The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

TEN
THE PYRAMID: LEVEL 4



24. SCOTTIE PIPPEN

Resume: 17 years, 12 quality, 7 All-Stars … Top 5 (’94, ’95, ’96), Top 10 (’92, ’97), top 15 (’93, ’98) … All-Defense (10x, eight 1st) … leader: steals (1x) … 4-year peak: 20–8–6, 49% FG … 4-year Playoffs peak: 21–8–6 (61 g’s) … 2nd-best player on six champs (’91–’93, ’96–’98 Bulls) … ’91 Playoffs: 22–9–6 (17 G) … member of ’92 Dream Team
Some scattered thoughts that will eventually resemble an explanation …
The first five Dream Team choices were Jordan/Magic/Bird, then Robinson and Pippen in that order. Those were the five “no-brainers,” according to the committee. From there, they spent the next few weeks choosing a roster that eventually included Barkley, Malone, Stockton, Drexler, Mullin and Ewing (and not Isiah). I don’t know, this seems relevant. Eighteen years later, when I wrote the upcoming “Wine Cellar” chapter, my first five choices were Bird, Magic, Jordan, Pippen and McHale. I could not have a Wine Cellar team without those five. From there, I spent the next few days figuring out the other seven spots, changing my mind at least five hundred times.
Of anyone I’ve ever seen in person, Pippen was the best defender. We always hear how Bird and Magic played “free safety,” a nice way of saying that they always guarded the other team’s weakest offensive player, then used that advantage to roam around, sneak behind low-post guys and jump passing lanes. Extending that analogy, Scottie was a strong safety out of the Ronnie Lott mold, a consistently destructive presence who became nearly as enjoyable to watch defensively as Jordan was offensively. Nobody covered more ground or moved faster from point A to point B. It was like watching a cheetah in a wildlife special—one second Scottie would be minding his own business, the next second he would be pouncing. Everyone remembers Kerr’s jumper to win the ’97 Finals, but nobody remembers Pippen tipping Utah’s ensuing in-bounds pass, then chasing it down and flipping it to Toni Kukoc to clinch the game. No other player except for Jordan, LeBron and maybe Kobe had the physical gifts and instincts to make that play.
Only Jordan was a better all-around player in the nineties … and that was debatable.1 From ’91 to ’95, Pippen averaged a 20–8–6 with 2.4 steals, shot 50 percent and doubled as the league’s top defensive player. In the playoffs from ’91 to ’98, he averaged 17–23 points, 7–9 boards and 4–7 assists every spring and consistently defended the other team’s best scorer. During MJ’s “sabbatical,” Scottie (20.8 PPG, 8.7 RPG, 5.6 APG, 49% FG) dragged the Bulls to within one fecally pungent call of the Eastern Finals2 and should have been our ’94 MVP runner-up behind Hakeem. The following year, he became one of four postmerger players (along with Cowens in ’78, Kevin Garnett in ’03, and LeBron in ’09) to lead his team in total points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in the same season. And he redefined the “point forward” concept during the nineties, allowing the Bulls to play any combination of guards without suffering in the ballhandling/defense departments.3 Chuck Daly created a great term to describe Scottie: a “fill in the blanks” guy. If a teammate was getting killed defensively, Scottie had his back. If you needed rebounding, Scottie went down low and grabbed some boards. If you needed scoring, Scottie could create a shot or attack the rim. If you needed a turnover, Scottie had a better chance of getting it than anyone. If you needed ballhandling, he could do it. And if you needed to shut someone down, he did it. Like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, Scottie specialized in cleaning up everyone else’s mess. When Magic was running amok in the ’91 Finals, Scottie put the clamps on him. When the Knicks were shoving an MJ-less Chicago team around in the ’94 playoffs, Scottie dunked on Ewing and stood over him defiantly. During the Charles Smith game the year before, Pippen and Horace Grant were the ones stuffing Smith and saving the series. When the ’98 Pacers nearly snuffed out the MJ era, Jordan and Pippen crashed the boards in Game 7 and willed themselves to the line again and again, two smaller guys dominating the paint against a bigger team. They just wanted it more.4
During the Dream Team practices, Daly called Scottie his second-best player and told David Halberstam, “You never really know how good a player is until you coach him, but Pippen was a great surprise in Barcelona—the confidence with which he played and the absolutely complete nature of his game, both on offense and defense. No one else really expected it.” According to Halberstam, MJ returned to Chicago after the Olympics and told Phil Jackson, “Scottie came in as just one of the other players, and none of the others knew how good he was, but then he kept playing, and by the end of the week it was clear that he was the top guard there—over Clyde and Magic and Stockton. It was great for people to see him in that setting and see how good he really was.” For those of you scoring at home, that’s sixteen combined rings paying homage.5
Irrefutable fact: Jordan never would have retired in ’99 unless he knew for sure that Scottie was leaving. You think Crockett was trying to win a seventh title without Tubbs? No way. I always liked the Miami Vice analogy for them: Crockett got most of the attention and deservedly so … but he still wasn’t taking Calderone down without Tubbs.6 You could also rely on Tubbs/Pippen to carry their own episodes every now and then, although Tubbs never could have carried a whole season of Vice like Pippen carried that ’94 Bulls team. His detractors conveniently forget that season, just like they ignore Older Scottie leading Portland to within one self-destructive quarter of the 2000 Finals, or how he jeopardized his impending free agency in the ’98 playoffs by gutting it out with a herniated disc, even limping around in Game 6 of the Finals just because the Bulls needed his presence. If you’re poking holes, you can easily dismiss him as Jordan’s sidekick or mention his infamous migraine before Game 7 of the ’90 Pistons series (which happened only a few days after his father passed away, but whatever). Hey, if all else fails and you want to discredit Pippen, just bring up the quitter thing.
And so where you stand on Scottie depends on one question: do you give up on anyone who ever made a stupid mistake?
We all remember that fateful ’94 Knicks series, when Scottie refused to finish Game 3 because Phil Jackson called the final play for Kukoc (who banked the game-winner with Pippen sulking on the bench). A betrayed Bill Cartwright screamed at Pippen afterward with tears rolling down his face, later calling it the biggest disappointment of his career.7 And maybe it was. Of course, Scottie carried a Jordan-less Bulls squad to 55 wins by himself. It had become his team, and when it’s your team, a mind-set takes hold: everything rests on your shoulders, everyone is gunning for you and you can’t take a night off. You become the pumped-up star of your own action movie. Unless you think like a superhero, you won’t survive. Scottie wasn’t wired that way, so he had to play the role of the alpha dog … and Game 3 was his Chitwood moment. He’d earned the right to say, “Coach, I’ll make it.” Jackson took the moment away and gave it to Kukoc, a slap in the face if you understood Scottie’s back story. He hailed from a dirt-poor town in Arkansas, one of twelve siblings with an ailing father who couldn’t work anymore. After an improbable growth spurt propelled him to NAIA Division I stardom, Scottie’s stock skyrocketed right before the ’87 draft,8 with Chicago landing him in the lottery and locking him up with a six-year bargain of a deal (and eventually tacking on a five-year extension that became a bigger bargain).9 When the Bulls courted Kukoc for most of Scottie’s career, Scottie never forgave them for it. Or Kukoc, for that matter. So that’s what led to the regrettable decision in the Kukoc game: a Molotov cocktail of money, jealousy, insecurity, ego and competitiveness exploded at the worst possible time. Scottie apologized, his team forgave him, he took the heat and that was that. Shit happens. The Bulls won three more rings with him. Everyone forgets that part. If you think one selfish moment should overshadow a totally unselfish career, maybe you should climb off your high horse before you get hurt.
Scottie finally escaped Jordan’s shadow in Portland, where he led a dysfunctional Blazers team to the precipice of the 2000 Finals—15-point lead, 10 minutes to play—before everything fell apart in a quagmire of improbable threes, shaky calls and bad coaching. Critics pointed to that game as more evidence that Scottie couldn’t be the best guy on a championship team. Good, that puts him with these guys: Cousy, Malone, Barkley, Garnett, McHale, Gervin, Oscar, Kobe, Robinson, Ewing and Baylor. I hope history remembers him as an exceptional athlete who redefined his position, routinely played hurt, allowed Jordan to blossom into “best player ever” status and ended up with enough rings for two hands. Every time I tried to talk myself out of putting Pippen in the top twenty-five, I kept thinking about the time Chicago’s soon-to-be-legendary ’96 team cruised through Boston right before Christmas. They were 19–2, working on a 10-game winning streak and generating the first wave of “greatest team ever” buzz, a complete affront to everyone who loved the ’86 Celtics in Boston. Come on, they couldn’t be that good, right? Then Jordan and Pippen came out and whupped our crummy team for two-plus hours.10 This was like watching Andre the Giant in his prime, when he’d come out smiling for a battle royal as the crowd went bonkers, then disdainfully tossed jabronies out of the ring for the next twenty minutes. By the fourth quarter, two-thirds of the crowd was rooting for Chicago under the rarely seen and entirely defensible “not only is our team reprehensible, but we used to root for a great team, we know greatness, we understand greatness and this is greatness” corollary. Jordan and Pippen finished with 37 points apiece. Scottie chipped in 12 assists and 9 rebounds for good measure. Then they flew to the next city and kicked the shit out of somebody else. Don’t tell me that Scottie Pippen wasn’t great.11
23. ISIAH THOMAS

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’90 Finals MVP … Top 5 (’84, ’85, ’86), Top 10 (’83, ’87) … two All-Star MVPs … leader: assists (1x), minutes (1x) … 4-year peak: 21–4–11, 47% FG … career: assists (5th), steals (15th) … Playoffs: 20–5–9 (111 G) … ’90 Finals: 28–5–7, 11-for-16 threes … best player on 2 champs (’88, ’89 Pistons) and one runner-up (’88)
An unusually lengthy Pro/Con list for the only Pyramid Guy who ever threatened me with bodily harm:
Pro: Holds the title of Best Pure Point Guard Ever until Chris Paul officially takes it away, as well as the guy who nailed the most categories on a “here’s what I want from my dream point guard” checklist: scoring, crunch-time scoring, passing, penetration, quickness, leadership, competitiveness, toughness, defense, ability to run a fast break and willingness to sacrifice his own numbers to get everyone else involved. Really, he had everything you’d want except a three-point shot. There’s a reason he became the best player on a team that won two titles in a row (and should have won three). If you doubt his leadership, watch what happens after the Pistons clinch the ’90 title on a last-second miss—everyone runs right toward Isiah and lifts him to the sky.
Con: His poor career field goal percentage hurts him historically. My dumb explanation: Isiah averaged 105 threes during his first thirteen seasons and made a ghastly 29 percent (398-for-1,373), although you can’t totally blame him because of the league’s poor three-point shooting from ’81 to ’86.12 He was deadly from 18–20 feet; anything beyond was sketchy. Remove those threes from his resume (45.2 percent career FG) and he made 6,796 of 14,577 two-pointers (46.8 percent). You could say Isiah was born after his time: had he arrived 10–15 years earlier, he wouldn’t have been seduced by those dumb threes, and had he arrived six years later, he would have made a higher percentage. He’s the anti-Maravich in this respect.
Pro: Routinely unstoppable in big games and big moments. Remember when he dropped 16 points in the last 91 seconds of regulation to keep Detroit alive in the ’84 Knicks series? Or the 25-point third quarter in Game 6 of the ’88 Finals? That’s what I loved about Isiah—he only brought out the heavy artillery when his team needed it. Of anyone I watched from 1976 to 2009 (and counting), only six guys abjectly terrified me in the last two minutes of a close game: Jordan, Kobe, Bernard, Reggie, Toney and Isiah. With LeBron looming.
Con: Somehow got off the hook historically for the single biggest NBA crunch-time brain fart since the merger: setting up Larry Bird’s series-altering steal in the ’87 Eastern Finals. Actually, it was a two-part brainfart—he should have called time out, and he never should have thrown a lazy pass toward his own basket. Indefensible.13
Pro: His overcompetitive/nasty/tenacious side made him a cross between a point guard and a pit bull and provided the spine for a series of especially tough Pistons teams. You have to admire any six-footer who threw the first punch in fights with Laimbeer and Cartwright, as well as anyone who would choke his own trainer during a game.14
Con: That same overcompetitive/nasty/tenacious streak made him one of the poorest sports in any league. Isiah disgraced the Pistons after two playoff exits (the “if Bird was white, he’d just be another good player” nonsense in ’87, and the orchestrated walkout during Chicago’s sweep in the ’91 Eastern Finals), organized the freeze-out of Jordan during the ’85 All-Star Game, stabbed Adrian Dantley in the back with the Dantley/Aguirre trade, burned so many bridges that they decided to leave him off the Dream Team (more on this in a second) and may have even been responsible for the Simpson/Goldman murders in 1994.15
Pro: Mastered the “I’m giving up my own numbers to get everyone else involved, then I’ll take over the last three minutes if they need me” point guard conundrum faster than anyone ever. He also eked the best possible basketball out of one-dimensional scorers (Dantley, Tripucka, Mark Aguirre), guys who couldn’t create their own shots (John Salley, Rick Mahorn, Rodman, Laimbeer), streaky shooters (Vinnie Johnson, James Edwards), and even reluctant shooters (Dumars). If the ’07 Suns were like operating a Formula One race car for Nash, then running those Detroit teams was like operating a high-risk/high-reward hedge fund—you had to know when to ride a hot hand, juggle the egos of various investors, trust your gut over conventional wisdom and command an extraordinarily high amount of trust with everyone involved.
Con: For some reason, that rare talent didn’t translate to any other walk of life: poor Isiah goes down as one of the worst coaches, worst GMs, worst TV guys and worst commissioners of the past thirty years. If you think what he did to the Knicks was bad, read up on what happened with the CBA; he could have invited all the players and executives into one penthouse suite, then rained bullets on them from a helicopter The Godfather: Part III–style and not done as much damage.
Pro: If you’re penalizing Isiah for retiring after just thirteen seasons, don’t forget that he tore an Achilles during the ’94 season and felt like his skills had eroded just enough that he couldn’t have survived the nine-month rehab process and kept playing at a high level. I always appreciated him for that. How many great athletes walk away exactly when they should walk away?
Con: Inexplicably kissed Magic before every game of the ’87 and ’88 Finals. We’ve never heard a good explanation. Ever.16
    You can’t discuss Isiah’s career without delving into his incredible omission from the Dream Team. The reasons were simple: supposedly Jordan wouldn’t play if Isiah was involved, and enough of the other players despised him that the committee decided, “Screw it, Isiah isn’t worth the trouble.” Understood. But they picked that team after the summer of ’91, with Isiah coming off three Finals appearances and two Conference Finals appearances as one of the five most important players of that generation (along with Moses, Bird, Jordan and Magic). Leaving him off the Dream Team was like leaving Billy Joel out of the “We Are the World” video.17 You just couldn’t do it. His stats don’t totally reflect his impact during the first ten years of his career—although three straight first-team All-NBA’s, A Finals MVP and back-to-back titles certainly help—and the Dream Team would have cemented his legacy. So he was robbed. And then some.
One last thought: say what you want about All-Star Games, but they’re an accurate snapshot of who mattered in every given year. It’s like being a dad and getting the biggest leg of the chicken. In All-Star Games, the daddies get the biggest legs (or in this case, minutes). So that got me thinking … who were the chicken leg guys in All-Star history, the ones who simply had to play big minutes because they were who they were? Leaving out centers (it’s too easy for two great centers to split minutes in an All-Star Game), here’s how the career minute totals of forwards and guards broke down (minimum: six All-Stars except for LeBron/Wade) …
Averaged 28-plus minutes: Jordan (13 games, 382 minutes); Oscar (12/380); Cousy (12/368); Pettit (11/360); West (12/341); Magic (11/338); Elgin (11/321); Isiah (11/318); Doc (11/316); Bird (10/287); LeBron (5/151)
Averaged 23–27 minutes: Havlicek (13/303); Kobe (11/298); Duncan (11/263); Garnett (11/260); Iverson (9/239); Gervin (9/215); Barkley (9/209); Lucas (8/183); Frazier (7/183); Pippen (7/173); McGrady (7/172); Wade (5/127)
Averaged 18–22 minutes: Hayes (12/264); Malone (12/244); Greer (10/207); Stockton (10, 197); Wilkens (9/182); R. Allen (9/182); Drexler (9/166); Archibald (6/162); Wilkins (8/159); English (8/158); Nowitzki (8/146); Worthy (7/142)
    Holy shit! Other than the random appearance from Lucas, the chicken leg breakdown went exactly like you’d think it would go, right? The Stockton/Malone numbers were low because they never cared about playing in their later years; Kobe’s numbers were skewed because he only played 3 minutes in the ’08 game; and the Garnett/Duncan numbers were low because they cost each other minutes splitting time. Other than that, it’s a surprisingly accurate reflection of which noncenters mattered most over the last fifty-plus years. And that’s the thing: Isiah mattered. He deserved to be on the original Dream Team. It’s true.18
22. KEVIN GARNETT

Resume: 14 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’04 MVP … ’00 runner-up … Top 5 (’00, ’03, ’04, ’08), Top 10 (’01, ’02, ’05), Top 15 (’98, ’07) … All-Defense (9x, seven 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’08) … ’03 All-Star MVP … leader: rebounds (4x) … 3-year peak: 23–14–6, 50% FG … ’04 Playoffs: 24–15–5, 43.4 MPG (18 G) … ’08 Playoffs: 20–11–3, 50% FG (26 G) … missed Playoffs three straight years … 2nd-best player on champ (’08 Celtics) … 20K-10K Club
Right after graduating from college, I became hooked on Watergate and spent a few weeks reading the Woodward/Bernstein books, watching and rewatching All the President’s Men and wasting too much time figuring out Deep Throat’s identity. That was right up there with “Who killed JFK?” for me. Who was Deep Throat? I had to know. Every time I watched the movie on cable from 1992 to 2005—and since it resides in my permanent “I can’t pass this up even though I just watched it three weeks ago” rotation, that was often—my favorite scenes were those hushed conversations in the dark parking garage with Bob Redford (playing Woodward) and Hal Holbrook (playing Throat). They always nailed the lighting just right; you could kinda see Holbrook, but not totally; and he was always sucking on a cigarette, acting furtively, talking in a raspy voice and doing everything you ever thought Deep Throat would do. When we finally learned in 2005 that Throat was a former FBI and CIA executive named Mark Felt, I was crushed. It was more fun not knowing. Turns out Deep Throat was a failing grandfather who wanted to make his family some cash before he croaked, so he outed himself for a quickie book. I found the whole thing wildly disappointing. Things were much more fun when Hal Holbrook was Deep Throat, you know? And if you’re an NBA fan, maybe it was more fun when Kevin Garnett toiled away in Minnesota as we wondered, “Exactly how great is this guy?”
We didn’t know the answer and were fine with this. We like arguing about this stuff. Here was one of the greatest forwards ever, one of the fiercest competitors in any sport, someone with a chance to finish with historic scoring and rebounding numbers, one of the killer defensive players of his era … and we had no clue how good he really was. He played with six quality players in his first twelve seasons: Joe Smith, Stephon Marbury, Terrell Brandon, Sam Cassell, Sprewell and Wally Szczerbiak. He never played for a decent coach and certainly didn’t have a cagey front office pulling strings for him.19 His NBA clock was ticking and he knew it; he had become an attractive single woman in her late thirties with rumbling ovaries. Garnett’s famed intensity slowly morphed into something else: frustration and despair, with a touch of “I might kill everyone on my team tonight” thrown in. Still, he couldn’t ask out. He just couldn’t do it to everyone in ’Sota. To keep the domestic analogies going, he was like an unhappy husband who couldn’t stomach the thought of divorce because he didn’t want to hurt the kids.
There wasn’t a more tragic figure in the league. Heading into that 2006–7 season, Minnesota released Paul Shirley, who sent me a gushing email about KG’s everyday brilliance and declared that if KG had played on a contender his entire career, “people would speak of him as a candidate for best player ever.” Would that become KG’s legacy: the coulda-shoulda-woulda star who ended up being the Ernie Banks or Barry Sanders of basketball? Every time I watched him play in person, I always admired his command of the room, how he seemed larger than life at all times, how it was nearly impossible to stop glancing at him. The guy just seemed famous. He stood out. Applying my world-renowned Foreigner Test, if you brought an exchange student to his first NBA game and the guy was from Zimbabwe or Kenya and had no idea what anyone looked like, then you asked him to watch everyone warming up and pick the guy who seemed like he should be the best guy, Garnett would have been the one he picked.
That charisma never translated to playoff success: The T-Wolves got knocked out of the first round in Garnett’s first seven Playoffs appearances. In nine elimination games over that stretch (Minny won two of them), Garnett averaged an 18–11–6 and shot 40 percent.20 Things turned during his MVP season in 2004, when Garnett had a certified monster Game 7 (a 32–21 against the Kings) before Cassell got injured and they fell to the Lakers. Then the Spree/Cassell dynamic imploded, Minnesota made all the wrong moves to replace them (Ricky Davis and Marko Jaric, anyone?) and Garnett became the only top forty Pyramid guy to miss the playoffs for three straight years. (One fun tidbit during this stretch: We learned KG kept in shape by running on the beaches of Malibu every summer. The sheer comedy of a seven-foot black guy sprinting along the sands of the whitest, most uptight place on the planet can’t be calculated. Some of his neighbors probably hadn’t seen a black person in twenty years. Imagine them glancing up from their morning coffee on the deck and seeing Garnett sprinting toward their beach house.) Wasn’t it his job to carry a subpar team? Wasn’t that what Barkley did in the late eighties and early nineties in Philly? And how much did his personality have to do with it? Every time I watched a Wolves-Clippers game during that stretch, I always pictured Garnett snapping afterward and killing everyone in the locker room except for Ricky Davis, who would have calmly watched the whole thing unfold while sipping from a malt 40. Poor Garnett had become the Tiffani-Amber Thiessen of the NBA, someone with all the tools who should have been more successful than he was. It just didn’t make sense.21
By now, the Garnett vs. Duncan argument was in full swing and centered around a hypothetical, impossible-to-prove argument: “If Duncan had Garnett’s teammates from 1998 to 2007 and vice versa, wouldn’t KG be the guy with four rings?” I thought that was bullshit—what set Duncan apart was his ability to raise his game to another level in big moments. Just as selfless and competitive as Garnett, Duncan channeled his intensity and saved peak performances for when they mattered most. He knew there was a crucial difference between a ho-hum January game in Atlanta and a must-win playoff game in L.A. He developed reliable mental alerts like “Unless I grab 20 rebounds tonight, we’re going to lose” or “If I don’t take over this game right now and score every time down the floor, we’re cooked.” Meanwhile, Garnett never wavered from how he played—ever—even if it meant passing the game-winning shot because some untalented doofus like Troy Hudson had a better look.22 Once Pierce and Allen were flanking him in Boston, that freed him to do Garnett things (protect the rim, make high-percentage decisions, control the boards, draw centers away from the hoop with his killer 18-footer, throw up a 20–12 every night and raise everyone else’s play with his unparalleled intensity) without dealing with the pressure of making big shots. After 25 up-and-down playoff games fueled the “Is KG clutch?” debate yet again,23 Garnett stood near Boston’s bench before Game 6 of the 2008 Finals, muttered a few things to psyche himself up and head-butted the basket support as hard as he could. Watching from about fifty feet away, my dad and I raced to make the “Uh-oh, I think we’re getting killer KG” comment. The signature moment: a three-point play when KG got knocked down and flung a line drive that banked in, then lay on the floor with his arms raised, screaming at the ceiling as the crowd went bonkers. We were like 18,000 people pouring Red Bull down his throat that night. He finished with a 26–14, played his usual terrific defense and found his swagger: a level of passion and intensity unique to him and only him. Let the record show that KG played one of his better games to clinch a championship. It’s something Elvin Hayes can’t say, or Karl Malone, or Patrick Ewing, or Chris Webber, or anyone else from the not-so-clutch group that Garnett escaped.
What Garnett did for the ’08 Celtics can’t be measured by statistics; it would belittle what happened. He transformed the culture of a perennial doormat. He taught teammates to care about defense, practice, professionalism, and leaving everything they had on the court. He taught them to stop caring about stats and start caring about wins. He single-handedly transformed the careers of three youngsters (Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe and Kendrick Perkins), one veteran (Pierce), and one embattled coach (Doc Rivers). He played every exhibition game like it was the seventh game of the Finals. During blowouts, he cheered on his teammates like it was a tight game; because of that, the bench guys did the same and turned into a bunch of giddy March Madness scrubs. I have never watched a more contagious, selfless, team-oriented player on a daily basis. By Thanksgiving, the entire team followed his lead. Every time a young player went for his own stats or snapped at the coach, KG set him straight. Every time one of his teammates was intimidated, KG had his back. Every time one of his teammates got knocked down, KG rushed over to pick him up; eventually, four teammates were rushing over to help that fifth guy up. Every time an opponent kept going for a shot after a whistle, KG defiantly blocked the shot just out of principle.24 Eventually, everyone started doing it. No shots after the whistle against the Celtics. That was the rule.
So it was a series of little things, baby steps if you will, but they added up to something much bigger and built the backbone of an eventual championship. A wonderful all-around player, ultimately Kevin Garnett was only as good as his teammates. And I’m fine with that. We’ll remember him like Jimmy Page or Keith Richards, a gifted guitarist who needed an equally gifted band to make a memorable album … and any solo album would ultimately be forgettable.25 That was our answer. Unlike with Deep Throat, I’m glad we know the truth.
21. BOB COUSY

Resume: 13 years, 13 quality, 13 All-Stars … ’57 MVP … Top 5 (’52, ’53, ’54, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59, ’60, ’61), Top 10 (’62, ’63) … two All-Star MVPs … records: most assists in one half (19), most playoff FTs made (30) … leader: assists (8x) … 2nd-best player on 6 champs (Boston) … 3-year Playoffs peak: 20–6–9 (32 G) … career: 18–8–5, 38% FG, 80% FT
The Cooz should start fading historically soon—if it hasn’t happened already—which is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. We can’t let that happen to a beloved Holy Cross grad. Future generations will point to his field goal shooting and say, “By any statistical calculation, Nash and Stockton were decidedly better.” Fortunately, I’m here. Allow me to make the case for Cooz in four parts:
His poor shooting (37.5 percent for his career) was deceivingly abysmal because he peaked in the fifties, an unglorious decade for field goal percentages and scoring. Of the 66 players who played at least 300 games from 1951 to 1960, Ken Sears led everyone (45 percent), Freddie Scolari brought up the bottom (33 percent) and Cousy ranked forty-second (37 percent). Stretch that to a 500-game minimum and twenty-two players qualify: Neil Johnston leads the way (44 percent), Jack McMahon brings up the rear (34 percent) and Cousy ranks fifteenth (just three spots behind alleged deadeye Dolph Schayes). Comparing him to his point guard rivals from 1951 to 1963 (400-game minimum), Gene Shue shot 39.9 percent, Dick McGuire shot 39.6 percent, Bobby Wanzer shot 39.2 percent, Cousy shot 37 percent, Andy Phillip shot 36.8 percent, Slater Martin shot 36.5 percent … and Cousy’s teams consistently averaged more shots and points than anyone else.26 Fast-forward to the high-scoring eighties: of the 124 players who played 500 games or more from 1981 to 1990, Artis Gilmore led the way at 63 percent, Elston Turner brought up the back at 43 percent and Isiah Thomas ranked 105th (46 percent). If you narrow the list to point guards (twenty-three in all), Mo Cheeks ranks first (53 percent), Darnell Valentine ranks last (43 percent) and Isiah ranks fifteenth. In other words, Isiah was actually a worse shooter for his era than Cousy. J-Kidd sucked more than both of them combined, the seventh-worst shooter from 1995 to 2008 of anyone who played 500 games or more (40 percent). While we’re on the subject, Baron Davis (41 percent career), Kenny Anderson (42 percent), Iverson (42.6 percent) and Tim Hardaway (43 percent) were poorer shooters for their respective eras. So you can’t penalize the Cooz for peaking during a quantity-over-quality era of shot selection.
You know how everyone makes a fuss about that stupid Tiny Archibald record? Cousy finished second in points and first in assists in ’54 and ’55; unlike Tiny’s Royals, the Celtics made the playoffs both times. He cracked the top four in scoring four straight times (’52–’55), finished in the top ten in scoring four other times, never finished lower than third in assists in thirteen seasons and won eight straight assist titles. Let’s say we assigned points for every top ten finish in scoring or assists per game—10 points for first place, 9 for second and so on, with 0 points for anything outside the top ten—then tallied up the combined points for each player’s career.27 Here’s how the top point guards of all-time finish with that scoring system: Oscar, 181; Cousy, 164; Stockton, 139; West, 102;28 Kidd, 96; Magic, 94; Wilkens, 89; Tiny, 87; Isiah, 64; Payton, 51. Just for kicks, a second list with the same scoring system, only first-team All-NBA’s are worth 10 and second-team All-NBA’s worth 5: Oscar, 281; Cousy, 274; West, 212; Magic, 189; Stockton, 189; Kidd, 151; Tiny, 127; Isiah, 104; Payton, 96; Wilkens, 89.
I hate the phrase “devil’s advocate” because it makes me think of that excruciating Keanu Reeves/Al Pacino movie that couldn’t even get the Charlize Theron nude scene right, but screw it: can you think of a valid reason why West (one title) and Oscar (one title) have endured historically as all-timers, but everyone has been so anxious to dump Cousy (six titles)? You can’t play the “he couldn’t have hacked it once the game sped up” card (like we used with Mikan earlier) because Cooz and Bob Pettit were the only NBA superstars who thrived pre-Russell and post-Russell. (If anything, Cooz was better off in a run-and-gun era—he led the league in assists as late as 1959 and 1960 and made second-team All-NBA in the final two years of his career.) You can’t play the “he couldn’t shoot” card because that’s untrue. You can’t play the “Russell made his career” card because he was better statistically pre-Russell and made just as many All-NBA teams without him. As recently as 1980, Cousy made the NBA’s 35th Anniversary twelve-man team. So what happened?
Cousy got screwed historically by his first four years (the pre-shot-clock era, when nobody scored more than 75–85 points a game) and the last five years (when they started counting assists differently). Cousy averaged 8.9 assists for a ’59 Celtics team that averaged 116.4 points per game; John Stockton averaged 12.4 assists for a ’94 Jazz team that averaged 101.9 points per game. How am I supposed to make sense of that?29 How do we know Cousy wasn’t averaging 15–16 assists per game if we applied the current criteria? By all accounts, nobody ran a better fast break and the stats reflect it: eight straight titles and four times where he finished with at least 30 percent more dimes than the number two guy. Cousy finished his career in 1963 with 6,945 assists; the next-highest guy (Dick McGuire) had 4,205. So it’s not like he was a little bit better than his peers, or a tad better, or even just better. He was significantly better.
Like fellow pioneers Erving, Russell and Baylor, Cousy deserves credit for pushing basketball in a more entertaining, fan-friendly direction. Here’s how SI’s Herbert Warren Wind30 described his impact in January ’56:
    Cousy is regarded by most experts as nothing less than the greatest all-round player in the 64-year history of basketball…. In recent years, when the game was coming very close to developing into a race-horse shooting match between men who had developed unstoppable shots and who could do very little else, Bob Cousy, above and beyond anyone else, has blazed the trail back to good basketball. Cousy has, in truth, gone much further: he has opened the road to better basketball. Perhaps no player or coach in the game’s history has understood the true breath of basketball as well as he. He has shown, in what has amounted to an enlightened revolution, that basketball offers a hundred and one possibilities of maneuvers no one ever dreamed of before. Reversing your dribble or passing behind your back and so on—those stunts had been done for years, but if you combine those moves with a sense of basketball, then you are going some place. Increase your repertoire of moves, and the man playing you, by guarding against one, gives you the opening you need to move into another. It is not unlike learning to speak a new language. The larger your vocabulary, the better you will speak it, as long as you are building on a sound foundation.
    To repeat: Cousy opened the door for Magic, Nash, the ABA guys and everyone else. Until he started doing his thing in college and professionally, white players hadn’t even considered the notion “Wait, while we’re trying to win the game, what if we tried to entertain the fans as well?” And it’s not like Cousy was playing like some reckless “and-1” tour scrub; every move had a purpose, every decision stayed true to the player he was. Watch Nash running the show now and that’s what Cousy was like back then, only better. There’s a reason he became the NBA’s first iconic guard, the league’s answer to Unitas, Mays and Mantle. People loved watching him. People loved playing with him. His teams usually won. What more do you want?31 As then Knicks coach Joe Lapchick extolled, “I’ve seen Johnny Beckman, Nat Holman, that wonderful player Hank Luisetti, Bob Davies, George Mikan, the best of the big men—to name just a few. Bob Cousy, though, is the best I’ve ever seen. He does so many things. He’s regularly one of the league’s top five scorers. [He’s] been a top leader in assists for the last five seasons. He’s become a very capable defensive player, a tremendous pass stealer. He always shows you something new, something you’ve never seen before. Any mistake against him and you pay the full price. One step and he’s past the defense. He’s quick, he’s smart, he’s tireless, he has spirit, and he is probably the best finisher in sports today.”
That just about covers it. And if you’re worried about his ability in the clutch, check out those six rings, or his famous 50-point playoff game against Syracuse (25-for-25 from the line). The Cooz did everything. Beyond the statistics and testimonials, Cousy deserves credit for forming the Players Association and empathizing with blacks during an era when few whites stuck up for them. My second-favorite Cousy moment happened when he broke down during Bill Russell’s SportsCentury documentary, despondent that he didn’t fully realize how much Russell was suffering at the time. It was the most emotional moment in ESPN history that didn’t involve Jim Valvano or Chris Connelly, and if you don’t think it gets a little dusty in the Sports Guy Mansion every time it comes on, you’re crazy. Of course, that doesn’t top the all-time greatest Cousy moment: when he filmed the free throw shooting scene in Blue Chips with Nick Nolte and made twenty-one in a row for the take they ended up using … even though he was sixty-five at the time.32 Now that, my friends, is a Level Four guy. Let’s see John Stockton top that feat with a 75-person movie crew silently watching in 2025.
20. LEBRON JAMES

Resume: 6 years, 6 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’09 MVP … ’04 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’06, ’08, ’09), Top 10 (’05, ’07) … All-Defense (2x) … 4-year peak: 29–7–7, 48% FG … ’09 Playoffs: 35–9–7, 51% FG (146) … best player on runner-up (’07 Cavs) … youngest player to reach 10,000 points (age 23)
A dopey ranking for obvious reasons: he’s twenty-three and headed for the top eight (possibly higher) in the The Second Book of Basketball, which should be released somewhere between 2016 and 2018 after my wife leaves me and I need a quick influx of cash.33 He might be our reigning Finals MVP when I’m signing this book for you in the winter of 2009—or when you’re smiling thinly because somebody just gave it to you as a Christmas present and you’re deciding how fast you could rewrap it for someone else, either way—which would propel him into the top fifteen obviously. So we’re doing a little projecting. Barring a Penny-like swoon or a Vick-like fall from grace, LeBron will become one of the twenty best players who ever lived. We can say that safely. Here are a few LeBron-related pieces from my columns (edited for space), and if they don’t give you a relevant feel for his evolution over the past six years, then I should quit writing and dig ditches for a living.
January 2004. When LeBron hits his prime and finally gets surrounded by quality shooters and big guys who run the floor, he’ll toss up a triple-double for an entire season. Comfortably. We’re talking 33/12/13 every night. LeBron sees everything in slow motion; he’s always thinking two moves ahead, like he’s playing chess. If I dribble here, this guy moves there, that guy moves here and then this should happen. Not since Magic or Bird has someone connected with teammates like this. He controls his body in traffic like MJ, explodes to the rim like Dr. J, manages a game like Isiah. From what I’ve seen, there’s nothing he can’t do except convince skeptics he’s worth the hype. With the nonstop Jordan comparisons—which are wrong, since he plays like a more athletic Magic—some expected LeBron to dunk on everyone and score 40 a game and were sorely disappointed to see a cocky kid with a crooked jumper on the wrong night. But doesn’t that say something about us? With everyone in such a rush these days, we never give anything a chance. Why spend time forming an opinion when we can make a hurried evaluation and move on to something else? For many, sampling LeBron was like trying out the new Chicken McNuggets: “Yeah, I saw him once, he wasn’t that good.” If that’s you, you’re missing out. Watching LeBron blossom—a once-in-a-generation player learning on the job—has been one of the most rewarding fan experiences I can remember. It’s like my dad once said about Bobby Orr: “You stayed home every night to see what he’d do next.”34 I get to say that about LeBron’s rookie season someday. And it won’t even be hype.
January 2005. Somehow LeBron is headed for 55 wins on a team with an overmatched coach, two decent starters, three role players and a bunch of stiffs. He’s reached “There’s nothing on right now, maybe I’ll flick on the package and see if LeBron is playing” status, which hasn’t happened since MJ started playing in Chicago (and we didn’t even have the package back then). He’s going to average a triple double within the next five years. And he just turned twenty. Two questions remain: Over the past three months, have you seen anything to make you think that we’re not watching someone in the early stages of becoming the greatest basketball player ever? (Um … no.) And did you ever think we would see a player who combined the best qualities of a Young Jordan and a Young Magic? (Me neither.)35
July 2005. LeBron’s situation in Cleveland reminds me of Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy and Chevy Chase at their peaks on SNL. Yeah, they were the undisputed stars and had some great moments. But at some point, they outgrew the show and it became inevitable that they’d start making big-money movies. In LeBron’s case, he’s the best young player in NBA history—both statistically and aesthetically—as well as someone destined to become the biggest superstar in any professional sport (maybe ever). He’s going to accomplish things we didn’t think were possible anymore—averaging a triple double for a season,36 leading the league in scoring and assists, stuff like that. Eventually, he’s going to start “making big-money movies” (translation: join the Knicks or Lakers), if only because it’s in the best financial interest of everyone involved (and I mean, everyone).37
April 2006. Twenty-five months. That’s how long it took before a Cleveland coach (and LeBron has had three) realized, “Instead of sticking LeBron in the corner or the wing and having entire possessions where he never touches the ball, maybe we should run the offense through him!” Really, you want to stick him at the top of the key and run the offense through your best playmaker, as well as someone who’s completely unstoppable whenever he decides to drive to the basket? You think that might work?38 Now he’s putting up 33–8–7’s and figuring out how to take over games. (Note: At least once a game, LeBron does something so explosive, so athletic, so incredible, you can’t even believe it happened. The last time I remember feeling this way about a professional athlete was Bo Jackson, who wasn’t just great … he stood out. I once attended a spring training game when Bo scored standing up from third base on a 180-foot pop fly. LeBron reminds me of Bo on those plays when he says, “Screw it, I’m scoring” and barrels toward the basket like a runaway freight train. He’s like a young Barkley crossed with a young Shawn Kemp crossed with young Magic, but with a little Bo thrown in. Of anyone in the league, he’s the only player who can cripple the other team with one monster play.)
As LeBron took over the last few minutes in Jersey, he made one of the more startling plays I can remember, pulling the “runaway freight train” routine in transition and careening toward the basket as one Net hacked him, then another Net fouled him from the other side, then a third guy fouled him just to make sure he wouldn’t score. LeBron was cradling the ball, taking supersize steps toward the basket and absorbing those karate chops. Boom-Boom-Boom. Any normal human being would have lost the ball or gone tumbling to the ground. Not LeBron. He kept plowing forward like a tight end bouncing off defensive backs. As the last guy walloped him, LeBron jumped (where did he get the strength?), regained control of the basketball, hung in the air, hung in the air for another split second, gathered the ball (at this point, he was drifting under the right side of the rim) and spun a righty layup that banked in. The shot was so freaking incredible, the referee practically hopped in delight as he called the continuation foul. Say goodbye to the Nets—they were done. He ripped their hearts out, MJ-style. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. And he’s only twenty-one.39
February 2007. LeBron coasted through Saturday’s Skills Challenge and played Sunday’s All-Star Game with the intensity of a female porn star trying to break one of those “most male partners in one afternoon” records. Could we end up putting him in the “Too Much, Too Soon” Pantheon some day, along with Eddie Murphy, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and every other celeb who became famous too quickly and eventually burned out? Here’s what I know. I had four conversations with connected NBA people centering around the same themes: LeBron isn’t playing nearly as hard as last season; it seems like his only goal right now is to get his coach fired; he’s regressing as a player (especially his passing skills and shot selection); he made a huge mistake firing his agent and turning his career over to his overwhelmed buddies back home; he was a much bigger problem during the Olympics than anyone realized; he doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself anymore; he has an overrated sense of his own impact in the sports world (as witnessed by ESPN’s interview last week when he answered the “What are your goals?” question with two words: “Global icon”); he’s been protected by magazine fluff pieces and buddy-buddy TV interviews for far too long; he lacks the relentless drive to keep dominating everyone that set Wade and Kobe apart; and, we’re much closer to LeBron reenacting the career arc of Martina Hingis, Eric Lindros and Junior Griffey than anyone realizes. This will evolve into the dominant NBA story of the next two months. You watch.40
June 2007. This wasn’t just about the improbable barrage of points (29 of Cleveland’s 30) down the stretch, those two monster dunks at the end of regulation, the way he persevered despite crummy coaching and a mediocre supporting cast, how he just kept coming and coming, even how he made that game-winning layup look so damned easy.41 Physically, LeBron overpowered the Pistons. Like watching a light heavyweight battling a middleweight for eight rounds and suddenly realizing, “Wait, I have 15 pounds on this guy,” then whipping the poor guy into a corner and destroying him with body punches. The enduring moment? LeBron flying down the middle for a Doc retro dunk and Tayshaun Prince ducking for cover like someone reacting to a flyby from a fighter jet. The Pistons wanted no part of him. They were completely conquered. They didn’t knock him down, jump in front of him for a charge … hell, they were so shell-shocked by what was happening, they didn’t even realize they should be throwing two guys at him.42 Down the stretch, LeBron turned into a cross between Bo and MJ, seized the moment, made it his own, took everyone to a higher place. As a reader named Billy emailed me afterward, “Watching LeBron finally enabled me to understand the Pele speech that the cook gave to Louden Swain in Vision Quest. When the game was over, I wanted to wrestle Chute.”43 Me too. Like so many other sports junkies, I watch thousands and thousands of hours of games every year hoping something special will happen, whether it’s a 60-point game, a no-hitter, a seven-run comeback, a back-and-forth NFL game, a boxing pay-per-view, or whatever else. Occasionally, it pays off. Maybe there are degrees of the word, but still, every time we’re clicking on a television or heading to a ball-game, deep down we’re hoping something special happens.
Well, Thursday night was ultraspecial. Watching King James finally earn his nickname made me feel like my basketball life was being irrevocably altered. Hold on to your seats, everybody … it’s happening! LeBron James is making the leap! If you care about basketball, you’ll remember where you watched this game twenty years from now.44 If you care about basketball, it meant something when Marv Albert blessed the night by calling it “one of the greatest performances in NBA playoff history.” If you care about basketball, you enjoyed TNT’s postgame show, when a giddy Barkley was so hyped up that he couldn’t remain still in his seat. If you care about basketball, this game immediately joined the Bird-’Nique Duel, The Flu Game, the Willis Game and every other classic that can be rehashed in three or four words. We’ll call this LeBron’s 48-pointer someday. ’Nuff said.45 I had a reader compare it to a player catching fire in the old NBA Jam arcade game, when every jump shot turned the basketball into a ball of flames. I had a Pistons fan named Duane email me, “Watching LeBron’s performance in Game 5 made me feel like Ron Burgundy. LBJ pooped in my refrigerator, ate the whole wheel of cheese and I’m not even mad. That was amazing.” I had a reader compare LeBron’s performance to the “No Effing Way Game” in Madden, when the computer makes the executive decision, “Look, you’re not winning this game.” I had a reader named Justin Jacobs email me, “After LeBron single-handedly beat the Pistons tonight, I looked at my ten-year-old brother and told him, ‘You just bore witness to one of the greatest performances in NBA history.’ You know you’re seeing a great moment in sports when you’re happy that your little brother was there to see it.”
Look, I don’t know where we’re headed with the LeBron era—how high he’ll go, what he has in store down the road, even whether Game 5 will end up being an aberration along the lines of Vince Carter’s 50-point game in the 2001 Philly series. But for the first time, I feel confident that we’re headed for the right place.
February 2008. A friend from NBA Entertainment and I were discussing LeBron’s career and trying to figure out where it might be headed.46 This is one of my favorite basketball friends, someone who has spent the past twenty-plus years working for the Association and legitimately cares about it. I joke about how I’m one of the last nineteen NBA fans; the number is obviously higher, but it’s still a small number who care not only about the league right now but also about what the league used to be and how everything ties together over the years. We are fanatics. Kool-Aid drinkers. Quite simply, the league means a little too much to us. It’s a relatively small group that takes a noticeable hit every time we lose someone like Ralph Wiley, who would have absolutely adored this particular season, but that’s a whole ’nother story. Anyway, I asked my friend what he thought the ceiling for LeBron’s career could be. Again, this is someone who was overqualified to answer that question, as well as someone who loves the NBA too much to exaggerate his answer. I knew I would get an honest take from him. Here was his answer: “Doesn’t have one.”
If he had said that last February, I would have snickered. This year? I nodded.
February 2009. I figured out LeBron’s ceiling. At least for right now. At age twenty-four, he’s a cross between ABA Doc (unstoppable in the open court, breathtaking in traffic, can galvanize teammates and crowds with one “wow” play, handles himself gracefully on and off the court) and 1992 Scottie Pippen (the freaky athletic ability on both ends, especially when he’s cutting pass lines or flying in from the weak side for a block), with a little MJ (his overcompetitiveness and “there’s no way we’re losing this game” gear), Magic (the unselfishness, which isn’t where I thought it would be back in 2003, but at least it’s there a little) and Bo (how he occasionally overpowers opponents in ways that doesn’t seem fully human) mixed in … only if that Molotov NBA superstar cocktail was mixed together in Karl Malone’s 275-pound body. This is crazy. This is insane. This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And to think, LeBron doesn’t even have a reliable 20-footer or any semblance of a post-up game yet. See, this is only going to get better. And it’s already historic.
As a Celtics fan, I shudder for the future. As an NBA fan, I am pinching myself.47
April 2009. Not since Magic has a superstar doubled as such a galvanizing teammate. If there’s an enduring image of the ’09 season, it’s the way LeBron stamped his personality on everyone around him. They orchestrate goofy pregame intros (my favorite: the team snapshot), trade countless chest bumps, giggle on the sidelines, hang out on road trips and support each other in every way. What’s telling about LeBron’s in-traffic dunks—and he unleashes them more frequently than anyone since Dominique—is how he seeks out his bench for feedback, and even better, how they give it to him. It makes the forced camaraderie of the Lakers seem glaring. If you want to watch a team that pulls for each other and follows the lead of its best player, watch Cleveland.
And if you’re a Cavs fan trying to talk yourself into LeBron staying after 2010, your best chance is this: through twenty-four years, LeBron has proven to be an inordinately devoted guy. When you’re with him, you’re with him. The upcoming documentary about his high school years bangs this point home. So does the fact that he jettisoned his agents and surrounded himself with high school buddies. So does everything that happened this season. He’s as good a teammate as a player. The more I watch him, the more I wonder if such an intensely loyal guy would ever say, “Thanks for the memories, everybody,” dump his teammates, dump his hometown and start a fresh life elsewhere. Although he isn’t surrounded by the most talented players right now, collectively it’s a team in the truest sense, with a devoted set of fans who appreciate them, and maybe that’s all LeBron James will need in the end. I thought he was a goner four months ago. I think he’s staying now. Regardless, he’s our Most Valuable Player for 2009. It won’t be the last time.
19. CHARLES BARKLEY

Resume: 16 years, 12 quality, 11 All-Stars … ’93 MVP … ’90 runner-up … Top 5 (’88, ’89, ’90, ’91, ’93), Top 10 (’86, ’87, ’92, ’94, ’95), Top 15 (’96) … season leader: rebounds (1x) … 3-year peak: 26–13–4 … best player on runner-up (’93 Suns), 27–14–4 (24 G) … ’90 Playoffs: 25–16–4 (10 G) … ’94 Playoffs: 28–13–5 (10 G) … member of ’92 Dream Team … career: 22.1 PPG, 11.7 RPG (20th), 54% FG … Playoffs: 23.0 PPG, 12.9 RPG, 51.3 FG (123 G) … 20K-10K Club
18. KARL MALONE

Resume: 19 years, 17 quality, 14 All-Stars … MVP: ’97, ’99 … ’98 runner-up … Top 5 (’89, ’90, ’91, ’92, ’93, ’94, ’95, ’96, ’97, ’98, ’99), Top 10 (’88, ’00), Top 15 (’01) … All-Defense (3x) … 2 All-Star MVP’s … 3-year peak: 30–11–2 … career: 25–10, 52% FG, 74% FT … Playoffs: 25–10, 46% FG (193 G) … best player on 2 runner-ups (’97, ’98 Jazz) … member of ’92 Dream Team … career: FTs and FTAs (1st); points (2nd); rebounds (6th); games (4th); minutes (2nd), 25.0 PPG (10th), 10.1 RPG (12th), 52% FG … 35K-14K Club (one of two members)
Put it this way: You’d think less of me if I didn’t do a Dr. Jack Breakdown of Barkley and Malone, right? We can’t have that. Without further ado …
Nickname. Charles went by “The Round Mound of Rebound,” “Sir Charles,” “Chuck Wagon” … he had nearly as many nicknames as Apollo Creed. None of them stuck. For some reason, it feels like “Chuck” (the name everyone endearingly calls him now) counts as a nickname, but that’s really just a proper name. Meanwhile, Malone had “the Mailman,” a clever alias which took on a second life in the ’97 and ’98 playoffs when shit-stirring columnists like myself started calling him “Mail Fraud.” Edge: Malone.
Durability. Barkley missed 121 games from ’91 to ’99 and only played six 79-plus game seasons. Malone had ten 82-game seasons and seven 90-plus game seasons (including playoffs) and missed 10 games total in his eighteen Utah seasons. Guess which guy was the workout fanatic and which guy consumed fried foods, drank tons of beer and bled gravy. Edge: Malone.
Bad luck. Barkley made the Eastern Finals as a rookie before Toney’s feet crumbled, Doc started fading and Moses’ rear end expanded. Still, Philly didn’t have to completely panic—they screwed Chuck by trading the number one pick in the ’86 draft for Roy Hinson and $750,000 (why not just take Brad Daugherty?), then dealing Moses for Jeff Ruland and Clifford Robinson in one of the five worst trades of the eighties that didn’t involve Ted Stepien. That meant poor Chuck had to carry a series of uninspiring Philly teams before cannibalizing them and forcing the Phoenix trade. Barkley had good teammates for the remainder of his career, but he was thirty by that time and his cholesterol level was already at 522. As for Malone, his buddy Stockton took care of him for nearly two full decades and gave him a wingman for roughly 700,000 high screens. Something tells me Barkley would love to go back in time to 1984 and switch places with him.48 Edge: Barkley.
Draft-day outfit. Barkley wore a double-breasted maroonish purple sportscoat with a matching tie that made him look like an eighties movie usher or a security guard at a casino that’s going out of business. Malone wore a silver-blue sports coat with a blue shirt, cream-colored pants and a pink tie that only went down to his navel. I’ll put it this way: Barkley’s outfit was funny, but Malone’s outfit makes me laugh out loud even twenty-four years later. No contest. Edge: Malone.49
Ability to finish in transition. Everyone was afraid to take a charge from Malone, a brilliant finisher who was built like a defensive end and always led with his right knee (with the message being “This is going right into your nuts if you stand in front of me”). But you know what? He couldn’t top Barkley in those early Philly years, when Chuck was a frightening blend of power and finesse and even he couldn’t figure out how to harness it. He ate up Bird’s best teams because they lacked athletes who could handle him in transition, especially when he grabbed a rebound and took off on one of those rollicking full-court forays that usually ended up with him throwing a two-handed tomahawk in DJ’s mug as the Spectrum erupted. That’s his legacy, at least for me. Wake me up when we see someone under six-foot-five do a better impression of a runaway train. Nobody ever caused more players to cower for their lives than Barkley; if they kept stats for something this dumb, I’d bet anything that nobody tried to take a charge from Chuck from 1984 through 1991. It never happened. The guy was a force of nature. Edge: Barkley.
Most distinct strength. Moses was the best offensive rebounder of my lifetime; Barkley was second.50 From ’87 through ’90, Chuck averaged nearly five offensive rebounds a game. He grabbed 510 offensive rebounds in 123 playoff games. He holds the NBA record for most offensive rebounds in a half (13) and quarter (11). Did I mention that the guy was six-foot-four-and-a-half? When will we ever see anything like that again? As for Mal-one, he mastered the screener’s role in the high screen better than anyone ever. How much of that success hinged on the familiarity of playing with Stockton? A shitload. But that became one of the deadlier plays in NBA history … you know, as long as it wasn’t happening with 2 minutes left in a huge game. Edge: Malone.
Defining game. For Barkley, it has to be the 56-point ass-kicking against G-State in the ’94 Playoffs right after C-Webb’s shoe commercial came out and included a clip of Webber dunking on Barkley. That’s one of my ten favorite “Hardwood Classics” games and an all-around evisceration of epic proportions. For Malone, unfortunately, it’s Game 1 of the ’97 Finals—right after he had been handed the MVP Award, when he choked on two go-ahead free throws in the last 20 seconds and Jordan drained the game-winner. We never took the Mailman seriously as an MVP again. At least I didn’t. Edge: Barkley.
Defining record. Either “15 field goals in one playoff half” or “most points scored within 90 minutes of finishing off 100 chicken wings at the Ground Round” for Barkley. I can’t decide. For Malone, it’s definitely his “most 2,000-point seasons (twelve)” record, which LeBron will be breaking in 2017. Edge: Malone.
Defining tough-guy story. Malone avenged Isiah’s 44-point killing of Stockton with a vicious elbow that busted open Isiah’s eyebrow and would have earned a thirty-five-game suspension had it happened today.51 Barkley didn’t just start a fight with Shaq (not a misprint), he fought the ’90 Pistons in a brawl that spilled into the first two row of the stands in Detroit and became the spiritual godfather of the Artest melee (with Chuck even taking a swing at a fan). If you got into a brawl, you wanted either guy on your side … but Chuck had a higher upside. Edge: Barkley.
Unintentional comedy. For whatever reason, both guys were wildly fun to imitate. My old boss Kimmel could spend fifteen solid minutes talking like Malone; all you do is deepen your voice, refer to yourself in the third person, talk in abrupt sentences in the present tense, add a slight southern accent and use a lot of double negatives.52 For Barkley, just make him sound like Muhammad Ali circa 1973 after about four drinks, then have him repeat himself over and over again and start sentences with prepositions like “First of all …” and “Number one …” Frankly, I can’t decide. So I left it up to Kimmel. His take? “Karl Malone love making up jokes. Karl Malone always say, ‘laughter is the best Mexican.’” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Edge: Malone.
Defensive prowess. Malone got better as the years passed and started making All-Defense teams after the midway point of his career, even reinventing himself as a grizzled defense/picks/rebounding guy for the ’04 Lakers: he did a fabulous job defending Tim Duncan in Round 2, holding him to just 17.5 points and 38 percent shooting in the last four games (all Laker wins). Then he injured a knee in the Minnesota series and crushed L.A.’s hopes for a title. Too bad. As for the shorter Barkley, his low-post defense ranged from consistently bad to legitimately atrocious, although he tallied a decent share of steals, blocks and momentum-swinging fast-break blocks. Barkley’s kryptonite was any tall power forward with a polished low-post game (the McHale/Duncan types). That’s when he moved into “crap, I’m just going to have to outscore you” mode. Big edge: Malone.
Acuity for handling male pattern baldness. Barkley shrewdly shaved his head; Malone kept going and going and going with the Ed Harris look, finally shaving his head during the late nineties (but not before doing some Rogaine ads first). Edge: Barkley.
Peak year. We’re using that MVP season for Malone even though I’ve been pissing on it throughout the book: 64 wins, 27.4 points, 9.9 rebounds, 4.5 assists, 55% shooting and first-team All-D is nothing to sneeze at (even in a diluted league). For Barkley, we’re going with that secretly incredible ’90 season when he tossed up a 25–12–4 on an uninspiring Philly team and dragged them to a division title,53 shooting an ungodly 60 percent from the field even though he stupidly hoisted up 92 threes (making 20 of them). Do you realize that Barkley made 686 of 1,085 two-pointers that year? That’s 64 percent! During one of the most competitive seasons in the history of the league! And he wasn’t even six-foot-five! Edge: Barkley.
Crunch-time abilities. They both had fatal flaws: Malone routinely and famously shrank from the moment; Barkley thought he was better than he was. Always better off playing Tony Almeida than Jack Bauer, Chuck measured himself by Jordan and wanted to dominate close games just like MJ did … and that’s what usually ended up killing his teams in the end. Even if those 56-point Golden State explosions rarely happened, Chuck carried himself in crunch time like he had dozens of them bursting out of his pockets. Watch some of those playoff contests from ’93 to ’95: had Chuck shared the ball in crunch time instead of firing up dumb threes, trying to run fast breaks and doing the “I’m getting the ball, backing in and stopping our offense for 6 seconds while I decide what to do” routine, the Suns would have captured the title at least once. But he couldn’t do it. He always wanted to be The Man even though he wasn’t totally that player. And that’s why he doesn’t have a ring. I actually think you’d have a better chance of winning a hypothetical ring with Malone than Barkley—like Garnett, Malone always secretly knew his place. Barkley didn’t.54 Edge: even.
Fatal flaw. The deer-in-the-headlights routine in big games for Malone. Time and time again, he came up short when it mattered (Game 1 of the ’97 Finals and Game 6 of the ’98 Finals were the best examples), and it’s impossible to forget NBC’s Bill Walton just ripping him apart during that ’97 Finals and repeatedly asking in a cracking voice, “What has happened to Karl Maloooooooone?” But you know what? I can forgive that. Plenty of great players didn’t totally have “it” inside them. Here’s what can’t be forgiven: Barkley’s refusal to stop partying or get himself into reasonable shape; his career should have been 15 percent better than it was.55 When Pippen lobbed shots at Barkley’s lack of conditioning after their unhappy ’99 marriage, Ron Harper defended Scottie by saying, “Everybody knows Charles is a great guy, but every year he’s talking about winning a championship, and then he comes to training camp out of shape. That shows what kind of guy he is. Pip wants to win. If you aren’t doing what you should be doing, he’s going to let you know.” Ouch. Barkley got himself in shape for those first two Phoenix seasons and that’s it.56 Malone stayed in superb shape for two solid decades. Major edge: Malone.
Personality/charisma. Barkley wins over Malone and everyone else in league history. Who would have been a more fun teammate than Charles Barkley? He loved gambling, drinking, eating, and busting on everyone’s balls. (Wait, that sounds like me!) As for Malone, he was fun to hang out with if you wanted to herd some cattle or needed a workout partner at 7:00 a.m. Um, I’ll take Chuck. And you wonder why he never reached his potential. Major edge: Barkley.
Head to head. They only met twice in the playoffs: 1997 and 1998 (with Utah winning both times), but Barkley was injured in ’98 and only played 4 games (87 minutes in all), while the tight ’97 series was swung by the obscenely lopsided Stockton-Maloney matchup. In ’97, Malone averaged 22 points and 11.5 rebounds and shot 45 percent (56 for 125); Barkley went for 17.2 points and 11.0 rebounds and shot 42 percent (27 for 63). Not exactly Hagler-Hearns. When they were playing for quality teams in their primes (’93 and ’94), they met in the regular season seven times: the Suns won five, with Barkley averaging 23.4 points, 11.4 rebounds and 4.3 assists and Malone averaging 21.8 points, 8 rebounds and 3.4 assists. Edge to Barkley. And then there’s this one: Heading into the ’92 Olympics, many thought the Dream Team would be Malone’s breakthrough. Jack McCallum even wrote, “Many observers think that [Malone and Pippen] will benefit the most from the worldwide exposure, since both are extremely photogenic athletes who, as Malone puts it, ‘haven’t exactly been plastered all over everything.’” So what happened? Barkley emerged as the Dream Team’s second-best player, number one power forward and breakout star. That has to count for something, right? Chuck blended in with great teammates better than Malone did, led the team in scoring and became its dominant personality. It’s just a fact. By the end of the Olympics, SI was describing him as the “talk of the Olympic games,” with McCallum gushing, “His astonishing range of abilities—outrebounding much taller players, running the floor like a guard and getting his shot off with either hand while bouncing off bodies around the basket—seem more pronounced when performed within the Dream Team galaxy.”57
What happened to Malone? He sank into the shadows as a supporting player (like one of those SNL cast members who appears in the opening credits after the main cast with one of those “and featuring Karl Ma lone …” graphics), getting press only after he raised a fuss about competing against an HIV-positive Magic before the ’93 season.58 Then Barkley carried Phoenix to 62 wins and gave the Bulls everything they could handle in the ’93 Finals. After the ’93 season, the Barkley-Malone argument was dead; Barkley had won. After the ’94 season? Still dead. Then Malone kept chugging along and chugging along, Barkley let himself go and things began to shift. Barkley’s apex was definitely better, but not so much better that it outweighed Malone’s longevity and consistency. Malone maximized the potential of his career; Barkley can’t say the same. It’s true. Final edge: Malone (barely).
17. BOB PETTIT

Resume: 11 years, 10 quality, 11 All-Stars … MVP: ’56, ’59 … Runner-up: ’57, ’61 … Top 5 (’55–’64), Top 10 (’65) … ’55 Rookie of the Year … 4 All-Star MVPs … 3-year peak: 28–18–3 … leader: scoring (2x), rebounds (1x) … career: 26.4 PPG (6th), 16.2 RPG (3rd) … Playoffs: 26–15–3 (88 G) … best player on one champ (’58 Hawks) and 3 runners-up (’57, ’60, ’61) … first member of 20K-10K Club
I’m asking for a little leap of faith, like when you watched The Hangover and never questioned how the boys could have done so many different things in Vegas during one ten-hour blackout.59 Could Pettit hang with guys like Duncan and Bosh today? Probably not. Offensively, I think he’d be okay—a less athletic cross between Carlos Boozer and Paul Pierce. (Pettit had three go-to moves: a don’t-leave-me-alone 18-footer, a leaning jumper coming off screens and a reliable turnaround that Bob Ryan once called “monotonous.” He couldn’t dunk unless a donut and coffee were involved. Tom Heinsohn once described Pettit’s cagey offensive game by calling him “the master of the half-inch.” Mrs. Pettit had no comment.) Defensively, you wouldn’t be able to hide him. But everyone from that era describes Pettit the same way: Relentless. Banger. Warrior. Hard-nosed. Remember Boston’s more physical playoff games when Bird couldn’t get his outside shot going, so he’d switch gears and start banging bodies down low (eventually pulling down 18 boards and getting to the line 12 times)? That was Pettit. In 64 playoff games in his prime (’57 to ’63), he averaged 28 points, 16 rebounds and a whopping 11.7 free throw attempts.60 He also exhibited remarkable durability, playing 746 of a possible 754 games (including Playoffs) without the help of chartered planes, arthroscopic surgeons, stretching routines and strength/conditioning coaches. And you can’t play the “Pettit only thrived because the black guys weren’t around yet” card because nine of Pettit’s eleven seasons coincided with Russell, seven with Elgin, six with Wilt, and five with Oscar and West, even capturing the ’62 All-Star MVP by scoring 25 points and notching a game-high 27 rebounds. Check out these numbers from ’59 to ’64.


Beyond that, Pettit and Wilt were the only two alpha dogs to topple Russell’s Celtics. Pettit avoided a Game 7 in Boston with a then-record 50 points, including 18 of St. Louis’s last 21, as well as a jumper and a clinching tip in the final 20 seconds to seal the 1958 title. So what if Russell was limping around in a cast and only played 20 minutes? That’s still one of the better performances in Finals history.61 Pettit hasn’t endured historically partly because no tape exists of that game, and partly because he didn’t have that one “thing” that kept him relevant along the lines of Oscar averaging a triple double, Russell winning eleven titles in thirteen years or even West becoming the NBA’s logo. He just missed the television era, didn’t play in a big market and lacked an identifiably transcendent skill like Bird’s passing or Baylor’s hang time. If you want to dig deeper, his southern roots (as well as the damaging Cleo Hill incident) probably linger for many of the great black players from that era, none of whom seem that interested in singing his praises these days. (Russell battled Pettit in four separate NBA Finals and only mentioned him once in Second Wind, with a little dig about how Pettit traveled every time he made an offensive move and the refs never called.) But you know what really killed Pettit historically? His hair. He made Locke on Lost look like Michael Landon. You can’t penalize him for that. You also can’t penalize him for Russell’s injury in the ’58 Finals; only one year earlier, Boston needed a triple-OT Game 7 in the Finals to defeat the Hawks. If he played today, Pettit would shave his head, grow a Fu Manchu, get a prominent tattoo, wax his body, and look like a f*cking bad-ass. Back then, it was perfectly fine for the league’s best power forward to look like he should be teaching eleventh-grade shop. You can’t judge.
16. JULIUS ERVING

Resume: 16 years, 14 quality, 16 All-Stars (5 ABA) … ’74, ’75, ’76 ABA MVP ’74, ’76 Playoffs MVP … ’81 NBA MVP … ’80 runner-up … Top 5 NBA (’78, ’80–’83), Top 10 NBA (’77, ’84), Top 5 ABA (’73–’76), Top 10 ABA (’72) … two All-Star MVP’s … ABA leader: scoring (3x) … 3-year NBA peak: 25–7–4 … best player on 2 ABA champs (’74, ’76 Nets) and 3 runner-ups (’77, ’80, ’82 Sixers), 3rd-best player on NBA champ (’83 Sixers) … ’76 Playoffs: 35–13–5 (13 G) … ’80 Playoffs: 25–8–4 (18 G) … career ABA: 28.7 PPG (1st), 12.1 RPG (3rd) … career: points (5th), steals (13th) … 30K-10K Club
The case against Doc being ranked this high: Couldn’t shoot a 15-footer … surprisingly subpar defender … too passive offensively … too nice a guy, not enough of a killer … more style than substance … unwittingly overrated by the national media because he was so gracious and well-spoken … put up his peak numbers in a ramshackle league where nobody played defense, then never approached those numbers after the merger … lost five straight playoff series in his NBA prime in which he barely outplayed Bob Gross (1977), got outplayed by Bob Dandridge (’78), played Larry Kenon to a draw (’79), played Jamaal Wilkes to a draw (’80) and got severely outplayed by Larry Bird (’81) … struggled enough with sore knees in the late seventies that SI ran a March ’79 feature called “Hey, What’s Up with the Doc?”62… never won an NBA ring until Moses saved him.
The case for Doc being ranked this high: One of the most groundbreaking, important and influential players ever … one of the most exciting players ever … ushered in the Wait a Second, This Dunking Thing Is Really Fun! Era, which eventually turned basketball into a billion-dollar business … single-handedly carried the failing ABA for three extra years … excelled at finishing fast breaks like nobody except for Barkley and maybe LeBron … filled a crucial void in the seventies as “the only beloved black basketball player during a time when fans were turning against basketball because it was considered to be ‘too black’”… probably the captain of the Articulate and Classy All-Time NBA team … along with Cousy, Russell, Wilt, Bird, Magic, Elgin, Mikan and Jordan, one of the nine most important NBA players ever … did I mention that he carried The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh?
(Quick tangent: Fish was the goofier bastard cousin of Fast Break. Doc played Moses Guthrie, the star of the Pittsburgh Pisces, who have their season turned around by a young waterboy and a wacky astrologist. Highlight no. 1: Doc’s acting made Keanu Reeves look like Philip Seymour Hoffman. Highlight no. 2: Doc awkwardly takes a date to a playground at night, then does dunks for her with bad seventies music playing. Somehow this brings them closer together. Highlight no. 3: The basketball scenes are so poorly edited that in one scene, one of Doc’s teammates (Driftwood) takes a jumper, then they cut to him standing under the basket as it goes in. Highlight no. 4: They play Kareem’s Lakers in the climactic scene and everyone has a glazed “Instead of paying us in cash, can’t they pay us in coke?” look. Highlight no. 5: Kareem disappears for the entire fourth quarter for reasons that remain unclear. It’s never mentioned or addressed. Phenomenal. I love this movie.)
Back to the “nine most important players ever” point: What happens to professional basketball without Julius Winfield Erving? Elgin and Russell turned a horizontal game into a vertical one, but Doc grabbed the torch, explored the limits of gravity and individual expression, ignited the playgrounds, delighted fans, inspired the likes of Thompson and Jordan and stamped his creative imprint on everything we’re watching today. He’s like Cousy in this respect; Cousy showed that you could entertain NBA fans while you tried to win and so did Doc. They just did it in different ways. Cousy modernized professional basketball; Doc colorized it, repossessed it, turned it into a black man’s game. If he’d never showed up, would it have happened anyway? Yeah, probably. But it’s like Apple with home computers, Bill James with baseball statistics, Lorne Michaels with sketch comedy … maybe the seeds for the revolution were in place, but somebody had to have the foresight to water those seeds and see what would happen. For basketball, that person ended up being Doc.
His glory years happened in the ABA, with little record of what happened because those teams could barely get fans to show up (much less land a local TV contract). Doc’s eye-popping statistics overshadow the meat of the story: few professional athletes were ever described in such glowing, you-had-to-be-there-to-understand terms. It’s like hearing William Goldman try to describe watching Brando in his prime on Broadway and ultimately failing, but in the process of failing, he was so passionate about it that the point was still made. Everyone in the ABA revered Doc. There was an implicit understanding that he was the league’s meal ticket, the one player who could never be undercut, clotheslined, elbowed, or injured.63 His open-court dunks had such a galvanizing effect on crowds—not just home crowds, but away crowds—that Hubie Brown created a “no dunks for Doc” rule for Kentucky home games because any exciting Doc dunk turned the crowd against the Colonels. (Now that’s a magical player—when you can sway opposing crowds to your side, you know you’ve accomplished something.) His foul line slam in the ’76 Slam Dunk Contest remains one of the single most thrilling basketball moments that ever happened. It almost caused a f*cking riot. And if you’re wondering about Doc’s ceiling as a basketball player, his five-game stretch in the ’76 Finals ranks among the greatest ever submitted at any level: 45–12, 48–14, 31–10, 34–15, 31–19 with none other than Bobby Jones defending him.
So why didn’t he reach similar heights in the NBA? Because the league was so much more talented and tumultuous—that postmerger stretch from ’77 to ’79 was a mess of transactions, drugs and contrasting styles.64 Because coaching and defensive plans became more elaborate, with every quality team making Doc shoot 20-footers and fouling him on any potential dunk. Because Doc played the NBA’s most stacked position (small forward) and dealt with a steady stream of Walter Davis, Bernard King, Dantley, Dandridge, Havlicek, Barry, Wilkes, Kenon, Bobby Jones, Bird, Dominique (note: this list keeps going and going) every night for the next decade. Because his knees were slightly shot from riding coach and playing on bad floors for five grueling ABA years. Because more and more players started doing the same superathletic things. It’s not like he was a bust or anything—he led the Sixers to four Finals and a title, averaged a 30–7–5 in the ’77 Finals, averaged a 26–7–5 in the ’80 Finals, won the ’81 MVP (debunked in the MVP chapter, but still), made five first-team All-NBA’s, remained the league’s biggest draw and submitted four iconic plays (the “ Rock-a-baby” dunk over Michael Cooper in 1983, the tomahawk dunk over Walton in the ’77 Finals, a vicious slam over Kareem in the ’77 All-Star Game, and the swooping behind-the-basket finger roll over Kareem in the ’80 Finals). Just the NBA portion of his career easily propels him into the Hall of Fame. For all-time purposes, the length of Doc’s career also sets him apart: sixteen seasons, all good/excellent/superior to varying degrees with remarkable durability,65 and even when he faded a little near the end, he never disgraced himself like so many others.
How do we translate Doc to modern times when his old-school style couldn’t totally succeed now? He couldn’t post anyone up unless it was a guard. He couldn’t consistently drain 18-foot jumpers, much less threes. During the ’81 playoffs, Boston’s Bill Fitch threw bigger forwards on him (usually McHale or Maxwell), had them play five feet off, then angled him toward the shot blockers in the middle (keeping him away from the baseline). For the most part, it worked. That was Doc’s fatal flaw: he couldn’t totally make teams pay for playing off him. (When Jordan entered the league, Doc’s good friend Peter Vecsey was touting MJ’s praises to an unimpressed Erving and finally yelped, “Julius, you don’t understand, he’s you with a jump shot!”) As the years pass, I’m sure people will pick Doc’s resume apart with everything mentioned in the first paragraph, his star will fade, and that will be that. All I can tell you is this: I was there. I was young, but I was there. And Julius Erving remains one of the most gripping, terrifying, and unforgettable players I have ever seen in person. If he was filling the lane on a break, your blood raced. If he was charging toward a center and cocking the ball above his head, your heart pounded. Over everything else, I will remember his hands—his gigantic, freak-show, Freddy Krueger fingers—and how he palmed basketballs like soft-balls. One signature Doc play never got enough acclaim: the Sixers would clear out for him on the left side, with Doc’s defender playing five feet off and forcing him to the middle as always, only every once in a while, Doc would take the bait, dribble into the paint like he was setting up a baby hook or something … and then, before you could blink, he’d explode toward the rim, grow Plastic Man arms and spin the ball (again, which he was holding like a softball) off the backboard and in with some absurd angle. He did it easily and beautifully, like a sudden gust of 110 mph wind, like nothing you have ever seen. His opponents would shake their heads in disbelief. The fans would make one of those incredulous moans, followed by five seconds of “Did you just see that?” murmurs. And Doc would jog back up the court like nothing ever happened, classy as always, just another two points for him.
I will never forget watching Julius Erving play basketball. Ever.
15. KOBE BRYANT

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP (’09) … Top 5 (’02, ’03, ’04, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09), Top 10 (’00, ’01), Top 15 (’99, ’05) … MVP: ’08 … Simmons MVP: ’06 … All-Star MVP (’02, ’07, ’09) … All-Defense (8x, six 1st) … scoring leader (2x) … 2nd-most points, one game (81) … best player on 1 champ (’09 Lakers) 2nd-best player on 3 champs (’00, ’01, ’02), best player on runner-up (’04) … 2-year peak: 33–6–5 … ’01 Playoffs: 29–7–6, 47% FG (16 G) … ’08 + ’09 Playoffs: 30–6–6, 47% FG (44 G) … 20K Point Club … career: 25–5–5
Question: What movie best captured the secret of basketball?
You answered Hoosiers without blinking. Don’t lie. I know you did. And sure, that movie taught us about teamwork, fundamentals and the human spirit, as well as underrated lessons like “Don’t tell the ref that the drunk guy who just wandered onto the court is one of your assistants”; “Women are fickle and evil, especially when they haven’t boinked anyone in a while and they live with their mom”; “The basket is ten feet high even in a giant stadium”; “Whites will always beat blacks in basketball because they care more and they are smarter” (just kidding; that joke was for Spike Lee, who thought Hoosiers was secretly racist and might be right); “If the coach kicks someone off the team and then allows him back a few weeks later, this guy can just randomly show up in the movie again and it never has to be addressed”; and “If the best player on your team has scored 85 percent of your points in a championship game, and you have the ball with a chance to win, don’t get fancy—clear the floor and run a freaking play for him.” But Hoosiers was the wrong answer. Sorry.
The right answer? That’s right … Teen Wolf.
Most people mistakenly think it’s a werewolf comedy. Nope. It’s a thinking man’s basketball movie. You missed the signs because you were too busy wondering how Michael J. Fox66 nearly notched a triple double in the climactic game even though he was five-foot-four and dribbled with his head down … why Mick was allowed to stand under the basket to psych Fox out for the last two free throws … why they never ran more plays for Fat Boy when his hook shot was sublime … why the Wolf’s high school wasn’t deluged with reporters and camera crews from around the country … why Coach Finstock never gets more credit in the Greatest Sports Movie Characters Ever discussion67… even where “Win in the End” ranks against “You’re the Best” and “No Easy Way Out” in the pantheon of Greatest Cheesy eighties Sports Movie Montages. I don’t blame you for getting sidetracked; you just missed the movie’s enduring lesson.
After Fox first transforms into the wolf—the most amazing sports movie game to attend, narrowly edging the Allies/Nazi game from Victory, and only because you can’t top a sparsely attended high school hoops contest in which a player turns into a monster and starts dunking on everyone—once the shock wears off and the Wolf starts kicking ass, his teammates turn into props. At one point later in the season, a teammate is dribbling up the court and the Wolf swipes the ball from him, zigzags through traffic and gets a layup. The success goes right to his head. He starts banging the hottest chick in school. His buddy Stiles starts marketing “Wolf” T-shirts. He’s the big wolf on campus. But even with the team winning and making a late run at the playoffs, his teammates can’t help resenting the Wolf and wishing they played for someone else. He’s getting all the credit. He’s taking all the shots. They have no stake in the team’s performance anymore. So they stop working as hard and openly grumble about Fox/Wolf. With his personal life falling apart as well, he makes a stunning decision to play the regional championship game as himself. You know the rest. The team meshes together and everyone plays a key role (especially number 45, who turns into Bill Russell); Fox explodes for an 18–8 with three steals68 and sinks the winning free throws (after recovering from a flagrant foul on a give-and-go that took eight seconds to complete even with four seconds left on the clock); the fans happily pour onto the court as Fox plants a smooch on his homely friend Boof; and we learn that you can still derive individual glory from winning. The end.
What does this have to do with Kobe? He spent his career vacillating between a Fox and a Wolf. The Fox persona happened fairly consistently during his first three seasons, jumped a level during the Y2K season (when he effectively clinched the 2000 Finals with a clutch Game 4) and crested with his unparalled all-around performance in the ’01 Playoffs (really, a masterpiece). He battled an identity crisis during the third title season—half man, half wolf—and morphed into the Wolf over the next two years, lowlighted by a sexual assault charge, the deterioration of his relationship with Shaq and L.A.’s massive collapse in the ’04 Finals. (Note: Wolf mode offended me as a hoops fan even as I was picking him for the ’06 MVP. Would you have wanted to play with him during this stretch? There’s no way you said yes. None.) He didn’t suppress Wolf mode for four solid years, finally embracing his inner Fox one month before the Gasol trade (December ’07). And that’s where we’ve been ever since. Looking back, Kobe never seemed totally comfortable in his own skin—dating back to his ill-fated decision to shave his tiny head MJ-style in the late nineties, or his unintentionally hilarious rap duet with Tyra Banks during All-Star Weekend in 2000—with the Fox/Wolf internal struggle symbolizing everything. He spent the past four years systematically rehabbing his image as a player and public figure, starting with a number change (from 8 to 24), then a self-provided nickname (“Mamba”), then an identity change (he’s evolved into a devoted family man and fantastic teammate with a wonderful sense of humor, or so we’re told), then a “coolness” change (Nike fake-leaked a video of Kobe apparently jumping a speeding car), then a stylistic change (with 1,000-plus games on his odometer, Kobe smartly shifted to a more efficient offensive game: mastering a perimeter game that includes an improved jump shot, a deadly fall-away, and three different spin moves), eventually finding himself as the defensive specialist and crunch-time stud of the U.S.’s 2008 gold medal team.
All of this is fine. He’s certainly one of the fifteen greatest players and our most polarizing Pyramid Guy other than Wilt, thanks to a career that lent himself to more pop culture/sports analogies than any athlete I can remember.69 I spent more time figuring him out than any athlete other than Manny Ramirez. What I determined was this: I don’t like watching Kobe as the Wolf. I like when he’s in Fox mode. I just think his career would have been more special that way. Regardless, you cannot follow basketball without having an opinion on Kobe Bryant. Here’s how mine evolved from 2000 to 2009 (edited for space):
January 2000. Other than Tiger, Kobe is the only athlete who could potentially transcend his sport because of his work ethic, charisma and competitive fire. Seeing him battle all the potential pitfalls and land mines on the journey to true greatness, like Jordan did in the late eighties and early nineties, is enough to make me jealous of every die-hard Lakers fan … and that’s saying something. Kobe might make it. He might not. And that’s the beauty of the whole thing.
Winter 2002. The Kobe Experience would be ten times more interesting if he were forced to carry a .500 team. This isn’t another case of Magic-Kareem, or even Bird-McHale or MJ-Pippen, where there was a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed both players to reach even greater heights. In this case, Shaq makes Kobe’s life easier, and vice versa … and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing.70 Even if it translates to ten championships before everything’s said and done, I can’t shake the feeling that neither player will reach his optimum potential with the other guy hanging around.
April 2003. Kobe and Shaq are more like Crockett and Crockett than Crockett and Tubbs, just two alpha dogs tugging on the same bone. They settle their issues every spring, almost like two bullies calling a truce so they can split everyone’s lunch money. Sometimes Shaq takes over, sometimes Kobe does, but neither seems happy about taking a backseat. Their improbable relationship contrasts every success story in basketball history. Doesn’t someone have to emerge as The Guy? Watching Shaq and Kobe is like watching an old married couple struggle to remember why they liked each other in the first place. The triangle seems tired, the Kobe-Shaq dynamic seems tired, everything seems tired. When Kobe sinks a game-winning shot, his teammates react like they have to celebrate or they’ll get fined. The Lakers’ demise feels inevitable, like watching an episode of Behind the Music and waiting for the band-self-destructs segment. Flip a coin, draw straws, but do something. One of them has to go.
November 2004. We got what we wanted: Shaq and Kobe have their own teams. Maybe we needed a rape charge, multiple backstabbings and a controversial police interview to grease the skids,71 but it did happen. Now his teammates stand around and watch Kobe, then he makes it worse by over-compensating and trying to get them involved. The most underrated aspect of MJ’s game was his unparalleled competitiveness, something that Phil Jackson learned to channel into the team concept (where it galvanized teammates and wilted opponents). Just by the sheer force of his personality, everyone else raised their game. They didn’t have another choice. Kobe doesn’t have that same quality. He doesn’t understand something that Bird, Magic, Isiah and even MJ realized: you’re better off letting your teammates help carry the show for the first forty-two minutes, then taking over the last six. Let them think it’s a democracy, even if they’re wrong. For whatever reason, Kobe can’t seem to grasp this … and it’s his ninth season. Not a good sign.
January 2005. Houston reader J. McMurray: “We need, at a bare minimum, a 5,000-word column on Kobe Bryant. Can you believe the drama that surrounds this guy? He is absolutely crazy, but in a Michael Corleone kind of way. Can’t you just see Kobe sitting alone in the boathouse at his mansion on Lake Tahoe, just staring into the darkness?”
April 2005. House believes that, other than Ron Artest, Kobe was our 2005 LVP (Least Valuable Player)72 because he prematurely destroyed a Lakers dynasty. I countered that Kobe was our 2005 Worst GM (by stupidly forcing Shaq out) and can’t be blamed for his actual play, just as Eddie Murphy screwed up his career by deciding to direct Harlem Nights. You can’t penalize Kobe the Player for being screwed over by Kobe the GM.
November 2005. Here’s Kobe explaining his new nickname: “The black mamba can strike with 99 percent accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession. That’s the kind of basketball precision I want to have. Not being able to train the last two summers, I was in a gunfight with a rusty butter knife. I did my share of killing, but I was just fighting to survive.” It’s funny when wrestlers change gimmicks, it’s funny when Diddy changes nicknames, and it’s downright hysterical when an NBA star once accused of sexual assault decides it would be a fantastic idea to embrace the identity of a thirteen-foot serpent. But when they explain the choice of their self-given nickname with a beauty like “The mamba can strike with 99% accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession” and refuse to credit Kill Bill, it reminds me why I still love writing this column. Long live the Mamba.
November 2005. Next time you watch Scarface, look for the disturbing parallels between Tony Montana’s career and Kobe’s career: The meteoric rise, an embarrassing trial, heavy levels of egomania and paranoia, soul-selling turns for the worse (Manny’s death and the Shaq trade), and the crazy symmetry of Tony’s taking on an entire army of Sosa’s soldiers by himself and Mamba’s taking 40–45 shots a game for the 2005–6 Lakers with the league’s worst supporting cast. Is it too late to build a giant water fountain at the Staples Center for Kobe to fall into headfirst?
February 2006. For a perimeter player to score 81 points, you have to hog the ball to a degree that’s disarming to watch. My father and I were fascinated by Kobe’s icy demeanor, the lack of excitement by L.A.’s bench guys, even the dysfunctional way that his teammates were killing themselves going for rebounds and steals to get him more shots.73 When an exhausted Kobe reached 81 and appeared barely able to stay on his feet, the Lakers removed him to a standing ovation, as well as halfhearted hugs and high-fives from his teammates. The best reaction belonged to Jackson, who seemed amused, supportive and somewhat horrified, like how Halle Berry’s husband probably looked after sitting through his first screening of Monster’s Ball. Only later would we appreciate the significance of the second-highest scoring outburst in NBA history. For me, the moment happened long after Dad went to bed, when ESPN’s ticket flashed the Lakers final score, followed by, “BRYANT: 81 points, 6 rebounds, 2 assists.” And I remember thinking two things: (a) “Holy crap! 81 freaking points! Wait, that’s a lot of points!” and (b) “Two assists … now that’s comedy.” Maybe this was Mamba’s ultimate destiny: one-man scoring machine, gunner for the ages, the real-life Teen Wolf.74
April 2006. Kobe ended up getting what he always wanted: the Lakers completely revolve around him. He gets to shoot 25–30 times per game and take every big shot. He gets all the credit. And because he lucked out with the only possible coach who could make this cockamamie situation work, his supporting cast kills itself to make him look good. Basically, he’s Elvis and everyone else is Joe Esposito. And it’s working! That’s the crazy thing.
Late April 2006. Kobe passed up so many scoring chances to set up teammates in Game 4 [of the Suns series], it nearly cost the Lakers a winnable game. Where did Bizarro Kobe come from? The answer lies with [then-L.A. Times columnist] J. A. Adande, who ran an eye-opening Kobe-related quote from Phil Jackson: “Sometimes his needs overwhelm the rest of the ballclub’s necessity … as we get into the playoffs, that’ll dissipate, because he knows that he’s got to put his ego aside and conform to what we have to do if we’re going to go anywhere in the playoffs. Any player that takes it on himself to do that [play for himself] knows that he’s going against the basic principles of basketball. That’s a selfish approach to the game. You know when you’re breaking down the team or you’re breaking down and doing things individualistic, you’re going to have, you know, some unhappy teammates … and he knows these things … intuitively, I have to trust the fact that he’s going to come back to that spot and know that the timing’s right. The season’s over, things have been accomplished, records have been stuck in the books, statistics are all jelled in, now let’s go ahead and play basketball as we’re supposed to play it.”
One interesting wrinkle about that quote: Jackson made it two years ago, right before the 2004 playoffs. Hmmmmmmm.75
November 2007. For the previous three weeks, Kobe was on businesslike cruise control (for him), only he’s so damned good, you couldn’t even tell unless you were watching closely. For instance, they played a guaranteed loss in San Antonio last week in which Kobe attempted zero free throws. Translation: I don’t want to get tripped by Bruce Bowen and screw up a potential trade, so I’m just shooting 20-footers tonight. In retrospect, this was Vince Carter’s biggest mistake—not being good enough to mail it in. Kobe doesn’t have the same problem. And if I’m the Lakers, I’m not even thinking about a trade until January. See what happens over these next few weeks and see if Kobe becomes sufficiently engaged. He’s too competitive to remain on cruise control as long as they’re winning.
June 2008.I hate comparing anyone to Jordan, but what Kobe has shown over the past four months has been Jordanesque—not just his ability to raise his game in big moments (which he always had), but the way he picks his spots, keeps teammates involved and then arbitrarily takes over games and puts them away. If being an NBA superstar was like playing Grand Theft Auto, then that would be the final mission, right? The way Kobe single-handedly assassinated the Spurs in Games 1 and 5 was something we’ve only seen from a handful of players in NBA history. You can’t say enough about it. He has become the player we always wanted him to be.
June 2008. Phil from Burlington writes, “In the second quarter [of Game 4 of the Finals], did you see how Turiaf fell, got called for a charge and none of his teammates helped him up? They all walked away. That would never happen to the Celts, and that is why they are going to win. That is the best example of the difference between the two teams.” That and this: no Celtic would bitch out a teammate like Bryant bitched out Gasol after the big Spaniard failed to catch his 130 mph no-look pass in the first half of Game 5. How can Lakers fans continue to defend such petulant behavior? You got me. But hey, he must be a good guy because he can do news conferences while holding both of his kids.76
August 2008. For most of the Olympic Games, Team USA had an alpha dog issue. Was this Kobe’s team or LeBron’s? Fast-forward to 8:13 left (of the gold medal game): Rudy Fernández’s three cuts the lead to two; the crowd goes bonkers; Spain’s bench reacts like a euphoric fifteenth seed during a March Madness upset; and the United States calls timeout. All along, my biggest fear had been a tight game and multiple U.S. guys saying, “I got it!” Instead, everyone deferred to Kobe and he made some monster plays to clinch it. Know that in the history of the NBA we have never had the best-player-alive argument resolved so organically. Kobe, you have the Lord of the Flies conch. Use it wisely.
February 2009. You have to admire a future Hall of Famer with more than 1,000 NBA games on his odometer for playing 103 straight games and nearly 4,100 minutes last season, killing himself on the Redeem Team last summer, then playing another 51 straight games (and counting) this season … then somehow adding two moves over the summer (MJ’s late-career fall-away and that funky pivot move after he fakes the foul line jumper). He’s one of the few who delivers the goods every time you see him in person. Every time. I headed to Staples on Tuesday knowing Kobe would show up for four quarters. How many current guys can you say that about? Three? Five? He has more to gain historically than anyone over these next four months: if the Lakers win the title, he becomes one of the top eight players ever and that’s that.
Okay, back to this book. That Jackson quote from April ’06 explained Kobe the best. He knew the right way to play as evidenced by his playoff performances … but playing that way wasn’t his first choice. That’s what makes Kobe so polarizing: he’s the only great player who knew The Secret and didn’t take care of it. Watching him play, at least for me, was like having a friend purchase a beautiful $10 million mansion—like one of those ones in New Orleans where they film bad Brad Pitt movies—then paint it a weird color, refuse to hire a housekeeper, decorate it with goofy modern furniture and basically ruin the house. Buddy, what the f*ck are you doing? Don’t you realize what you have here? Kobe never did. He played basketball with a singular mentality, trusting his own exploits would lift his teammates but only intermittently bothering to make them better in a conventional way. I see him evolving historically as the next Oscar Robertson, with his numbers looking better and better as in-the-moment discretions and disappointments fade away almost entirely. The ceiling of that evaluation hinges on these next few years: if Kobe wins one more championship and/or embraces The Secret late in his career (think ’72 Wilt), he quickly jumps Oscar and West to become the third-best guard of all time. I would be fine with this. But if it happens, I just hope he remembers to plant a big smooch on Boof. (June ’09 Addition: That’s what happened. We will cover the details in the Epilogue—hold tight.)
14. ELGIN BAYLOR

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 11 All-Stars … ’63 MVP runner-up … ’59 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’67, ’68, ’69) … All-Star MVP (’59) … 3-year peak: 35–17–5 … best or 2nd-best player on 8 runner-ups (’60s Lakers) … 4-year Playoffs peak: 35–15–4, 46% FG (47 G) … Playoffs: 27–13–4 (134 G) … career: 27.4 PPG (4th), 13.5 RPG (10th) … 20K-10K Club
Jesse Owens. Jackie Robinson. Bill Russell. Jim Brown. Elgin Baylor. Oscar Robertson. Muhammad Ali.
Elgin doesn’t belong on the list. That’s what you’re thinking. Not the guy who wore goofy sweaters to the lottery every year. Not the unofficial caretaker for the worst franchise in professional sports. You might accept him on the Worst GM list, or even the Celebs Who Looked Most Like Nipsey Russell list. But not the list above. Not with Jesse and Jackie and Russell and Brown and Oscar and Ali. That’s a stretch. That’s what you’re thinking.
So come back with me to 1958, the year Elgin graduated from the University of Seattle and joined the Lakers. If you don’t think the city is teeming with black people now, you should have seen Minneapolis in 1958. America hadn’t started changing yet. Blacks were referred to as “Negroes” and “coloreds.” They drank from different water fountains, stood in their own lines for movies and were discriminated against in nearly every walk of life. When Elgin entered the NBA, the unwritten rule was that every team could only employ two black players. Nobody challenged it except the Celtics. Elgin strolled into a league where nobody played above the rim except Russell, nobody dunked and everyone played the same way: rebound, run the floor, get a quick shot. Quantity over quality. That’s what worked. Or so they thought. Because Elgin changed everything. He did things that nobody had ever seen. He defied gravity. Elgin would drive from the left side, take off with the basketball, elevate, hang in the air, hang in the air, then release the ball after everyone else was already back on the ground. You could call him the godfather of hang time. You could call him the godfather of the “wow” play. You could point to his entrance into the league as the precise moment when basketball changed for the better. Along with Russell, Elgin turned a horizontal game into a vertical one. He averaged a 25–15 and carried the Lakers to the Finals as a rookie. He scored 71 in New York in his second season.77 He averaged 34.8 points and 19.8 rebounds in his third season—as a six-foot-five forward, no less—and topped himself the following year by somehow averaging that incredible 38–19–5 on military leave. When he carried the ’62 Lakers to the cusp of a championship, he came within an errant Frank Selvy 10-footer of winning Game 7 in Boston.78 He would never come closer to a ring. Elgin wrecked his knee during the ’64 season and was never the same, although he still made ten first-team All-NBA’s and played in seven Finals. During the first two weeks of the ’72 season, Elgin believed he was holding back a potential champ and retired nine games into the season. The Lakers quickly rolled off a 33-game streak and cruised to a title. How many stars have the dignity to walk away when it’s time? How many would have walked away from a guaranteed ring? When does that ever happen?
Elgin lived through some things that we like to forget happened now. Lord knows how many racial slurs bounced off him, how many N-bombs were lobbed from the stands, how much daily prejudice he endured as the league’s signature black forward.79 Russell bottled everything up and used it as fuel for the next game: he wouldn’t suffer, but his opponents would suffer. Oscar morphed into the angriest dude in the league, a great player playing with an even greater chip on his shoulder. Elgin didn’t have the same mean streak. He loved to joke with teammates. He never stopped talking. He loved life and loved playing basketball. He couldn’t hide it. And so his body soaked up every ugly slight like a sponge. Only a few of those stories live on (like the West Virginia exhibition game). If you read about black stars from the fifties and sixties, everything comes back to the same point: the respect they earned from peers and fans was disproportionate to the way they were treated in their everyday lives. When Russell bought a house in a white Massachusetts suburb, his neighbors broke in, trashed the house and defecated on his bed. When Elgin was serving our country in 1961 and potentially sacrificing his livelihood, there were dozens of towns and cities strewn across America who wouldn’t serve him a meal. Black stars felt like two people at once, revered in one circle and discriminated against in another. Just because America changed over the last four decades doesn’t mean those guys stopped remembering the way it used to be. Throw in today’s nine-figure contracts and the babying/deifying/celebritizing of today’s basketball stars and you can see why they might be bitter.
Do modern players realize that someone like Elgin paved the way for their eight-car garages and McMansions with the 1964 All-Star Game in Boston, or how the mood in the locker room turned defiant only when Lakers owner Bob Short tried to order Elgin and West around like two busboys? The story never developed legs historically, although we hear about Curt Flood and Marvin Miller all the time. That just goes with the territory with Elgin. Only die-hard fans realize that, by any calculation, Elgin was the third best forward ever. From a historical standpoint, it definitely works against him that he never won a title or that there just isn’t enough “I can’t believe how good he was” videotape of him.80 He lacked that signature “thing” to carry him through eternity, nothing with the legs of Oscar’s triple double or Russell’s eleven rings. You rarely hear Elgin mentioned with the big boys anymore. Unless you’re talking to an NBA fan over the age of fifty. Then they defend Elgin and berate you for not realizing how unbelievable he was.
My theory? Everything that happened after Elgin’s playing career obscured the career itself. The Clippers hired Elgin to run them in 1986, and really, he’s been something of a punch line ever since. After purchasing Clips tickets in 2004, I wrote about him:
Blessed with a kind face and a happy smile, almost like the grandfather in a UPN sitcom, he’s the Hall of Famer who sits with the other embarrassed GMs during the lottery every spring. I have made many jokes about Elgin over the years.81 He’s an easy target. This is a man once described by TNT’s Reggie Theus as “a veteran of the lottery process”—and he meant it as a compliment. I wrote after last June’s draft, “Having Elgin run your team must be like getting in the car with my mom at night, when she’s careening off curbs and saying things like, ‘I can’t believe how bad my eyes have gotten’ and ‘We shouldn’t have ordered that bottle of wine.’ Just constant fear.” Well, Elgin wasn’t too happy about that one. Much to my surprise, he reads more Clippers-related articles and columns than one would think. When he found out I was coming for lunch, he wasn’t pleased. Coincidentally, he ended up in the Staples cafeteria at the same time; one of my lunch partners asked Elgin at the salad bar if he wanted to join us. Elgin glanced over at our table, noticed me sitting there and growled, “That guy’s an [expletive].” Only he used a seven-letter expletive, placing most of his emphasis on the first three letters. For instance, let’s pretend the word was bassbowl. Elgin would have said it, “That guy’s a BASS-bowl.”
People loved that story. Of everything I ever wrote for ESPN.com, it’s easily one of the most popular anecdotes I ever passed along. You bass-bowl! I hear that ten times a year at the Clippers games. It took me two years to win Elgin over, but by his final season we were getting along really well. When I filmed an ESPN piece about shooting a half-court shot at a Clippers game, their organization had been splintered into various camps. I knew there was a festering power struggle when Dunleavy and I had a good-natured shooting contest for $100 and I ended up winning. We were on camera and I forgot to collect. Dunleavy disappeared.82 Elgin quickly limped over looking like he had just seen an old lady get mugged.
“He never paid you, did he?” Elgin whispered.
I shook my head. Elgin made a face.
“That’s typical,” he hissed.
When Elgin gets mad, he stammers a little. So the next few words came out like this: “And you-you-you know what else? He went first, but after you made your shot, he-he-he made it seem like he had last shot. Did you catch that?”
“I caught it,” I said. “I thought it was funny that he cheated.”
Elgin made another face.
“I’m glad you caught that,” he said. “I didn’t think you caught it.”
We ended up rapping for the next twenty-five minutes while the camera guys packed up their stuff. Every time I ever question my choice in life for a profession, I always come back to moments like this: talking hoops with someone like Elg, someone who will live on long after we’re both gone. The Dunleavy thing just killed him. You could see it. Even though Elgin was the most beloved figure in the Clippers office—and that’s an understatement—Dunleavy knew how to play the game and Elgin was too freaking old to bother. Times were changing with the Clippers. Elg could see the writing on the wall. I could see it in his face that day, and I could see it for the rest of that season. Worried that the 2008–09 campaign would be his last, I called a mutual friend to schedule lunch with Elgin in August. I wanted to write a column about him. At seventy-four years old, he was the oldest high-ranking NBA employee by far, the last link to the days of Russell and Cousy, when black players ate at a Greyhound bus station because nobody else would serve them, when you wrecked your knee and were never the same, when you played twenty-seven exhibition games in twenty days because your owner made you. One time I asked Elg how he felt about chartered planes and he flew off the handle.
“Sheeeeeeeeeet,” he said. “When I played, we flew coach and carried our own bags! We landed two, three, four times! You ever hear about the time we crashed in a cornfield?”
I heard. It’s the closest an American professional sports team ever came to perishing in a plane crash. For Elgin Baylor, it was just another thing that happened to him. That’s why I thought it would make for a great column—just lunch with Elgin, him ranting and raving about stuff like that. To make sure Elg would show up, I mentioned to our mutual friend, “Make sure you tell him that he should have tipped in the Selvy shot. I saw the tape.”
A few hours later, my phone rang.
“Elg is going nuts,” our friend said. “He says you don’t know what you’re talking about. He says Sam Jones pushed him, that’s why he didn’t tip it in. He says Sam even admitted it to him afterward.”83
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s not what the tape shows.”
“Well, you picked the right button to push. He’ll be there for lunch. Just be ready to hear about this for an hour.”
We scheduled a date and planned to see each other then. A week later, they postponed. We planned on rescheduling, then fate intervened: the power struggle escalated and the Clippers kept yanking Elgin around, finally canning him and handing his GM responsibilities to Dunleavy.84 The team’s employees were told that Elgin resigned, only the terse PR release that followed never mentioned anything about a resignation, nor Elgin’s fifty-year association with the NBA and all the hits he took along the way.85 We elected our first black president six weeks later, something that wouldn’t have happened without the strength of people like Elgin once upon a time. You are probably younger than forty, so when you think of him, you probably remember Elg wearing one of those Bill Cosby sweaters and wincing because the Clippers’ lottery number came too soon. That’s the wrong memory. Think about him creating hang time from scratch. Think of him putting up a 38–19 in his spare time. Think of him dropping 71 on the Knicks. Think of his eyes narrowing as they passed along his owner’s condescending message during that snowy night in Boston. Think of him retiring with dignity because he didn’t want to hang on for a ring. Think of him telling Rod Hundley that he couldn’t play that exhibition game in West Virginia, not because he was trying to prove a point, but because it would have made him feel like less of a human being.
Elgin left the Clippers on the same day that Barack Obama took part in his second presidential debate. The two events weren’t related at all. Or so it seemed. On his final night in the NBA, his Clippers friends called and e-mailed to say goodbye. None of them heard back from him. Elgin Baylor was gone and didn’t want to be found. Fifty years, gone in a flash. For the most underappreciated superstar in NBA history, it couldn’t have ended any other way.
13. JOHN HAVLICEK

Resume: 16 seasons, 13 quality, 13 All-Stars … ’74 Finals MVP … Top 5 (’71, ’72, ’73, ’74), Top 10 (’64, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’75, ’76) … All-Defense (8x, five 1st) … 3-year peak: 27–9–8 … 4-year Playoffs peak: 27–9–6 (57 G) … leader: minutes (2x) … most career assists for a nonguard (6,114) … best or 2nd-best player on 4 champs (’68, ’69, ’74, ’76), played for 8 champs in all (8–0 in the Finals) … Playoffs: 22–7–5 (172 G) … career: minutes (10th), points (14th) … 25K Point Club
Here’s the enduring Havlicek question for me: would it have been better for him historically if he were black?
That question admittedly seems strange. If the Association nearly went under because it was too black, then why would Havlicek’s color be a negative? Because color never stops being the elephant in the room for white guys, that’s why. Remember when Bird clinched “best forward ever” status coming off three straight MVPs and his best statistical season? He had just finished off the ’87 Pistons in the most memorable way possible, with Magic-Bird IV looming in the next round … and you know what became a national story? Those moronic “he’d be just another good guy if he were black” claims from Rodman and Isiah. The pinnacle of the career of one of the five greatest players ever and people were still talking about color. This time, unfairly. But it always seems to come up. It’s a black man’s game. It just is. Shit, one of my first choices for a title was The Book of Basketball: A White Man’s Thoughts on a Black Man’s Game. My publishing company talked me out of it. Can’t play the race card in the title. Or something. Everyone’s sphincters tighten whenever a white guy discusses race and sports. Malcolm Gladwell made one request for this book: an extended footnote where I compared the all-time teams for Whites, Blacks, Biracials and Foreigners and figured out who’d win a hypothetical tournament. He’s biracial. He loves talking about race. And I do too … but when you’re white, the degree of difficulty skyrockets. You can’t screw up. You have to say everything perfectly. You have no leeway. So I’m giving Gladwell that footnote—look, here it is86—but had to write a two-hundred-word preamble so it didn’t come out of nowhere.
Back to white guys. When we evaluate them, they fall into six categories. Either “undeniably and stereotypically white” (think Mark Madsen), “white but effective” (think Matt Bonner or Steve Kerr), “deceivingly white” (the Billy Hoyle All-Stars), “nonissue white” (guys who excelled to the point that you stopped thinking about their color, like Bird or West), “totally overrated white” (guys whose stock became inflated specifically because of their color: think Danny Ferry or Adam Morrison), and “totally underrated white,” which I will define as “someone who was unfairly evaluated in the past tense because he was white.” We have one example for that last category and only one: John Havlicek. Read this next paragraph like you don’t know any better, then tell me what color you would have guessed.
So there’s this three-sport high school star who plays basketball exclusively at Ohio State, even though Woody Hayes lobbies every summer to play him at receiver as well. After getting drafted as a receiver by the Cleveland Browns,87 he lands on the Celtics as their number one pick and becomes an effective swingman for them, playing three different positions, guarding all types of players and even taking over in crunch time. What sets him apart is the way he runs and never stops running; he has the endurance of a Kenyan marathoner. Nobody can keep up. He runs and runs and runs. He fills the lane on every fast break. He sprints back and forth along the sideline trying to get open. He’s such a remarkable athlete that Boston sportswriters openly wonder if he should pitch for the Red Sox in his spare time. As his team ages and the scoring burden shifts to him, he never changes his balls-to-the-wall style even as he’s averaging 45–46 minutes a game. His teams finish 8–0 in the Finals; he leads them in scoring four of those times. He wins titles thirteen years apart with two totally different rosters. He wins the ’74 Finals MVP after playing 289 of 291 possible minutes, prompting Sports Illustrated to point out a few months later, “A case could have been made that [he] was more like Most Valuable in the Game Today. Or the Best Athlete the NBA has ever had—which would rank him right up there universally because few other sports demand anywhere near as much of an athlete as pro basketball.” He makes seven second-team All-NBA’s (including two thirteen years apart) and four straight first-team NBA’s. He makes five All-Defense teams; that number would have doubled if they’d had those teams during his first six years. He retires in 1978, but not before cracking the top five in nearly every relevant category except assists and rebounds. His peers remember him as one of the clutch players of his era, as well as one of the most athletic and versatile, with Bill Russell saying simply in 1974, “He is the best all-around player I ever saw.” He goes down for eternity as a physical specimen and elite basketball player of the highest order. The end.
Would you have said black or white? Admit it … you would have said black. And that’s the problem with Havlicek historically: he had a blue-collar last name, a wife who looked like a classy newsanchor, two of the whitest looks ever (a crew cut in the mid-sixties, curly hair and bushy sideburns in the seventies) and one of those generic, aw-shucks personalities that was impossible to define. Good guy. Simple guy. White guy. That’s all we remember.88 Give him darker skin, Doc’s ABA afro, a snazzy Fu Manchu, and a name like Johnny Harmon and you know what happens? Havlicek becomes properly rated. I am convinced. (You were surprised to see him at no. 13 weren’t you?)89 Other than LeBron, no perimeter player fulfilled more functions on a basketball court than Hondo. Other than Malone and Kareem, nobody played at a higher level for a longer and more durable time. Other than Russell and Sam Jones, nobody won more titles. Other than Jordan and Bird, nobody had more memorable clutch moments. Other than Magic and West, nobody did a better job of reinventing his game as the years passed. Behind Bird, Magic, Russell, and Duncan, he might rank fifth on the Winnability Scale. Only Russell and Jordan came through more times for championship teams.
And then there’s this: Only Russell and Kareem spread postseason heroics over a longer time frame. Hondo’s series-saving steal against the ’65 Sixers became one of the five most famous plays ever. He played all 48 minutes in the clincher of the ’66 Finals, with L.A. coach Fred Schaus saying afterward, “No one in the league his size is even close to Havlicek in quickness. He is entirely responsible for the trend to small, quick forwards.” He made the winning jumper of the ’68 Finals and averaged a 26–9–8 in 19 playoff games—serving as Russell’s unofficial lead assistant in his spare time (Russell handled the defense and subs, Hondo handled the offense)—with SI’s Frank Deford noting afterward, “Because Havlicek can play the whole game at top speed and because he can move about the lineup so nimbly, he makes it possible for Russell always to replace whoever is tired or cold with the best man on his bench, regardless of position.” He averaged a 25–10–6 on the ’69 championship team, playing an inconceivable 850 minutes in 18 games (47.2 per game, a playoff record for 15-plus games), making the game-winning shot of the Knicks series and carrying Boston’s offense in the Finals. He led the ’73 Celtics to a team record 68 wins, separated his shooting shoulder in the Eastern Finals and played left-handed in Games 5 through 7 (with Boston falling short). He pulled off the epic 289/291 in the ’74 Finals and made a super-clutch banker to extend the famous double-OT game. He gutted through constant pain from an injured right foot in the ’76 playoffs, made the single biggest shot of the Finals (the running banker in the triple-OT game) and played 58 minutes in Game 5 when doctors had ordered him to play no more than 25.
Havlicek was the ultimate winner. You would have wanted him in your NBA foxhole. You wouldn’t have blinked with SI wrote things like “It is altogether unlikely that you will ever see another Havlicek. The dimension Havlicek has brought to basketball is entirely and uniquely his own, and it will probably go with him once he finally winds down,” or when peers like Jerry West raved, “Superstar is a bad word. In our league people look at players, watch them dribble between their legs, watch them make spectacular plays, and they say, ‘There’s a superstar.’ Well, John Havlicek is a superstar, and most of the others are figments of writers’ imaginations,” or even when Rick Barry admitted during Hondo’s final season, “Havlicek is the only true superstar.” And if you have any doubt about his resume, remember that Havlicek was so consistently cool under pressure that everyone started calling him “Hondo.” That’s right, John Wayne’s nickname. The guy was named after John f*cking Wayne! The point is, we reached a point with Havlicek where everyone agreed, “This is one of the greatest NBA players ever.” It wasn’t a debate. Now it is. And it’s only because he was white.90
1. Ron Harper told SI in ’99, “Everybody talks about MJ first, but Pip had a more all-around game. Defense, offensive rebounds and defensive boards: Pip made the game easier for us to play.”
2. Hue Hollins whistled a touch foul on a last-second Hubie Davis jumper in Game 5, pretty much gift-wrapping the series for the Knicks. Even Vince McMahon was embarrassed by that call.
3. Another NBA tragedy: watching Scottie toiling away for one season in a stilted, slow-it-down “Hey, Scottie, dump it into Hakeem or Barkley, go to the corner and stand there” offense. Almost as bad as Kidd in the triangle.
4. Scottie in ’93: “I hope [MJ] leads the league in scoring for the rest of his career. And when it’s all over, I’ll be able to say, ‘I helped him do it. And I played with the greatest player ever.’” Now that’s a second banana!
5. Jackson told SI in ’99, “[Scottie] was probably the player most liked by the others. He mingled. He could bring out the best in the players and communicate the best. Leadership, real leadership, is one of his strengths. Everybody would say Michael is a great leader. He leads by example, by rebuke, by harsh words. Scottie’s leadership was equally dominant, but it’s a leadership of patting the back, support.”
6. Don’t forget, Tubbs had to bang Calderon’s ugly daughter just to get to Calderon. Much bigger sacrifice than Scottie passing up some shots. She looked like Andy Pettitte with a crewcut.
7. It narrowly edged the time Cartwright realized that he couldn’t grow a full goatee.
8. NBA draft code words “upside,” “length” and “wingspan” were pretty much invented during the Pippen draft.
9. Had Scottie played out that rookie contract and become a free agent in ’93, right as Jordan was retiring, his value would have soared. For the first eleven years of his career, Scottie Pippen was woefully underpaid. He was the 122nd-highest-paid player in the NBA in 1998.
10. Our three best guys that year: Dana Barros, Todd Day and Dino Radja. Little known fact: Dino was the last 19–10 guy (in ’96) who also smoked butts before and after games. In a related story, we went 33–49.
11. You know I feel passionate about something when I spring a double negative on you.
12. Remember, Isiah made 28% of his threes in ’83 and somehow finished second in the league. If he’d come along ten years later, it’d have been a bigger part of his arsenal.
13. On the other hand, this was one of the ten greatest moments of my life … so thank you, Isiah!
14. One of my favorite clips: Isiah getting busted open by Malone’s elbow, flipping out and briefly strangling his trainer as the guy was trying to stop the bleeding. That was the only inexplicable strangulation in NBA history. Even the Spree/Carlesimo incident was semiexplicable.
15. What, you don’t believe me? Isiah retired on May 24, 1994, and suddenly had a ton of time on his hands; the murders happened two weeks later. You don’t think that’s a coincidence? Prove me wrong!
16. And if you’re nitpicking, I want to know why it was okay to show Magic and Isiah kissing on network TV, but when Matt the Gay Guy made a move on Billy’s best man before Billy’s wedding five years later on Melrose Place, Fox didn’t have the balls to show their kiss.
17. I mulled this analogy long and hard: At the time, Joel was the fourth-most-famous person in that video behind Michael Jackson (MJ), Bruce Springsteen (Bird), and Stevie Wonder (Magic) and just ahead of Bob Dylan (who had lost his fastball). Finishing the analogy: Michael McDonald (Barkley), Huey Lewis (David Robinson), Tina Turner (Ewing), Lionel Ritchie (Mullin), Kenny Rogers (Malone), Tom Petty (Stockton), Quincy Jones (Chuck Daly) and Christian Laettner (George Michael). Sadly, there’s no basketball equivalent to Dan Aykroyd singing in the chorus.
18. I say we make it up to him by letting him pick the 2012 Dream Team. “And starting at center, weighing more than Angola’s entire team … Eddy Curry!”
19. I’d make a GM joke about McHale here, but he handed Boston the ’08 title and I don’t want to be an ingrate. By the way, KG faded in the ’09 season with a mysterious knee problem loosely described as “I spent 13 solid years playing 1100-plus games and 40 minutes a night at an intensity normally reserved for mothers trying to rescue their children who are trapped under a truck” but with an “-itis” at the end.
20. In his only Game 5 (’98 against Seattle), KG practically crapped himself with 7 points, 4 rebounds and 10 TOs.
21. Every red-blooded male born between 1965 and 1980 dug T.A.T. for the Kelly Kapowski/Valerie Malone resume, only it never translated to a movie career or a leading sitcom role. She couldn’t have had Christina Applegate’s career?
22. KG fans defend his unclutchness because he never got clutch reps in his formative years (whereas Duncan did). Decent point. Think of KG’s career like a video game: spend a ton of time playing Grand Theft Auto and you’re more likely to complete a mission than someone who doesn’t own a PlayStation, right?
23. After Game 3, I wrote a column that included the question “Is Garnett on pace to pass Hayes, Chamberlain and Malone as the biggest choke artist in the history of the NBA Finals?” Sadly, it had to be asked—he had missed 36 of his last 50 shots with the likes of Pau Gasol and Ronny Turiaf guarding him.
24. This was fun during the regular season and not as much fun in the playoffs, as Boston struggled vs. Atlanta and KG was blocking shots after whistles but refusing to post up Solomon Jones. I think I screamed, “Come on, KG, take this goddamned stiff to the hoop!” at least 250 times that spring.
25. Extending this analogy, Duncan was like Eric Clapton—great in a band and really good by himself, although there’s no way Duncan ever would have done something as sleazy as stealing George Harrison’s wife.
26. Cooz had a phenomenal French/New York accent. He couldn’t pronounce R, but that didn’t stop him from announcing Celtics games for two solid decades, leading to him calling Rodney Rogers “Wodd-ney” in 2002. When they acquired Bryant Stith in the mid-nineties, we just assumed Cooz would grunt his name like a deaf-mute. He settled on “Bwwwy-unn.”
27. To clarify, when Cousy finished first in assists and second in scoring in ’55, he’d get 10 points for assists and 9 points for scoring for a total of 19.
28. I know, I know … West wasn’t a true point guard. But he handled the ball for L.A. during the second half of his career and even led the NBA in assists in ’72. So there.
29. Tommy Heinsohn claimed in Elliott Kalb’s book that assists only counted in the fifties if you passed to someone without dribbling. In other words, none of Cousy’s fast-break passes counted as assists. Could this be true? Again, it’s hard to trust someone who once compared Leon Powe to Moses Malone.
30. You had to like the fifties, when sportswriters had names like “Herbert Warren Wind.” I wonder if I would have been “William John Simmons” back then. Kinda catchy.
31. Grumpy Old Editor wholeheartedly disagrees: “Granted, Cousy is a good guy and an innovator for an all-white league. But unlike Russell and even Sharman, his game does not survive beyond the sixties. And the idea of him as a pioneer when Black Magic screams otherwise is a joke. If he played in New York, you would have buried him.” I am firing him soon.
32. Cooz played an athletic director named Vic. I hate to nitpick here, but couldn’t they have gone with Bob Kiley or Bill Corsey there? How did they settle on “Vic”? Do you think Vic ever tried to recruit Rumeal Smith? That was an inside joke for the three people who have been reading every footnote so far.
33. In fact, that’s what I plan on calling that book: The Second Book of Basketball: A Quick Influx of Cash. I’ll give you 9–2 odds that in the acknowledgments, I’m thanking everyone at the Promises Rehab Center in Malibu, as well as my new girlfriend, Destiny (or Amber, or Crystal, or Jasmine, or anyone else who sounds like I may have met her as she was writhing on a pole).
34. Four Boston athletes were like that for me: Bird, Pedro, Orr (a tad before my time, but still) and Rich “El Guapo” Garces. I mean, did you see Guapo? He was built like the Penguin and so overweight, one time he covered first base on consecutive ABs and became so out of breath that the pitching coach had to come out to buy him some time. Now that’s fat. I miss you, Guapo.
35. I picked Bron fourth for 2005 MVP and compared his season to “one of those early Tom Hanks movies, where you spend most of the time just feeling bad for him that he’s not in something better.” Like The Money Pit, basically.
36. Back then, I was convinced that he’d average a triple double. Now? I don’t see it unless he signs with the Knicks and plays for Mike D’Antoni. Then he might average a 40–15–15. No, really. I once had a reader joke that there should be a word called “D’Inflation” to cover these scenarios.
37. There’s a persistent rumor, never confirmed, that LeBron has a $50 million unwritten promise from Nike that kicks in if he joins the Knicks or Lakers. The Clips aren’t covered by the alleged bonus; given their history of bad luck, Nike would probably pay him $50 million not to play there.
38. Chicago made the same mistake with MJ until Phil Jackson took over and rectified the issue. By the way, I just edited out a Boogie Nights reference. We were at capacity.
39. In case you were worried about my objectivity relating to LeBron, during this same season, I criticized him for losing his passing chops and wrote, “The erosion of LeBron’s passing skills is the biggest tragedy of the past few years other than Lindsay Lohan losing her boobs.”
40. The Cleveland fans took great pleasure in rubbing this section in my face a few months later. After the All-Star Game, he ripped off 33 PPG over his next 10 games and everything was fine. I’d like to think my biting comments were partially responsible—I mean, that column did lead ESPN.com. What, you don’t think LeBron has the internet and email? You don’t think he had time to plow through a 6,600-word feature? Just humor me.
41. This section is about Game 5 of the 2007 Pistons-Cavs series in Detroit (aka the “48 Special”), when LeBron made LeLeap and propelled Cleveland into the Finals one game later.
42. Possible explanations for Flip Saunders not sending a second guy at LeBron: (a) his blood sugar was dangerously low; (b) he had money on Cleveland; (c) he suffered a head injury en route to the stadium; (d) LeBron was so incredible that Flip actually went into shock; (e) he’s the real-life Forrest Gump. I vote for D or E.
43. The most underrated sports movie scene now that every NBA JumboTron has beaten Pacino’s Any Given Sunday speech into the ground. It’s not about the six minutes, kid. It’s what happens in the six minutes.
44. I still believe that sentence to be true. I watched that game with my two-year-old daughter, who was lying next to me reading books and asking every two minutes or so, “What happened?” because I was making noises like, “Holy shit!” and “No!!!!!!!!!!!”
45. Jason “Big Sexy” Whitlock later convinced me to name it the “48 Special.” I like that. Sounds like a ’70s rock band.
46. That was Paul Hirschheimer, longtime NBA Entertainment honcho and diehard Knicks fan, as well as someone who took a sincere interest in this book, hooked me up with countless game tapes and demanded that Bernard crack the top sixty as his only payment. Done and done. Although Bernard would have made it anyway (I love ’Nard) and Grumpy Old Editor points out that he would have “destroyed the manuscript” if I didn’t. So there’s that, too.
47. When I was working on this book (April ’09), LeBron looked so great that I left this footnote open and wrote, “UPDATE AFTER CAVS WIN TITLE.” Whoops.
48. On second thought, Barkley and Salt Lake would have been like Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love: just a deadly, horrifying match in every respect.
49. The NBA should throw a charity dinner where every NBA star has to show up wearing the same outfit that they wore on draft day. They could make tickets ten grand and I’d be willing to pay twenty just to be in the room. “Hakeem, I love your 1984 prom tuxedo! Looks terrific!”
50. In ’86, Chuck and Moses finished 2nd and 3rd in offensive rebounds. After getting split up, Chuck finished 1st and Moses 4th in ’87; they finished 1–2 in ’88 and ’89; then Moses 1st and Barkley 2nd in ’90. Why did Philly break up a historic rebounding combo? Because an abnormal number of NBA executives are f*cking idiots! I keep telling you.
51. Malone and Stockton ranked right behind Laimbeer and Mahorn and just ahead of Ainge on the Top Five Dirtiest Guys of the MJ Era list. It’s true. I know there’s an eight-year-old Mormon kid crying right now and screaming, “Noooo! Noooooooo!” But it’s true. Scratch Salt Lake City off the book-signing tour.
52. For example: “Karl Malone don’t like no HIV. Karl Malone don’t want to worry about no blood hitting Karl Malone in the eye.”
53. Would KG have won 49 games and a division title playing with Johnny Dawkins, Hersey Hawkins, Ron Anderson, a fairly washed-up Mike Gminski and a just-about-washed-up Rick Mahorn in an extremely competitive season? No way.
54. The definitive Barkley stat: in 44 playoff games from ’93 to ’95, he hoisted up 124 threes and made just 33 (27 percent). That’s an embarrassment. I would have fined him ten grand per three.
55. There’s a famous story about Barkley hitting Manhattan the night before a Sunday afternoon game at MSG, subsequently stinking out the joint, then Danny Ainge waving his ring afterward and screaming, “That’s why you’ll never have one of these!” Only when Barkley’s personal life began to fall apart recently (a $400,00 debt to a Vegas casino plus a DUI arrest) did the media start mentioning Barkley’s drinking. Everyone loved him too much. Including me. I spent two days with him for a 2002 column and buried three phenomenal Barkley stories. I just liked the guy.
56. Biggest help: spending the summer playing on the Dream Team and getting pushed by MJ. This also drove LeBron to new heights—working out with Kobe and Wade during the ’08 Olympics and getting those “Shit, I still need to get better” juices flowing. Like the effect Stephon Marbury had on Carmelo Anthony in Athens, only the exact opposite.
57. This should have given Chuck the winnability edge over Malone, but his penchant for carousing and keeping teammates out for all hours made it a draw. MJ would have loved playing with Barkley, but he would have been more productive with Malone.
58. Are we sure Malone wasn’t a giant a-hole? What about when Kobe accused him of hitting on his wife? Actually, that made me like the Mailman more. Go Karl! I never thought Karl allegedly telling Mrs. Kobe that he was “hunting little Mexican girls” got its just comedic due.
59. Grumpy Old Editor refused to make the leap: “Ranking Pettit this high is a joke. He’d be like every oversized white guy with post moves and cement feet who gets trampled in his first pro season. Think Kent Benson or Big Country Reeves.” Yeah, but still.
60. If not for Hack-a-Shaq, Pettit would have averaged more FTs per game than anyone with 50-plus career playoff games (10.4). That’s reason no. 345 to hate Hack-a-Shaq.
61. Did you know that the ’58 Hawks were the last all-white team to win a title? I’m going out on a limb and predicting that’s holding true 100, 200, and 500 years from now.
62. If you were a seventies magazine editor and didn’t use a “What’s up, Doc?”–type headline for Doc, you lost your job. I’m almost positive. Here’s Doc’s former ABA coach Al Bianchi (from the same story): “Julie used to take off and really soar. And that’s the sad part of seeing him now. The Doc can’t fly no more.” An unnamed NBA coach added, “I don’t know if it’s the big contract, plain disgust, concern about his longevity or just that he’s burnt out and can’t do it nightly anymore, but Dr. J is not the player we once knew. The electricity isn’t there. The truth is that—except for a few playoff games in ’77 and the all-star games—the guy has been on vacation for three years. Somebody else has been masquerading as no. 6. On a consistent basis Julius has played to about 40 percent, tops, of the ability he showed in the ABA.”
63. I’m dubious of Doc’s ABA stats. This was already a league where nobody played D, only ABA opponents were about as physical with Doc as President Obama’s cronies are with the prez during a White House basketball game. Could that help explain why he never found quite the same success in the NBA? I think so.
64. Poor Doc played for one of the most selfish/overpaid teams ever assembled (the postmerger 76ers), shared the ball with me-first guys like McGinnis and Free and never played with a table-setter until Mo Cheeks in 1980. Doc was too nice to fight for shots. If he had a drawback, it was a legendary weakness for the ladies—he even knocked up a beat writer who covered Philly in the late seventies (fathering future tennis player Alexandra Stevenson with her). When they said Doc was the greatest interview in the league, they weren’t kidding.
65. In Doc’s first 14 seasons, he played 1,277 of a possible 1,349 games (including seven seasons of 95 games or more) without suffering a major injury. That’s an average of 91.2 games per year! Considering his style of play—acrobatic, up-and-down, above the rim—that’s incredible, no? Or do we credit the Obama treatment for at least some of that durability? Much like no pitcher wanted to be the dick who broke Cal Ripken’s hand and ended his streak, nobody wanted to be the dick who broke Doc’s leg with a hard foul. Let’s agree that he was superdurable and superrespected.
66. Undeniable symbolism given Kobe’s love for MJ: an actor with the initials M.J. played the Wolf (the character who represented Kobe’s struggles the most). Also, my friend Christian once argued that Fox picked number 42 as an homage to Jackie Robinson because he was the first werewolf to play organized, competitive basketball. Lots to think about with Teen Wolf.
67. His enduring advice: “There are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.” This was also good: “It doesn’t matter how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. And even that doesn’t make all that much difference.”
68. From what we saw, Fox notched 14 points (5-for-6 FG, 4-for-4 FT), 6 assists, and 2 steals. Number 45 (young Bill Russell) chipped in with 10 points and 3 blocks. Fat Boy had 5 and number 33 had 6. We saw 35 of the 47 points after Fox’s return; I projected his stats for the 12 we missed and ignored looped footage (no sports movie had worse editing).
69. My unofficial count from columns includes Tony Montana, Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Fox/Wolf, Hollywood Hulk Hogan, Crockett/Tubbs (along with Shaq), Eddie Murphy, A-Rod, a porn actress named Houston, and my personal favorite, Marlo Stanfield. “My name is my name!” Couldn’t you see Kobe screaming that?
70. Looking back, it’s too bad Kobe didn’t have a heel turn (to borrow a wrestling term) right after the ’02 Finals. During the champagne celebration in the locker room, Kobe could have done an interview where he hugged Shaq, waited for Shaq to start walking away, slammed a steel chair against his head, ripped off his Lakers jersey to reveal a “Kobe No. 1” jersey, then kicked Shaq’s unconscious body repeatedly as Stuart Scott screamed, “Nooooooooooo! Nooooooo! My God, no!” like the WWE’s Jim Ross. Instead, he went the other way and tried like hell to be a babyface (wrestling lingo for a good guy). I’m still disappointed.
71. When Colorado police interrogated Kobe about sexual assault, Kobe inexplicably mentioned that Shaq dealt with stuff like this (apparently meaning a hookup gone wrong) all the time. FYI: This is why Shaq hated Kobe! Also, there’s a legendary tale—probably apocryphal—about David Stern’s team having an emergency meeting to discuss Kobe’s charges, with someone theorizing that Kobe’s mistake was not realizing this innocent Colorado girl wasn’t as experienced as NBA groupies, so when he tried for “the trinity,” it didn’t go over too well. A confused Stern apparently asked someone to explain the trinity. There was an awkward silence, followed by someone hesitantly explaining a popular sexual act in NBA circles that I am afraid to even print. Apparently the look on Stern’s face was beyond priceless and hasn’t been approached before or since. Also, House and I had a coin flip to see who got to use “The Trinity” for their next fantasy team name. House won.
72. Artest earned 2005 LVP for obvious reasons. Artest is to the LVP trophy what Jerry West is to the NBA logo.
73. It’s always riveting to watch a basketball player score copious amounts of points, even if he’s freezing out his teammates in the process. At halftime of a late nineties Celts game, they had a Special Olympics contest and one kid seemed a little too, um, competent to be playing in it. Not only did he drop like 20 points in four minutes, I’m convinced to this day that he was the impetus for The Ringer. In fact, this kid was so good that everyone in my section feared Rick Pitino would sign him to a $30 million contract. But guess what? Even though it didn’t seem quite fair that the kid was playing, it was still a moment. Everyone was riveted. Everyone was cheering. Of course, I was drunk at the time, so this might not have happened the way I remember it. The important thing is that I believe it happened.
74. I wrote that season, “The best part about playing craps with Kobe must be watching him eventually drift over to the ‘Don’t Pass’ line.” And that wasn’t even the best craps joke of my career—a friend of mine dated a girl who couldn’t have orgasms (she had like a mental block), and when he was complaining about it I joked, “I want to play craps with her at Foxwoods just to see if she keeps betting on the ‘Don’t Come’ line.” I am the king of hacky craps jokes.
75. Kobe’s Lakers blew a 3–1 lead to the ’06 Suns; his teammates sucked so badly in Game 7 that Kobe spitefully took just 2 shots over the next 14 minutes of game action as Phoenix’s lead ballooned to 25. I’d blame him more if he hadn’t been playing with the likes of Kwame Brown and Smush Parker. He also quit during Game 6 of the ’08 Finals as the Celtics ran L.A. off the floor, although it’s unclear if it was sabotage or his spirits were crushed. Kobe stank in the ’08 Finals (for him): 26–5–5, 40.5% FG, 3.8 TOs, not one great game.
76. After sitting next to L.A.’s bench for Game 5 of the ’08 Finals, Matt Damon emailed me that Kobe used his alpha dog status malevolently: instead of inspiring teammates, he belittled/intimidated them. He believed Kobe would never win a title until he changed the way he treated his peers and his coach. Curt Schilling sat courtside for Game 3, blogged about it and came to the same conclusion: “From the first tip until about 4 minutes left in the game I saw and heard this guy bitch at his teammates. Every TO he came to the bench pissed, and a few of them he went to other guys and yelled about something they weren’t doing, or something they did wrong,” later saying, “He’d yell at someone, make a point, or send a message, turn and walk away, and more than once the person on the other end would roll his eyes or give a ‘whatever, dude’ look.” You have to love the 21st century, when baseball players blog about their experiences at NBA games. I don’t know how we got here, but it’s fantastic.
77. Wilt quickly broke that mark by scoring 73 at the old MSG. They played a triple-OT game against each other in December ’61 where Wilt finished with 78 and Elgin had 63. This absolutely would have led SportsCenter in 1961.
78. Elgin exploded for 61 in Game 5, causing Cousy to say later, “[When] we held Elgin to 61, I remember going up to Satch Sanders and telling him sincerely that he’d done a helluva job defensively. And he had. He made Elgin work for every basket. But that’s how good Elgin was.” Cooz always called him “Elgin” because the word “Baylor” was simply unattainable for him.
79. In Wilt, 1962, Gary M. Pomerantz writes that Don Barksdale was frozen out by teammates on the ’53 Baltimore Bullets (they didn’t pass to him for an entire quarter) and broke into tears on the bench. They finished 16–54 that season and folded a year later. Karma.
80. I’ve seen some of the early Elgin tapes and can’t emphasize this strongly enough—watching Elgin dismantle his “peers” is like watching the Back to the Future scene when Marty McFly cranks his electric guitar solo as everyone else stares at him in disbelief. Imagine a 2009 player dunking routinely from the three-point line. That’s what Elgin looked like compared to everyone else.
81. In fairness to Elgin, he had bad luck with two potential franchise guys (Danny Manning and Livingston suffered crippling knee injuries), lost Derek Smith and Ron Harper to torn ACLs and never bottomed out in the right draft. His biggest mistakes were trading down from no. 2 in ’95 (McDyess went 2nd, Sheed went 4th, KG went 5th) and botching no. 1 in ’98 (misfiring with Michael Olowokandi over Pierce, Nowitzki, Vince, and others). Okay, maybe he was a bad GM.
82. He never paid me. Bad coach, bad GM and a welcher to boot. I got him back by sponsoring his basketball-reference.com page and thanking him for all the wasted years of my season ticket money. No, really. Best $10 I ever spent.
83. Add Elgin to the list of people over 35 who had a memory destroyed by YouTube. For me, it was finding out that Jimmy Snuka’s famous steel cage leap at MSG vs. Bob Backlund—which seemed like 25 feet at the time—was actually closer to 10. I still haven’t totally gotten over it.
84. The Clips replacing Elg with Dunleavy—who had already bombed as Bucks GM—was like a bumbling CEO on Wall Street firing his loyal, longtime chaffeur who covered up 15 different potential crimes and 25 affairs over the years, then replacing him with the CEO’s loser nephew who just got released from jail for his 3rd.
85. Elgin got revenge by suing the Clips for age/racial discrimination two months later, claiming that he had been unfairly compensated for the previous 20 years. The suit is still pending.
86. The biracial team was too tough to figure after I couldn’t get hold of Dave Chappelle. Here are the ten-man rotations for the other teams weighted toward post-1976 guys. Whites: Walton, Bird, Barry, West, Stockton (starters); Havlicek (6th man), Cowens, McHale, Maravich, Cousy (bench). Blacks: Russell, Moses, Doc, Jordan, Magic (starters); LeBron (6th man), Kareem, Oscar, Kobe, Barkley (bench). Foreigners: Hakeem, Duncan, Nowitzki, Nash, Petrovic (starters), Ginobili (6th man), Gasol, Rik Smits, Detlef Schrempf, Tony Parker (bench). Obviously the foreigners would get wiped out. The blacks might be too loaded; I can’t imagine Kobe-Oscar-Kareem coming off the bench. Plus, Barkley and MJ definitely would be involved in one off-court, casino-related incident during the 7-game series. Check out the Whites again. Barry is the only prick on the team. Their passing skills would have been off the charts. They could run the 2nd team’s offense through McHale and play him at crunch time with Bird and Walton. Defensively, they’d get exploited at PG and they’re undersized, but it’s a flexible team that would enjoy playing together. For a 7-game series, the blacks would be a-400 favorite because of the hypercompetitive Russell-Jordan-Magic trio. But you know what? I’d bet on the whites at +350 if only because of the odds. You don’t know how much this kills Jabaal Abdul-Simmons.
87. Hondo was Cleveland’s last cut of the ’62 preseason even though he ran a 4.6 40 and caught everything; he couldn’t master blocking and everyone ran the ball back then. He’s your answer for the trivia question “Who’s the only person to play professionally with Bill Russell and Jim Brown?”
88. SI never wrote a Havlicek feature until October ’74 (one of those “the old man is still doing it” features). During his overly sentimental farewell tour, an amused Cowens remarked, “John’s never had a definite profile like Russell or Cousy. He’s played all these games without being recognized, and now everybody is apologizing for it.”
89. Grumpy Old Editor wasn’t as surprised: “As someone who would have given Jabaal a run for his money in the ‘I wanna be black’ contest, and who hated the Celtics almost as a religious requirement, I never doubted how good Havlicek was. Choose-up game? After Jordan, he might be my first choice.”
90. One of the toughest calls in the book: Hondo for Level 4 or Level 5. I decided on L4 for two reasons. First, every Pantheon guy qualifies for “If you surrounded him with a good team, you were winning a title or coming damned close” status and Hondo wasn’t quite there. Second, he never won MVP (finishing top five just twice) and made just four first-team All-NBA’s (getting squeezed out from ’66 to ’70). Even with the playoff heroics and superhuman minutes, I just couldn’t justify it. So our four cutoff guys were Miller (Level 1), Nowitzki (Level 2), Stockton (Level 3), and Hondo (Level 4). I like it.