Ranking Best NBA Players to Never Make an All-Star Game | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors

Building a catalog of the NBA's most underrated players ever is one helluva undertaking. It is extensive and painstaking, a task open for interpretation and subject to constant scrutiny from the sheer enormity of it all. Different players will make different lists. So few will be universal inclusions.

Marcus Camby is one of them.

Seldom has an entire career flown so far under the radar. Camby cut his teeth leveraging length and an inexhaustible motor on defense and the glass. His offensive production was modest, if forgettable, and heavily dependent on the primary ball-handlers around him and the frequency with which he created and finished off second-chance opportunities.

Yet Camby didn't exist solely within those functional nooks and crannies. He took more jumpers than most think. (And what a wonderfully weird, minutes-long form he had.) He put the ball on the floor more often than you remember. His blocks came further away from the rim than they had any business being.

Somehow, though, Camby is easy to forget. The why of it all isn't quite clear. But his impact is, indeed, forgotten on a macro scale. (Remember the rush to coronate Rudy Gobert as a better version of Camby before he was actually better than Camby?)

Maybe it's his lack of tenure with a single team. Camby suited up for six different franchises, never once for longer than six seasons. He wasn't quite a journeyman, but there was, in hindsight, a transience to all of his terms. That feeling, at least to some degree, affects how he is remembered. As Colin McGowan wrote for Sports On Earth in 2013:

"When you look at Camby's Basketball Reference page, it yawns: just one long, unbroken line of double-double-ish numbers that illuminate what might be one of the least context-dependent players of his generation. He was what he was, wherever he went. And because he never stuck in one place for too long, all our memories of Camby are truncated in one way or another. Chances are you think of him as a hodge-podge of jerseys and performances, and perhaps a name that pops up on a lot of rap tracks because it sounds cool and more or less rhymes with a lot of things."

Camby, though, is so much more than the number of jerseys he wore. On the contrary, his quasi-nomadic resume makes his peak all the more impressive. He was, more or less, the same player at every stop, just in varying volume.

Scalability doesn't amount to stardom, but the punch he packed stretched beyond plug-and-playness. From the moment he entered the league in 1996-97 through his split season with the Los Angeles Clippers and Portland Trail Blazers in 2009-10, he averaged 10.4 points, 10.0 rebounds, 2.6 blocks and 1.0 steals—production matched by exactly no one.