tricks out of the mid-post has helped him become one of the best pure scorers in the NBA during his tenure. In fact, stathead.com has him ranked as the fifth-best pure scorer over the last 13 seasons.
As Rip City Project's Marlow Ferguson Jr. pointed out last year, only one eligible player hasn't made the Hall of Fame after racking up seven All-Star appearances or more. That player was Larry Foust, a center who dominated with the Fort Wayne Pistons in the 50s.
Aldridge never dominated the league in a way that Joel Embiid or Nikola Jokic are doing now, but he was consistently one of the best 15-20 players in the league for the entirety of his prime.
That consistency helps his Hall-of-Fame case, as not a lot of guys in NBA history have been that good for that long.
His ability to reliably get a bucket from the post over the last 13 seasons is astonishing, as the only other player to score 1,000 points in each of the last 13 seasons is LeBron James.
If he had been able to play out the rest of this season and next, Aldridge (who will finish his career with 19,951 points and 8,478 rebounds), would have likely crossed into the 20,000 point, 10,000 rebound club.
All 18 members of that club are either already in the Hall of Fame or will likely make it on their first try.
He doesn't necessarily have the playoff success, but teams that Aldridge was on were able to make the playoffs in 9 of his 15 seasons.
While he never played in the NBA finals, Aldridge was a big reason why the Spurs were able to get to the Western Conference Finals in 2017. Aldridge was arguably their second best player that year.
Aldridge may not get into the Hall of Fame the first time he is on the ballot, but he should eventually get in as voters see his consistency and his ability to fill it up with a style that many thought was going obsolete.
The five-time All-NBA forward does not have the big dunks that Griffin has or the clutch threes that Thompson has, but his consistent scoring will hopefully help him be remembered as one of the most underrated forwards in the NBA who belongs in the Hall of Fame.
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