Rick Barry was legitimately a great player who almost no one could stand. Yet he was truly, truly elite.
Barry played at Miami, averaging 37.4 ppg from 1962-65. He was drafted by the San Francisco Warriors (now Golden State Warriors and played there from 1965 to 1967 before trying to jump to the ABA after a financial dispute with the Warriors. If things had been a little different, he might have been teammates with Wilt Chamberlain, who had been traded to Philadelphia before Barry’s arrival.
The ABA didn’t work out too well, because he kept getting moved as teams folded or relocated. At one point he was employed by the Virginia Squires, but he hated the idea of his kids growing up in the South and was ultimately trade to the New York Nets. And there he was very close to being teammates with Julius Erving before the courts forced him back to the Warriors, who were now called Golden State rather than San Francisco Warriors.
He had a brilliant run there, with the high point being the 1975 championship, something that was not supposed to happen.
Barry was a temperamental player, in somewhat the same way that Kobe Bryant was: he was also a perfectionist and if you couldn’t match his level of intensity and accomplishment, he didn’t think very much of you.
He grew estranged from the Warriors again and finished his career with the Houston Rockets.
Barry was beyond brilliant as a player though. He was masterful in nearly every aspect of the game and is one of the last prominent players to shoot his free throws underhanded – he makes a very coherent argument for the technique, arguing that less can go wrong – he is in that sense a curiosity today. Every so often, someone tries it, usually when they are terrible at the line, and he re-enters the basketball conversation.
For all of his brilliance though, he was also one of the most abrasive and disliked figures in basketball history. If you had put him on a team with Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan though, those guys would have understood each other perfectly.