Milwaukee Bucks: Best players to never make an All-Star appearance
Milwaukee Bucks: Best players to never make an All-Star appearance – Paul Pressey
For our final entry, we’re going back all the way during the Bucks’ contending years during the 1980s.
Paul Pressey had some very big shoes to fill going into the 1984-85 season after the Bucks traded away five-time All-Star forward Marques Johnson, Junior Bridgeman, and Harvey Catchings to the Los Angeles Clippers in exchange for Terry Cummings, Craig Hodges and Ricky Pierce.
Using the point forward archetype that Bucks head coach Don Nelson had fashioned with Johnson, Pressey immediately blossomed under that role and formed the dynamic trio the Bucks had for the rest of the decade with Cummings and Hall of Fame guard Sidney Moncrief.
As a two-way point forward, Pressey’s mixture of ball handling and on-ball defending made him one of the most versatile players in the league. While Pressey’s influence lasted that entire decade, his statistical peak arguably came during that 84-85 season that saw the Bucks won 59 games.
In what was his third year in the NBA, Pressey averaged a career-high 16.1 points on a .517/.350/.758 slash line, 6.8 assists, 5.4 rebounds and 1.6 steals through his 80 appearances on the season. And Pressey came so close to getting the nod for that year’s All-Star Game in Indianapolis as he earned the fifth-most amount of votes for Eastern Conference guards.
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Despite his versatility, all-around production and the Bucks’ glowing success, Pressey didn’t come that close again to being considered for an All-Star and thus, finishing out this list.