Dudley Do-Wrong
I recently went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole that led me to Chris Dudley. I won’t bore you with the details about how I got to that point, but I was reminded about Dudley’s unique career and thought it might make for an interesting post.
Dudley was a journeyman center who put together a 16-season, 886-game career playing for five franchises: Cleveland Cavaliers, New Jersey Nets, Portland Trail Blazers, New York Knicks, and Phoenix Suns. An all-defense/no-offense type of player, Dudley owns the lowest career scoring average in NBA history among players with at least 800 games played (3.9 PPG).
As some of you may already know, Dudley was a notoriously poor free throw shooter. There are numerous examples of this, but two games in particular stand out:
On January 29, 1989, Dudley missed five consecutive free throws on one trip to the line thanks to three lane violations by the Washington Bullets (it only counted as two misses, officially).
On April 14, 1990 versus the Indiana Pacers, Dudley set an NBA record by missing 13 consecutive free throws. He went 1-18 (5.6%) from the charity stripe for the game, the worst single-game free throw percentage in NBA history among players with at least 15 attempts.
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