After being raised in Brooklyn, Blackman attended Kansas State University where he played basketball under coach Jack Hartman.

[1] In his senior year Blackman led Kansas State into the West Regional of the NCAA tournament as the #8 seed.

That was also Blackman's best statistical season as he averaged a career high 22.4 PPG and lead the franchise to its first ever playoff appearance.

The Mavericks managed to beat the Seattle SuperSonics and reach the second round before ultimately losing to the Los Angeles Lakers.

On February 17, 1986, Blackman set the Mavericks single-game record for free throws made and attempted in a 22–23 performance.

After this series the Mavericks began to decline and wouldn't achieve the same amount of success until much later on in the Dirk Nowitzki era.

Blackman made 6,487 field goals with the Mavericks and scored 16,643 points, which was a franchise record for 18 years – until broken by Dirk Nowitzki on March 8, 2008.

Blackman was NBA's all-time scoring leader among Hispanic/Latin players (born in Iberian, Latin American & Spanish-speaking countries) until March 6, 2015, when Pau Gasol overtook him.

[5] Blackman signed with the Greek League team AEK Athens BC in the middle of the 1994–95 season.

Over the summer of 1995, Blackman moved to Olimpia Milano, where he was brought in by head coach Bogdan Tanjević.

Olimpia also reached the Korać Cup final, losing to Efes Pilsen Istanbul in the home-and-away series.

The next year, he served as an assistant coach for the German National team and helped lead them to a bronze medal at the 2002 World Basketball Championships in Indianapolis.

[7] During the 2006 NBA Finals, Blackman's former coach with the New York Knicks, Pat Riley, admitted, publicly for the first time, that sitting Rolando Blackman in favor of John Starks during Games 6 and 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals was the biggest coaching mistake in his career, and that he has never forgiven himself for it.