The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

THREE
HOW THE HELL DID WE GET HERE?



WHILE TRYING TO absorb six-plus decades of NBA history, one question keeps popping up: How do we put everything in perspective? If Wilt averaged 50 points a game for an entire season, what does that really mean? Would he average 40 a game now? Thirty? Twenty? Could the ’72 Lakers win 33 games total if they were playing in 2009? Were the ’96 Bulls the greatest team of all time or just the most successful? I can’t answer these questions without putting some sort of elaborate context in place. When I tell you that Oscar Robertson’s season-long triple double wasn’t as impressive as it seemed, you’d have to take my word unless you saw every relevant rule change, innovation, talent glut/dearth, statistical whim, big-picture mistake and trouble patch laid out from 1946 to 1984. Why stop there? Because that’s when the NBA, for better and worse, became the league it is now. Stylistically, creatively, fundamentally and talent-wise, you could transport any good player or team from 1984 to 2009 and they would be fine (and in some cases better than fine).
Think of the NBA like America’s comedy scene and everything will fall into place. Ever watch tape of Milton Berle, Bob Hope or Sid Caesar performing on their top-rated shows in the 1950s? Lots of mugging, lots of easy jokes, some cross-dressing, more mugging, tons of self-flagellation, even more mugging. It’s bewildering that they were considered geniuses at the time. But they were. Nobody was bigger. (Kinda like George Mikan and Dolph Schayes, right?) When Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Bob Newhart and the Smothers Brothers pushed comedy in a different direction in the sixties—astute observations, hyperintelligent premises—they were considered geniuses of the highest order. (Kinda like Oscar, Elgin, Wilt and Russell, right?) But you know what? If you YouTubed any of those guys in their primes, you wouldn’t laugh that much. Only during the Ford presidency did comedy start to look like it does now: Richard Pryor’s acerbic take on the African American experience, George Carlin’s pointed riffs, Saturday Night Lives ballsy redefinition of televised sketch comedy, Steve Martin’s intentionally absurd stand-up act, even young observational comics like Jay Leno and David Letterman who had been influenced by Carlin and Bruce. (Kinda like Julius Erving, Bob McAdoo and Tiny Archibald redefining the limits of speed and athleticism with the NBA.) The 1977–1982 stretch saw iconic movies capture similar strides, like Caddyshack, Animal House, Stripes and The Blues Brothers, all funny movies fueled by drugs, recklessness, and individualism. (Kinda like the NBA when it was being led by the likes of Pete Maravich, George Gervin, David Thompson and Micheal Ray Richardson.) Then the eighties rolled around and comedy settled into the era of over-the-top humor, sarcastic irony, and “Did you ever notice … ?” jokes that, for better and worse, still make us laugh now. Letterman’s groundbreaking NBC show. Howard Stern’s equally groundbreaking radio show. Eddie Murphy’s SNL impressions and standup acts. A little cable show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.1 Stand-ups like Jerry Seinfeld and Sam Kinison. Consistently funny movies like Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, Night Shift, Fletch and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. All of that stuff holds up even today.
By the mid-eighties, the comedy world had figured it out and reached the place it needed to be. But it didn’t just happen. The civil rights struggle, three assassinations (JFK, RFK and MLK), and a growing discontent about Vietnam altered the comedy scene in the sixties; people became more serious, less trusting, more prone to discuss serious issues and argue about them. That’s how we ended up with Woody and Lenny. The seventies were marred by a polarizing war and the Watergate scandal, pushing disillusioned Americans into cynical, outspoken and carefree directions (drugs, free sex, etc.), a spirit that quickly manifested itself in comedy. The comedians of the late seventies and early eighties learned from everyone who had pushed the envelope—what worked, and more importantly, what didn’t work—and developed a more somber, reflective, sophisticated attitude stemming from how the previous generation’s pain shaped their perspective. A perspective that, for better and worse, hasn’t really changed since. And now we’re here. Were Bird and Magic better in ’84 than LeBron and Wade are right now? It’s a nice debate. Was Eddie Murphy funnier in ’84 than Chris Rock is right now? It’s a nice debate. But if you’re asking me whether a Get Smart episode from 1967 is funnier than a South Park episode in 2009, no. It’s not a debate.
So it’s all about context. The ebbs and flows of the years (and with the NBA, the seasons) affect our memories and how we evaluate them. If we’re figuring out the best players and teams of all time—don’t worry, we’re getting there—we need to examine every season from 1946 (year one) through 1984 (year thirty-nine) and the crucial developments that helped us get here. Consider it a brief and only intermittently biased history of how the NBA became the NBA.2
1946–1954: GROWING PAINS

Heading into the summer of ’54, everyone thought the NBA was going down in flames. And they believed it for five reasons.
Reason no. 1. Without rules to prevent intentional fouling, stalling, and roughhouse play, league scoring dropped to an appalling 79.5 points per game. Every game played out like a Heat-Knicks playoff slugfest in the mid-nineties, only with clumsy white players planting themselves near the basket, catching lob passes, getting clubbed in the back and shooting free throws over and over again. If you were protecting a lead, your point guard dribbled around and waited to get fouled. If you were intentionally fouling someone, you popped him to send a statement. Players fought like hockey thugs, fans frequently threw things on the court and nobody could figure out how to stop what was happening. You can’t really overstate the fan-unfriendliness (I just created that word) of the stalling/fouling tactics. There was the time Fort Wayne famously beat the Lakers, 19–18. There was the five-OT playoff game between Rochester and Indy in which the winner of each overtime tap held the ball for the rest of the period to attempt a winning shot, leading to a bizarre situation in which Rochester’s home fans booed and booed and ultimately started leaving in droves even with the game still going. The ’53 Playoffs averaged an unbelievable eighty free throws per game. The anti-electrifying ’54 Finals featured scores of 79–68, 62–60, 81–67, 80–69, 84–73, 65–63 and 87–80. You get the idea.
Reason no. 2. The league suffered its first betting scandal when Fort Wayne rookie Jack Molinas was nabbed for wagering on his own team.3 Even after Molinas had been banned and commissioner Maurice Podoloff prohibited gambling on any NBA games, the damage was done and the league took an inordinate amount of abuse on sports blogs and radio shows.4
Reason no. 3. The ’54 playoffs were screwed up by an ill-fated “What if we slapped together a six-game round robin with the top three teams in each conference?” proposal, which led to the Knicks getting knocked out in a nationally televised quagmire that lasted longer than any NFL game. According to Leonard Koppett, “The game encompassed all the repulsive features of the grab-and-hold philosophy. It lasted three hours, and the final seconds of a one-point game were abandoned by the network. The arguments with the referees were interminable and degrading. What had been happening, as a matter of course, in dozens of games for the last couple of years, was shown to a nationwide audience in unadulterated impurity.”5
Reason no. 4. Since everyone traveled by train and bus back then, the league stretched only from Boston to Minnesota, with just three “major” television markets in place (Boston, Philly and New York) and seven smaller markets (Minneapolis, Syracuse, Baltimore, Rochester, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Milwaukee). Let’s just say that the Minneapolis-Syracuse Finals in ’54 didn’t knock I Love Lucy out of the number one Nielsen spot.6
Reason no. 5. The lily-white league desperately needed some, um … how do we put this … um … I want to be politically correct … you know, especially after the whole Imus/Rutgers thing … so let’s just say this as discreetly as possible … um … well … the league needed more black guys!
1954–1955: THE LIFESAVER

When Syracuse owner Danny Biasone7 created the 24-second shot clock, his brainstorm didn’t do much except for speeding up possessions, eliminating stalling, hiking league scoring by 13.6 points per team and basically saving the league. How did he arrive at 24? Biasone studied games he remembered enjoying and realized that, in each of those games, both teams took around 60 shots. Well, 60 + 60 = 120. So Biasone settled on 120 shots as the minimum combined total that would be acceptable from a “I’d rather kill myself than watch another NBA game like this” standpoint. And if you shoot every 24 seconds over the course of a 48-minute game, that comes out to … wait for it … 120 shots! Biasone came up with the idea in 1951 and spent three years selling the other owners on it, even staging an exhibition game for them in August 1954, using a shot clock, to prove the idea worked. That’s how we ended up with a 24-second clock. Of course, the nitwits in Springfield didn’t induct him until 2000, which would have been touching if poor Biasone hadn’t been dead for eight years. Really, inventing the shot clock and saving professional basketball wasn’t enough of an accomplishment to make the Basketball Hall of Fame for forty-one years? And you wonder why I’m blowing it up later in the book. Personally, I think we should create a $24 bill and put Biasone’s picture on it.
The karma gods rewarded Biasone when Syracuse beat Fort Wayne in seven for the ’55 title8 (the second-lowest-rated sporting event of all time behind Fox’s Celebrity Boxing 2). Coincidence? I say no. Scoring cracked 100 per game by the ’58 season. One year later, Boston beat Minnesota by a record score of 173–139, with Cousy finishing with 31 points and a record 29 assists. And the NBA never looked back.
One other essential change: the fouling rules were revamped. A limit was placed on team fouls (six per quarter, followed by a two-shot penalty); an offensive foul counted as a team foul but not free throws unless the offending team was over the limit; and any backcourt foul counted as a team foul. The first change prevented teams from fouling throughout games without repercussions; the second change sped up games; and the third change made teams pay a price for fouling anywhere on the court. Sounds like three simple, logical, “why the hell didn’t they always do that” tweaks, right? It took the league eight years to figure it out. I’d compare the NBA’s first eight years to the first eight years of porn (1972–80)—yeah, some good things happened and everyone who was there remembers those years fondly, but ultimately we moved in a much better, more logical, and more lucrative direction. The porn industry didn’t take off until it transferred everything to videotape; the NBA didn’t take off until it created a shot clock.9
1955–56: MIKAN II: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

After his ’56 Lakers floundered to a 5–15 start and attendance petered, Big George stepped down as general manager, made an ill-fated return10 and couldn’t handle the game’s increased speed. As Koppett described it, the plodding Mikan “simply wasn’t equipped for the 24-second game. The widened foul lane he could handle; the constant running he could not.” And I’m supposed to rank Mikan as one of the top thirty players of all time? Bob Pettit filled Mikan’s void by winning the league’s first MVP trophy, leading the league in scoring and rebounding for a Hawks team that fled Milwaukee for St. Louis before the season—in retrospect, a bad career move given the success of Happy Days two decades later.11
1956–1957: RUSSELL

Boston’s Red Auerbach traded future Hall of Famers Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan for Russell’s rights before the 1956 draft. Why? Because he needed a “modern” center who could handle the boards, protect the rim, and kick-start fast breaks for his speedy guards. Red anticipating in 1956 exactly where the sport was heading—to a T—remains his single greatest accomplishment. Well, that and living into his mid-eighties even though he lived on Chinese food and went through cigars like breath mints. For the Celtics, Russell carried them to the ’57 title. For the NBA, Russell imported previously foreign concepts like “jumping,” “dunking,” “shot blocking” and “blackness.” The ultimate win-win.
1957–1958: BASKETBALL CARDS

After Bowman’s 1948 set bombed with fans, Topps waited a full decade before trotting out its first NBA set. Eighty players (including veterans like Cousy and Schayes) suddenly had their own “rookie card.” Six decades later, it’s practically impossible to find those cards in mint or near-mint condition for obvious reasons (the set sold poorly) and less obvious reasons (most of the cards were miscut, off-center, and either overprinted or underprinted).12 Russell’s short-printed rookie trails only Mikan’s ’48 Bowman rookie (worth $9K-plus in near-mint condition) in the Most Valuable Basketball Card Ever race. Another four years passed before Fleer made an ill-fated, one-year jump into the card business with a now-valuable, hard-to-find 1961–62 set that featured rookies for Wilt, West and Oscar (and might be the least exciting cards ever made). Three sets, three failures. No more basketball cards were produced until the 1969–70 season, when Topps released a “tall boy” set of ninety-nine cards that doubled as rookies for Kareem, Hondo, Willis, Pearl, Frazier and Wilkens.
Why is this important? Every relevant rookie card from 1946 to 1970 can be found in the ’48 Bowman, ’58 Topps, ’62 Fleer and ’70 Topps sets. If this book becomes the Da Vinci Code of NBA books, I’m using part of my financial windfall to buy these four sets in mint condition. The rest of the money will be spent on a Manhattan Beach house on the water, a minority stake in the Clippers that includes courtside seats, a BMW M6 convertible, hookers, divorce lawyers, a Hollywood production company that takes a ton of meetings and lunches but never actually produces anything, and expensive Zegna shirts that show off my chest hair. Move over, Donald Sterling—there’s a new sheriff in town.
1958–60: COLORIZATION

Not only did Lakers rookie Elgin Baylor follow Russell’s lead by bringing hang time, explosiveness, and midair creativity into the league, but Wilt Chamberlain was finishing a one-year Globetrotters stint13 and planned on joining Philadelphia the following year. (The Warriors had drafted Wilt as a territorial pick in 1955 when he was a senior in high school. Don’t ask.) Anticipating his arrival, the league created an offensive goal-tending rule, nicknamed the Wilt Chamberlain Rule, that prohibited offensive players from tipping shots on the rim. The rule evolved over the years because, in the tape of Wilt’s 73-point game in ’62, he redirected a number of jump shots from teammates into the basket before they hit the rim, something that wouldn’t be legal now. They had to have tweaked the rule in the mid-sixties. By the way, you know you’ve arrived in life when you get a rule named after you.14
The Dipper exceeded all expectations in his rookie season, averaging a record 37.6 points, capturing the Rookie of the Year, MVP, and MLBHC (Most Likely to Bang Hot Chicks) awards and even inspiring NBC to expand its telecasts to Saturday and Sunday afternoons.15 On the other hand, Wilt became so frustrated by constant pounding from smaller opponents that he briefly retired in the spring of 1960. With other stars like Cousy complaining about the interminable length of the season16 (as well as constant traveling, low salaries, the physical toll from a brutal schedule and the league’s refusal to protect them from doubleheaders and back-to-back-to-back games), the NBA suddenly faced its second crisis: a public breach with its stars. This wouldn’t fully manifest itself for another four years. And then? It manifested itself. Like a bitch.
1960–61: THE SCORING BOOM

Not necessarily a good thing. Why? Nobody played defense, and every game looked like a disjointed All-Star contest or even worse a college pickup game where nobody runs back on D because they’re sweating out the previous night’s keg party. The ’61 Celtics led the league in scoring (124.5 per game) and averaged 119.5 field goal attempts and 33.5 free throw attempts. To put those numbers in perspective, the 2008 Celtics averaged 76 field goal attempts and 26 free throw attempts per game. That’s insane. Play suffered so badly that NBC dropped the NBA one year later despite a memorable ’62 Finals.17 The following season (’63), commissioner Maurice Podoloff slapped together a production team to “broadcast” the All-Star Game and the NBA Finals, then sold a syndication package to local affiliates around the country like it was American Gladiators or The Steve Wilkos Show. Unbelievable.
Because of the inordinately high number of possessions, the statistics from 1958 to 1962 need to be taken with an entire shaker of salt and possibly a saltwater taffy factory.
Within five seasons, scoring increased by 18.6 points, field goal attempts increased by more than 4 per quarter, there were nearly 18 more rebounds available for each team, and shooting percentages improved as teams played less and less defense.


Then the ’62 season rolled around and the following things happened:
Wilt averaged 50 points
Oscar averaged a triple double
Walt Bellamy averaged a 32–19
Russell averaged 23.6 boards and fell two behind Wilt for the rebound title
Hard to take those numbers at face value, right? And that’s before factoring in offensive goaltending (legal at the time), the lack of athletic big men (significant) and poor conditioning (which meant nobody played defense). I watched a DVD of Wilt’s 73-point game in New York and two things stood out: First, he looked like a McDonald’s All-American center playing junior high kids; nobody had the size or strength to consider dealing with him. Second, because of the balls-to-the-wall speed of the games, the number of touches Wilt received per quarter was almost unfathomable. Wilt averaged nearly 40 field goal attempts and another 17 free throw attempts per game during his 50-point season. Exactly forty years later, Shaq and Kobe averaged a combined 52 points a game on nearly the same amount of combined field-goal/free-throw attempts.18 Things leveled off once teams started taking defense a little more seriously, although it took a full decade to slow down and resemble what we’re seeing now statistically (at least a little). Here’s a snapshot every four years from 1962 on. Notice how possessions, rebound totals and point totals began to drop; how shooting percentages kept climbing; and beyond that, how the numbers jumped around from ’62 to ’74 to ’86 to ’94 to ’04 to ’08.20


Compare the numbers from ’62 and ’08 again. Still impressed by Oscar’s triple double or Wilt slapping up a 50–25 for the season? Sure … but not as much.
1961–62: THE FIRST RIVAL

Abe Saperstein’s American Basketball League died quickly, but not before planting the seed for two future NBA ideas: a wider foul lane (16 feet) and a three-point line. The ABL also gambled on “blackballed” NBA players, including Connie Hawkins, who averaged a 28–13 for Pittsburgh and won the league’s only MVP award. In the one and only ABL Finals, the Cleveland Pipers defeated the Kansas City Steers, three games to two, with future Knicks star Dick Barnett leading the way. The ABL disbanded midway through its second season, with the league-leading Steers declared league “champs.” Good rule of thumb: if you have a franchise named the Kansas City Steers in your professional sports league, you probably aren’t making it. If you have a team called the Hawaii Chiefs, you almost definitely aren’t making it. And if you name a team (in this case, the Pittsburgh Rens) after the abbreviation for “Renaissance,” you definitely aren’t making it.21
1962–63: THE VOID

When Bob Cousy retired after getting his fifth ring, the Association lost its most popular player and someone who ranked alongside Mickey Mantle and Johnny Unitas from a cultural standpoint. Cooz got treated to an ongoing farewell tour throughout the season, as well as the first-ever super-emotional retirement ceremony that featured Cooz breaking down and some leather-lunged fan screaming, “We love ya, Cooz!” Who would step into the Cooz’s void as the league’s most beloved white guy? Did West have it in him? What about Lucas? Yup, the league was becoming blacker and blacker … and if you were a TV network thinking about buying its rights in a bigoted country, this was not a good thing.
(On the flip side, with Lenny Wilkens thriving on the Hawks and Oscar running the show in Cincy, the old “blacks aren’t smart enough to run a football or basketball team” stereotype started to look stupid … although it never really disappeared and even resurfaced as a key plot line during season one of Friday Night Lights in 2007.)22
1963–64: THE SIT-DOWN STRIKE

January 14, 1964, Boston, Massachusetts.
(We’re going with a paragraph break and parentheses to build the dramatic tension. Sorry, I was feeling it.)
Frustrated by low wages, excessive traveling and the lack of a pension plan, the ’64 All-Stars make one of the ballsiest and shrewdest decisions in the history of professional sports, telling commissioner Walter Kennedy two hours before the All-Star Game that they won’t play without a pension agreement in place. With ABC televising the game and threatening Kennedy that a potential TV contract will disappear if the players leave them hanging in prime time, Kennedy agrees fifteen minutes before tip-off to facilitate a pension deal with the owners. Attica! Attica! Attica!
How this night never became an Emmy Award-winning documentary for HBO Sports remains one of the great mysteries in life. You had Boston battling a major blizzard that night. You had every relevant Celtic (current or retired) in the building, including the entire 1946–47 team, as well as a good chunk of the league’s retired stars playing an Old-Timers Game before the main event. You had an All-Star contest featuring five of the greatest players ever (Wilt, Russell, West, Oscar and Baylor) in their primes, as well as a number of other relevant names (Lucas, Havlicek, Heinsohn, Lenny Wilkens, Sam Jon, Hal Greer) and the greatest coach ever (Auerbach) coaching the East. You had Larry Fleisher advising the players in the locker room, a powerful lawyer who brandished significant influence with the players down the road. You had the first instance in American sports history of professional stars risking their careers and paychecks for a greater good. And ultimately, you had what turned out to be the first pension plan of the modern sports era, the first real victory for a player’s union in sports history.23 Other than that, it was a pretty boring night.
Halberstam unearthed two classic tidbits while reporting Breaks of the Game. First, the leaders of the “let’s strike” movement were Heinsohn, Russell and Wilkens. The votes were split (Halberstam’s estimation: 11–9 in favor) and a few influential stars wanted to play and negotiate later … including Wilt Chamberlain. Even during far-reaching labor disputes, Wilt did whatever was best for him. Classic. And second, just when it seemed like the dissenting players might convince everyone else to play, Lakers owner Bob Short sent a message down to the locker room ordering West and Baylor to get dressed and get their asses out on the court, sending the entire locker room into “Screw these guys, we’re not playing!” mode. And they didn’t. The seeds for free agency and big-money contracts were planted on this night. Again, you’re telling me this wouldn’t be a good HBO documentary? Where’s Liev Schreiber? Somebody pour him a coffee and drive him to a recording studio!
In general, the NBA was veering in a healthier direction. Walter Kennedy replaced Podoloff as the league’s second (and, everyone hoped, more competent) commish.24 The Celtics became the first to routinely play five blacks at the same time as opponents emulated their aggressive style—chasing the ball defensively, keeping a center underneath to protect the rim, and using the other defenders to swarm and double-team. With the degree of difficulty rising on the offensive end, the athleticism of certain players started to flourish. You know something was happening since attendance rose to nearly 2.5 million and ABC forked over $4 million for a five-year rights deal despite a dearth of white stars.
The network handed its package to Roone Arledge, an innovative young executive who eventually helped revolutionize television with his work on Monday Night Football, Wide World of Sports, the Olympics, college football, and even Nightline (the first show of its kind).25 According to Halberstam, “What ABC has to prove to a disbelieving national public, [Arledge] believed, was that this was not simply a bunch of tall awkward goons throwing a ball through a hoop, but a game of grace and power played at a fever of intensity. He was artist enough to understand and catch the artistry of the game. He used replays endlessly to show the ballet, and to catch the intensity of the matchups … he intended to exploit as best he could the traditional rivalries, for that was one of the best things the league had going for it, genuine rivalries in which the players themselves participated. Those rivalries, Boston-Philly, New York-Baltimore, needed no ballyhoo; the athletes themselves were self-evidently proud and they liked nothing better than to beat their opponents, particularly on national television. They were, in those days, obviously motivated more by pride than money, and the cameras readily caught their pride.” For the first time, the NBA was in the right hands with a TV network.26
1964–65: THE BIG TRADE

When the struggling Warriors sent Wilt (and his gigantic contract) back to Philly for Connie Dierking, Lee Shaffer, $150,000, Baltic Avenue, two railroads, and three immunities, the trade rejuvenated Philly and San Francisco as NBA cities—both would make the Finals within the next three years—and was covered like an actual news event. In fact, “Chamberlain Traded!” may have been the NBA’s first unorchestrated mainstream moment. Put it this way: Walter Cronkite wasn’t mentioning the NBA on the CBS Evening News unless it was something like “Celtics legend Bob Cousy retired today.” I’ve always called this the Mom Test. My mother was never a sports fan, so if she ever said something like, “Hey, how ’bout that Mike Tyson, can you believe he bit that guy’s ear off?” then you knew it was a huge sports moment because the people who weren’t sports fans were paying attention. Anyway, Wilt getting traded definitely passed the Mom Test. Also, I think Wilt slept with the Mom Test.
(One other biggie that year: with Tommy Heinsohn retiring after the season, Oscar Robertson replaced him as the head of the players union. I just love the fact that we live in a world where Tommy once led a labor movement. Elgin, I gotta tell ya, I absolutely love your idea for a dental plan! Bing, bang, boom! That’s a Tommy Point for you, Mr. B!)
1965–66: RED’S LAST STAND

I always loved Red Auerbach for announcing his retirement before the ’66 season started, hoping to motivate his players and drum up national interest in an “Okay, here’s your last chance to beat me!” season. Like always, he succeeded: Boston defeated the Lakers for an eighth straight title in Red’s much-hyped farewell,27 given an extra jolt after Game 1 of the Finals when Auerbach announced that Russell would replace him as the first black coach in professional sports history.28 Like everything Red did, the move worked on both fronts: Boston rallied to win the ’66 title, and Russell turned out to be the perfect coach for Russell (although not right away).
Red’s retirement marked the departure of old-school coaches who didn’t need assistants, bitched out officials like they were meter maids, punched out opposing owners and hostile fans, never used clipboards to diagram plays and manned the sidelines holding only a rolled-up program. He controlled every single aspect of Boston’s franchise, coaching the team by himself, signing free agents, trading and waiving players, making draft picks, scouting college players, driving the team bus on road trips, handling the team’s business affairs and travel plans, performing illegal abortions on his players’ mistresses and everything else.29 That’s just the way the league worked from 1946 to 1966. Red was also something of a showman, putting on foot-stomping shows when things didn’t go Boston’s way, antagonizing referees and opponents, and lighting victory cigars before games had ended. Until Wilt usurped his title, Red served as the league’s premier supervillain, the guy everyone loved to hate even as they were admitting he made the league more fun.
With players finally earning real money and achieving fame on a mainstream level, the player-coach dynamic was shifting—it was becoming more difficult to scream at players Lombardi-style or make them run wind sprints until they keeled over, that’s for sure—and salary hikes made it harder to keep great teams together.30 Auerbach lowballed his players by convincing them they’d make the money back in the playoffs; he knew that if they bought into that bullshit, then he’d never have to worry about motivating them. Once salaries started climbing past a certain point, you couldn’t play the playoff-money card. Like always, Auerbach read the league’s tea leaves perfectly and left at the perfect time. From the moment Biasone created the shot clock, Red determined where the sport was heading, embraced the influx of black players and capably handled the enigmatic Russell, a ferocious competitor, lazy practice player and overly sensitive soul who was affected by everything he couldn’t control: the plight of African American athletes, his lack of acceptance in Boston, the lack of a labor agreement, Wilt’s reported salary, even the civil rights movement and his place in it. Other than Muhammad Ali, Russell was the single most important athlete of the sixties and it’s impossible to imagine him playing for anyone else, as evidenced by the fact that Red never gave us the chance. They were a perfect match, a little Jewish guy from Brooklyn and a tall black guy from Louisiana bringing out the best in each other, dominating the league for a solid decade and changing the way basketball was played. Will a professional basketball coach ever matter that much again? No. No way.
1966–67: THE SECOND RIVAL

The American Basketball Association formed in February of 1967 and announced plans for its first season in October. The intentions of the league’s founders were unclear: did they want to compete with the NBA or force a potentially lucrative merger? Within a few months, they named George Mikan commissioner, announced franchises for eleven cities (New York,31 Pittsburgh, Indy, Minny, Oakland, Anaheim, Dallas, New Orleans, Houston and Denver) and promised to (a) sign current NBA players and incoming rookies (happened); (b) get themselves a TV contract (didn’t happen), (c) play with a multicolored ball and a three-point line (happened), and (d) encourage their players to grow gravity-defying afros, dunk as much as possible and try all kinds of drugs (happened).32 Instead of accepting that a rival was inevitable, NBA owners panicked and moved up their expansion plans, adding five more teams (Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Milwaukee and Phoenix) over the next three years and then three more (Portland, Cleveland and Buffalo) for the 1970–71 season. As an ABC executive joked in Breaks, when they put in a clause in the 1965 TV contract allowing ABC to cancel if any NBA team folded, they should have gone the other way and placed a limit on the number of expansion teams. After all, nothing ruins a sports league faster than overexpansion, diluted teams and the death of rivalries, right?33 Throw in competition for players, a potential antitrust lawsuit and the new Players Association potentially challenging the reserve clause, and suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy for the National Basketball Association. Although nobody knew it yet.
1967–71: THE BROKEN MIRROR

That would be Spencer Haywood. He was bad luck. For everyone. Sure, you make your own bad luck to some degree, and in this case the NBA allowed salaries to escalate too rapidly during the latter part of the sixties. In 1966, Knicks rookie Cazzie Russell (the number one overall pick) signed a three-year, $250,000 contract, pushing the Association into the “okay, guys, you don’t have to have a second job during the summers anymore” era. The following year, college star Elvin Hayes passed up ABA money (and the chance to play for Houston) for a $350,000 deal with the Rockets. Jimmy Walker (Jalen Rose’s dad) parlayed the ABA’s interest into a lucrative $250,000 package with Detroit, becoming the first of dozens of talented young NBA players who didn’t reach their potential partly because somebody paid them too much too soon. Warriors star Rick Barry jumped leagues, signed with Oakland and became the first professional athlete to dispute the reserve clause in contracts (a clause that allowed teams to keep a player’s rights for one year after his contract ended). The legal challenge went poorly and Barry spent the season as Oakland’s TV announcer. As far as career moves go, this ranked right up there with David Caruso ditching NYPD Blue and Andy Richter leaving Conan O’Brien’s show. On the bright side, somebody had to challenge the reserve clause, right?34
Here’s the irony: Even as money was poisoning professional basketball for the first time, the NBA couldn’t have been in better shape as a whole. During the 1968–69 season, the Lakers opened up the league’s first state-of-the-art arena (the 17,000-seat L.A. Forum), attendance topped 4.4 million, ratings rose from 6.0 (1965) to 8.9 in 1969, and ABC even televised a few prime-time playoff games (including Game 7 of the 1969 Finals during May sweeps). But everyone was getting greedy: players, owners, agents, you name it. And you know how that plays out.
Enter the Broken Mirror. Haywood started his professional career when Lew Alcindor did, so we can blame his bad karma for swaying the NBA’s number one pick that year: Phoenix would have been a better market for Big Lew, but Milwaukee won the coin toss and the Suns took Neil Walk second.35 Haywood became the first nonsenior to play professionally, signing with the ABA’s Denver Rockets as a “hardship” case and unwittingly giving the ABA an enormous advantage: Now the ABA had first crack at nonseniors and high schoolers because the NBA stuck by its antiquated four-year draft eligibility rule. So you could blame Haywood for the eventual influx of underclassmen and teenagers who nearly submarined the NBA in the 1990s, as well as the NBA preventing more dangerous Haywood signings by arranging a merger in May 1971. The NBA accepted ten ABA teams (everyone but Virginia). In return, the ABA dropped its antitrust suit, each ABA team agreed to pay $1.25 million over ten years, and ABA teams were deprived of TV money until 1973. The NBA Players Association quickly sued to block it, arguing that the merger created a monopoly and preserved the unconstitutional reserve clause. The ensuing legal dispute (nicknamed the Oscar Robertson suit) would drag on for another five miserable years. In retrospect, it’s hard to fathom how the NBA could have handled twenty-eight teams in 1972, so the timing of that lawsuit looks like divine intervention. Regardless, I blame the Broken Mirror (Haywood) for putting it in motion.
After winning three ABA awards as a rookie (MVP, Rookie of the Year and All-Star MVP),36 Haywood left tread marks fleeing for the 1970–71 Sonics after realizing his quote-unquote three-year, $450,000 Denver contract only paid him $50,000 per year, then another $15,000 annually for twenty years starting when he turned forty. He had been victimized by a brilliant ABA trick called the Dolgoff plan, in which they offered contracts with deceivingly high dollar figures but backloaded most of the deals. How did they pull off such chicanery? According to Loose Balls, by routinely bribing agents to talk their clients into those deals.37 (The bigger problem arose when NBA stars used those artificially high numbers to negotiate legitimately high deals, leading to the salary explosion that transformed the NBA as we knew it. And not in a good way. Well, unless you enjoy watching wealthy, coked-out, passionless basketball. Then you were pumped.) Haywood signed with Seattle and successfully contested the NBA’s hardship rule, leading to a slew of prospects filing early and claiming financial “hardship” even though nearly all of them were getting paid under the table in college.38
Haywood symbolized an increasingly erratic sport: wealthy and empowered just a little too soon, looking out for himself only, thriving during an era with too many teams and younger stars being given too much money and responsibility waaaaaaaaay too soon. That’s how the seventies became the Too Many, Too Much, Too Soon era. The Broken Mirror became its defining figure, peaking too early, earning a ton of money and spending it just as fast, switching teams every few years (always after letting the previous one down), helping to destroy the post-Bradley Knicks, souring Sonics coach/GM Bill Russell on professional basketball, marrying a celebrity (the model Iman), developing a massive cocaine problem and even being involved in the single greatest known coke story in NBA history (we’ll get there). It can’t be a coincidence that Spencer Haywood retired after the 1982–83 season and the league immediately took off. It just can’t.
1971–72: THE STREAK

Why hasn’t anyone made a documentary about the ’72 Lakers? You had the league’s most beloved star and tragic figure, Jerry West, winning his first title on a 69-win team. You had Elgin retiring two weeks into the season and becoming the first superstar to retire without winning a ring,39 paving the way for Dan Marino, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and every other star who took heat for falling short. You had Wilt playing the way we always wanted him to play. You had an increasing number of Hollywood celebs hitting home games at the “hip” L.A. Forum, a trend that Doris Day had pioneered in the early sixties. Best of all, you had L.A.’s 33-game winning streak, which happened in a diluted league but remains remarkable when you remember the previous record was 20 (the ’71 Bucks).40 I’ll save my thoughts on the ’72 Lakers for the “Keyzer S?ze” chapter, but let’s rank that streak against the unbreakable records in NBA history. Here’s my top ten:
Wilt’s 50 per game. Perfect storm of the right era, the right guy, the right rules and the right ball hog. We might not see 40 a game again, much less 50.
Wilt’s 55-rebound game. Since nobody has come within 20 boards of this mark in the past two decades, and since it’s difficult for an entire team to snare 55 rebounds these days, I’m declaring this one safe. The guy who came within 20? (Wait for it … wait for it …) Charles Oakley in 1988.
Russell’s eleven rings. Too many teams, too much movement, too tough to keep a great team together for more than a few years. I just can’t imagine someone getting twelve. Even if someone had a Horry-like career as a role player and played contender roulette for fifteen years, landing in the right situation over and over again, could they get twelve? Nobody had better timing/luck than Horry and he only has seven. Could someone be 55 percent luckier than Big Shot? I don’t see it.
L.A.’s 33-game win streak. Like Bob Beamon’s long jump in Mexico, only if he jumped 39 feet instead of 29 feet. Here’s how it happened: you had a veteran, experienced, talented nucleus that had been together for years dismantling a diluted league that, except for Milwaukee and Baltimore, had seen too much player movement because of expansion and the ABA. In a three-season span from 1969 to 1972, we witnessed four of the thirteen longest streaks ever: 33 games, 20 games, 18 games and 16 games (the ’71 Bucks again). Coincidence? No way.
I have a goofy theory on the 33-gamer: Bill Sharman took over the Lakers that year and may have been the first “real” NBA coach ever. Back then, NBA game days consisted of players showing up an hour before the game, farting around, then getting advice from coaches like “Keep Willis off the boards” and “Don’t let Monroe kill us” while everyone smoked Marlboro Reds. Sharman was a stickler for detail, conditioning and repetition—things today’s generation takes for granted but everyone ignored in the fifties and sixties—forcing his players to stretch every day, pushing them to eat healthy and quit smoking, scheduling game-day shoot-arounds so players could get accustomed to rims and shooting backgrounds at different arenas, requiring them to watch game films and basically doing everything that modern coaches do. For a veteran team like the Lakers, those little things pushed them to another level. He also handled Chamberlain better than any other coach, becoming the first to convince Wilt to buy into Russell’s rebounding/shot-blocking routine, even pulling a Jedi mind trick by soliciting Wilt’s opinions and ideas all season so Wilt felt part of everything that was happening.41 The Dipper sacrificed a ton of shots but fully embraced the whole unselfishness/teamwork thing,42 and over everything else, that’s what made his team so great. So yeah, on paper, it doesn’t make sense that the ’72 Lakers were better than the ’69 Lakers … but when you factor in a diluted league, Sharman’s influence and Wilt’s reinvention, it makes sense.
George McGinnis’ 422 turnovers. Disclaimer: This happened in the ABA. McGinnis holds the first (422), second (401), and third (398) all-time turnover spots, making him the Chamberlain of turnovers.43 The NBA didn’t start keeping track of turnovers until the ’78 season, robbing us of two landmark George years before he notched 312 in 1978 and a whopping 346 in 1979. Who made more turnovers over the years, George McGinnis or Rachael Ray? Will we ever see someone else average more than five turnovers a game without getting benched or killed by his own fans? If I’d had my column back in the mid-seventies, I would have been ragging on George constantly: between his ball-stopping habits, ugly one-handed jumper, moody attitude and disinterest in defense, George took more off the table than any “superstar” ever. You can’t believe how much McGinnis secretly sucked until you watch his stink bomb in the ’77 Finals. I know he peaked two or three years earlier (most famously with a 52-point, 37-rebound game in 1974) and had a miserable series, but still, you can’t tell me someone that sloppy and simple to defend belonged on a championship team.44 Regardless, I can’t imagine anyone breaking George’s hallowed 422 or averaging a quadruple nickel like he did in ’75 (29.9 points, 9.2 boards, 6.3 assists and 5.3 turnovers). Kevin Porter and Artis Gilmore set the current NBA record with 360 turnovers apiece in ’78. Allen Iverson approached that mark with 344 in 2005; nobody else in the 2000s topped 320. George, your record is safe. Future generations will remember you as the one and only member of the Quadruple Nickel Club.
Wilt’s 100-point game.45 Kobe’s 81-point game made this one seem slightly breakable. The right perimeter player at the right point in his career with the right touch of officiating could definitely challenge it with help from the three-point line. In his 81-point explosion, Kobe played 42 minutes and made 21 of 33 two-pointers, 7 of 13 threes and 18 of 20 free throws against a mess of a Toronto team. (The key for Kobe that night: Toronto’s perimeter defenders were Jalen Rose, Mike James, Morris Peterson, Joey Graham and a washed-up Eric Williams. Those guys couldn’t have stopped a David Thompson nosebleed.) So let’s tweak those numbers slightly, have him hog the ball a little more and make him slightly more accurate. Had he played 46 minutes and made 24 of 37 two-pointers, 10 of 15 threes and 22 of 24 free throws, that’s exactly 100 points. Look at the two sets of numbers again; is the second set that big a stretch from the first?
Chicago’s 72-win season. The perfect storm of the right era (the league at its most diluted), right team (a pissed-off Bulls team hell-bent on reclaiming its throne) and right alpha dog (a possessed Jordan coming off his “baseball sabbatical” and a humiliating playoff defeat). I can’t imagine anyone finishing a season with fewer than 10 losses. It’s too improbable.
Scott Skiles’ 30-assist game. Some perfect storm potential because the record happened against Paul Westhead’s nonsensical ’91 Nuggets team that attempted Loyola Marymount’s run-and-gun style and failed so memorably. Whether it’s broken or not, let’s agree that we’ll never see another balding white dude shell out 30 assists again.46
Rasheed Wallace’s 41 technicals. In just 77 games! In other words, Sheed averaged an astonishing 0.53 technicals per game for the 2000–1 season; it’s like Teddy Ballgame’s .406 but for semi-homicidal sports marks.
Jose Calderon’s 98.1 free throw percentage. This just happened—Calderon made 151 of 154 free throws in ’09 and shattered Calvin Murphy’s seemingly insurmountable 95.8 from ’81 (right before they changed the 3-to-make-2 rule). Murphy made 206 of 215 FTs and still holds the 200-plus record. Larry Bird holds the 300-plus (93%, 319 for 343) and 400-plus (91%, 414 for 455) records. And Magic Johnson (91%, 511 for 563) holds the 500-plus record. Regardless, don’t feel bad for Murphy, because he still owns one of the great records in sports history: fourteen kids by nine different women, the unofficial siring record for athletes as far as I’m concerned. Put that thing away, Calvin! And you wondered why they called him the “Pocket Rocket.”
1972–73: THE DOUBLE CROSS

During the final year of its latest four-year contract with ABC—the network that helped nurture professional basketball into a mainstream force—the NBA negotiated a deal with CBS mandating that the winning network had to show NBA games starting between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoons. Since ABC couldn’t dump crucial college football games in October and November, a bitter Roone Arledge dropped his right of first refusal and decided to destroy the NBA on CBS. Which he did. Easily. Arledge promoted the living hell out of his Saturday college football games and crushed the Association in the ratings, quickly turning it back into a Sundays-only TV entity. Then he expanded Wide World of Sports to Sundays, where it did an eye-opening 12.0 rating and thrashed the NBA every week like a redheaded stepchild. If that weren’t enough, he rolled the dice with trash sports like Superstars and World’s Strongest Man, and even those programs beat the NBA. Within a year, the NBA’s ratings had dropped 25 percent, from 10.0 to 8.1, and when college hoops took off on NBC, suddenly the NBA was cranking out third-place finishes every Sunday. As Halberstam wrote in Breaks of the Game, “Along Madison Avenue it became known as Roone’s Revenge.”
Why would the owners screw over a network that saved its league? Apparently the newer owners were jealous of the NFL’s lucrative contract with ABC, as well as the attention lavished on Monday Night Football, feeling they’d never be better than number three on ABC’s depth chart behind pro football and college football. I’d throw in this theory: for thirty solid years, this was the dumbest league going. These guys couldn’t figure out how to align divisions or eliminate jump balls at the beginning of every quarter, so of course they’d be dumb enough to sabotage their ABC alliance and start a feud with the most powerful TV executive alive. According to Halberstam, only one relevant NBA voice argued against the double cross: Auerbach, who appreciated ABC’s efforts and asked the salient question, “You don’t really think a man like Roone Arledge is going to take this lying down, do you?” Everyone ignored Red and pushed for the switcheroo to CBS, paving the way for everything that would happen over the next ten years: free-falling ratings, nontelevised Game 7’s, tape-delayed Finals games and sweeping public apathy47
1973–74: THE WAR THAT COULDN’T BE WON

When two sides battle, normally there’s a winner and a loser. When the ABA and NBA battled, everyone lost. The ABA was hemorraghing money and going through commissioners like they were Starbucks baristas,48 while the NBA was suffering in five distinct ways. In order:
Bidding wars and swollen contracts damaged the new generation of NBA up-and-comers. Sidney Wicks, Haywood, Hayes, Jimmy Walker, Sam Lacey and Austin Carr suffered right away; McAdoo, McGinnis (after crossing over in ’75), Maravich and Archibald suffered eventually. When those players should have been enjoying their primes in the late-’70s, only Hayes was contributing to a contender. We also had sketchy players making significantly more money than their coaches, creating its own legion of problems that Tommy Heinsohn explained beautifully in his award-winning autobiography, Give ’Em the Hook:
Darryl Dawkins is the perfect example. The guy could have been a monster, should have been a monster, but nobody had the controls. Armed with a long-term contract, Darryl had the security of dollars coming in. I’ve seen this happen so many times …. It’s not just the length of the contract that hurts, it’s the length of the guaranteed lifestyle. Unless you’re talking about athletes who are truly dedicated to the game, the only time these guys bear down is when their security is threatened. I used to talk about this with Cousy, who began coaching the Kings in Cincinnati the same year I took the job in Boston. One night he started telling me about Sam Lacey, his rookie center—how he was pessimistic about him because Sam wouldn’t do this, Sam wouldn’t do that, and just didn’t take very well to coaching. “Cooz,” I said. “I don’t know what you expected. You guys just signed Sam for some serious dough, didn’t you? So obviously he must assume management thinks quite highly of him. And his wife certainly thinks he’s great. His mother thinks he’s great. His agent thinks he’s great. You’re the only guy telling him he’s not great. So, Cooz, who do you think he’s going to listen to?” Cooz agreed, then he watched me polish off seven glasses of Scotch and a pack of Marlboro Reds in less than two hours before letting me drive home. I vaguely remember driving into a stop sign and hitting a homeless guy. The cops let me go because I was Tommy Heinsohn. Those guys got a round of Tommy Points that night! Bing, bang, boom!49
The ABA kept bowling over the NBA’s top referees with Godfather offers, stealing four of the top six (John Vanak, Joe Gushue, Earl Strom and Norm Drucker), improving the quality of ABA games and leaving the NBA in a legitimate bind.50 By the ’76 season, as Hubie Brown told Terry Pluto, “The officiating at the end of the ABA was like the players—it was just an incredible amount of talent, just staggering. And nobody knew it. The officials were a bigger secret than the players.” Only Hubie could lapse into hyperbole while discussing ABA officials.
3. NBA scoring dropped from 116.7 in 1970 to 102.6 in 1974. You could attribute some of the decline to better defense and better coaching; older guards like Frazier, Jo Jo, Bing, Goodrich and Norm Van Lier setting a deliberately slower pace; a famine of overall offensive talent; and waaaaaaaay too many guys named Don and Dick. The ’70 teams averaged 116.7 points on 99.9 attempts and shot 46.0 percent from the field. The ’75 teams averaged 102.6 points on 91.2 attempts and shot 45.7 percent from the field. Free throw attempts were roughly the same (24.5 per team in ’70, 25.0 in ’75), so every ’75 game had about seventeen fewer total possessions than a ’70 game. Why, you ask?
(You really want me to say it?)
(Fine, I’ll say it.)
Too many white guys! Okay? All right? I said it! The league needed more black guys! The ABA stole too many of them! It was a freaking problem! Okay?
To be fair, it wasn’t “blacks” as much as “young athletes.” Here’s how the clash played out for relevant rookies from ’71 through ’75:
1971: Austin Carr, Sidney Wicks, Elmore Smith, Fred Brown, Curtis Rowe, Clifford Ray, Mike Newlin, Randy Smith (NBA); Julius Erving, Artis Gilmore, George McGinnis, Ralph Simpson, Tom Owens, Johnny Neumann, Jim McDaniels, John Roche (ABA)
1972: Bob McAdoo, Paul Westphal, Jim Price, Kevin Porter, Lloyd Neal (NBA);51 George Gervin, James Silas, Jim Chones, Brian Taylor, Don Buse, Dave Twardzik (ABA)
1973: Doug Collins, Ernie DeGregorio, Mike Bantom, Kermit Washington, Kevin Kunnert (NBA); Larry Kenon, Swen Nater, John Williamson, Caldwell Jones (ABA)
1974: Bill Walton, Jamaal Wilkes, Tom Burleson, Scott Wedman, Tom Henderson, Campy Russell, Brian Winters, Truck Robinson, John Drew, Phil Smith, Mickey Johnson (NBA); Moses Malone, Marvin Barnes, Maurice Lucas, Billy Knight, Bobby Jones, Len Elmore (ABA)
1975: Gus Williams, Alvin Adams, Darryl Dawkins, Lionel Hollins, Junior Bridgeman, Bill Robinzine, Joe Bryant, Ricky Sobers, Kevin Grevey, Lloyd Free, Bobby Gross (NBA); David Thompson, Marvin Webster, M. L. Carr, Dan Roundfield, Mark Olberding (ABA)
Scoring those five years like rounds in a prizefight: 10–8, ABA; 10–9, ABA; 10–9, ABA; 10–9, NBA; 10–10, even. From a quality-of-play standpoint, the ABA grabbed nearly every athletic rebounder and exciting perimeter scorer, forcing the NBA to keep trotting out the likes of Dick Gibbs and Don Ford every night.52 If HBO’s Harold Lederman was judging, he’d probably say, “ OHHHHHH-kay, Jim—I have to give this one to the ABA. Maybe the NBA landed more role players and fringe starters, but Jim, out of the twenty best incoming rookies from 1971 to 1975 (Erving, Gervin, Wicks, McAdoo, Kenon, Westphal, Moses, Nater, Barnes, Gilmore, McGinnis, Walton, Silas, Wilkes, Lucas, Thompson, Collins, Knight, Buse and Bobby Jones) the ABA landed fourteen of them, including five guys who could potentially put asses in seats: Erving, Gervin, Thompson, Gilmore and Moses! They landed the biggest punches, pushed the envelope with high schoolers and robbed the NBA of nearly every exciting athlete! I have the ABA winning, 49–46!”
Considering the NBA had eighteen teams at the time, that was a pretty significant shortage of incoming talent, no? That’s why I have trouble taking the numbers from ’72 to ’76 seriously—particularly some of the gaudy scoring/rebounding numbers that don’t jibe with the drop in scoring—because such a relatively small talent pool spread was stretched over twenty-eight teams and two leagues. Imagine if you removed all the European players from the 2009 NBA, forbade the Eastern and Western Conferences from playing each other, then directed 75 percent of the most talented rookies to one conference for five solid years. Wouldn’t the stats be skewed? Wouldn’t you take the respective conference championships a little less seriously?
Julius Erving blossomed as basketball’s most exciting player and a legitimate box office draw, winning 1974 MVP and Playoffs MVP awards, getting an endorsement deal with Dr. Pepper and gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated’s March 15 issue: a picture of Julius dunking as his head broke up the comically unsophisticated headline “What’s Up? Doc J.” Even if fans couldn’t see him on TV, the buzz surrounding Doc had made him cooler than any NBA player. With the Lakers and Knicks fading and the NBA’s younger stars failing to resonate with the public, for the first time the ABA finally had something the NBA needed, and a merger seemed more likely than ever. Alas, the Oscar Robertson suit was still holding it up. The NBA was like a separated rich guy who falls for a mistress from the wrong side of the tracks (the ABA), develops a relationship with her kid (Doc) and wants to marry her even though it’s probably the wrong idea … only he has to wait another five years for the divorce to clear and keeps wondering if he’s doing the right thing getting married again. I think that analogy made sense. I’m almost positive.
In the spring of ’74, Utah drafted high schooler Moses Malone and stole him away from the University of Maryland with a four-year, $565,000 deal. That’s right, the ban on high schoolers had been lifted for professional basketball. Poor Moses ended up making an unprecedented life adjustment, moving from Virginia to Utah at the tender age of nineteen and living on his own without the ability to put a decent sentence together. Like Josh Baskin in Big, only with more Mormons and more mumbling.53 For the NBA, it was one more body blow: instead of Moses becoming a household name at Maryland and progressing at his own pace, the best center prospect since Kareem would be learning bad habits in a floundering league. Within a year, Utah went under and Moses was stuck playing with Marvin Barnes on the Spirits of St. Louis. Not exactly the ideal mentor.54
(Only one bright spot this season: San Diego lured Wilt to the ABA, but the NBA blocked the deal and Wilt was stuck coaching the Q’s all season. Wilt took it seriously for about a month, then less seriously, and by the midway point of the season, he was no-showing games. S.D. finished last in league attendance with less than 1,900 per game. In Wilt’s defense, they didn’t keep coaching stats at the time so he couldn’t come up with any individual goals.)
1974–75: RACIAL PROGRESS … OR NOT

The 1975 Finals made sports history: for the first time, a championship game featured two black coaches—Al Attles for Golden State, KC Jones for Washington—and if that weren’t enough, they were wearing superhip seventies leisure suits! (Somebody needs to start a website called My Favorite 100 Al Attles Disco Suits. Every time they cut to him on the bench, it looks like he’s waiting on line for Luis Guzman’s club in Boogie Nights.) Jones took heat because CBS’ inside-the-huddle cameras kept catching him crouching submissively during timeouts as assistant Bernie Bicker-staff furiously diagrammed plays and seemed to be the one coaching the team. So what if Bickerstaff happened to be black as well? This just proved that blacks shouldn’t be coaching NBA teams. Or something. Poor KC got fired a year later and didn’t get another crack at a head coaching job until 1983.55
You know what? We can do better for 1974–75. My favorite subplot was Oscar shattering the Great Player Turned Incomprehensibly Bad TV Analyst barrier. It’s unclear why CBS believed Oscar would have clicked with TV audiences when he had a (deserved) reputation for being humorless and cantankerous. Maybe they just wanted a big name. But Oscar tanked so badly that they dumped him for former referee Mendy Rudolph. Mendy Rudolph? Now that’s insulting. Here’s what fascinates me after the fact: a whopping eight of the twenty-five all-time greatest players were legitimately horrendous on television, but that didn’t stop the networks from repeatedly hiring the latest available legend under the whole “Hey, he’s a huge name, he’ll be fine!” theory before eventually weaning themselves off the hare-brained idea (although we still see it with the NFL). Here’s the official NBA Legends Turned Horrible TV Personalities chronology.
Elgin Baylor (’74). CBS teamed him with Brent Musburger and Hot Rod Hundley for its inaugural NBA season, only Elgin struggled so famously that the network replaced him during the ’74 playoffs. As soon as the Warriors were eliminated, they dumped him for Rick Barry for the Conference Finals.56 Can we get Elgin’s CBS work on YouTube? Can someone make that happen for me?
Oscar Robertson (’75). Stood out for a couple of reasons. First, he never looked at the camera. Ever. It was like the camera was the sun and he didn’t want to get blinded. Second, he had absolutely nothing to say, so he made up for it by making a variety of unprofessional sounds as the game was happening: You know, like “Ohhhhhhhhhhh!” and “Yes!” Oscar always sounded like he was getting a lap dance in the CBS Champagne Room. The network couldn’t get rid of him fast enough after the season, sparing us from seeing an inevitable “The Big O No!” headline if the Oscar era lasted too long.57
Rick Barry (’75–’81). Moonlighted as a Playoffs color guy if the Warriors were done playing, coming off like the annoying guy at your Super Bowl party who played a year of college football and thinks that gives him the right to criticize and nitpick everything that’s happening. When he retired and joined CBS full-time for the ’80–’81 season, Barry’s TV career fell apart following an incredible moment during Game 5 of the Finals, when CBS showed a picture of a few members of the ’56 Olympic basketball team (including a young Russell with a big grin on his face), leading to this exchange:
GARY BENDER: Rick, who do you think that guy is over there?
BARRY (attempting his first joke ever): I don’t know, it looks like some fool over there with that, um, that big watermelon grin there on the left.58
(CBS cuts from the picture to a dumbfounded Russell with the words “watermelon grin” still hanging in the air. He glances back and forth between Gary Bender and Barry with a “Did he just say what I think he just said?” look on his face. Three excruciating seconds pass.)
BENDER (still smiling, although he may have been shitting himself): Who is that guy? (Pause) That’s you, Bill. Don’t you recognize that picture?
RUSSELL (not smiling): Nope.
Did it end there? Nooooooooo! Only fifteen seconds later, with Russell still steaming, Barry tried to loosen things up by handing the pictures to Russell on camera. As Barry kept asking over and over again, “You sure you don’t want these?” a seething Russell turned his entire body away from Barry toward Bender, who tried to defuse things by telling Rick, “You might want to leave this one alone.” And Barry still kept going until Russell finally said coldly, “No, I don’t want ’em.” Unequivocally the most awkward sports-TV moment that didn’t include Joe Namath and Suzy Kolber. You couldn’t even believe it as it was happening. Needless to say, Barry’s contract was not renewed. And that’s an understatement. (Of course, if this incident happened in today’s overly PC era, Barry would quickly disappear from planet Earth like Michael Richards did.) Barry eventually found a second life on TBS, providing play-by-play for the ’85 Eastern Finals with—you’re not gonna believe this—Bill Russell! Who’s the genius who came up with that idea? That was like Mike Tyson getting freed from jail and immediately hosting the 1996 Miss Black Teen USA pageant.
John Havlicek (’78). A late addition to the Musburger-Barry team for the ’78 Finals,59 Hondo said absolutely nothing and flatlined for seven games. Was this really a surprise? I loved Hondo, every Boston fan loved Hondo, but he’s not exactly someone you’d want giving the best man’s speech at a wedding.60 I remember watching one of those Finals games on NBA TV at like three in the morning, seeing Hondo introduced in the beginning, getting excited, then thinking he had gotten sick or something because we didn’t hear him speak for the next forty-five minutes. Nope. He was just sitting there. You can’t even give him a grade other than “incomplete” or “possibly in a coma.”
Bill Russell (’80–’83). Well received during his first run in the early seventies, Russell was unprepared/uninterested/un-(fill in any other adjective that suggests life) the second time around and couldn’t carry the load himself after Barry was fired. Actually, he sounded like my dad every time he falls asleep during a Red Sox game, wakes up in the late innings and mumbles, “Wait, what happened to Beckett? Did we take him out?” That was Russell for three solid years. Although you can’t blame him because he worked with Barry for one of them. Maybe he was heavily medicated.
Moses Malone (’86). Okay, we’re cheating here—CBS used Moses as a pregame/halftime/postgame studio guy for Game 4 of the ’86 Finals, an awesome game overshadowed by CBS’ decision that it would be a good idea for Moses to speak extemporaneously on live TV. Teamed with Musburger and Julius Erving (no slouch himself in the Horrible TV Guy department), Doc came off like a cross between Eddie Murphy and abolitionist Frederick Douglass compared to Moses. It’s hard to figure out what CBS was thinking here. I mean, it’s not like Moses was getting more articulate as the years passed—we were only three years removed from his “Fo fo fo” prediction for the ’83 Playoffs and his nickname within the league was “Mumbles” Malone. The more I’m thinking about it, I wonder if someone at CBS lost a bet—as in “okay, if you win, I’ll pay for our golf trip to Scotland, but if I win, you have to use Moses Malone as a TV guy for a Finals game.” That had to be what happened, right? Whatever the reason, this was the only NBA telecast ever that needed closed captioning.61
Magic Johnson (’92–’97). NBC signed Magic right after he retired and it seemed like a layup. Nobody was more personable or likable than Magic, right? Then the telecasts started. Magic giggled during plays without provocation, kept interrupting Marv Albert and Mike Fratello, and tied every play or storyline into something that had happened while he was playing for the Lakers. You also couldn’t really understand him because, for whatever reason, it always sounded like he was eating a ham sandwich. Of course, I loved having Magic around because he was like a never-ending SNL skit. The Knicks would take the lead on a Ewing shot, then the Bulls and Jordan would answer with a basket, and suddenly Magic would start screaming, “Patrick was down on his end sayin’, ‘I’m gonna win this game’ and Michael came back down and said, ‘Uh-uh, big fella, you ain’t winnin’ on my court!’”62 There was something undeniably entertaining about listening to Magic provide color for games, the same way it’s entertaining when you see a pedestrian trip on the sidewalk or a buddy puke all over himself at a bachelor party. When NBC mercifully moved Magic to the studio, it wasn’t the same; he was just annoying and had nothing to say. What’s strange is that Magic went away for a while, returned on TNT and developed into a decent sidekick for Kenny and Charles. I have no rational explanation for this. None.
Julius Erving (’97). Hands down, the worst studio analyst of all time. And that’s a strong statement. Only two years before, Joe Montana appeared on NBC’s NFL show and may have been dead for all we knew. I remember waiting for Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy to jump in right before every commercial and wheel Montana’s corpse out of the TV frame. Still, it wasn’t surprising that Montana stank—we didn’t like him for his personality, just for banging hot blondes and winning Super Bowls. It’s not like our expectations were high. But Doc was one of the few NBA stars to successfully strike that delicate balance between “articulate spokesman and ambassador” and “slick dude who lives for dunking on heads.” It was incomprehensible that Doc would suck on TV. Seeing him stammer awkwardly on the air, say nonsensical things like “Great players make great plays” and perform the deer-in-the-headlights routine was a little disarming. Every time the camera homed in on him, you could actually feel the tension in the studio. It was tangible. Before one Houston-Utah playoff game, Doc made history by predicting, “I think the key for Houston will be when Hakeem gets the ball, how fast he decides to either shoot, dribble, or pass.” That’s an actual quote. I remember my old roommate Geoff and I spending the next fifteen minutes trying to determine what other options Hakeem could possibly have had on a basketball court, ultimately deciding on these: (a) turn the ball over, (b) call time out, (c) pass out, (d) shit on himself, or (e) drop dead. It was an unforgettable moment, as evidenced by the fact that I can remember where we were watching the game when it happened. Poor Dr. J. Some people just aren’t meant to be on television.63
Isiah Thomas (’98-’00). NBC made a big deal about this hiring because, you know, Isiah was a great player, which means he’ll be a great TV guy, right? (Whoops, I forgot—there’s no correlation whatsoever.) Well, he didn’t have much to say—which didn’t matter much because partner Bob Costas was rusty from a twenty-two-year play-by-play layoff and treated every game like it was a radio telecast64—and you could barely hear Isiah because his meek, high-pitched voice was drowned out by any semiex-cited crowd. When Detroit canned Doug Collins midway through the season, NBC signed him for a three-man booth (Costas, Collins and Isiah), a problem because Collins was roughly ten thousand times more competent than Isiah (even if he suffered from Rick Barry–itis). Now Isiah couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and even if he did, we couldn’t hear him. By the time the Finals rolled around, you could practically hear the voice of NBC’s producer imploring Collins to keep including Isiah in the broadcast. YouTube65 the ’98 Finals some time and watch how many times Collins starts a sentence with something like, “And Isiah, you know better than anyone that you can’t pick up your dribble” or “I don’t think the Jazz can hold Chicago off with Jordan playing like this …” Pause while NBC’s producer screams in Collins’ ear. “… Right, Isiah?” Holy shit, was it awkward. All things considered, that may have been the worst three-man booth ever. NBC moved Isiah to the studio for the next two years, where he had nothing to say and spent most of the time grinning crazily like Gene Hackman’s right-hand man in No Way Out just before he shoots himself. But everything paid off during the postgame celebration for the 2000 Finals: Peter Vecsey capped a classic two-month, I-don’t-give-a-shit-if-you-fire-me run where he took more cheap shots than Claude Lemieux by totally blindsiding poor Isiah, randomly telling him on live TV as they were recapping everything, “And I just found out that you’re the next Pacers coach!” Poor Isiah didn’t know what to do; he hadn’t even looked as flustered after Bird stole the ball from him in the ’87 Playoffs. The best part was Vecsey standing there with a defiant smirk while Isiah stuttered and stammered in front of a national TV audience. Phenomenal stuff. It made the entire lousy Isiah-on-TV era worth it.66 (Unfortunately, it wised up the network executives for good. Not only did we never see Vecsey on network TV again, we’ve never seen another NBA Legend Turned Horrible TV Personality—although there’s always a chance ABC will be dumb enough to hire Shaq when he finally retires. I have my fingers crossed.)
1975–76: THE DUNK CONTEST

Two unforgettable moments stood out during a chaotic season that featured Kareem’s trade to Los Angeles, two commissioner hirings, two NBA high schooler signings, three ABA teams folding, a bitter legal fight between Philly and New York over George McGinnis, and the threat of a merger hanging over everything: the world-renowned triple-OT game (Phoenix-Boston), and a now-legendary ABA Slam Dunk Contest that put David Thompson on the map, turned Doc into a demigod and laid the groundwork for the creation of NBA All-Star Weekend. If you could pick one image that defined each league from 1970 to 1976, you’d pick Cowens skidding across the floor in the ’74 Finals and Doc dunking from the foul line in the Dunk Contest. One league played with passion and did all the little things, while the other league embraced the schoolyard elements of the game, but in either clip you’ll see fans jumping out of their seats. Still, basketball purists discounted the ABA because nobody played defense and everyone went for their own stats, so the fact that the league’s signature moment happened in a Dunk Contest wasn’t helping matters.
Doc’s foul-line dunk had to be the most exhilarating basketball moment that didn’t happen in an actual game. For one thing, nobody had seen one of these contests before, so they didn’t know what to expect; once the dunks started coming, the fans were like thirteen-year-old boys looking at porn for the first time, almost overwhelmed by the sight of everything. You had the decade’s most memorable player facing off against a precocious upstart, with Thompson going right before Doc, firing up the crowd with a superb double pump, and finishing with an incomprehensible-at-the-time 360, playing the role of the talented young band that’s too good to be a warm-up band. (Think Springsteen opening for the Stones in ’75.) You had Doc dramatically measuring his steps from one basket to another as the crowd shuffled in anticipation and wondered what the heck he was doing, finally realizing, “Wait a second, is he going to dunk from the foul line?” Then you had the dunk itself: Erving loping toward the basket and exploding from the foul line, his oversized hand making the basketball look like a golf ball, carrying and carrying and finally tomahawking the ball through the basket as everyone lost their collective shit. Doc’s dunk stands alone for originality pent-up drama, sheer significance and lasting impact, even if he screwed up by not saving that dunk for last. Right guy, right place, right time, right moment. Basketball was starting to go up—literally—and it wasn’t a bad thing.67
SUMMER OF 1976: THE MERGER

This gets my Greatest Summer Ever vote: our two hundredth Independence Day, the release of Jaws, the Montreal Olympics, the fictional graduation of Randy “Pink” Floyd’s class at Lee High School and the ABA-NBA merger in the span of three months? Come on. The merger process was given a jolt when the ABA hired a dick-swinging antitrust attorney named Fred Fruth, who had some world-class negotiating sessions with the NBA’s bright assistant commissioner—wait for it … wait for it—Mr. David Stern!68 Here’s what they settled, with my comments in parentheses:
Denver, New York, San Antonio and Indiana joined for a cost of $3.2 million per team. Those teams would not receive TV money for three years, could not take part in the ’76 college draft and would be called “expansion teams,” but they were allowed to keep their players. The Nets also had to pay the Knicks $4.8 million over ten years for violating their territory rights.
(My thoughts: A bit of a raping so far, although it’s nice that the Knicks got even more money to throw away at bad players. My biggest issue was the NBA excluding ABA teams from a deep ’76 rookie draft in which Johnny Davis (number twenty-two), Alex English (number twenty-three), Lonnie Shelton (number twenty-five) and Dennis Johnson (number twenty-nine) dropped to Round 2. Shows how little leverage the ABA had at the time.)
Kentucky owner John Y. Brown received $3 million for folding his franchise, then spent half that money to buy Buffalo. So the four ABA teams that joined the NBA got crushed financially, but Brown bought in and pocketed $1.5 million? Huh? Meanwhile, the St. Louis owners struck the greatest mother lode in professional sports history, folding their shitty franchise for $2.2 million and one-seventh of the TV money from the four remaining ABA teams—money they were guaranteed in perpetuity. In other words, they received four-sevenths of a cut of the TV contract every year forever. Through 2009, that cut was worth about $150 million. Just free money falling out of the sky, year after year after year after year.69
(My thoughts: The Nets won two titles with Doc, only the league’s signature player and a big reason for the merger, then got shafted to the degree that they sold Doc before the ’77 season just to keep their franchise afloat. The Spirits had a terrible team that would have folded anyway—no fan support, no assets that remotely compared to Doc, no appeal as an NBA market whatsoever—and they somehow finagled a deal that was a hundred times better than New Jersey’s deal. Go figure.)
Players from folded ABA franchises would be auctioned off in a dispersal draft, with price tags assigned to each player and Chicago guaranteed the first pick (so they could take Artis Gilmore). The remaining picks were made in reverse order of finish during the ’76 season, with Atlanta trading the number two pick to Portland for Geoff Petrie, then Portland landing the two biggest prizes (Maurice Lucas at number two and Moses at number five).70 Also, Detroit paid a whopping $500,000 for Marvin Barnes in an apparent attempt to get Bob Lanier to hang himself.
(My thoughts: In the Things That Would Have Been Much More Fun if They Happened Now department, can’t you see ESPN televising the ABA dispersal draft at like 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon as Ric Bucher breaks the Portland/Atlanta trade, Chad Ford laments the lack of European players and Jay Bilas spends ten minutes raving about Malone’s rebounding skills and “second jump-ability”? Alas.)
The NBA agreed to abolish the reserve clause and allow free agency for any veteran player with an expiring contract. This was the single biggest sticking point—the owners wanted compensation, the players did not—and it could have dragged on for another few years if not for a brainstorm by NBA Players Association head Jeff Mullins: give the owners compensation for four years because that’s how long it would have taken for the case to reach the Supreme Court, anyway. Everyone agreed and that was that. Compensation would be awarded by O’Brien’s office as long as the two teams involved didn’t agree first.
(My thoughts: This was the single biggest NBA moment since the shot clock. Everything about the way players were paid and contenders were built was about to change. For good and bad. And for the first few years, it was mostly bad.)
What ensued was the single zaniest summer of player movement in NBA history. Chicago and Houston reinvented themselves with franchise centers (Gilmore and Malone). Portland landed a rebounding sidekick for Walton. The Nets sold Doc to Philly for $3 million and traded Brian Taylor with two number one picks for Tiny Archibald.71 Philly suddenly had the ’75 ABA co-MVPs (Doc and McGinnis) on the same team. Moses bounced around twice before landing in Houston. Portland stupidly traded Moses to Buffalo for a number one pick; Buffalo rerouted him to Houston for two first-rounders just six days later. The Knicks bought McAdoo from Buffalo and lavished him with a five-year, $2.5 million deal, killing his incentive to give a shit until 1982. Gail Goodrich became the Jackie Robinson of free agency, inadvertently murdering professional basketball in New Orleans for two solid decades (hold that thought). Red Auerbach refused to pay Paul Silas market value, shipped him to Denver for Curtis Rowe, then bought Sidney Wicks from Portland (and murdered Celtic Pride in the process). None of the top five teams from ’76 (Golden State, Phoenix, Boston, L.A., Cleveland) improved itself in any conceivable way. Throw in the rise of cocaine, free agency, and escalating salaries and you need to get emotionally prepared for the weirdest three-year stretch in NBA history.
1976–77: THE CANNONBALL

Brace yourself: this might be the only time in sports history that a professional sports league didn’t expand enough. The NBA jumped from eighteen franchises to twenty-two but added twenty-eight quality players to its talent pool, including four franchise guys (Erving, Gervin, Gilmore and Thompson) and a potential franchise guy (Moses).72 Throw in a loaded draft class (John Lucas, Dantley, English, DJ, Parish, Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis…) and there were two quality newcomers for every franchise. Suddenly we had teams struggling with alpha dog battles (McAdoo-Haywood, Erving-McGinnis, Barnes-Lanier) and contrasting styles (old-school versus playground), certain teams quickly gelling into contenders (Portland, Denver) or falling off (Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, G-State), and fans alternately delighted by the ABA’s infusion of athleticism and appalled by high-priced guys playing so selfishly. And if that’s not enough, cocaine and freebasing were taking the league by storm. Again, silliest year ever—like mixing up everyone’s Madden rosters, restarting a franchise season and randomly giving drug problems to 25 percent of the players. Even the records bore out the chaos: no team won more than 52 games and only one lost more than 28 (the Nets). Meanwhile, the “ABA was a quality league” argument gained steam when nine alumni became ’77 All-Stars and five played prominent roles in the ’77 Finals. The infusion of ABA blood made the league faster, deeper, and infinitely more athletic; other than Bill Walton, the league’s most thrilling players were ABA guys (Doc, Ice, Thompson and Moses). The days of a potbellied Nelson logging big minutes in the Finals were long gone, personified by Phoenix returning every key player and finishing 34–48. Still, it was an upheaval of sorts. Like watching the water in a pool thrashing around after a cannonball.
The water kept splashing the following summer, when eleven of the top eighteen draft picks switched by trade and two were repackaged a second time. Trading picks was a relatively recent trend; as late as 1971, everyone picked in their spots and that was that. All hell broke loose in 1977, with two trades netting Milwaukee the first, third and twelfth picks in a superb draft—and, of course, they botched two of them (Kent Benson and Ernie Grunfeld, back in the halycon days when teams could waste two top-twelve picks on slow white guys without getting creamed on the Internet and talk radio). Still, they were the first team to say, “We’re going to rebuild with multiple picks,” a relatively bold move in a league where nearly every franchise was losing money and worrying about its precarious relationship with fans.73 We also had our first full-fledged free agency summer in 1977, with Jamaal Wilkes (Lakers), Gus Williams (Seattle), Truck Robinson (New Orleans), Bobby Dandridge (Washington), Jim Cleamons (New York) and E. C. Coleman (G-State) switching teams.74 Usually teams banged out compensation themselves, with the most famous example happening in ’79, when Boston signed Detroit’s M. L. Carr and it ballooned into a larger deal: Carr and two future number one picks for McAdoo (used to land Parish and McHale a year later). When San Diego signed Walton that same summer, the teams couldn’t agree and left it up to the league. The wackiest free agent transaction will always be the ’79 Clippers signing Brian Taylor from Denver, then giving up two second-round picks, four kilos of cocaine and their best drug connection as compensation.75
Despite unprecedented upheaval, our first postcannonball Finals (Portland-Philly) made everyone happy: CBS (highest-rated Finals ever), the NBA (Bill Walton, backing up the “great white hope” hype), Brent Musburger (who nicknamed Walton “Mountain Man” and tried to become the Cosell to his Ali), basketball purists (delighted that Portland “saved” the league), and virulent racists (who enjoyed the way this series was “analyzed” by mainstream media). The Sixers were painted as a disorganized schoolyard team, a product of the ABA and its “look at me” culture, just a bunch of high-priced blacks who didn’t care about making each other better. They had players with nicknames like “Jellybean”76 and “World,” their layup lines were more famous than any of their wins, and because everyone was out for themselves, Doc was unfairly considered to be more sizzle than steak. By contrast, Portland played like Russell’s old Celtics teams and thrived on fast breaks and ball movement, with everything hinging on Walton’s once-in-a-generation skills. They started three white guys, their best player had red hair and their point guard had a crew cut. Their deliriously happy fans filled a 12,666-seat bandbox and made every game sound like a mid-sixties Beatles concert. Even their rough but lovable bald coach barked out orders and looked like he should have been running one of those Dead Poets Society--type boarding schools. So when the Blazers swept the Lakers, then rallied back from a two-games-to-none lead by winning the next four from Philly, they defeated the NBA’s two biggest quote-unquote problems in one felt swoop: Kareem (the surliest of superstars, someone who had just worn everyone out) and the overtly prejudiced belief that undisciplined, overpaid black guys really were ruining the game. That’s why Portland’s “quest” to save basketball made for ratings magic. As long as Walton and the Blazers were kicking some selfish black ass, the average white sports fan would pay attention to the NBA. (And if the Blazers didn’t keep kicking some selfish black ass? Then the NBA was in trouble.)77
1977–78: THE BLOWN TIRE

If ’77 was the NBA’s craziest season, then the ’78 season had to be its most damaging. Let’s rank the problems in order of least harmful to most harmful.
Crisis no. 1: the drive-by shooting of the Blazers. Walton went down with Portland sporting a 50–10 record and generating buzz that they might be the greatest team ever. In one felt swoop, the NBA lost its signature team, most visible white star, most compelling story line and most entertaining team not just for ’78 but ’79 and ’80, too. Imagine Jordan breaking his foot during Chicago’s 72-win season and disappearing for the next three years. How does that Heat-Sonics Finals in ’96 grab you? Or consecutive Indiana-Utah Finals in ’97 and ’98? Get the idea? Walton’s injury was practically a death blow until Larry and Magic showed up.78
Crisis no. 2: cocaine. Everywhere at this point … and nobody knew it was bad yet. I don’t need to spell it out for you. Just watch Boogie Nights. You should, anyway. I made ten references to it already and could easily go for thirty more. Just rent it. It’s a real film, Jack.
Crisis no. 3: consecutive Bullets-Sonics concussions. Do you realize the ’78 and ’79 Finals were the only NBA Finals of the past half century that didn’t have a recognizable superstar or big-market team? The ’78 Finals stretched over eighteen agonizing days to accommodate CBS; Unseld won Finals MVP and a brand-new car, although the ceremony was marred when the distraught head of CBS asked if he could borrow Unseld’s car to kill himself in it. The bad luck extended beyond Walton going down: the league barely missed out on a Sixers-Nuggets Finals in ’78 (“Thompson versus the Doctor!”) and a thoroughly entertaining Spurs-Suns Finals in ’79 (“Davis and Westphal take on the Iceman!”). If Stern had been running the league in ’78 and ’79, you might have seen that decade’s equivalent of Dick Bavetta or Bennett Salvatore reffing a few of those pivotal Spurs-Bullets, Sixers-Bullets and Nuggets-Sonics games. And you know it’s true.79
Crisis no. 4: the CBS problem. A heated contract negotiation that spring resulted in a four-year, $74 million deal that the network tried to back out of even as it was signing it. As part of the deal (and we’re using that word loosely), CBS was given carte blanche to run playoff games on tape delay, tinker with playoff dates/times and scale back on the number of Sunday telecasts. And cable TV hadn’t been invented yet. Yikes.
Crisis no. 5: fighting. Fighting had always been considered part of basketball, an inevitable outcome of a physical sport (much like hockey). Willis Reed put himself on the map by cleaning out the ’67 Lakers. Maurice Lucas made his reputation by dropping Gilmore. Dennis Awtrey lasted ten years because he was the Guy Who Once Decked Kareem. Ricky Sobers turned around the ’76 Warriors-Suns series by socking Barry. Calvin Murphy had the league’s most famous Napoleon complex, frequently beating up bigger guys and scoring a knockout over six-foot-nine Sidney Wicks. So when the Blazers and Sixers had their ugly brawl in Game 2 of the ’77 Finals, nobody was really that appalled. It started when Darryl Dawkins tried to sucker-punch Bobby Gross (hitting teammate Doug Collins instead), then backpedaled right into a flying elbow from Lucas,80 followed by the two of them squaring off like 1920s bare-knuckle boxers before everyone jumped in. After getting ejected, Dawkins couldn’t calm down and ended up destroying a few toilets in the Philly locker room. Was anyone suspended? Of course not! Not to sound like Grumpy Old Editor, but that’s the way it worked in the seventies and we loved it! Portland swept the last four games and everyone agreed afterward that Lucas’ flying elbow was the turning point of the series. It was the perfect NBA fight for the times—no injuries, tremendous TV and a valuable lesson learned about sticking up for your teammates.81
Fast-forward to October: Sports Illustrated revolves its NBA preview issue around “the Enforcers,” sticking Lucas’ menacing mug on the cover and glorifying physical players in a pictorial ominously titled “Nobody, but Nobody, Is Gonna Hurt My Teammates.” In retrospect, it’s an incredible piece to read; the magazine took intimidating-looking pictures of each enforcer like they were WWF wrestlers, with Kermit Washington (gulp) posing shirtless like a boxer. Each picture was accompanied with text to make these bruisers sound like a combination of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. An example: “Kermit Washington, the 6’8”, 230-pound Laker strong man, is a nice quiet person who lifts weights and sometimes separates people’s heads from their shoulders. In one memorable game last November in Buffalo, Washington ended an elbow skirmish with John Shumate by dropping the 6’9” forward with a flurry of hooks and haymakers. ‘Shumate came apart in sections,’ an eyewitness said.”
Wow, punching people never sounded so cool! Since SI was the influential sports voice at the time—remember, we didn’t have ESPN, USA Today, cable or the Internet yet—the tone of that issue coupled with kudos given to Murphy and Lucas the previous season may have inspired the violent incidents that followed. Lucas was a valuable player who wasn’t good enough to command an SI cover unless it was for something else … you know, like beating the shit out of someone. Was it okay to punch other players in the face? According to Sports Illustrated, actually, it was. As long as you had a good reason.
Fast-forward to opening night: Kent Benson sneaks a cheap elbow into Kareem’s stomach, doubling Kareem over and sending him wobbling away from the play in obvious pain. An enraged Kareem regroups and charges Benson from behind, sucker-punching him and breaking his jaw.82 Unlike other ugly NBA events from the past, this one had a black-guy-decking-a-white-guy clip playing on every local newscast around the country, with the black guy doubling as the league’s signature player of the seventies. Uh-oh. The league decides against suspending Kareem, deeming it punishment enough that he’s missing two months with a broken hand from the punch.
Fast-forward to December: Kermit gets belted by Houston’s Kevin Kunnert after a free throw and they start fighting. Kareem jumps in to hold Kunnert back, Kermit nails Kunnert (who slumps over holding his face),83 then Kermit whirls around, sees Rudy Tomjanovich running toward him and throws what Lakers assistant Jack McKinney later called “the greatest punch in the history of mankind,” breaking Rudy’s face on impact and his skull after it slammed off the floor. Kareem later described the punch as sounding like somebody had dropped a melon onto a concrete floor. Rudy rolled over, grabbed his face, kicked his legs and bled all over the court as everyone watched in horror. The final damage: two weeks in intensive care, a broken jaw, a broken nose, a fractured face and a skull cracked so badly that Rudy could taste spinal fluid dripping into his mouth.
Four forces were working against Kermit other than, you know, the fact he nearly killed another player. With Kareem’s haymaker happening two months earlier, the combination of those punches spawned dueling epidemics of “NBA Violence Is Out of Control!” headlines and editorials (with everyone forgetting that SI had glorified that same violence ten weeks earlier) and “Why do I want to follow a league that allows black guys to keep kicking the crap out of white guys when I’m a white guy?” doubts (the underlying concern that nobody mentioned out loud unless you were sitting in the clubhouse of a country club, as well as the subplot that scared the living shit out of CBS and the owners). Second, the only existing replay made Kermit seem like an unprovoked madman out for white blood, but the cameras missed Kunnert’s initial elbow and the rest of their fight, catching the action only after Kunnert was sinking into Kareem’s arms and Rudy was running at Kermit. Third, Saturday Night Live made light of the incident on “Weekend Update,” showing the punch over and over again for a gag and giving it new life.84 And fourth, with TV ratings faltering, attendance dropping and the league battling the “too many white fans, too many black players” issue, really, you couldn’t have asked for worse timing. It was a best/worst extreme—the most destructive punch ever thrown on a basketball court, the perfect specimen to throw such a punch,85 the worst result possible, the worst possible timing (CBS’ contract was up after the season) and the worst possible color combination (a black guy decking a white guy). Kermit was suspended for sixty days without pay—no hearing, no appeal, nothing—losing nearly $54,000 in salary and becoming Public Enemy No. 1. (This went well beyond a few death threats. After Kermit returned from the suspension, police advised him against ordering hotel room service because they worried someone would poison him.) And Rudy eventually sued the league for $3 million, with his laywers portraying Kermit as a vicious Rottweiler who had been allowed off his leash by neglectful owners. Nothing good came from this incident. Nothing.
The Lakers coldly traded Kermit during his suspension, shipping him to Boston for my favorite Celtic at the time, Charlie Scott. Dark day in the Abdul-Simmons house. I remember attending my first Kermit/Celtics game, seeking him out in warm-ups, finding him, and thinking, “That’s him, that’s the guy,” then watching him fearfully like he was like Michael Myers or something. He may have been the league’s first pariah. But Kermit won Boston fans over immediately. Here was this tragic, forlorn figure carrying himself with undeniable dignity, attacking the boards with relentless fury, injecting life into Cowens like nobody had since Silas, throwing every repressed emotion into these games. Sometimes when the Garden was quiet—and that happened a lot, since we only won 32 games and fans were fleeing in droves—you could even hear Kermit grunt when he grabbed a ballboard: uhhhhhhhhh. Kermit averaged 11.8 points, 10.5 rebounds and 52 percent shooting in just twenty-seven minutes per game. By the end of the season, Kermit had become my favorite Celtic and I was convinced that Rudy’s face had attacked Kermit’s fist.
Of course, we traded him that summer. Go figure.86 He moved to San Diego and then Portland, where Blazer fans embraced him the way the Boston fans had. When Halberstam wrote beautifully about him a few years later—really, one of the great character profiles ever written of an athlete—Kermit evolved into something of a victim, culminating in John Feinstein writing an entire book about the punch in 2002.87 Maybe Rudy was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but so was Kermit. Like hundreds of NBA players before him, Kermit threw an angry punch with mean-spirited intentions … only this one connected. He became the league’s Hannibal Lecter, the guy who threw The Punch and nearly killed someone. The NBA took violence more seriously after that, making fighting ejections mandatory and handing out longer suspensions, although it’s turned into somewhat of an urban legend that Kermit’s punch changed everything. The league didn’t make a concerted effort to shed fighting completely until an ugly Knicks-Bulls brawl in the ’94 Playoffs spilled into the stands with a horrified David Stern in attendance. That was the tipping point, not Kermit’s punch.
1978–79: LIFE SUPPORT

Here’s where the perception that the NBA was in trouble took hold, thanks to tape-delayed playoff games, declining attendance, star players mailing in games, Walton’s continued absence, Buffalo’s move to San Diego, Erving’s disappointing play in Philly, a 75:25 black-to-white ratio and something of a smear campaign from various newspaper columnists and even Sports Illustrated. Since sports fans in 1978 and 1979 took their cue from SI, everyone was thinking the same thing: “The NBA is in trouble.” Even if it wasn’t necessarily true. With Boston already owning Bird’s draft rights, Indiana State’s undefeated ’79 season assumed greater significance for NBA fans as it unfolded. Bird loomed as the potential savior of a floundering Celtics franchise, and when Bird battled Magic’s Michigan State squad in the 1979 NCAA Finals, that boosted Magic’s profile to savior status as well. By sheer coincidence, two of the league’s three biggest markets (L.A. and Chicago) controlled the first two picks in the ’79 draft. The Lakers won the coin toss and Magic, while Chicago’s ensuing tailspin ended with Jordan saving them five years later. Throw in Boston signing Bird and everyone wins!88 Within a year, Bird saved the Celtics, Magic gave Kareem a pulse for the first time in five years, Philly finally built the right cast of role players around Doc, all three teams won 60-plus games and made the Conference Finals and Magic put himself on the map with the clinching game of the Finals.
A bigger savior was coming that summer: cable. Just weeks after the NBA signed a three-year, $1.5 million deal with the USA Network for Thursday night doubleheaders and early round playoff games, ESPN launched the first-ever twenty-four-hour sports network on September 7, 1979, paving the way for SportsCenter, fun-to-watch highlights, and an eventual competitor for the league’s cable rights. You couldn’t find better advertising than slickly packaged game summaries that featured every exciting dunk, pass, and big shot and left out all the unseemly stuff. (You know, like fistfights, empty seats, utter indifference, and players jogging around and looking spent for the wrong reasons.) For the record, David Stern believes the arrival of ESPN and cable TV had more to do with saving the NBA than Bird and Magic, although he feels like the whole “saving” part has been totally overblown.89 Which it probably was. Remember, the Dallas Mavericks joined in 1980–81 for a cool expansion fee of $12 million, finishing 15–67 that season and spawning countless “Yeesh, maybe they should have had J. R. Ewing coach the team” jokes that were hysterically funny twenty-eight years ago. How bad could things have been if rich guys were throwing out $12 million checks to join the NBA?
Still, here’s how much the NBA/CBS relationship had deteriorated: Despite being given two appealing Conference Finals in 1980 (Boston-Philly and L. A.-Phoenix), CBS showed only three games live, broadcast another three on tape delay and completely ignored the other four (including a pivotal Game 4 in Phoenix).90 When they landed Kareem, Magic and Doc in the Finals, they made the Lakers and Sixers play Games 3 and 4 back-to-back on a Saturday/Sunday, then gave affiliates the option of airing Game 6 (a potential clincher) either live or on tape delay at eleven-thirty at night. Since it was a Friday during May sweeps, nearly every affiliate opted for reruns of The Incredible Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, with only the Philly, L.A., Portland and Seattle markets carrying the game live. That meant one of the most famous basketball games ever played (Magic starting at center in place of an injured Kareem, then carrying the Lakers to the title) happened well after midnight on tape delay in nearly every American city. Think how many young fans could have been sucked in for life. On the other hand, can you really blame the CBS affiliates there? I mean, both The Incredible Hulk and Dukes of Hazzard plus Dallas to boot? That was a murderer’s row! After a three-minute Googling frenzy, I can report that Dallas and Dukes were the top two shows in 1980; Dukes had about 21 million viewers and Dallas had a jaw-dropping 27 million. Obviously they weren’t dumping those shows for an episode of The League with Overpaid Black Guys Who Do Drugs.91 That’s just a bad business decision. So yeah, it stinks that nobody watched Magic’s famous 42-point game live. But it stinks more that the NBA screwed up by not scheduling that game for Saturday afternoon so everyone could see it.92
One year later, the unthinkable happened: even though a star-studded affair between Philly and Boston doubled as the greatest Conference Final ever played, CBS aired only nine of a possible fourteen Final Four games (six of those nine were tape-delayed) and showed four of the six ’81 Finals games on tape delay (including the clincher). In a related story, the broadcast of the ’81 Finals was the lowest-rated in history (6.7)93 and an improbable ’81 Western Finals matchup between the 40–42 Rockets and 40–42 Kings probably made CBS consider the first-ever tape delay of a tape-delayed telecast.94 So yes, the NBA needed cable. Badly.
1979–80: THREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Do you realize that it took the three-point line eight solid years to fully establish itself? A quick timeline:
1980. The old “dipping the toes in the water” mentality takes hold. Only Brian Taylor (239) and Rick Barry (221) attempt more than 200 threes, only twelve players attempt more than 100 for the season, only five players finish at better than 38 percent, and the average NBA game features fewer than six attempted threes. For the Celtics, I remember Chris Ford emerging as our “three-point threat” (nailing 43 percent of them) and feeling like this run-of-the-mill shooting guard suddenly had real value for us. Every time he made one, the crowd went crazy. So something was happening. We just weren’t sure yet.
1981. A slight backlash. Mike Bratz leads the league with just 169 attempts; only Brian Taylor shoots better than 34 percent (38.3 percent to be exact); the league average drops from 28 percent to 24.5 percent; and attempted threes drop to four per game. Bizarre. Although we do have our first signature three: in Game 6 of the Finals, Bird nails a back-breaking three to clinch the title, then cements it with a joyous fist pump that was exciting even on tape delay when I was half asleep at one-thirty in the morning.
1982. Still nobody biting. Only four players attempt more than 100 threes. We did have another signature moment in Game 5 of the Celtics-Bullets series: Frankie Johnson and Gerald Henderson got into a fourth-quarter fight, then a pissed-off Johnson drained three treys (including a 30-foot bomb) to push the game into overtime before Boston prevailed in double OT. That game was televised live by USA, so it’s the first documented time anyone went into eff-you mode with threes.95
1983. Crickets. Only four guys attempted more than 100 threes and the league’s average was a paltry 24 percent. Of the leaders who qualified, Mike Dunleavy finished first (34 percent) and Isiah Thomas was second (28 percent), ironic since he’s the worst long-range shooter of any modern point guard.
1984. There’s a little traction when Utah’s Darrell Griffith leads the league in attempts (252), makes (91) and percentage (36.1 percent). How’s that for irony? A guy nicknamed Dr. Dunkenstein was keeping the three alive?
1985. Threes climb to 6.2 per game; the league’s average climbs to 28.2 percent; fifteen players attempt 100-plus threes; four players break the 40 percent mark; and the three gains “cool” status when Bird adds it to his arsenal (making 42.7 percent and draining two memorable ones in his 60-point game).
1986. Our long-awaited breakthrough includes:
The first three-point contest at All-Star Weekend, which Bird wins handily after guaranteeing victory beforehand.96
The Legend getting inspired by his title and adopting the three as a weapon, ripping off a ten-game stretch later that month in which he made 25 of 34 threes. By season’s end, he led the league in attempts (194) and makes (82) but finished fourth in percentage (42.3 percent). Beyond that, the Legend becomes the first to use threes as a psychological weapon, draining four in the fourth quarter of Boston’s sweep over Milwaukee in the Conference Finals, then making the ludicrous “dribble out of the paint, dribble around three guys, find a spot in front of Houston’s bench, and launch an Eff You Three” that nearly caused the Garden’s roof to cave in during the clinching game of the ’86 Finals.
Three-point specialists were emerging like Craig Hodges (45%), Trent Tucker (44%), Kyle Macy (41%), Michael Cooper (39%) and Dale Ellis (36%), guys who spread the floor and opened things up down low.
Three legitimately memorable threes: Doc banking a buzzer-beater to beat the Celtics on national TV; Dudley Bradley winning a playoff game over Philly with an improbable buzzer-beater; and Jeff Malone making the crazy “chase down the loose ball and falling out of bounds” three that they showed in “The NBA … It’s FANNNNNtas-tic!” commercial for a solid year.97
1987. Bingo! Threes climb to nearly 10 per game, the league’s percentage climbs over 30 percent, eight players attempt 200-plus threes and twenty attempt at least 1,215 threes. And if Bird made that three to win Game 4 of the ’87 Finals, we would have had ourselves the most famous three ever. Anyway, that’s how the three became the threeeeeeeeeeeeeel It was an eight-year process.
One other trend opened up offenses: a point guard boon. Of the twenty-two NBA teams in 1981, half employed true PGs: Magic Johnson/Norm Nixon, Tiny Archibald, Mo Cheeks, Gus Williams,98 Kevin Porter, Rickey Green, Johnny Davis, Eddie Johnson, Micheal Ray Richardson, John Lucas and Phil Ford. With Isiah Thomas and Johnny Moore joining the mix the following season, that’s an inordinately high number of true points, isn’t it? No wonder scoring and field goal percentages kept going up. The ’78 teams averaged 108.5 points and 46.9 percent shooting; by ’84, those numbers had risen to 110.1 and 49.1 percent (and those numbers would have been higher if everyone wasn’t jacking up bad threes). The days of the ’77 Lakers nearly making the Finals without a single ball handler were over, and if you ever see any of those Philly-Boston games from 1981, watch Tiny and Cheeks put on an absolute clinic—just two guys who knew how to run fast breaks, handle the ball, bang home 15-footers and penetrate whenever they needed to penetrate. What a pleasure.
1980–81: NOSE CANDY

Cocaine use went from recreational to potentially league-altering in 1980. Why do I know this? Because the following things happened:
During a practice before the 1980 Finals, the Lakers were stretching on the floor when a coked-out Spencer Haywood simply passed out. He was excused for the rest of the postseason. Quickly. The Broken Mirror strikes again! It’s amazing he wasn’t on the floor for the Kermit-Rudy punch.
Utah’s Terry Furlow was killed in a car accident just one week after the ’80 Finals ended. Furlow was driving and his blood had traces of cocaine and Valium. Hmmmmmm.99
In August 1980, spurred on by Richard Pryor setting himself on fire in a freebasing accident, the L.A. Times released an investigative feature about drug abuse within the celebrity culture and reported that cocaine and freebasing had become a borderline epidemic in the NBA, with then-Atlanta GM Stan Kasten estimating the number of players dabbling in drugs at 75 percent. Seventy-five percent!
When SI wrote about David Thompson being his “old soaring self” in November of 1980, the piece included repeated references to cocaine rumors the previous season, with Thompson not really denying them by telling an acquaintance, “I’m not doing anything worse than what everybody else in the NBA is doing.”100
Should we have been surprised? Look at what was happening in the late seventies and early eighties: Widespread coke use had taken off within the music/movie/television industries, prep schools, discos, nightclubs and every professional sports league,101 but everyone remembers the NBA struggling most because we could see the effects (bleary eyes, skinny bodies, inconsistent and lethargic play). There isn’t a more naked sport than basketball. Nobody can deny that from 1977 to 1983, certain stars struggled as they should have been peaking; certain young stars openly battled personal issues; and certain veteran stars acted erratically, missed scores of practices, burned the candle at both ends and/or had their careers end abruptly. We learned the identity of some of them thanks to drug rehab stints and public admissions—Thompson, Walter Davis, John Drew, Richardson, John Lucas, Barnes, Bernard King, Eddie Johnson—and we’ll always wonder about some of the others (including one of the era’s biggest stars, someone who became infamous in NBA circles for his surreal ability to thrive even after he had used cocaine). Regardless, there were an inordinate number of “What the hell happened to him?” and “Why did his career inexplicably end?” guys for such a brief time frame; after Furlow’s death and the L.A. Times report, it’s hard to figure how two more years passed before the powers that be did anything.102
Some teams traded troubled players instead of helping them. The Knicks dumped Richardson, the Nets dumped Bernard, the Hawks dumped Drew; it’s like they wanted to get anything of value before those guys snorted themselves out of the league. The ’81 Warriors suspended Lucas for their last eight games while fighting for a playoff spot; then again, he didn’t leave them much choice after no-showing six games and missing three team flights and over a dozen practices.103 When Drew finally sought help in 1983, he admitted to the New York Times that he’d been freebasing for three years and snorting cocaine since 1978. You’re telling me his teams didn’t notice? Or that the Lakers didn’t notice Haywood sniffling his way through the ’80 season? (That same piece revealed that Buck Williams, speaking at an awards dinner that year, had estimated the percentage of NBA players using drugs as “maybe 20 or 30 percent,” adding that the figure was much lower than he thought it would be. Much lower? Really?) It turned out to be a fairly wasted era for basketball; maybe it’s good thing everything was tape-delayed.
What’s the greatest NBA coke-era story that I can print? A 1982 SI feature about troubled Hawks guard Eddie Johnson casually included revelations that Atlanta had placed him in a psychiatric facility against his will, that Eddie had stolen a Porsche from a car dealer, that he’d been arrested for gun possession and cocaine possession in separate incidents, and that he’d jumped out of a second-story apartment building to evade drug dealers who were shooting at him.104 (I vote for Don Cheadle to play Eddie in the movie.) And you know what? That’s honorable mention. We have to give first prize to the Broken Mirror himself, Spencer Haywood. After Paul Westhead suspended him for the ’80 Finals, Haywood wrote in his 1988 autobiography that he hired a Mafia hit man to kill his coach before changing his mind. I’m almost positive this would have marred the Finals. Also, that revelation led to my favorite quote from the coke era: Haywood remembering in the book, “I left the Forum and drove off in my Rolls that night thinking one thought—that Westhead must die.” I wish this had been my high school yearbook quote.
(One positive this season: free agent compensation was replaced by right of first refusal, so we didn’t really have free agency, but we kind of did. Example: L.A. signs Mitch Kupchak, the Bullets agree not to match and Washington ends up with Jim Chones, Brad Holland and a 1983 number one pick for “not refusing.” I like the right of first refusal; it’s really too bad it can’t extend to ex-girlfriends. “Yeah, you can date her, but only if you give me your iPod.”)
1981–82: THE PERILS OF OVERCOACHING

After everyone made a fuss about Bill Fitch (NBA title) and Cotton Fitzsimmons (Western Finals) doing terrific jobs in the ’81 Playoffs, the era of overcoaching kicked off when SI’s subsequent NBA preview centered on the success of former college coaches in the NBA.105 Suddenly coaches were frantically diagramming plays during time-outs, studying tape until the wee hours, hiring multiple assistants and pontificating about the sport like Henry David Thoreau, culminating in Hubie Brown getting hired by the Knicks (I love Hubie, but he’s the ultimate “hey, look at me” coach) and paving the way for Rick Pitino’s $50 million deal in Boston and Avery Johnson employing at least 375 assistants for the Mavericks during the 2007–8 season. The new wave of coaches made defenses sophisticated enough by 1981 that the league created an “illegal defense” rule to open the paint. Here’s how referee Ed Rush explained it to SI: “We were becoming a jump-shot league, so we went to the coaches and said, ‘You’ve screwed the game up with all your great defenses. Now fix it.’ And they did. The new rule will open up the middle and give the great players room to move. People like Julius Erving and David Thompson who used to beat their own defensive man and then still have to pull up for a jump shot because they were being double-teamed, should have an extra four or five feet to move around in. And that’s all those guys need.”
Nice! That explanation actually made sense. But as the egos of coaches swelled, so did the egos of players who didn’t feel like getting ordered around. One famous youngster battled injuries during his second season and threw up a series-losing air ball in a stunning Round 1 playoff upset. As the player headed into his third season, the team’s owner handed him the biggest contract in sports history: $25 million for 25 years. When the team struggled coming out of the gate, the player told reporters that he couldn’t play for his coach anymore and demanded to be traded. The coach got canned the following day. Now disgraced and considered a selfish jerk, the young player was booed at home and became the poster boy of the Too Young, Too Rich, and Too Immature NBA. One of his teammates wondered, “If he got mad at a player, would the player be gone the next day?” SI called him a “greedy, petulant and obnoxious 22-year-old” and decided he’s “clearly a great player. Just as clearly, he’s no longer a great guy.”
The player? That’s right … Earvin “Magic” Johnson. It’s all true.
Only after the ’81 Playoffs did people start believing that coaches could work wonders. I’ve purposely avoided them in this book for the following reason: there’s no concrete evidence that they make a genuine, consistent difference except for a small handful of gifted leaders (Pat Riley, Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly, Larry Brown, Jerry Sloan) and forward thinkers (Mike D’Antoni, Don Nelson, Jack Ramsey). Plenty of coaches understand The Secret; only a few can pass it along to players; even fewer can keep The Secret thriving with any type of roster. Daly spearheaded those terrific Bad Boy Pistons teams, failed to find the same success with two knuckleheads (Derrick Coleman and Kenny Anderson) in New Jersey, then suffered through the unhappiest of seasons with a petulant Penny Hardaway on the ’97 Magic. Only a handful of coaches would have enjoyed the same success that Daly had with Detroit, just like the same handful would have failed to reach Coleman, Kenny, and Penny. Which brings me back to my point: unless you’re teaming an elite coach with a quality roster, coaches don’t really matter. You have your top guys—usually three or four per year—and everyone else ranges between functional, overrated, replaceable, incompetent, “my God, what a train wreck,” and Vinny Del Negro. Most of them tread water or inflict as much damage as good.
Look at the firing numbers over the past decade: eight to ten coaches get fired every year, none lasts more than three or four years, and there might be three or four quality coaches in any given season. Doc Rivers lost 18 straight games and won a title within a sixteen-month span. Hubie finished with a record of 424–495 and somehow became known as a memorably good coach in the process. Paul Westphal led the Suns to the ’93 Finals; within eight years, nobody would hire him. KC Jones made the Finals four of five years in Boston, took two years off, then lasted 118 games in Seattle. We have amassed overwhelming evidence that coaches are exceedingly dispensable—they’re only as good as their talent, with a limited number of exceptions. Occasionally they might stumble into the right situation, but ultimately, players win titles and coaches lose them. I am going to keep pining for the return of the player-coach if it’s the last thing I do. What’s the difference? So it doesn’t work and he gets fired? How is that different from what happens now? Maybe Red Auer-bach knew what he was doing with a seven-play playbook, no assistants and a rolled-up program.106
One more thing: if you thought coaches were getting wacky, you should have seen the new slew of owners. Donald Sterling spent $13 million on the Clippers, watched the first home game from midcourt with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, then jumped in coach Paul Silas’ arms and kissed him when they won; within a few months, he’d failed to make deferred payments to players, refused to pay operating expenses and owed over half a million to the NBA’s pension fund and various creditors. Cleveland’s Ted Stepien overpaid for free agents Scott Wedman and James Edwards, lost $5.1 million during the ’82 season and traded away so many number one picks that the Association awarded the franchise compensatory picks when Stepien sold the team. (They also passed the Stepien Rule—teams weren’t allowed to trade first-rounders in consecutive years. How many guys can say they owned an NBA team and had a rule named after them?) Philly’s Harold Katz nearly caused an owner revolt when he offered Moses a then-record six-year, $13 million deal and gave Houston a number one pick and Caldwell Jones so they wouldn’t match.107 This launched a twenty-five-year pattern of franchises stupidly overpaying for players, then warning the players’ union it had to do something to keep the costs down. How could so many rich people be so dumb?
1982–83: THE CONNECTION

This was the year when everyone realized, “Hey, maybe we should do stuff to win the fans over!” That led to the following innovations and brainstorms:
Feeling frisky after inking a new four-year deal for $93 million, CBS unveiled an abnormally catchy intro that included computerized graphics of a basketball court, Brent Musburger’s orgasmic narration, recaps of previous games and a signature hum-along song that everyone from my generation immediately loved: “Dah-da-da-da do-do-do dooo do-do-do-doooo … (do-do-do-do) … dah-da-da … duhhh duhhhh duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh … DAH-DA-DOOO!”
The NBA created its NBA Entertainment division, which immediately launched an “NBA Action … It’s FANNNNNN-tastic!” commercial campaign that can only be described as a watershed. Wait, so you’re telling me it’s fun to attend an NBA game? Don Sperling and his NBAE crew kept the first effort relatively simple: just happy eighties music with various shots of cheerleaders, cheering fans and even someone holding an I LOVE IT sign, along with action shots of Kareem reaching for a jump ball, Bird’s reverse layup, Magic clapping and Doc’s tomahawk jam. The ads peaked within a few years and gave us three classics: the one with “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters that featured Isiah stomping his feet and doing a circle, Bernard winking on the bench and a smoking-hot Laker Girl blowing a kiss at the camera; the parade of buzzer-beaters that included Jeff Malone’s aforementioned three (the greatest for all of eternity unless someone makes one with their dick); and an Oscar-winning sixty-second classic that used Hall and Oates’ “One on One” and featured a number of pretty passes, Jerome Whitehead stuffing a Tom Chambers dunk and James Worthy’s gorgeous 360-degree layup in slow motion during the sax solo.108 I can’t emphasize this strongly enough: those ads had a galvanizing effect on kids like myself in the eighties—they made the NBA seem cool, made us look forward to the next one, and made it seem like something was happening with this league.
(A note that’s too important to be a footnote: “I’m So Excited” also appeared in an unforgettable Miami Vice two-parter called “Return of Calderon,” during the nightclub brawl in which Crockett and Tubbs thought they found the Argentinean assassin. The song played in Vacation during the gas station scene when Clark Griswold flirted with Christie Brinkley, as well as during a crucial scene in Beverly Hills Cop II. And it anchored the Saved by the Bell episode when Jessie became addicted to caffeine pills, leading to her famously ridiculous “I’m so excited … I’m so excited … I’m so … scared” meltdown. There’s a ton of hyperbole in this book, but the following statement does not qualify: No eighties song overachieved from a pop culture standpoint more than “I’m So Excited.” See? That was important.)
3. Marvin Gaye’s All-Star Game anthem doubled as the best moment in All-Star history, hands down; nothing else came close. Coolest singer alive at the time. The celebrity capital of the world (L.A.). Stars like Bird, Isiah, Magic, Kareem, Dr. J, Moses, Jack Sikma and Sikma’s blondafroperm looking on. High expectations going in. And even though everyone had always sung the song in the most traditional way possible, Marvin sauntered out with dark, oversized “I might be coked up, I might not” sunglasses, gave the anthem his own little spin and absolutely crushed it. By the last fourth of the song, the entire Forum was clapping and swaying like it was the Apollo Theater. That performance will never be topped. Right year, right sport, right city. You could not have gotten that 150 seconds in any other sport, you have to admit.109
1983–84: WE’RE HERE

For better and worse, the NBA of the twenty-first century was shaped in what has to be considered the single greatest season in the history of professional sports, or at least one of the top five hundred. A closer look at each milestone:
The salary cap. In March ’83, the league avoided a possible labor stoppage with a new CBA that guaranteed players 53 percent of the gross revenues in exchange for a cap that went into effect the following season ($3.6 million, climbing every year after), making players and owners revenue-sharing partners for better or worse.110 Why did the owners want it? Because it put a lid on escalating salaries and gave them (relatively) fixed costs. Why did the players want it? Because it forced every team to spend money; that season, Philly and New York were spending five times as much as the Pacers. As the years went along, the cap became more and more elaborate and confusing, a luxury tax component was added and Larry Coon became an Internet hero for writing a forty-thousand-word FAQ that explained every conceivable cap/tax rule and loophole.111 Coupled with overexpansion (still a few years away), the days of contenders going nine-deep with quality players and two franchise guys was almost over. We just didn’t know it yet.
The drug policy. The new CBA agreement moved the league into “three strikes and you’re out” mode. The first offense was a suspension with pay and rehab (paid by the league) as long as the player voluntarily came forward. Same for the second offense, although teams were given the option of waiving the player and replacing him on their cap. The third strike was a lifetime ban (reviewable every two years) regardless of whether the player came forward voluntarily or not.112 Richardson and Lucas were the odds-on favorites to be banned first, with Sugar winning the snort race (he got kicked out in 1986).113 The important thing to remember: not only was the NBA committed to cleaning things up, fans felt like the league had committed itself to cleaning things up. The days of bleary-eyed superstars drifting through games was almost over. At least until they switched to pot in the nineties.
The David Stern era. Fitting that he took over on February 1, 1984, one month into what would become the league’s most important year. We don’t need to waste words blowing Stern here. Just know that he’s either the first-or second-best sports commissioner ever (depending on how you feel about Pete Rozelle); he was overqualified for the job (and still is); he had a dramatic impact not just on the league itself but also on the NBA’s marketing/entertainment/legal/corporate staffs (having Larry O’Brien as a boss and then Stern was like jumping from single-A to the majors); he became the face of the Association almost immediately (and remember, it had never had one before); by December ’89, the league had inked four-year deals with NBC and Turner for a combined $875 million; and Stern succeeded to the degree that he was earning more money than only a handful of players by the end of the decade. If that’s not enough, he increased the entertainment level of every draft from 1984 to 2009 by approximately 24.7 percent. Maybe Stern didn’t make the league take off, but he was flying the plane masterfully when it happened.
All-Star Weekend. When an NBA marketing adviser named Rick Welts lobbied O’Brien to turn the All-Star Game into an entire weekend, the commissioner’s response was predictably grumpy and shortsighted. As Welts recalled three years later in the New York Times, “I wouldn’t say it got a ringing endorsement. Larry said that, number one, it couldn’t cost the league a nickel. We said we’d see what we could do.” (Note: if someone ever writes O’Brien’s autobiography, and really, the odds are 200 to 1, it would definitely not have a title like Thinking Ahead or The Visionary.) Welts and his marketing team quickly sold sponsorships for the Dunk Contest and Old-Timers Game, scheduled those events for Saturday in Denver and convinced TBS to televise it. And then something weird happened: fans became legitimately excited about the Dunk Contest, especially when Doc agreed to appear and re-create the magic from his revered ’76 performance (also in Denver).114 The Old-Timers Game was surprisingly fun and loaded with legends (Hondo, Pearl, Pistol Pete, Barry, Unseld, Cowens, Heinsohn, even Johnny “Red” Kerr), with Pistol exploding for 18 points in 18 minutes and East coach Red Auerbach fuming after a game-turning call in the final minute.115 Even better, Heinsohn never coughed up a lung despite Vegas posting even odds for “Tommy Heinsohn will cough up a lung during the game.”
The Dunk Contest contestants were Larry Nance, Edgar Jones, Dominique (the odds-on favorite), Ralph Sampson (as always, they had to have one “Why the supertall guy?” contestant), Clyde Drexler, Orlando Woolridge, Michael Cooper and two doctors (Dunkenstein and J). Wilkins, Nance and the Docs advanced to Round 2 (both Erving and ’Nique dunked two balls at once); Nance prevailed in the Finals because Erving blew his first dunk. Watching it twenty-five years later on tape, it’s shocking how rudimentary the dunks were—only Doc’s last dunk from the foul line (his entire foot was over) qualified as memorable, and Nance’s Plastic Man performance (a variety of long-armed dunks with his hand way over the rim) seems pretty mundane. But at the time? Riveting! If you watch the YouTube clips, the pivotal moment happens right before the finals, when Doc crouches on the sidelines and diagrams potential dunks with his two young sons and teammate Andrew Toney (replete with different phantom dunk gestures); this was one of those rare “Wow, maybe these black guys aren’t all on drugs; they actually seem like normal people” moments that the NBA needed so desperately in order to connect with secretly-still-a-little-racist America. Within two years, they added a Three-Point Contest (dramatically won by Larry Bird) and we were off and running.
One other note: the actual All-Star Game was fantastic. Doc had 34 points; Isiah won the MVP with 22 points and 15 assists; Magic had 22 assists in 37 minutes; the East won by a 154–145 score that doubled as the highest combined point total ever to that point;116 and the supercompetitive game featured an inordinate amount of quality players (including twelve Pyramid guys and five of the top twenty-five, a stat that will make sense in about 107 pages) actually giving a crap. Until the ’87 Classic, this was the best All-Star game ever played. Again, only good came out of the ’84 All-Star Weekend. Even Rick Barry’s latest rug was a huge hit.
The birth of tanking. With Hakeem and Jordan looming as draft prizes, both the Rockets (blew 14 of their last 17, including 9 of their last 10) and Bulls (lost 19 of their last 23, including 14 of their last 15) said, “Screw it, we’ll bastardize the sport,” and pulled some fishy crap: resting key guys, giving lousy guys big minutes and everything else. Things peaked in Game 81 when a washed-up Elvin Hayes played every minute of Houston’s overtime loss to the Spurs. Since none of the other crappy teams owned their picks, only Chicago and Houston controlled their destinies (hence the tanking). The worst teams in each conference flipped a coin for number one back then, so the 29-win Rockets “won” the toss and picked first; the 26-win Pacers “lost” and picked second (Portland by proxy); and the 27-win Bulls settled for third (winning the ultimate prize).117 The unseemly saga spurred the creation of a draft lottery the following season. And even that didn’t totally solve the tanking problem; Team Stern has changed the lottery system five times in twenty-four years, and we’re probably headed for a sixth soon. My solution: every lottery team gets the same odds. What’s wrong with keeping shitty teams shitty and improving mediocre ones? Why is this bad? You can’t have great teams unless you have lousy ones. If that makes me an NBA Republican, so be it.
The 1984 Finals. Or, as it’s more commonly known, the Single Biggest Break in NBA History. Two years after the NBA extended its season so CBS could show the Finals live (raising the very logical question that I pray you’re asking: “Wait, what the hell took the NBA so long?”), the network finally obliged … and, of course, they hit the ratings jackpot. Not only did you have the rebirth of the league’s most storied rivalry, you had Bird versus Magic II; East Coast versus West Coast; Jack Nicholson versus Busty Heart;118 Johnny Most versus Chick Hearn; the Garden versus the Forum; the two best passing teams of that decade; two loaded squads with eighteen quality guys (including eight future Hall of Famers); and a seven-game donnybrook that featured four ESPN Classic-caliber contests (including Gerald Henderson’s steal saving a potential sweep in Game 2). Game 4 (Boston 129, L.A. 125 in OT) was probably the most entertaining/dramatic/physical/hostile/loaded Finals game to that point, an exceptionally played, hypercompetitive slugfest that featured Kevin McHale’s series-turning clothesline on Kurt Rambis; Kareem nearly whistling an elbow off Larry’s noggin and the two of them exchanging face-to-face eff-yous; Magic improbably falling apart in crunch time and OT; Bird just missing a desperation three to win it and McHale missing the bunny follow; Bird’s backbreaking turnaround over Magic in OT; Maxwell walking across the lane and giving Worthy the choke sign after Big Game James clanged a huge free throw; and M. L. Carr’s improbable steal/dunk to clinch it.
Here’s why I know we will never see another basketball game like that: the rules don’t allow it. You won’t see that many great/good players on the same court in the salary cap era, and you won’t see that level of hostility and passion because of the rules now in place against taunting and flagrant fouls. The NBA, where diluted p-ssyball happens! If you listen to me on anything, I hope it’s this: just watch the damned game sometime. It’s that good. Even as the Celtics were euphorically prancing off the court with McHale flashing his armpits, it felt like the axis for professional sports had been shifted a little. And when Boston prevailed in a heated Game 7 in equally dramatic fashion, the days of anyone wondering if the league was too black (or whether the league would make it, drugs were ruining the sport, or they might lose their TV contract) were finally over. So, um … yeah.119
The 1984 draft. You will not find a bigger month for a sports league than June ’84 for the NBA. Not only did the Finals revive the sport, not only did the world embrace the power of Stern’s mustache, but Chicago stumbled into the future of professional basketball (Jordan) in a draft that included three other legends (Hakeem, Stockton and Barkley). When Nike signed Jordan to a then-mammoth $2.5 million deal during the same summer when Bird and Magic filmed their famous Converse commercial, the door opened for NBA players to cross over to mainstream advertisers and become their own mini-corporations. Jordan did it first with his posters, Air Jordan sneaker line and Mars Blackmon commercials; others like Magic and Bird quickly followed suit. The League That Was Too Black had become the League That Raked In Shitloads of Money, and it would never look back.


Anyway, that’s how the hell we got here. And yeah, maybe we never covered overexpansion, JumboTrons, luxury boxes, skyrocketing ticket prices, the growth of sports radio and fantasy hoops, the influx of foreign players, the addition of a third referee, video games taking off, the underclassmen boon, the HIV scare, the impact of the Dream Team (and the negative impact of Dream Team II), RileyBall, the lottery changes, rookie opt-out clauses, Latrell Sprewell’s choking habits, the ’99 strike, the rookie salary scale, the ban on high schoolers, advances in ACL surgeries, the art of finding cap space, tattoos and baggy shorts, the marijuana epidemic (that’s right, epidemic), the perils of overcoaching, KG’s $120 million contract, the ’99 lockout, Mark Cuban and the Maloofs, the Internet boom, Barkley’s TV career, Moochie Norris’ afro, the Artest Melee, the dress code, ESPN’s Trade Machine, the Donaghy scandal, All-Star Weekend in Vegas, the scary stretch from 1994 to 2004 when defenses became too effective and games slowed down too much, or even the economy’s recent collapse and its effects on a league that I nicknamed the “No Benjamins Association” in a February ’09 column. For our purposes—figuring out who mattered and why—we got to where we needed to go. Just trust me.120
1. MST 3000 and Letterman created the unintentional comedy genre: mocking things that weren’t originally intended to be funny. Nearly 15 years later, I unveiled the Unintentional Comedy Scale on ESPN.com, with Dikembe Mutombo’s voice earning a perfect 100 out of 100 and at least 20 different professional golfers earning a zero (because of the little-known rule that you must endure six electroshock treatments upon getting your PGA Tour card).
2. That was nearly the title for this book: A Brief and Occasionally Biased History of the NBA. The titles I loved most (but ultimately was talked out of): Tuesdays with Horry … Love Child of the Basketball Jesus … Tell Me How My Book Tastes … Where a Pulitzer Happens … The Greatest NBA Book I’ve Ever Written … Majerle and Me … The Hoops Testament … Black Men Can Jump … The Second Best Basketball Book Ever … I Love This Game … I Should Have Been Black … The Basketball Bible … A White Man’s Thoughts on a Black Man’s Game … Secrets from a Topless Pool in Vegas … The Association … Weekend at Bernie Bickerstaff’s.
3. It’s hard to believe that Boston College didn’t give Molinas an honorary doctorate.
4. They didn’t have these things in 1954. Just wanted to make sure you were paying attention. Although it would have been fun to read blogs with mean-spirited names like “Bob Cousy’s Lisp.”
5. Koppett’s book 24 Seconds to Shoot: The Birth and Improbable Rise of the NBA proved to be an enormous help for this chapter. He’s dead, but I’d like to thank him anyway.
6. Our top five shows in 1954: I Love Lucy, Dragnet, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, You Bet Your Life and The Chevy Show featuring Bob Hope. Isn’t it weird that someone 55 years from now will look at the 2009 top five and say, “I wonder what the hell happened on American Idol?” just like I wondered, “I wonder what the hell happened on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts?”
7. Four great Biasone facts: he was born in Italy and did the Ellis Island thing; he made his money owning a bowling alley; he wore long, double-breasted coats and Borsalino hats; and he smoked filtered cigarettes. I don’t know what Borsalino hats are and that still sounds fantastic.
8. Also noteworthy: Earl Lloyd and Jim Tucker became the first black players to play for a championship team.
9. Extending this analogy, Bob Cousy was Seka, Dolph Schayes was Marilyn Chambers, Joe Fulks was Harry Reems, Red Auerbach was Gerard Damiano and George Mikan was definitely John Holmes.
10. Keeping the Mikan-Holmes analogy going, this comeback went about as well as the last two years of Johnny Wadd’s career, when he became a junkie and dabbled in gay porn to support his habit.
11. We definitely would have seen Richie Cunningham wearing Hawks T-shirts and jerseys, and possibly a retro cameo with Pettit and Clyde Lovellette wearing bad wigs and pretending they were 20 years younger, then Clyde insulting the black chef at Arnold’s and Fonzie kicking his ass.
12. Pettit’s quadruple-printed card remains the easiest to find. Go figure, they quadruple-printed Pettit (white) and single-printed Russell (black). I’m sure this was a coincidence. Russ’ rookie fetches from $500 to $4,000 depending on its condition.
13. Once the NBA started stealing black stars away from the ’Trotters, it was only a matter of time before the ’Trotters morphed into something else—namely, a fan-friendly hoops team that did tricks, whupped the Generals, and had a sweet Wide World of Sports run. You know who loved them? Young Jabaal, that’s who.
14. Other rules or phrases named after NBA players or personalities: the Ted Stepien Rule, the Magic Johnson Rule, the Trent Tucker Rule, the Jordan Rules, Hack-a-Shaq, the Larry Bird Exception, the Allan Houston Rule and the Ewing Theory.
15. You know what’s really weird? The network’s number one announcing team in 1959 was Marv Albert and Hubie Brown.
16. Teams routinely played 25–30 preseason games as well as a 72-game regular season and any playoff games, and the guy who did the schedule back then was apparently suffering from a major head injury. Details to come.
17. The other factor: every new NBA star was black. Well, then! Down the road, NBC made up for this apparent burst of racism by greenlighting The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and even the unwatchable A Different World.
18. When M.J. scored 37.1 per game in the ’87 season, he averaged just 27.8 shots and 11.8 free throws. All right, maybe we didn’t need the word “just” in there.
20. The numbers from ’94 to ’04 dropped because of overcoaching, superior defense, far fewer possessions, overexpansion, more physical play and a noticeable dearth of elite talent (thanks to bad drafts, the influx of high schoolers and youngsters getting paid too soon).
21. Also, the number of black NBA players increased to 25 out of a possible 96 (26 percent). Actual quote from Al Attles in Tall Tales: “I came into the league in 1960 and the word was that there could be up to four blacks per team.” Nowadays, only New England prep schools think like this.
22. This was the astonishing two-parter in which an older assistant set off a racial powder keg by saying Smash Williams was better off as an RB than a QB. If FNL was MJ’s career, Lyla Garrity’s slam-page episode would be the 63-point game in Boston (the coming-out party), the two-parter with Smash would be the ’91 Finals (when the show’s considerable potential was realized), the story arc where Landry and Tyra killed her stalker was MJ’s baseball career (far-fetched and a complete waste of time), and Season 3 was like Jordan’s last three title seasons (cementing its reputation as the greatest sports-related drama ever). Glad I got that off my chest.
23. Cousy started the Players Association in 1954, although its initial goals were to curb the endless barnstorming tours and get players paid for personal appearances. Not until the mid-’60s did they begin to make headway on medical plans, pension plans, the reserve clause and everything else. Our first two presidents of the Players Association? Holy Cross grads! Who says the Cross couldn’t crack the Ivy?
24. And with that, we’d never have another white celebrity named Maurice.
25. I loved Arledge for coming up with Superstars and Battle of the Network Stars, two of my favorite shows as a kid. If not for him, I never would have seen Charlene Tilton’s hard nipples in the softball dunk tank or the watershed Gabe Kaplan-Robert Conrad 100-yard dash (the “USA 4, USSR 3” of reality-TV moments).
26. You have to admire me for running a Halberstam excerpt when he’s an infinitely better writer. I have no ego. I’m like Russell—I don’t care about stats.
27. Leading by 10 with 40 seconds left, Red lit up his victory cigar right before a furious comeback—the Lakers scored 8 straight before the C’s finally ran out the clock. Imagine the Auerbach era ending with the biggest choke in sports history and a jinxed final victory cigar.
28. Back then, they called Russell the first “Negro” coach. That phrasing eventually faded away, much to everyone’s relief, especially Vinny Del Negro’s.
29. Just kidding. All Red did was arrange the illegal abortions. Okay, that was a joke, too. Should I just get out now? Yeah, I should get out now.
30. Wilt signed for $100,000 before the ’66 season; Russell received $100,001 (yes, intentional). From a prestige/credibility standpoint, those contracts made the NBA seem just as stable as the NFL and Major League Baseball. Look, our guys make big money, too! You have to love the fact that we once lived in a world where rich athletes were considered a positive.
31. This franchise moved to Long Island because it couldn’t land enough game dates in NYC. And you wondered why Dr. J grew big hair.
32. I exaggerated. Speaking of afros, Oscar Gamble’s 1976 baseball card has been in the glove compartment of every car I ever owned; it’s a good-luck charm. One time I was pulled over for speeding and when I was searching for my license and registration, the Gamble card fell out. I noticed the cop trying not to smile, so I muttered something like, “That card cracks me up.” The cop let me go with a warning. The moral of the story: everyone loves big-ass afros.
33. Gary Bettman ignored these lessons and tried a similar strategy with the NHL, nearly destroying it in the process. And he came from the NBA! I love professional sports.
34. Baseball player Curt Flood gets credit for standing up to The Man and paving the way for a new era of sports contracts, only Barry did the same two years earlier. So why doesn’t he get credit? Because Rick Barry was a dick. I keep telling you!
35. I watched a Suns-Hawks ’70 Xmas game and Walk was the hairiest NBA player ever: chest hair, neck hair, shoulder hair, you name it. So what were the odds of an extremely hairy white center named Neal Walk becoming an All-Star? I say 0.000000004 percent.
36. That wasn’t even the best thing about this All-Star Game: Haywood won MVP along with a 1970 Dodge Challenger and a $2,000 RCA television. Nice! That might be my favorite prize ever—not just for sports, but for any game show, raffle or anything else. Do you think Spence was driving the Challenger when he dropped the RCA off at an L.A. pawn shop 8 years later?
37. If you think agents are scumbags now, they were ten times more scumbaggy in the ’60s and ’70s. Makes you wonder if Scott Boras came from the past.
38. ABA owners created the phrase “hardship case” to make the Haywood signing seem more palatable to the outside world and give it a perceived legal framework. In other words, the phrase meant nothing. Awesome.
39. Elgin’s ring (they gave him one) was probably whipped against the wall of his Clippers office 17,000 times since 1972. He qualifies for the Ewing Theory because the Lakers ripped off a 33-game win streak right after he retired, but that’s unfair because it took so much dignity for him to walk away from a guaranteed title. He left with his head held high. In other words, it was the complete opposite of how GP’s career ended.
40. It took another 36 years before anyone even broke 20 again—when the ’08 Rockets won 22 straight.
41. No joke: I adopted Sharman’s strategy as a parenting tactic with my daughter. Keep her off the pole! I gotta keep her off the pole!
42. In ’71, Wilt averaged a 20–18–4 and shot 54.5%. In ’72, Wilt averaged a 15–19–4 and shot 64.9%. He attempted 1,226 FGs and 669 FTs in ’71; that dropped to 764 FGs and 524 FTs in ’72. So he did sacrifice.
43. Too bad they didn’t keep track of TOs when Wilt played—that’s another record he would have gone out of his way to break. Can’t you hear Chick Hearn saying, “My God, what is the Big Dipper doing? He just intentionally sailed his tenth pass of the game into the stands!”
44. In fairness to George, he led the ’73 Pacers in scoring when they won the title, then carried the ’75 Pacers to the Finals and averaged a stunning 32–16–8 in 18 playoff games with a jaw-dropping 111 TOs. George also had 8 TOs in the ’74 ABA All-Star Game. The guy couldn’t toss his car keys to a valet without someone else catching them.
45. Wilt almost made this list a fourth time for shooting 72.7 percent from the field in ’73. That one feels breakable to me—if the right aging, gigantic center came along who only shot dunks and layups, it could fall. Rigor Artis shot 67 percent in ’81 and 65 percent in ’82. Maybe 43-year-old Shaq will do it.
46. Pete Maravich holds the white-guy record for points (68); Jerry Lucas for rebounds (40); Mark Eaton for blocks (14); Dirk Nowitzki/John Stockton for steals (9); and Dan Majerle/Rex Chapman for threes (9). Peja Stojakovic had 10 threes in a game but I don’t count the Euros as true white guys. Just a personal thing with me.
47. The lesson, as always: don’t mess with the karma police.
48. There were six ABA commishes in all: Mikan, Jack Dolph, Bob Carlson, Mike Storen, Todd Munchak and Dave DeBusschere. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if your fledgling league has 6 commissioners in 9 years, you probably aren’t making it.
49. I made those last five sentences up. Sorry, Tommy. By the way, he’s the only NBA author to repeatedly use the word “baby” in his prose, as in “Kareem was great, but Cowens was better, baby!” Strangely, this would become a broadcasting crutch for the insufferable Tony Siragusa two decades later.
50. This was one of the ABA’s underrated achievements, right up there with Villanova and Western Kentucky being forced to forfeit their 1971 records and NCAA tournament prize money because ABA commish Jack Dolph left his briefcase open at the ’71 All-Star Game and reporters noticed signed contracts for Harold Porter and Jim McDaniels. I nominate this for Dumbest Commish Moment Ever. Not even Gary Bettman can top it.
51. Those were the only ’72 draft picks who played 350-plus career games and averaged 10-plus points. The next seven picks after LaRue Martin (number one) and McAdoo (number two): Dwight Davis, Corky Calhoun, Freddie Boyd, Russ Lee, Bud Stallworth, Tom Riker, Bob Nash. Was that a draft class or the cast of an all-male porn movie?
52. The number of semiathletic white small forwards from the mid-’70s is staggering: in ’76 alone, we had Don Nelson, Ford, Gibbs, Bill Bradley, Dick Snyder, Tom and Dick Van Arsdale, Scott Wedman, Jack Marin, Keith Erickson and Larry Steele playing 20-plus minutes a game (and Kenny Reeves for the Bulls). Anytime you have a position that features two Dons and three Dicks and your league is supposed to be entertaining, that’s probably not a good thing.
53. Look, you can’t discuss young Moses without mentioning that, as many claim, he initially expressed himself mostly through grunts. The iconic Moses story: during his second ABA season, Moses injured his foot and the trainer couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Moses disagreed by simply saying, “Foot broken.” And it was.
54. It’s a good thing that Moses didn’t end up on the ’75 Spirits: they had Marvin Barnes at his crazy apex, New York schoolyard legend Fly Williams, legendary head case Joe Caldwell and a swingman named Goo Kennedy. That’s right, Bad News, Fly and Goo on the same team! Too bad they never signed Splooge Simpson.
55. I defy you to find a weirder coaching resume than the one belonging to KC Jones: Brandeis University (head coach, ’67–’70); L.A. Lakers (assistant, ’72); San Diego Conquistadors (head coach, ’73); Bullets (head coach, ’74–’76); Celtics (assistant, ’79–’83; head coach, ’84–’88); Sonics (head coach, ’90–’91); New England Blizzard of the women’s ABL (’97–’98). My head hurts.
56. That had to be doubly insulting for Elgin—not just getting booted, but booted and replaced by Rick Barry? That’s like having your college girlfriend dump you for the biggest douche on the varsity crew team.
57. It’s really a shame that the dude who runs the “Awful Announcing” blog wasn’t around back then.
58. I showed this clip to the Sports Gal, who defended Barry by saying, “He didn’t mean it that way. Look at the way he was smiling. It looks like a half watermelon. I really don’t think he meant it the bad way. Maybe he didn’t know what it meant. Did he get fired?” Um, yes. Yes, he did.
59. These were the days when networks routinely had all-white broadcast teams without considering the racial implications. Now we’ve swung the other way—you’re only allowed to have two white guys on a studio show and that is it! You hear me? Only two!
60. A great rule of thumb for the “Would he be good on TV?” question: could you see him giving a funny best man’s speech? If not, then don’t hire him. Proving my point: I’d want to attend any wedding where Charles Barkley gave the best man’s speech. And so would you.
61. Every NBA DVD should have three audio choices: English, Spanish and Moses Malone. I’m not apologizing at any point in my life for these Moses jokes. The man couldn’t speak English and didn’t seem interested in learning how to try. What else can I tell you?
62. Magic absolutely loved the phrase “winnin’ time.” Every pivotal moment revolved around “winnin’ time,” as in “Michael knows right now it’s winnin’ time!”
63. Yes, I include myself.
64. Here’s what Bob sounded like that first year (say this urgently out loud): “Scottie dribbles to the left … Mullin is on him … Scottie passes to Jordan … Jordan makes a move to his left … dribbles twice … gives it up to Kukoc … here’s Kukoc … Kukoc on the drive! … It goes in! … and the Bulls lead eighteen to sixteen! … Kukoc has six points for the Bulls! … Now here’s Jackson dribbling it up the floor for Indiana … ” And so on. I hate when play-by-play guys talk too much. We have a TV. We can see.
65. That’s right, I used “YouTube” as a verb there. Sorry, I was feeling it.
66. At the time I wrote, “It’s too bad Vecsey can’t be the sideline reporter for the Oscars, just so he could interview people like Matt Damon and say things like, ‘I guess that’s why you’re telling friends that you want to dump Winona Ryder!’ That stunned look of resignation/horror/disgust/embarrassment that Vecsey constantly evokes should have an impact beyond the sports world.”
67. The Slam Dunk Contests is a hundred times better in person than on television. Even if there’s only one memorable dunk the entire night, it’s still worth sitting there for three hours enduring all the other crappy events. I was there for Dwight Howard’s Superman dunk in 2008 and that was a moment.
68. My favorite Loose Balls anecdote that doesn’t involve Barnes: the ABA fell behind in payments that summer to Fruth, so when one executive mentioned that they’d take care of the fee soon, Fruth told him, “I know you will, because if you don’t have $25,000 on my desk by Friday, Julius Erving will be working in my garden.” Classic! Long live the Fruth!
69. How many meetings do you think Stern had with high-powered lawyers from 1984 to 2009 where he tried to figure out ways to weasel out of the St. Louis pact, failed, then unleashed a parade of f-bombs and kicked everyone out of the conference room? The over/under has to be 39.5.
70. Portland also had the fifth pick that year, stupidly taking Wally Walker over Adrian Dantley in a typical “let’s take the white guy, maybe he’s not as good as the black guy, but our fans will love him” 1970s move. They could have landed Dantley, Malone and Lucas in the same summer; instead, they dealt Moses, botched the Walker pick and still won the ’77 title.
71. This ranks up there in the Dumb Sequences pantheon: so you sell Doc and mortgage your future for Tiny Archibald? Huh? Those picks turned out to be number two overall two years in a row (Phil Ford and Otis Birdsong). And with that, three-plus decades of Nets hell had begun!
72. The others: 5 All-Stars (Ron Boone, Don Buse, Dan Issel, Bobby Jones, Billy Knight), 4 future All-Stars (Larry Kenon, Maurice Lucas, Dan Roundfield, James Silas), 14 valuable rotation guys (Mack Calvin, M. L. Carr, Don Chaney, Louie Dampier, Caldwell Jones, Swen Nater, Mark Olberding, Tom Owens, Billy Paultz, Ralph Simpson, Brian Taylor, Dave Twardzik, John Williamson, Willie Wise), and one high-priced head case (Marvin Barnes).
73. This spawned a three-year trading frenzy that led to this startling fact: Chicago (number two) was the only top-fifteen team to pick in its assigned spot in the 1979 draft.
74. E. C. Coleman made first-team All-Defense in 1977 and was out of the league within 18 months. As far as I can tell, this is the most random thing that ever happened.
75. Be honest: part of you wanted to believe this.
76. That would be Jellybean Joe Bryant, or as we know him now, Kobe’s dad. He was an unapologetic gunner who spent much of the ’77 season demanding to be traded. Let’s just say that the apple landed about 3 inches from the tree.
77. I’m stating the perception, not the reality. It’s sad that I have to clarify that. By the way, Jabaal Abdul-Simmons may have been the only white American outside Philly rooting for the Sixers in the ’77 Finals. Every Doc dunk made me “Gilligan’s Island is on!”–level happy. I was also fascinated by Lloyd Free and his jump shot; when he changed his name to World B. Free and averaged 30 a game in San Diego, I felt vindicated for jumping on the Free bandwagon so early. That was the perfect combo of talent and craziness that I was looking for in elementary school.
78. Let’s say Walton stays healthy and Portland wins three straight titles. Our ’80 Conference Final matchups: Philly-Boston and Portland-L.A. with Walton, Bird, Doc, Kareem and Magic. Wow.
79. Four perfect candidates: Seattle at Denver, ’78 (Game 5, series tied at 2); Philly at Washington, ’78 (Game 6, Bullets leading 3–2); Seattle at Phoenix, ’79 (Game 6, Phoenix leading 3–2); Washington at San Antonio, ’79 (Game 6, Spurs leading 3–2). The less sexy team won all 4 of those games. Um, this never happens anymore. Not sure if you’ve noticed.
80. That was an “I’m standing up for my teammate” moment that ranks alongside Flatch punching the guy who cheap-shotted Jimmy Chitwood in the ’54 North Sectional Regionals, then getting thrown into the trophy case and cutting his shoulder. That’s a gutless way to win! That’s a gutless way to win!
81. The NBA spruced up the fighting penalties after the ’77 Finals, doubling the maximum fine ($10,000) and eliminating limits for game suspensions.
82. In Giant Steps, a book that will make you hate Kareem between 25 and 30 percent more by the last page, Kareem bitches about Awtrey making his reputation for sucker-punching him from behind, then neglects to mention that he did the same thing to Benson … and later brags about the Benson punch. He also suckered Happy Hairston during the ’72 season (it’s on YouTube).
83. The cameras missed it, but Kunnert got clocked—even when they’re scraping Rudy off the floor, you can see Kunnert still wiping blood off his own face with a towel. Only 10 months later, Kunnert and Kermit were teammates on the Clippers, setting up one of the all-time awkward “Hey, good to see you again” moments in NBA history.
84. This was a much bigger deal in 1977 because we only had a few channels and SNL averaged 30–35 million viewers. In the segment, Garrett Morris “defends” Kermit and says, “We blacks get blamed for everything. Look at this film. Why, he just grazed the cat. Whoops! Let’s look at it from another angle …” One of his only funny moments ever.
85. In Breaks, Halberstam argues that it’s the most devastating punch ever thrown—a chiseled specimen planting his feet and throwing a perfect right cross into the face of someone sprinting toward him. Or as the Grumpy Old Editor calls it, a “cosmic accident.” Ten years earlier, Willis Reed easily could have been Kermit during that ’67 Lakers brawl.
86. That was the year the Celtics fell apart and Hondo retired. When Irv Levin switched franchises with John Y. Brown and moved the Braves to San Diego, he took Kermit with him. I was crushed. Two favorites gone in 4 months.
87. It’s really a long magazine profile, only Feinstein doubled the word count and repeated more than a few stories to stretch it into a book. Feinstein was a big influence on The Book of Basketball because he rushes his books to get to the next one. I want you to feel the opposite with mine. I want you to say, “Not only did I get my $30 worth, but honestly, I’m burned out on Simmons for like 9 months, that book could have been about 200 pages less.” Wait, you’re already saying that? What the hell? We’re not even at the halfway point yet! Get some coffee or something.
88. The Bulls passed up Sidney Moncrief for David Greenwood at number two. Ouch. In Magic’s book, he writes that Jerry West wanted to trade down and pick Moncrief—remember, they already had Norm Nixon playing point—only Dr. Jerry Buss overruled him because he was buying the team and Magic was a bigger name.
89. How do I know this? I called the commish and asked him. We talked for 35 minutes. Amazingly, he could still recall every detail and number off the top of his head 33 years later.
90. Incredibly, no tape exists of the four missing games, but you can buy the first two seasons of Simon and Simon on DVD. I don’t get the world sometimes.
91. Just stating the stigma, not the reality. By the way, our top-ten TV programs in 1980: Dallas, Dukes of Hazard, 60 Minutes, M*A*S*H, Love Boat, The Jeffersons, Alice, House Calls, Three’s Company, Little House on the Prairie. You know it was a competitive TV year when C.H.I.P.S. was twenty-fifth.
92. Had Game 6 moved to Saturday, Game 7 could have moved to Tuesday and bumped CBS’ worst night of the week: some rerun (extensive Googling couldn’t figure out which one) followed by a “Movie of the Week.” I did find that a show named California Dreaming held the 8:00–9:00 spot until December 10, 1979. IMDb.com’s synopsis: “Vince and Ross are suburban L.A. teenagers enjoying disco, surfing, cars and the rest of the Southern California lifestyle.” One of the show’s stars? Lorenzo Lamas! I loved the late-seventies.
93. CBS’ ratings for every Finals from ’76 to ’90: 11.5 (Boston-Phoenix), 12.7 (Philadelphia-Portland), 9.9 (Washington-Seattle), 7.2 (Washington-Seattle), 8.0 (L.A. Philadelphia), 6.7 (Boston-Houston), 13.0 (L.A.-Philadelphia), 12.3 (L.A. Philadelphia), 12.3 (Boston-L.A.), 13.7 (Boston-L.A.), 14.1 (Boston-Houston), 15.9 (Boston-L.A.), 15.4 (L.A.-Detroit), 15.1 (L.A.-Detroit), 12.3 (Portland-Detroit).
94. “Wedman! Dunleavy! It’s the Western Conference Finals on CBS!”
95. Remember the days when players could get in fights and remain in the game? Then the Kermit punch happened and everything changed … oh, wait, not true.
96. Even better, they used the Miami Vice theme for everyone’s turn. Two of my biggest heroes in the mid-’80s were Bird and Sonny Crockett—now they were basically teaming up? Throw in a girlfriend putting out right after the contest and that could have been the greatest night of my sixteen-year life. So close. I was one piece away.
97. My second-favorite 3 ever behind Bird’s 3 in the 60-point game that didn’t count and ended with him falling into the trainer’s lap as the Hawks celebrated.
98. Technically, Gus wasn’t running a team because his agent, Howard Slusher, foolishly advised him to hold out for the entire ’81 season in a misguided effort to get a new deal. I think Slusher secretly advised the dolts running the Writers Guild during their 2007–8 strike.
99. Former teammate Eddie Johnson later told SI that Furlow, his best friend, was a free-baser and “did a lot of things I didn’t want him to do. I tried to get him to change, but Terry felt like he could conquer anything.” You’ll understand the irony within two pages.
100. Denver made Thompson take responsibility for the team’s crappy ’80 season by making him return $200K to help its financial troubles (which Denver loaned back with interest by 1983). Can you imagine the Players Association going for that now? Also, how big a favor did they inadvertently do for Thompson? That absolutely would have been coke money.
101. During this same stretch, the NHL suspended New York’s Dave Murdoch for one year for coke possession; baseball suspended Steve Howe; the NFL’s “drug problem” appeared on the cover of SI in 1982; and Mackenzie Phillips tried to snort the entire cast of One Day at a Time.
102. The ’79 and ’80 Hawks had Drew, Furlow and Eddie Johnson. I spent 20 minutes looking for a freebase pipe in their ’80 team picture and couldn’t find it.
103. In a June ’81 SI piece, Lucas denied using coke and claimed he was suffering from depression, a diagnosis confirmed in the piece by his therapist, Dr. Robert Strange, or as he’d come to be known, “the worst therapist of all time.” Within a few years, Lucas admitted to snorting everything in sight for most of his career. I love the “SI Vault.”
104. Eddie’s explanation to SI: “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was at these chicks’ house, and these guys busted in the door. I didn’t know what was going on. I was just there. Then they started shooting at me.” Oh.
105. One of the coaches featured in the article? Westhead, fired a few weeks later for clashing with Magic. See? Coaches ultimately don’t matter except for a select few.
106. All you need to know about NBA coaches: during every time-out, they huddle with their staff about 15 feet from the bench, allow the players to “think,” then come back about a minute later with some miraculous play or piece of advice. “Hey guys, listen up—I think we just figured out how to stop LeBron!” I want to see an owner forgo a coach, put the players in charge of themselves and see if there’s any difference … and with the $4 million they saved on coaches, they could knock down season ticket prices. I pray that Donald Sterling reads this.
107. You gotta hand it to Harold here—I mean, they did win the ’83 title, right?
108. If I was putting together a cheesy-but-phenomenal ’80s time capsule and could only use 30 minutes of material, I’d include the “We Are the World” video; the “One on One” NBA ad; the final training scene in Rocky IV when he climbs the 25,000-foot mountain in Russia wearing ski boots and a normal parka; Madonna’s performance at the ’85 MTV Video Music Awards; Journey’s “Separate Ways” video; The Karate Kid’s “You’re the Best” fight montage; the Super Bowl Shuffle video; and the Beverly Hills Cop scene where Axel Foley drives through Bev Hills for the first time. That’s really all you need to know about the ’80s. It’s all in there.
109. Marvin’s father murdered him just 14 months later. Don’t forget to include Marvin Gaye Sr. on the Mount Rushmore of Worst Celebrity Dads along with Ryan O’Neal, the Great Santini, and Jim Pierce.
110. Two key provisions: teams could exceed their cap to match offer sheets and use 50 percent of a retired/waived/injured player’s cap figure to acquire another player. That kept the good teams good, if you catch my drift.
111. You can find that website at www.cbafaq.com. I’m convinced that Larry Coon is a stage name.
112. Any conviction or guilty plea involving a cocaine/heroin crime also resulted in an immediate ban. We never had a guinea pig for this one; just think, if someone like Richard Dumas had ever been caught selling 30 pounds of pot during his playing days, we’d be calling this the Richard Dumas Rule.
113. The complete list of players banned for at least one season: Richardson (’86), Lewis Lloyd (’87), Mitchell Wiggins (’87), Duane Washington (’87), Chris Washburn (’89), Roy Tarpley (’91), Dumas (’94, two-strike suspension), Stanley Roberts (’99) and Chris Andersen (’06). Nice nine-man rotation! The starters: Sugar, Lloyd, Dumas, Tarp and Roberts. The coach: Amy Winehouse.
114. I can’t speak for every other kid in the mid-’80s, but I remember counting down the days to two random events: the first dunk contest and WrestleMania I one year later. In a related story, there wasn’t a girlfriend to be seen during that stretch. Not a one.
115. Red went ballistic after Thurmond blocked Barry’s shot with 59 seconds left and got whistled for a cheap foul. Hissed Red afterward, “I don’t mind getting beat, but my guys were playing for pride and to win the game, and [ref Norm Drucker] tried to make a joke out of it.” Red was the best. The Old-Timers Game disappeared after someone (can’t remember who) got seriously hurt one or two years later. Nobody wanted to see someone drop dead during All-Star Weekend. Not even if it was Kareem.
116. The two sides took a staggering 241 shots and made 53 percent of them. As always, two great PGs make for a great ASG, and with Bird involved, it’s even better. Everyone played at least 11 minutes except for the immortal Kelly Tripucka (6 minutes, 1 point), whose hair, mustache and teeth made him look like a mutant John Oates.
117. Indiana’s pick went for Portland’s Tom Owens in ’81; Cleveland’s went for Dallas’ Mike Bratz in ’81; and the Clips traded theirs for Philly’s World B. Free in ’78. Maybe coke infected not just players but owners and GMs. By the way, the Cavs beat Washington in game 82 for their twenty-eighth win, dropping their pick to number four and costing Dallas a shot at MJ. Ouch.
118. Busty was a local stripper who became the Morganna of the Bird era. You know whose section she kept landing in? Mine! Busty, thanks to you and your mega-guns for helping me get through puberty. And to the guy who was sitting in front of me during Game 5—I’m sorry for standing up too quickly and knocking you unconscious with my boner. That was uncalled for.
119. In March ’85, SI ran a feature about the decline of TV sports ratings but passed on its usual NBA-bashing, even admitting, “A kind of dry rot [for ratings] has set in for all major sports except pro basketball.” My baby’s all growns up! My baby’s all growns up!
120. Also, I needed to save something extra for the paperback. Get ready for How the Hell Did We Get Here: The Sequel, seasons 1985–2010, available for the 2010 holidays! I am shameless.