The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

FOUR
THE WHAT-IF GAME



WE SPEND AN inordinate amount of time playing the what-if game. What if I never got married? What if I had gone to Harvard instead of Yale? What if I hadn’t punched my boss in the face? What if I never invested my life savings with Bernie Madoff? What if I never walked in on my wife banging our gardener? You can’t go back, and you know you can’t go back, but you keep rehashing it anyway.
There are three great what-ifs in my life that don’t involve women. The first is, “What if I had gone west or south for college?” This haunts me and will continue to haunt me until the day I die. I could have chosen a warm-weather school with hundreds of gorgeous sorority girls, and instead I went to an Irish Catholic school on a Worcester hill with bone-chilling 20-degree winds, which allowed female students to hide behind heavy coats and butt-covering sweaters so thick it became impossible to guess their weight within a 35-pound range. That was a great idea.1 The second: “What if I didn’t quit the Boston Herald, take a year off from writing, and tend bar in 1996?” You wouldn’t be reading this book if that hadn’t happened. I needed to recharge my batteries, stay up until 4:00 a.m., date the wrong women, smoke an obscene amount of pot and figure some shit out. That’s what I needed at the time, and nobody can tell me different. And of course, the third: “What if I had tried to write this monstrosity of a book without the help of copious amounts of hard alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, ADD medication, Marlboro Lights, coffee and horse tranquilizers?” I’ll let you decide whether that decision worked out or not.
The what-if game extends to every part of life. For instance, I have three and only three favorite movie what-ifs. In reverse order …2
3. What if Robin Williams played the Duke in Midnight Run? He signed to play Jonathan “the Duke” Mardukas and backed out before shooting because of a scheduling conflict. The producers scrambled around for a replacement before settling on Charles Grodin, not exactly a scorching-hot name at the time. The rest is history. Maybe Williams would have taken things in a more frantic, slapstick direction—and that’s saying something, since this was the same movie that broke the record for most guys knocked briefly unconscious by a punch—but it wouldn’t have been a good thing. Grodin nailed the Duke. Understated, sarcastic, never flinched. Williams messes that movie up. I am convinced. And if you don’t agree with me, I have two words for you: shut the f*ck up.
2. What if Leonardo DiCaprio did Boogie Nights instead of Titanic? Leo had the choice, mulled it over, opted for Titanic … and ended up carrying that movie and becoming a superduperstar. (By the way, that movie bombs with anyone else.)3 But imagine if he played Dirk Diggler. Look, I liked Mark Wahlberg’s performance in that movie. It’s a solid B-plus and he didn’t take anything off the table. But that could have been the defining part of Leo’s career. To rank the best new actors of the past fifteen years, Leo and Russell Crowe are either one-two or two-one, Philip Seymour Hoffman is third and Matt Damon is fourth.4 As much as I like Wahlberg, he’s not on that level. Leo could have taken Dirk Diggler to new heights, which seems significant since Boogie Nights is already one of my ten favorite movies ever. I even think he could have pulled off the “Feel the heat” and “It’s my dojo!” scenes.5
1. What if Robert De Niro was hired for Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino? This almost happened. When Francis Ford Coppola screened them, he liked De Niro so much that he saved the part of young Vito for him in The Godfather: Part II. This will always be the number one movie what-if because it can never be answered: Pacino was tremendous in I and submitted a Pantheon performance in II. Could De Niro have topped that? Possibly, right? That character was in both of their wheelhouses. I guess it comes down to which guy was better, which is like the Bird-Magic debate in that there isn’t a definitive answer and there will never be a definitive answer.6 Now that, my friends, is a great what-if.
We should set some ground rules if we’re extending the concept to the NBA, like avoiding injury-related what-ifs because injuries are part of the game. (“What if Bill Walton’s feet never broke down?” sounds fine on paper, but if you’ve ever read anything about Walton, you know he never had a chance running around on those fragile clodhoppers. He was predisposed to breaking down, the same way someone like Kurt Cobain was predisposed to becoming a suicidal druggie maniac.) I also want to avoid fascinating-but-nonsensical what-ifs, like “What if Shaq and Kobe had been able to get along?” (those guys had mammoth egos and were destined to clash),7 as well as draft-related what-ifs unless the right decision was glaringly obvious even at the time and the team still screwed up. And I’m avoiding the “What if Jordan didn’t retire for eighteen months?” question because that decision affected too many subsequent scenarios—it’s like asking “What if Ali didn’t lose four years of his prime?” or “What if Shawn Kemp used condoms?” And besides, it’s not like he willingly retired, right? (Wink wink.) Everything else is fair game.
Here are the top thirty-three what-ifs in NBA history, in reverse order:


33. What if the ’63 Royals never
got switched into the Eastern Conference
when the Warriors moved to San Francisco?

The ’63 Royals dragged a Boston team with seven Hall of Famers to a seventh game, then peaked over the next three seasons (55, 48 and 45 wins), only they could never get past Russell’s Celtics (and later Wilt’s Sixers). Playing in the West, the Royals potentially could have made five straight Finals (’63 to ’67); at the very least, they would have made the ’65 Finals because Baylor missed the playoffs. And you know what? It’s impossible to measure the impact of such a seemingly minor decision on Oscar Robertson’s career. Here’s the greatest point guard of the NBA’s first thirty-five years and one of the ten best players ever, only he never reached the Finals in his prime simply because he switched conferences at the worst possible time. Would we remember Oscar differently had he been putting on a show every spring in the Finals on ABC? What if Oscar shocked the Celtics on the biggest stage and won a title? Would his career momentum have built the way Jordan’s did after his first title, like an invisible barrier had been broken down? Would we remember Oscar as the greatest or second-greatest player ever instead of a top-ten guy?
Now here’s what really drives me crazy. In 1962, there were four Eastern Conference teams (Boston, New York, Philly and Syracuse) and five Western Conference teams (Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and Cincy). When Philly moved to San Fran,8 the conferences became imbalanced and one Western team had to move to the East. The Royals were a logical pick because they were located more east than anyone else. I get that. But one year later, Chicago moved to Baltimore and remained in the Western Conference.
Do me a favor and look at a map. Do it right now. I’ll wait.
(Twiddling my thumbs.)
(Humming.)
Good, you’re back. Now check out that map. I mean, What the hell? It’s no contest! How could they keep Cincy in the East and Baltimore in the West when Baltimore was nearly a thousand miles farther east? How does this make sense? How?9 From a commonsense standpoint, why weren’t the NBA powers that be more interested in making it easier for Oscar to reach the Finals? Those shortsighted dopes robbed us of some potentially bravura playoff moments, including three or four Oscar-West playoff showdowns in their primes and at least one guaranteed Celtics-Royals Finals. And all because nobody running the NBA knew how to read a map.
(Amazingly, this wasn’t the league’s biggest geographical screw-up ever. After the ABA and NBA merged, Denver and Indiana were sent to the Western Conference while San Antonio and the Nets joined the East. For the ’77 season, Houston and San Antonio played in the East while Milwaukee, Detroit, Kansas City and Indiana played in the West. Check out that map you just found, then explain to me how this made any sense whatsoever. I’ll give you a thousand dollars.)


32. What if the Knicks chose Rick Barry
over Bill Bradley in 1965?

A memorable college player and potential box office draw, Bradley graduated from Princeton and headed right to England, where he planned on spending two years on a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. There’s a big difference between waiting for a franchise center for two years (like David Robinson) and waiting for a slow small forward, right? It’s unclear if Bradley was a better prospect than Barry (a scoring machine at the University of San Francisco); maybe he was a bigger name and the Knicks desperately needed some star power, but that two-year wait nullified every Bradley advantage, in my opinion.10 Had the Knicks taken Barry, maybe their feel-good ’70 title season never happens, but maybe Barry never gets lowballed and makes his stupid jump to the ABA (or loses three years of his prime because of injuries and lawsuits).
And if you want to get technical, Barry was the second-best passing forward of all time behind Larry Legend; if anyone could have fit in seamlessly with those Knicks teams, it’s him. One of two extremes would have played out: either Barry goes down as one of the twelve greatest players ever and a New York icon, or he goes down as a temperamental, annoying a*shole whom everyone in New York despised before he finally got driven out of town for eyeballing Willis Reed after a dropped pass, then getting thrown into the fifteenth row at MSG by Willis. It’s one or the other.


31. What if Detroit Took Carmelo Anthony over Darko Milicic?

The Pistons landed the second pick in ’03 and targeted Darko right away; they already had a keeper at small forward (Tayshaun Prince) and needed size because they were still eight months away from Danny Ainge gift-wrapping Rasheed Wallace for them. Of course, many thought they were making a franchise-altering mistake (including me), which opens the door for what-if potential. If ’Melo goes to Detroit, you know what happens? Detroit loses the ’04 title. He screws up their chemistry and threatens Prince’s confidence just enough that we wouldn’t have seen the same Pistons team that fileted the ’04 Lakers. Also, Brown coached ’Melo in the 2004 Olympics and they loathed each other to the degree that a bitter ’Melo went into a yearlong tailspin. Do you really think these guys wouldn’t have clashed in Detroit? Come on. Can’t you see ’Melo pouting on the bench during an ’04 playoff game while a confused Ben Wallace stands near him, wonders whether to say something, then just walks away? The long-term effect: Brown quits; ’Melo or Prince gets traded; that Detroit nucleus of Hamilton-Billups-Wallace-Wallace never makes a Finals; Darko gets major minutes on a lottery team in his formative years and potentially turns into something other than a mopey dunk tank; the “Free Darko” blog is named something like “Free Darius”; and I never write jokes like “Does anyone else think NBA Entertainment should make a DVD called ‘Ultimate Darko,’ featuring every garbage time minute that Darko played this season, plus some of his best high-fives and shoulder slaps on the Pistons bench, along with director’s commentary from Darko, LaRue Martin, Sam Bowie and Steve Stipanovich?” In the irony of ironies, picking the wrong guy ended up winning Detroit that one championship. As for the “What if they had taken Bosh or Wade?” argument, there was a definitive top three at the time (LeBron, Darko and Carmelo), and Detroit would have been skewered for taking anyone else second. Those guys didn’t have the same value. When I found Chad Ford’s 2003 pick-by-pick analysis online recently,11 I was reminded that (a) Miami stunned everyone by taking Wade at number five and (b) there was a real debate at the time whether Bosh would ever put on enough weight to be anything more than the next Keon Clark. So saying that they could have had Wade or Bosh with that pick is unfair unless you’re making the argument Detroit should have traded down. There’s no way Wade or Bosh was going second in that draft. None.12


30. What if the Mavs re-signed Steve Nash in 2004?

At the time, I defended Dallas for letting Nash leave because (a) he hadn’t looked good in the previous two playoffs and (b) $60 million seemed like an obscene amount of money for a thirty-one-year-old point guard with back problems. What I didn’t defend was Dallas subsequently using that found money (and more) to throw $73 million at Erick Dampier, who’s such a dog that PETA monitors all Dallas practices to make sure he isn’t mistreated. If you’re throwing money around, throw it at Nash over Dampier, right?13 Dallas also fatally underestimated the rule changes that transformed Nash into a two-time MVP. Had they kept Nash and Antawn Jamison (dealt for Jerry Stackhouse and Devin Harris) and still made the Antoine Walker/Jason Terry trade, that’s suddenly a monster roster (Nash, Nowitzki, Jamison, Terry, Josh Howard, DeSagana Diop, Veteran Free Agent X and February Buyout Guy X year after year after year) as well as the league’s single most entertaining team (and that’s before we get to what-if number 13). Looking back, it’s peculiar that Mark Cuban played the “fiscal responsibility” card with Nash right before spending recklessly on a thief like Dampier. I have a great deal of respect for Cuban as a businessman and a thinker, but other than passing on Nash, he spent the decade making it rain Pacman-style—only coming close to a title in 2006, when the Mavericks were robbed—and the window closed with a nine-figure payroll and no hope for turning things around unless Jason Kidd gets placed on an accelerated HGH program while we’re printing this book. Too bad. One of my “Bucket List” sports goals in life was to watch a pissed-off David Stern hand Cuban the Finals trophy while Cuban sobbed like Rocky at the end of Rocky II.


29. What if John Thompson never
screwed up the ’88 Olympics?

As the years passed, an urban legend was spawned about that defeat, something about “the team wasn’t talented enough,” which eventually led to the dawning of the original Dream Team in 1992. In the words of John McLaughlin, wrong! They had a franchise center (David Robinson), a franchise forward (Danny Manning, the number one pick that year), two reliable shooters (Mitch Richmond and Hersey Hawkins) and two athletic swingmen who were perfect for international play (Dan Majerle and Stacey Augmon). But Thompson killed their chances by picking point guards Charles Smith (his own guy from Georgetown)14 and Bimbo Coles over Tim Hardaway (my God), Mookie Blaylock, Dana Barros, Rod Strickland, Steve Kerr and even high schooler Kenny Anderson. He willingly sacrificed outside shooting and the slash-and-kick game (only two of the most crucial ingredients to international success) so he could play a pressure defense that fell right into the hands of the cagey Russians (who thrived on ball movement and open three-pointers). Savvy.
This was one of those rare miscalculations where everyone braced for a collapse well before it happened. I mean, we were all worried. And after Russia toppled us in the semis and we left Seoul with a bronze, everyone played the “Screw it, we need to send the pros!” card instead of blaming Thompson and saying, “Let’s never give a coach that kind of roster power again.”15 But you know what? Thompson’s incompetence spawned the first Dream Team—a transcendent summer for the NBA and a tipping point for international basketball—and everything that came afterward, including indefensible behavior by our boys in ’96 and ’02 and an embarrassing butt-whupping by Argentina that forced the powers that be to crack down on assholism and stop slapping together purposeless All-Star teams. Ultimately, it made our product better, and once foreign countries started catching up to us, how many fledgling careers were ignited in Germany, Spain, Argentina, Lithuania, and everywhere else? All because John Thompson blew the gold medal. Thank you, John. I think.


28. What if Minnesota didn’t piss off
Kevin Garnett by quietly shopping
him before the ’07 draft?

Here’s what happens: KG glumly returns to another crappy T-Wolves team for a few months (maybe more), opening the door for Boston to trump Los Angeles for Pau Gasol in February and team him with Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen and Al Jefferson. Not a Finals team … but not a bad team either, right?16 Maybe the Celtics could have just made the KG trade in February using the same players, but would it have been as effective? Remember, Boston signed James Posey and Eddie House at discounts once KG was aboard—that’s not happening without the trade—and would have had a near-impossible time pulling off a six-for-one deal midseason with both rosters already filled. Throw in KG’s trade kicker and that deal doesn’t happen until the summer. By that time the Celtics would have moved on Gasol or …
(Wait for it …)
(Wait for it …)
Kobe.
Remember Kobe’s hissy fit before the ’08 season that spurred the Lakers to shop him around, only nobody would meet their asking price (an All-Star plus cap space plus picks)? If the Celtics hadn’t traded for Garnett, they could have offered Paul Pierce, Theo Ratliff’s expiring contract, their number one and their rights to a future Minnesota number one for Kobe and two relatively unfriendly contracts (Brian Cook and Vlad Radmanovic). Boston would have kept a foundation of Kobe, Ray Allen, Jefferson, Kendrick Perkins and Rajon Rondo; the Lakers would have replaced Kobe with another All-Star and gotten three number ones (including Minnesota’s future pick, which could have been valuable) and $20 million of expiring contracts with Ratliff and Kwame Brown (already on their roster) to make a run at Garnett or Gasol. Since Pierce outplayed Kobe in the 2008 Finals, can you imagine if this happened with Pierce (and maybe even KG) on the Lakers and Kobe on the Celtics?
Obviously I enjoy the way it worked out: Garnett revived basketball in Boston and won a title; Pierce redefined his career; Kobe calmed down and won the MVP before gagging in the Finals; the Lakers hijacked Gasol and riled everyone up (I’m still riled, actually);17 both Phoenix and Dallas panicked and made controversial “I’m going all in with these eights” trades for Shaq and Kidd (then imploded in the playoffs); Miami dumped Shaq’s contract and kicked off Tankapalooza 2008; Shawn Marion became the first professional athlete to seem pleased going from a team with a .700 winning percentage to a team with a .200 winning percentage; and the Lakers and Celtics made ABC $325 billion by meeting in the Finals. And none of it happens if the T-Wolves don’t piss off Garnett in the summer of ’07.


27. What if Ron Artest never charged
into the stands in Detroit?

I can’t believe we made it this far in the book without paying homage to the most unfathomable NBA moment of the decade. Consider:
It’s the only sporting event from 1997 to 2008 that prompted me to write two separate columns within 36 hours. If we built a Hall of Fame for Jaw-Dropping TV Nights in My Lifetime, my original induction would include O.J.’s Bronco Chase (the Babe Ruth of this idea), the first Tyson-Holyfield fight, Princess Diana’s limo accident, Buckwheat’s assassination by John David Stutts, the night Gordon Jump tried to molest Dudley and Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes, and the Artest melee. Those will always be the Big Six, at least for me.18
The clip has been watched and rewatched almost as many times as the Zapruder film. It’s also been removed from YouTube for violating copyright restrictions more than any other NBA-related clip other than Game 6 of the Lakers-Kings series.19
Along with the Tim Donaghy scandal and the time Darius Miles gave Stern a full-body, genitals-to-genitals hug during the 2000 draft, it’s the most traumatic event of David Stern’s reign as commissioner (he even admits as much) and changed the rules about player-fan interactions for the rest of NBA eternity.
From a comedy standpoint, it catapulted both Artest and Stephen Jackson into the Tyson Zone, gave us the phrase “pulling an Artest” for eternity and even allowed us to imagine what life would be like if Jermaine O’Neal could punch out Turtle from Entourage. Jackson ended up winning the Comedy MVP for somehow coming off crazier than the guy who charged into the stands, challenging the entire Pistons team, throwing wild haymakers in the stands and basically turning into the Token Crazy Guy in a Basebrawl Fight multiplied by 100. When Jackson left the arena waving his arms like a pro wrestler as people dumped beer on him, I think he shattered the My God, That Guy Is Freaking Crazy! record in professional sports.
From an I-knew-this-could-happen standpoint, put it this way: if you scrolled through the lineups of all thirty teams before the 2005 season, then asked yourself, “What pair of teammates would be the most likely candidates to start a fight in the stands, eventually leading to the ugliest sequence in NBA history?” the heavy favorites would have been Artest and Jackson in Indiana, with Zach Randolph and Ruben Patterson a distant second in Portland. Maybe it was a Hall of Fame TV night, but at no point did anyone who follows the NBA on a regular basis say to themselves, “I can’t believe Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson are taking on Row 3 in the Palace right now!”
Another underrated and slightly silly side effect: it was one of the most memorable moments in fantasy sports history. Imagine taking Ron with one of your top picks, then watching him charge into the stands a few weeks later. Wait, Ron … Ron … noooooooooooooo-oooooooooooo!
Adam Carolla had a funny take: imagine being the first guy who was mistakenly attacked by Artest. You’ve been watching these guys for two hours, you’re pretty buzzed, you’re loving the seats … and then this fight breaks out, it’s riveting as hell, it keeps going, and then suddenly Artest gets nailed by the cup and he’s coming right at you. As Carolla said, it would be like watching Captain Hook in the movies for two hours, then Captain Hook comes right out of the movie screen and attacks you. Would you have blamed that first guy for soiling himself?
So you have all those things already in play, followed by the what-if potential that emerged afterward. Right before the melee, the Pacers had just finished throttling the Pistons and staking their claim as “The Team to Beat in 2005.” In the span of five minutes, everything went down the drain … and if you remember, the shoddy ’05 Finals between San Antonio and Detroit ranks alongside the ’94 Finals and the ’76 Finals on the Wait, Are We Sure These Were the Best Two Teams? Scale. There’s no way to prove it, but I will always believe Indiana had the best 2005 team even if they were predisposed to self-combusting. Whatever. From that moment on, professional basketball was effectively murdered in Indiana. In retrospect, Larry Bird probably feels like Artest and Jackson charged into the stands and started beating the hell out of him. That’s basically what happened.20


26. What if Jason Kidd accepted San Antonio’s
$87 million offer during the summer of ’03?

Even when you’re as savvy as Gregg Popovich and R. C. Buford, you still need some luck. The Spurs won titles in ’05 and ’07 without Kidd and were one miracle play (Fisher’s three-pointer in ’04) and one brainless play (Manu’s foul on Nowitzki in ’06) from winning four straight. Assuming they land Kidd in ’03, they definitely deal Tony Parker that summer or down the road (not a good thing) and don’t have enough money to pay Ginobili without triggering the luxury tax (definitely not a good thing since they’re a refuse-to-pay-the-tax team). Kidd’s personal life could have screwed up their chemistry to some degree because his then-wife was a legendary prima donna, and going from Parker (congenial) to Kidd (passive-aggressive moody) would have jeopardized the fragile balance of talent/personality/selflessness that made San Antonio so successful in the first place. Do the Spurs win more than two titles with Kidd? Fewer than two? None?21
Here’s what we know: From 2004 to 2006, the upgrade from Parker to Kidd wouldn’t have made up for the cap hit and loss of depth. From 2006 to 2009, you would much rather have spent $40 million on Tony Parker than twice as much on a declining Jason Kidd.22 So Popovich and Buford dodged a bazooka bullet on this one. And since we’re here …


25. What if Tim Duncan signed with Orlando in 2000 to play with Grant Hill?

And to think, it almost happened. If Duncan signs with Orlando, that swings the title in three seasons (’03, ’05 and ’07) … and with Hill missing games and killing Orlando’s cap, suddenly Duncan would have been emulating KG’s career and squandering his prime on a series of undermanned teams. Those two would have been mirror images of each other—Duncan wasting away in the East, Garnett wasting away in the West—as we spent those years wondering who got more screwed and who did more with less. Bad times all around.23 Also, where would T-Mac have landed if Orlando chose Duncan and Hill? Maybe in San Antonio to replace Duncan? And what if they still drafted Ginobili and Parker? Could they have won a title with those three guys and Robinson in 2003? Could they have even made the Finals without a dominant big guy? Hmmmmmm.
(Note: I would have ranked this one higher, but it’s unclear if Duncan was ever that close to joining Orlando. Could you see him winning a title, then ditching his teammates for a bigger paycheck in Florida? Me neither.)24


24. What if MJ never played with the Wizards?

In the big scheme of things, no biggie. But imagine how cool it would have been if Game 6 of the ’98 Finals—MJ winning the title by himself and ending his career with the layup-steal-jumper sequence—was our last basketball memory of Michael Jordan? That Washington comeback made him seem mortal, cluttered our brain with a few unpleasant memories, hurt his career historically (even if we didn’t realize it) and opened the door for a decade of ludicrous “Kobe/LeBron might even be better than MJ!” arguments. Which leads me to my world-renowned Kurt Cobain Theory: Part of the reason Nirvana gained steam historically was because Cobain killed himself at the perfect time, right after In Utero and the MTV Unplugged album, when he was hooked on drugs and slowly going insane. Had he hung around and survived, we would have been treated to a few rehab stints, some bizarre behavior, a messy/bloody/violent breakup with Courtney Love that would have landed one of them (or both) in jail, at least two incoherent albums that every annoying Cobain fanatic would have defended as “genius, man, pure genius,” followed by a six-year disappearance and an eventual booking on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, where he definitely would have hooked up with Mary Carey. He would have made Scott Weiland seem more bubbly than the dudes from Wham! After enduring his pathetic downfall for twelve or fourteen years, would we still be hailing Cobain as a musical genius and crediting him as the father of alternative music? No way! He would have been just another druggie musician who threw away his career.25 If you don’t believe me, look how we regarded Michael Jackson before he died—the freak of freaks, a celebrity cautionary tale, a creepy (alleged) child molester—even though as recently as 1987 we agreed that Jackson was the most talented pop artist ever. Or consider how Eddie Murphy would have been remembered historically had he perished in a plane crash two months after the 1988 release of Coming to America. Memories affect perceptions for better and worse. They do. Our last Cobain memory was that MTV special, just an anguished, captivating, overwhelmingly talented dude delivering the best Unplugged of all time. That’s one of the things that helped him endure. And our last Jordan memory should have been the swipe of Malone and the jumper over Bryon Russell. Alas.


23. What if John Havlicek didn’t get injured during the ’73 Eastern Finals?

I know, I know … I promised that we would avoid injury-related what-ifs. The ’73 Celtics finished 68–14 (the fourth-best record ever) and had their most dominant team of the Cowens/Havlicek era. Hondo separated his shooting shoulder in Game 3 of the Knicks series, missed the rest of that game plus the next one (both Boston losses) and played left-handed for the last three, with the Celtics still stretching it to seven before the Knicks finally realized, “Wait, Hondo is playing with one hand—let’s hound him every time he has the ball!” So the Celtics suffered their first-ever Game 7 defeat at the Garden, with the Knicks beating an aging Lakers team in the Finals. That trophy belonged to Boston; considering Hondo played 1,442 of a possible 1,475 games (including playoffs), the fact that his only major injury in sixteen seasons happened at that specific point in time ranks among the biggest flukes in NBA history. When an over-the-hill Celtics team stumbled into the ’76 title, it was almost like the NBA gods were paying them back for robbing them in ’73.26
Just know this was the only fluky post-shot-clock injury that almost definitely swung a title. Do the ’58 Celtics beat the Hawks if Russell didn’t sprain his ankle early in the series? Maybe … but we don’t know. Do the ’88 Pistons topple the Lakers if Isiah doesn’t sprain an ankle in the third quarter of Game 6? Maybe … but the Lakers still had home court in Games 6 and 7 (and Magic and Worthy in their primes). Do the ’87 Celtics beat the Lakers if McHale didn’t break his foot? Do the ’83 Lakers hang with Philly if Worthy didn’t break his leg? Could the ’04 Lakers have held off Detroit if Karl Malone didn’t hurt his knee? Do the ’85 Celtics beat the Lakers if Bird didn’t injure his shooting hand in a bar fight?27 Would the ’03 Mavs have won a title if Nowitzki didn’t get hurt? What about the ’99 Knicks with Ewing? Could the ’96 Magic have hung with the Bulls if Horace Grant didn’t get hurt in the first half of Game 1? Could the ’62 Sixers have beaten Boston if Wilt didn’t injure his hand trying to punch Tommy Heinsohn (and hitting a teammate instead)? There are no definitive answers. We don’t know. With the ’73 Celtics, we know: they had the best team, the best player (Hondo) and the reigning MVP (Dave Cowens). Even getting half a series from Hondo (and 40 percent of Hondo when he played), that series still went seven. What does that tell you?


22. What if Wilt ended up on the Lakers instead of the Sixers in 1965?

We covered this story in the Wilt-Russell chapter. (And by “we,” I mean me.)28 Yup, Wilt, Elgin, and Jerry could have become teammates four years sooner than it actually happened. And it didn’t happen for a remarkable reason. Forget about the potential playoff ramifications; can you imagine how much damage Wilt would have done in Hollywood in his sexual prime? He would have been throwing his cock around like it was a boomerang. I’m almost positive that Elizabeth Taylor and Raquel Welch would have been clunked in the face with it. That probably happened anyway. Let’s just move on.


21. What if Kobe signed with the Clippers in 2004?

The Clippers fervently believed Kobe was coming—remember, this was the same summer when Kobe was getting blamed by everyone for pushing out Shaq and Phil Jackson—until he broke their hearts by changing course at the last minute. Other than the Lakers offering an extra year and slightly more money, was anything else offered to help stop Kobe from joining a younger and more talented Clippers team? Are the rumors true that the Lakers illegally promised Kobe a postretirement piece of the Lakers?29 Were the Lakers reluctant to pursue Kobe offers before the ’08 season because of something promised during those ’04 negotiations? It’s all hypothetical, and we’ll never know for sure until Kobe retires and we learn if he earned the Magic Johnson Memorial Ownership Discount from Dr. Buss. But everyone working for the Clippers feels like something happened to trump their offer beyond the dollar figures. They just don’t know what.30
Regardless, this was the biggest moment in Clippers history, the time they came within a hair of stealing Kobe and completely changing the face of pro basketball in Los Angeles as we knew it. The second biggest moment was when they signed Bill Walton … who played 167 games in six years and topped 55 once. The third happened in the second round of the ’06 playoffs, needing one stop to secure the series, when Mike Dunleavy stuck an ice-cold rookie named Daniel Ewing on Raja Bell and blew their one chance at an extended playoff run. The fourth was when they lost a deciding Game 5 in 1990 and ESPN Classic showed the game fifteen years later. (That’s right, the Clips on ESPN Classic!) The fifth was a five-way tie between the times Marques Johnson, Derek Smith, Norm Nixon, Shaun Livingston, and Danny Manning blew out their knees. And the sixth was when I nearly made a half-court shot at a Clippers game for E:60. Not a fun three decades for the Clips in California.


20. What if the Lakers picked Dominique Wilkins over James Worthy in the 1982 draft?

The defending champs were picking first thanks to a head-scratching trade with Cleveland.31 Desperately needing young blood at the forward spot, the Lakers lucked into the perfect draft for that wish list—Worthy, Terry Cummings and ’Nique went one-two-three—ultimately opting for Worthy’s all-around excellence and experience over ’Nique’s upside and explosiveness.32 You know what’s surprising? This wasn’t a popular choice at the time. NBA fans were drooling at the thought of ’Nique (one of the most thrilling college players ever to that point) running the wing with Magic, Nixon and the Showtime Lakers. But an unhappy Wilkins could have imploded them and the Lakers didn’t want to take the chance; he didn’t help his cause by refusing to play for the Clips (picking second) or Jazz (picking third). Knowing what we know now, it’s just far-fetched to imagine ’Nique giving up shots, deferring to Kareem and breaking a sweat on defense. Then again, maybe Riley and Magic could have changed his ways (after all, they salvaged McAdoo’s career and he was infinitely more selfish than ’Nique), and had they done so, the ceiling of those Showtime Lakers teams climbs a level because ’Nique was such an electric player and unstoppable scorer. Beyond that, Magic would have made him better and they might have broken the record for Most Alley-Oops That Brought the House Down. Shit, we might have spent 1985 to 1993 having Jordan-Dominique arguments that centered around “Who’s better?” instead of “Who’s a better dunker?”
Had the Lakers taken Wilkins, his career would have been remembered differently: either better or worse, but definitely not the same. We can agree on that. We can also agree that Worthy would have been the big loser here: the Clippers would have taken him second, then Utah would have taken Cummings third because he could play both forward spots (in fact, they took Thurl Bailey the next year for the same reason). Instead, Worthy went first, Cummings went second and poor Utah had to trade number three to Atlanta for John Drew, Freeman Williams and $750,000 in a deal that seemed awful even before Drew entered rehab a few months later and admitted he’d been freebasing for three solid years. (Way to do your homework, Utah!) Has there ever been a best-case/worst-case draft scenario that rivals James Worthy landing on the ’83 Lakers instead of the ’83 Clippers? Instead of winning three rings, a Finals MVP and NBA’s 50 at 50 honors, he would have joined a woeful Clippers team, fallen prey to the Clippers jinx, blown out his knee in twenty-nine places within three years and missed every one of Magic Johnson’s postgame Laker orgies. We never would have uttered the words “Big Game James.” Ever.33


19. What if Atlanta took Chris Paul with the number two pick of the 2005 draft?

We knew this was an Aretha Franklin-sized mistake at the time because Paul was the best player in the ’05 draft and, more importantly, Atlanta desperately needed a point guard!34 But with Paul turning into a franchise guy and Evolutionary Isiah, it’s slowly becoming the poor man’s version of Bowie-over-MJ for this generation of hoop fans, a relatively inexplicable decision that became between ten and twenty times more inexplicable as the years passed. With the supporting talent the Hawks already had in place (Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, etc.), you couldn’t pick a better team for him. You really couldn’t.35 It’s safe to say CP3 will be haunting Atlanta fans for years to come. All 527 of them.
But here’s what we haven’t made enough of …


18. What if Portland took Chris Paul with the number three pick?

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh … you forgot about this one, huh? Portland sent that pick to Utah for the number six pick (Martell Webster), the number twenty-seven pick (Linus Kleiza) and a 2006 number one (the number thirty pick, Joel Freeland). So let’s say the Blazers had just kept number three and picked Paul, which would have made sense because, you know, he was the best player in the draft and all. They’re still a lottery team the following season, although probably not quite as bad; maybe they end up with Rudy Gay at number eight instead of Aldridge at number four. They’re definitely better in ’07, maybe a fringe playoff team, so let’s take Oden away from them and give them the number twelve pick (Thaddeus Young) that year. So which foundation would you rather have if you’re a Portland fan?
Scenario A: Oden, Aldridge, Webster, Roy, Travis Outlaw, Jarrett Jack, Joel Przybilla, the rights to Rudy Fernandez and Paul Allen’s billions
Scenario B: Paul, Roy, Gay, Outlaw, Przybilla, Jack, Young, the rights to Rudy Fernandez and Paul Allen’s billions
Hmmmmmm. Paul and Roy as your backcourt for the next six to eight years?36 Could that have worked when both guys need the ball in their hands? (Possibly.) Would they have had enough size? (From the looks of it, no.) Would they have played a more wide-open style and would it have worked? (With the talent on hand, I say yes.) Anyway, if Portland takes Paul, that sets off a crazy chain reaction: New Orleans ending up with Deron Williams instead of Paul; Utah never getting a franchise point guard; Oden and Aldridge landing in other cities; maybe Roy not turning into a franchise guard playing second fiddle to Paul; and maybe Paul not being quite as driven because he’s not as ticked off for the next few years after three teams passed on him.37 I like the way it worked out.


17. What if the Knicks bought Julius Erving’s contract from the Nets in 1976?

After the ABA merger happened, the Nets made an intriguing offer to the Knickerbockers: He’s yours if you waive our territorial penalty ($480,000 per year for ten years). Already saddled with the expensive Haywood contract, the Knicks turned them down and set their franchise back seven solid years.38 Philly bought Doc for $3 million and poor Doc coexisted with overhyped guys, ball hogs, head cases and underachievers for the next three years, too dignified and too unselfish to fight them for shots. So really, this couldn’t have turned out worse unless Doc also knocked up a white female sportswriter covering the Sixers and didn’t publicly acknowledge their daughter until she became a tennis star sixteen years later.
(Hey, wait a second…)
One more wrinkle: the Nets settled that territorial fee two years later by swapping the fourth pick in the ’78 draft (Micheal Ray Richardson)39 and their number one pick in 1979 (eventually Larry Demic at number nine) for the thirteenth pick in 1978 (Winford Boynes), Phil Jackson, all of Phil Jackson’s weed and a settlement for the remaining money. If you want to get technical, this had a double impact because, before the ’83 season, the Knicks signed Bernard King to a $4.5 million, five-year offer sheet that Golden State matched, finally agreeing to send King to the Knicks for … (drumroll, please) … Micheal Ray Richardson!40 So maybe the Knicks screwed up by not getting Doc, but it led to two wildly entertaining Micheal Ray years, one “What the hell is wrong with Micheal Ray?” season, one extremely good Bernard season, then one and a half life-altering Bernard years. That’s not so bad, right?


16. What if Kobe was convicted of sexual assault
instead of settling with his accuser
out of court for big bucks?

Whoops, I forgot: four years ago, everyone in the Los Angeles area agreed to pretend this never happened. Now they act perturbed if anyone else brings it up (or broaches it). I live in L.A. right now, so unfortunately, I have to follow the code. When I move back East someday, we’ll update this section in the next printing. Stay tuned.


15. What if the Suns didn’t screw up a potential Nash dynasty with some of the cheapest and most perplexing moves ever made?

I wanted to avoid playing the “What if the front office did this instead of this?” game because it’s so subjective, but Phoenix’s bipolar game plan from 2004 to 2008 had to be commemorated in some way. Here’s a detailed look.
During the same summer they signed Nash, Phoenix traded the seventh pick in the ’04 Draft (and a chance to take either Luol Deng or Andre Iguodala) to Chicago for $3 million and a 2006 number one. One week later, they signed Quentin Richardson to a six-year, $42.6 million deal, even though they could have drafted Deng or Iguodala and paid either of them one-third what Richardson was getting. They kept Richardson for one year before swapping Q and their twenty-first pick (Nate Robinson) in the ’05 draft to the Knicks for Kurt Thomas. Two summers later, they dumped Thomas on Seattle along with two number ones just to shed him off their cap for tax purposes. As astounding as this sounds, Bryan Colangelo’s decision to sign Richardson instead of just drafting Deng or Iguodala—which was dumb at the time, by the way—ended up costing them four first-round picks! Would you rather have Richardson, or would you rather have the number seven pick in 2004, the number twenty-one pick in 2005, and first-rounders in 2008 and 2010? I thought so.41
Phoenix lowballed Joe Johnson so insultingly that he asked them not to match Atlanta’s $70 million free agent offer, leading to Phoenix accepting Boris Diaw and two future first-rounders for him. So the Suns had just come within two wins of the ’05 Finals and built a run-and-gun identity; suddenly they were dealing a twenty-four-year-old potential All-Star, the perfect swingman for their system and a deadly shooter who could even play backup point guard, and they were only getting back a bench player and two future picks? Also, how could they botch the Johnson situation so badly that he asked to leave? With Nash, Amar’e, Marion and Johnson, you’re set for the rest of the decade. That’s it. That’s your core. That’s your guarantee for 57-plus wins a year and a specific style that can work. Surround them with role players and veteran buyout guys and you’re contending until Nash breaks down, and even then, you can just shift the offense over to Johnson as the main creator. How can you give that guy up? So what if he’s insulted and doesn’t want to come back? He’ll get over it! You’re paying him $14 million a year and he gets to play with Steve Nash! Arrrrrrrrgh.42
Instead of picking Rajon Rondo with the twenty-first pick in ’06 (the pick acquired from Chicago), they shipped his rights to Boston for Cleveland’s 2007 number one and $1.9 million. A few weeks later, they gave Marcus Banks $24 million. Would you rather have a potential up-and-comer like Rondo for cheap money or a proven turd like Banks for five times as much? Tough call. If you just had a head injury.
They gave Diaw a five-year, $45 million extension that summer, which meant the Diaw/Banks combo now earned as much money every year as Joe Johnson. Awesome.
So the Iguodala/Deng/Rondo pick became number twenty-four in the ’07 draft … and naturally, the Suns sold it to Portland for $3 million. Why didn’t they just take Spanish star Rudy Fernandez (Portland’s pick)? You can’t play the luxury tax card because Fernandez wasn’t planning on joining the NBA for at least a year; it would have been savvy if Phoenix had stashed him in Europe as an asset down the road. Instead, owner Sarver announced to his fans, “Screw you, I’d rather have the $3 million, I’m taking the cash.” One year later, Fernandez would have been a top-ten pick after lighting it up in Spain; he even gave the Redeem Team everything it could handle in the 2008 Olympics. Can you quantify the damage there?43
I hate delving into the Marty McFly Zone when many of the aforementioned screwups were interrelated, but let’s figure out how the Suns could have turned out if cheapskate owner Robert Sarver didn’t sign off on the aforementioned bipolar game plan in 2004. We know for sure that they could have had a six-man nucleus of Nash, Marion, Stoudemire, Johnson, Leandro Barbosa and Deng/Iguodala from 2004 to the present that shouldn’t have been touched, and we know they dumped first-rounders in ’05, ’06 and ’08 for tax purposes. Even if they surrounded that nucleus with draft picks, minimum-wage veterans and February buyout guys and did nothing else, wouldn’t they have been positioned for the short term and long term better than any franchise in the latter half of this decade? The bigger question: why own an NBA team if you’re going to cut costs? What’s the point? Why would that be fun? So people could stare at you during dinner and whisper, “Hey, that’s the cheap-ass who owns the Suns”? This pisses me off. What a wasted chance, and what a waste of Nash’s prime.
(Note to the Phoenix fans: You can now light yourselves on fire.)


14. What if Orlando had kept Chris Webber’s draft rights instead of trading him?

Remember when the Magic defied 1-in-66 odds to win the ’93 lottery, giving them the number one pick for the second straight year in maybe the biggest stroke of luck in NBA history? Since Webber was the ideal complement to Shaq (a great passer who could play the high post, crash the boards, run the floor and defend the rim), we spent the next few weeks wondering how anyone could match up with Shaq, Webber, Nick Anderson, Dennis Scott and Lord knows who else over the next ten to twelve years. Magic GM Pat Williams had other ideas: he was swayed by Penny Hardaway’s workout right before the draft, which Williams described afterward by saying, “I’ve never seen someone come in and do the things that Penny Hardaway did in that workout.”44 On draft day, Williams shocked everyone by swapping the first pick to Golden State for the third pick overall and first-rounders in ’96, ’98 and ’00, a move that was widely panned at the time and nearly caused a riot in Orlando. No NBA trade received more attention, went in more directions over a ten-year span and spawned more what-ifs. Webber battled with Warriors coach Don Nelson constantly as a rookie (Webber wanted to play forward, Nellie wanted him to play center) during a 50-win season in which Tim Hardaway was recovering from a torn ACL. The following year, Hardaway returned with C-Webb, Latrell Sprewell (first-team All-NBA in ’94), Chris Mullin (just past his prime), Rony Seikaly, Avery Johnson and Chris Gatling … I mean, that’s a pretty nice top seven, right? Webber didn’t care; he had an opt-out clause and wanted out. Stuck between a rock and Shawn Kemp’s boxers, the Warriors swapped him to Washington for Tom Gugliotta and three number ones and inadvertently damaged his career (see the grisly details). Meanwhile, Hardaway exceeded everyone’s expectations, led Orlando to the ’95 Finals and made an All-NBA first team—and then he clashed with Shaq (Shaq bolted for L.A.), devolved from an unselfish playmaker to a me-first scorer and blew out his knee in Phoenix. Bad times all around.
So what if Orlando just kept Webber? Does Shaq still leave after the ’96 season? (Impossible to say.) Would Webber have thrived as the Robin to Shaq’s Batman? (I say yes.) Who would the Magic have targeted with their ’94 cap space instead of Horace Grant?45 (My guesses: Detlef Schrempf and Steve Kerr.) Would they have made the ’95 Finals with Shaq, C-Webb, Scott, Anderson, Brian Shaw and my two free agent guesses? (I say yes.) Would they have had a better chance against the ’95 Rockets with that team? (Actually, yes.) As for Penny Hardaway, he takes Tim Hardaway’s minutes on that aforementioned 50-win Warriors team, thrives in Nellie’s offense with Spree, Mullin and Owens flanking him, and potentially becomes a Hall of Famer for all we know. Just remember, C-Webb and Penny were both top-forty talents who never reached their potential for reasons that aren’t entirely satisfying. Had the trade never happened, maybe one of them (or both of them) would have reached that potential. Let’s give them starting spots on the What-If All-Stars.


13. What if Anthony Carter’s agent never messed up?

A forgotten footnote in NBA history: when Anthony Carter’s agent (Bill Duffy) never faxed Miami a letter exercising Carter’s $4.1 million player option for the 2003–4 season.46 After the deadline passed, Carter became a free agent (whoops!) and Miami suddenly had enough cap space to throw a $60 million, six-year offer at Lamar Odom. One summer later, they packaged Odom, Caron Butler, Brian Grant’s cadaver and a 2006 first-rounder to L.A. for Shaq. Two obvious repercussions here: First, Miami never wins the 2006 title if Duffy doesn’t screw up. Second, since Miami couldn’t have gotten Shaq without Duffy, where else could Shaq have landed when the Lakers had to trade him?47 Could Dallas have stolen him for something like Michael Finley, Devin Harris, Alan Henderson’s expiring contract and a number one pick? Would Denver have offered Marcus Camby, Nene Hilario and Voshon Lenard? Could the Bulls have hijacked him for Eddy Curry (a free agent after the season), Antonio Davis (expiring) and a first-round pick? I say Dallas had the best chance, which means they would have avoided that crippling Dampier move, gotten Shaq, and kept their best four guys (Nowitzki, Howard, Stackhouse and Terry). How many titles are we thinking there? Two? Three? When I emailed him about this last summer (subject line: “Insanely Random Question”), Cuban responded, “[I have] no idea if we would have gotten him, but I know Shaq wanted to come.”
You know what that means? If we’re making the list of Guys Who Prevented Us from Seeing a Pissed-Off Stern Hand a Sobbing Cuban the Lawrence O’Brien Trophy, here’s the top five in no particular order: Dwyane Wade, Bill Duffy, Bennett Salvatore, Don Nelson and Isiah Thomas (for stupidly taking Penny’s contract in the Marbury deal and giving Phoenix enough cap space to woo Nash the following summer).
Hey, speaking of Isiah …


12. What if the Knicks never hired Isiah Thomas?

This could have been its own bizarro “Where Amazing Happens” NBA commercial called “Where Isiah Happens.”
(Cue up the annoying piano music that haunted me every time I tried to fall asleep after hearing it for six straight months during the ’08 season.)48
Picture: The ’05 Suns celebrating after a playoff win.
Caption: Where Phoenix dumps the Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway contracts on some unsuspecting sucker and remakes its team into a contender happens.
Picture: The ’07 Bulls celebrating after a playoff win.
Caption: Where Chicago dumps Eddy Curry and his gigantic ass for two lottery picks and copious amounts of cap space happens.
Picture: The ’07 Raptors celebrating after a playoff win.
Caption: Where Toronto finds some dummy to take Jalen Rose’s contract off their hands and aid its rebuilding process happens.
Picture: San Antonio’s 2005 trophy celebration.
Caption: Where San Antonio dumps Malik Rose’s contract for a cap-friendly center who helps them win the title happens.
Picture: Steve Francis sitting glumly on the Knicks bench.
Caption: Where Orlando finds someone to take Steve Francis’ horrendous contract so they can free up $15 million in cap space happens.
Picture: The ’08 Blazers celebrating after a last-second win.
Caption: Where the 2008 Blazers become the NBA’s most likable young team because they found a taker for Zach Randolph happens.
Picture: Anucha Browne Sanders celebrating on the courthouse steps.49
Caption: Where a humiliating $11 million sexual harassment settlement happens.
Picture: A white SUV.
Caption: Where a Truck Party happens.50
Picture: Curry and Randolph looking overweight, like they just barbecued Nate Robinson on a grill and ate him.
Caption: Where an NBA frontcourt that includes two C-cups happens.
Picture: A mostly empty Madison Square Garden.
Caption: Where a sixty-year tradition of professional basketball going down the tubes happens.
Picture: Isiah sitting on the bench with that frozen, blank look on his face like he’s either flatlining or planning to kill everyone in the locker room after the game.
Caption: Where Isiah happens.
(Follow-up note: Has any GM in NBA history ever directly altered the fortunes of seven franchises for the better? Portland, San Antonio, Phoenix, Toronto, Orlando, Chicago, New York … that’s nearly 25 percent of the league! He is missed. By the other GMs.)


11. What if Maurice Stokes never went down?

Not an injury what-if because the Royals star technically didn’t get injured playing basketball; he contracted encephalitis, a fluke of an illness that happens only if an undiagnosed bacterial infection or undiagnosed brain trauma is left untreated, worsens and eventually causes brain damage. Poor Stokes banged his head in the final game of the ’58 season against Minneapolis, flew back to Cincinnati that night, never got treated over the next three days, flew to Detroit for a playoff game and played sluggishly, then finally collapsed on the plane home. So a fluky combination of factors—poor medical treatment, multiple flights (the last thing you want to do with brain trauma) and poor Stokes gutting out a playoff game when he felt terrible—led to brain damage and Stokes spending the rest of his shortened life in a wheelchair.
How good was Stokes? He averaged a 17–16, 16–17 and 17–18 in his only three seasons as the NBA’s first ahead-of-his-time power forward, like a taller Charles Barkley, a six-foot-seven, 275-pounder who pounded the boards, handled the ball full-court, and had a variety of Baylor-like moves around the basket (scoop shots, finger rolls and the like). Had he avoided gaining weight in his late twenties (you never know with this stuff), Stokes would have been a mortal lock for the NBA’s 50 at 50. Given that Oscar was a future territorial pick for the Royals, we can safely assume that an Oscar-Stokes combo would have altered the course of a Finals or two in the sixties. From a big-picture standpoint, the NBA lost its most charismatic black star of the fifties and sixties. What a shame. There wasn’t a single silver lining except for an improbable, feel-good human interest story that we’ll continue in the Jack Twyman section of the Pyramid.51


10. What if Memphis instead of Cleveland landed Lebron?

Take a trip back to the 2003 lottery with me. We’re down to Cleveland and Memphis in the final two. If the Grizzlies draw number two, they turn the pick over to Detroit because they stupidly traded a conditional number one for Otis Thorpe five years earlier (a pick that only had top-one protection in 2003).52 If the Grizz draw number one, then they keep the pick and get LeBron. Suddenly we’re presented with the greatest hit-or-miss moment in the history of professional sports—like going on Deal or No Deal, getting down to two suitcases and having a 50/50 chance of winning $500 million. For a few seconds, ESPN’s camera shows Jerry West, who has the same look on his face that Forrest Gump had when he groped Jenny’s boobies for the first time. If Jerry had dropped dead right then and there, nobody would have been surprised. Well, we know how it turned out: Cleveland got the first pick, Memphis got nothing, and a heartbroken West retired and eventually disappeared off the face of the earth, presumably to spend the next few years playing Russian roulette in Southeast Asia like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. (Sorry to throw consecutive movie references at you, but the situation demanded two of them and that’s that.) Now look at the domino effect over the next five years if Memphis gets that pick:
LeBron joins a deep Grizzlies team (Pau Gasol, Shane Battier, Mike Miller …) that won 50 games despite getting nothing from that ’03 draft. A little better than starting out on a lottery team with knuckle-heads like Ricky Davis and Darius Miles, right?
Picking second, Cleveland takes Carmelo and built around ’Melo, Carlos Boozer and Carlos Boozer’s chest hair. Since Denver GM Kiki Vandeweghe took Nikoloz Tskitishvili over Amar’e Stoudemire in 2002, it goes without saying Kiki would have been stupid enough to take Darko at number three over Chris Bosh. The rest of the draft probably unfolds the same way, although Chad Ford still probably has the immortal Maciej Lampe going ninth to the Knicks.
What are the odds LeBron stays in Memphis after his rookie contract ends? I’m going with between 0.000001 and 0.009 percent. And that might be high. Which means he becomes a free agent following the 2007 season, leading to numerous lousy teams devoting their ’06 and ’07 seasons to carving out enough cap space for him, as well as Isiah failing to plan ahead, inadvertently knocking New York out of the LeBron sweepstakes and a summer of rioting in the streets of Manhattan the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ’77 blackout and the Son of Sam murders. Also, LeBron’s departure swiftly kills basketball in Memphis, with the Grizzlies moving to England and becoming the London Hooligans. (Actually, what am I saying? That still might happen.) And every title from 2008 to 2020 might look different. That’s about it.


9. What if Ralph Sampson entered the 1980 draft?

In April 1980 the rejuvenated Celtics were coming off 60 wins and preparing for a bloodbath with Philly in the Eastern Finals … and as this was happening, they won the coin flip giving them the number one pick (thanks to the McAdoo trade one year earlier). The seven-foot-four Sampson was finishing a much-hyped freshman year at Virginia (15–11, 5 blocks a game); we forget this now, but Sampson ranked right up there with Walton, Kareem and Wilt once upon a time on the This Guy Is Going to Join the NBA and Obliterate Everyone Scale.53 The Celtics quietly started lobbying him: Come play with us. You’ll compete for a title right away with Bird, Cowens, Maxwell and Tiny on the greatest franchise ever. Why risk getting hurt? You and Bird could own this league for the decade. When Sampson improbably turned them down, they settled on plan B: trading that pick (along with number thirteen) for Robert Parish and number three (Kevin McHale), then winning three titles within the next six years.
Do they win those trophies with Sampson? That depends on how you project his career had he skipped those last three college years—in which he never improved playing with inferior teammates while facing slowdown tactics and triple-teams—and got thrown into the fire at the highest possible level on a contender. In 1980, Auerbach believed that Sampson had the athletic ability and instincts to become the next Russell. I always thought Sampson was like a postmerger Kareem sans the Sky Hook: same height, same body, slightly disappointing rebounder and shot blocker (though still solid in both departments), but a mismatch for nearly everyone because of his size and quickness. Those last three college years significantly damaged his ceiling. He never developed a money-in-the-bank shot; if anything, he bought into the whole “Sampson is a guard in a big man’s body” hype, started screwing around 20 feet from the basket and tried to run fast breaks like a mutant Bob Cousy Throw in a dreadful Houston team in his rookie season and that’s four wasted seasons in his formative years. He never recovered. Imagine Ralph learning the ropes in Boston, mastering the rebounding/shot-blocking thing, playing high-pressure playoff games, running the floor with a great fast-break team and getting fed easy baskets from Bird from 1980 to 1984. On paper, that would have been the cushiest situation in NBA history for a franchise center.54 Would that have been better than a McHale/Parish combo? Depends on how you feel about Auerbach’s “next Russell” assessment. Red flipped out publicly after Sampson turned them down, hissing that Ralph was being “hoodwinked by glad-handlers” and adding, “The people who advised him to stay in school will have trouble sleeping nights. They’re taking away earning potential he’ll never get back, and they’re forgetting that if he gets hit by a car, it’s the end of the line. It’s ridiculous. If he were an intellectual genius and was planning on being a surgeon, you could see him wanting to go to school.” Considering Sampson only played four healthy NBA seasons and filed for bankruptcy a few years later, maybe Red knew what he was talking about. (Whether he assessed Ralph’s ceiling correctly is another story.) But Ralph stayed in school, leading to …


8. What if the ’86 Rockets never fell apart?

Magic’s Lakers won titles in ’80, ’82 and ’85 and were demolished by the ’86 Rockets. Bird’s Celtics won titles in ’81, ’84 and ’86 and held the number two pick in a seemingly loaded ’86 draft. So who ended up squeaking out two more titles and becoming the Team of the Decade? The Lakers. Why? Because of our number two what-if (sigh), as well as the untimely, unseemly, unprecedented, unfathomable, un-(fill in any other negative word) of the promising Sampson-Hakeem era.
We always hear about the tragic falls of Doc and Darryl, the two Coreys, Mike Tyson, Len Bias and about fifty different bands and singers from the eighties, but nobody ever remembers to include the team Pat Riley once called “the Team of the Future.” For historical purposes, Houston’s “upset” of the ’86 Lakers was eventually dismissed as something of a fluke; during a fifty-month stretch from April ’85 to June ’89 in which we changed presidents, watched Rocky single-handedly end the Cold War, became terrified of cocaine and unprotected sex, lost the ability to produce decent music, made a former Austrian bodybuilder the biggest movie star alive, learned how to market black athletes, looked on sadly as Eddie Murphy lost his sense of humor and Michael Jackson transformed from biggest star on the planet to full-fledged freak and cautionary tale, and set the table for Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld to become the richest comedians of all time, the Lakers lost only one of their eighteen playoff series … only it was to an upstart Rockets team who fell off the face of the earth almost as quickly as they showed up. So naturally, it must have been a fluke. Right?
Here are the facts: The Rockets lost Game 1 and swept the next four, clinching at the Forum even after Hakeem got thrown out with six minutes remaining for fighting with Mitch Kupchak. (This one ended with Sampson famously making his miracle buzzer-beater and Michael Cooper sinking to the floor in disbelief, adding to the whole “what an upset” myth.)55 If you watch that series carefully, Houston couldn’t have been a worse matchup for the Lakers, whose major weaknesses were rebounding and defending elite low-post scorers. That Sampson-Hakeem combo was their Kryptonite.56 Watching Kareem “try” (repeat: “try”) to defend the impossibly quick Hakeem was like watching one of those slow thirty-five-year-old linebackers (think Tedy Bruschi) getting stuck covering a quick running back (think Brian Westbrook) on a swing pass in the open field without help. Mr. Ninny just had no chance. If they switched him to Sampson (playing the high post), that pulled him away from the rim, robbed the Lakers of their only shot blocker, and allowed Ralph to beat him off the dribble … and that’s before we get to the nightmare of undersized or athletically challenged forwards like Kupchak, A. C. Green or James Worthy trying to handle Hakeem on the low post. If that weren’t enough, Houston was blessed with lanky, athletic perimeter guys (Robert Reid, Lewis Lloyd,57 Rodney McCray) who could rebound and cause problems for Magic. In retrospect, the only thing Houston was missing was a coaching staff of female call girls who could have seduced the Lakers after games and gotten them into trouble. That’s how good the matchup was for Houston. Throw in pesky point guard John Lucas (who suffered a drug relapse two months before the playoffs) and they were put on the planet to beat up on those mid-eighties Lakers teams.
Still not sold? Hakeem and Ralph were the first picks in consecutive years (’83 and ’84) and, along with the McHale/Parish combo in Boston, caused such a panic that every mid-eighties team became obsessed with adding size, leading to our number one what-if (hold tight), Joe Kleine and Jon Koncak getting picked ahead of Karl Malone, lottery teams rolling the dice with troubled losers like Chris Washburn and William Bedford and everything else. Suddenly the poor Lakers were a smallball team trapped in a big-man’s league; with Kareem’s rebounding/shot-blocking numbers in free fall, after Houston laid the smack down on them, everyone assumed the Magic-Kareem era was over. We never could have guessed that the promising Hakeem-Sampson era had already peaked in those four games. The following year, they battled the Disease of More (both Sampson and Hakeem wanted new contracts), lost Lucas to Milwaukee (he needed a fresh start) and suffered the double whammy of cocaine suspensions for Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins (before the ’87 All-Star break, Houston’s three best guards were gone), and while all of this was happening, the effects of a harrowing Sampson fall at the Boston Garden in ’86 started to surface: after injuring his back and hip in the plunge,58 he started running differently to take pressure off his back and wrecked his knees. Golden State acquired him during the ’87–’88 season for (hold your nose) Joe Barry Carroll and Sleepy Floyd. So much for the Next Great Team in the West. Only recreational drugs and a fluke fall could stop them.
Here’s the best way to put Houston’s demise in perspective. Let’s say the Pistons fell apart after the ’86 playoffs because Isiah’s knee betrayed him and Dennis Rodman, Vinnie Johnson, and John Salley were all kicked out of the league for cocaine. What happens to that void in the Eastern Conference? At the very least, the Celtics play in two more Finals (’87 and ’88) and possibly steal one or both because they aren’t worn down from battling the Pistons. Maybe Jordan wins eight titles instead of six. Maybe Dominique and the Hawks sneak into the Finals one year. Maybe the Blazers win the 1990 title and Clyde Drexler’s career unfolds differently. Who knows? For the Lakers, having the hoops gods knock that Rockets team off—just vaporize them, basically—was almost as big a gift as that 1979 number one pick from New Orleans. And wouldn’t we remember Hakeem’s career differently had he been sticking it to Kareem and the Lakers for the rest of the eighties? What if he won four or five titles instead of two? Would that propel him past Kareem and make him the second greatest center of all time? It’s safe to say that the ’86 Rockets were the signature what-if team in NBA history.59 Twenty years later, the Houston Chronicles Fran Blinebury wrote a column about them called “The Lost Dynasty” that included this quote from Lucas: “When I walk around Houston now and I hear people talk about winning those championships in ’94 and ’95, I just shake my head. I tell them, ‘You’ve either forgotten or you have never seen the best Rockets team. I know. I was a part of it. And I was a big part of bringing it down.’ … You look at most teams that are put together like that one and they get about an eight-to 10-year window. We didn’t know it, but our window was right there, and then it slammed shut.”
Allow me one last Ralph-related note because we can’t have a what-if chapter without him. Only seventeen NBA rookies were considered sure things in the past fifty years: Elgin, Wilt, Oscar, Kareem, Maravich, Walton, Bird, Magic, Sampson, Hakeem, Jordan, Ewing, Robinson, Shaq, Webber, Duncan and LeBron. Eleven of those sure things cracked the top twenty of my Hall of Fame Pyramid (coming shortly). Only Sampson and Webber will miss the Hall of Fame. Only Sampson and Walton failed to play more than four quality seasons, although Walton did win an MVP and Finals MVP and reinvent himself as the sixth man on an iconic team. When you look at Ralphs career compared to every other sure thing, it has to be considered one of the biggest flukes in sports history—a combination of bad luck, the wrong situation, and a player who was slightly overrated in the first place. Sampson flamed out as quickly as Bo Jackson or Dwight Gooden, only without the fanfare and legendary stories to keep his historical fire burning. He didn’t just fade away; there’s no trace of him. He left footprints like the kind you’d see on a beach. He didn’t even inspire a “Whatever Happened to Ralph Sampson?” documentary that would have cruised to a sports Emmy in the right hands. If there’s a lesson with all of this, I haven’t found it yet. Just know that Magic, Kareem and Riley probably wipe their foreheads and say “Phew!” every time somebody brings up the ’86 Rockets. And they should.


7. What if Julius Erving played with Pete Maravich?

Oh, wait, he did! For two exhibition games … but still. Before the ’72–’73 season, Erving signed with Atlanta and jumped to the NBA for two exhibition games before the ABA legally blocked the move and forced him to play another season in Virginia. In retrospect, Doc’s biggest mistake was jumping to the wrong team; Milwaukee held his NBA draft rights but Atlanta thumbed their noses at the Bucks and signed Doc, with the ensuing legal battle involving two professional teams separately suing the Hawks. Everything was held up for one year before Nets owner Roy Boe paid off the Hawks and Squires to bring Doc to New York.60 Four absorbing wrinkles here:
The ABA without Doc for its last three seasons? One word: catastrophe.
In the past fifty-five years, the three most boring NBA seasons were 1974, 1975 and 1976. Let’s just say that Doc would have helped.
Had Doc ignored Atlanta and concentrated on joining Milwaukee (not far-fetched since Doc wasn’t a superstar yet and other ABA stars were jumping leagues),61 Doc and Kareem potentially could have been teammates before either turned twenty-six. And not just that, but an aging Oscar would have been there, and Bobby Dandridge, too. Forget about altering the NBA landscape from 1973 to 1976; once Doc started coming into his own, the ’74 Bucks could have won 70-plus games in a diluted NBA. Don’t you love the what-if game?
If everything worked out and Doc jumped to the ’73 Hawks, he would have gone to a team that won 46 games with Maravich, Lou Hudson and Walt Bellamy. Imagine adding Doc to the mix. And what about Young Doc and Young Pistol playing on the same team? I think the pilot just turned off the NO RIDICULOUS ALLEY OOPS sign. A Doc-Pistol alliance would have pushed YouTube to another level, transformed Maravich’s career, caused Brent Musburger to ejaculate on live TV and made Atlanta the league’s most popular team and biggest box office draw. Also, the ABA would have folded within two years and never merged with the NBA. And we’d have copious amounts of game film of the Doctor at his high-flying, mushroom-afro-wearing apex instead of just eyewitness accounts and possibly apocryphal stories. Damn it all.


6. What if New Orleans kept the rights to Moses Malone?

And you thought this one was going to be “What if the ’77 Blazers hadn’t traded Moses?” Ha! Too easy. This decision affected the fortunes of six franchises, swung six MVP votes and at least six titles (possibly more), robbed us of a potential Greatest Team Ever and set the tone for three decades of Clippers futility. The story starts in December 1975: Anticipating a merger, the NBA held a supplemental draft for recent undergraduates who signed with the ABA but didn’t have an official NBA draft class. Lord knows how they came up with the rules for this thing, but five players were drafted (Moses, Mark Olberding, Mel Bennett, Charles Jordan and Skip Wise) and two of the selections cost teams their 1977 number one picks (New Orleans with Moses, the Lakers with Olberding). The following summer, the Jazz decided that they would rather have that number one pick back over keeping Malone’s rights, so Moses was tossed into the ABA/NBA dispersal draft and assigned a price tag of $350,000.62
Now you’re asking, “Wait, Moses was only twenty-one years old. Why didn’t the Jazz just keep him? Wasn’t he better than a future number one pick?” They might not have realized how good he was since Moses broke his foot the previous season and played just 43 games (averaging a 14–10), but the reason was much less defensible. The Jazz were enamored of free agent Gail Goodrich and needed that 1977 number one as part of a compensation package to sign him away from Los Angeles. How can we explain the idiocy of a floundering team deciding, “Let’s team up a twenty-eight-year-old shooting guard who doesn’t play defense with a thirty-three-year-old shooting guard who doesn’t play defense; we’ll score more points and the fans will love it”? That’s just how the NBA worked back then. Sports Illustrated’s Jerry Kirshenbaum wrote a November feature about the trade that included this section: “Goodrich had been signed earlier by the New Orleans front office with the blessing of Coach Butch van Breda Kolff, who had him for a while during his two-year stint as Laker coach in the late ’60s. Van Breda Kolff thinks Goodrich wears his years well, just as he himself does. Now in his fifth pro coaching post, the Jazz boss has a foghorn for a voice, shows up for games in what might be called casual clothes and enjoys the kind of stamina he demonstrated during a nine-hour pub crawl the other day to commemorate his 54th birthday. It was a celebration broken only occasionally by talk of basketball.”
Ladies and gentlemen, your 1976–77 New Orleans Jazz! So what if Gail Goodrich is thirty-three and has eleven years on his NBA odometer? He wears his years well! Who wants to do a shot? And you wonder why Red Auerbach dominated the NBA for thirty years; maybe he was just the only GM with an IQ over 100 who wasn’t drunk all the time. Goodrich suffered an Achilles tendon injury, played just 27 games that first season and retired two years later. So much for wearing his years well. It’s also strange that the Jazz decided Malone’s young legs and voracious rebounding wouldn’t come in handy when Rich Kelley, Ron Behagen and Otto Moore were their incumbent big guys. Remember, Malone’s talent wasn’t exactly a secret; one of the most famous college recruits of all time, Moses became the first player to jump directly from high school to the pros in 1974. The Jazz didn’t care. We can only guess that van Breda Kolff said something like, “I don’t care if he’s talented; supposedly the guy is as dumb as a rock. I want Goodrich!” So not only did the Jazz relinquish the rights to a future three-time MVP, they packaged their 1977, 1978 and 1979 number one picks and a 1980 second-rounder for Goodrich and L.A.’s 1978 number one pick. The Lakers ended up picking number six in ’77 (Kenny Carr), number eight in ’78 (sent to Boston for Charlie Scott) and (wait for it … wait for it … wait for it) number one in 1979 (Magic Johnson). Incredibly, unfathomably, unbelievably, inconceivably, an already moronic decision to overpay Goodrich (just about washed up at that point) ended up costing New Orleans Moses and Magic.63
Hold on, we’re not close to being done. Portland picked Moses fifth in the ABA dispersal draft purely for trading purposes, wanting no part of his $300,000-per-year contract. According to Breaks, Moses struggled in training camp for understandable reasons: Portland had a hyperintelligent offense with a hands-on coach and Moses had never been coached before; this was his third team in three seasons; his skills were extremely raw at this point (just a straight rebounder/banger with great footwork and that’s it); and since he was already on the trading block and backing up both Walton and Maurice Lucas, Moses wasn’t exactly invested in the situation. As the situation devolved into a fire sale, Moses unleashed holy hell in one exhibition game, with players and coaches collectively realizing, “Holy shit! This guy is a prodigy!” They had no idea that the team had already agreed to trade him to Buffalo for a 1978 number one pick and $232,000,64 creating …


5. What if the ’77 Blazers didn’t trade Moses Malone?

Put it this way: they ended up winning the title without him and started out 50–10 the following year before Walton’s feet fell apart. Within a year, Walton had signed with the Clippers and their championship window had closed. Had they kept Moses, maybe Walton doesn’t keep playing in pain, maybe they don’t rush Walton back for the ’78 Playoffs, maybe Walton’s feet don’t fall apart, maybe Walton doesn’t have the falling-out with their medical staff … for all we know, maybe Walton plays 400–500 more games in Portland with shortened minutes thanks to Moses. Throw in the way Moses matured in ’77 (averaging a 13–13 in just 30 minutes), ’78 (19–15), and ’79 (25–17, MVP) and who knows how many championships were swung? Think of that vacuum of good teams in the late seventies—could the Blazers have won three in a row had Walton stayed healthy? Four? Five? And what would have happened to Breaks of the Game? Would Halberstam have picked another team? This trade didn’t just swing NBA titles, it could have swung the Greatest Sports Book Ever title! My head hurts.65
And we’re not even done, because poor Moses played in Buffalo for exactly six days before they shipped him to Houston for two number one picks in ’77 and ’78, hammering home Portland’s screw-up since Buffalo basically swapped a number one for two number ones. Don’t worry, this worked out just as badly for them as it did for everyone else: Moses only played six minutes in two games for the Braves because, hey, when you already have John Shumate and Tom McMillen at power forward, why see what you might have with the most ballyhooed high school recruit since Lew Alcindor?66 That ’77 pick from Houston ended up being number eighteen (somebody named Wesley Cox) because Moses ignited the Rockets and propelled them to a division title. When the Rockets struggled the following season (a combination of Moses missing 23 games and the harrowing after-effects of the Tomjanovich/Washington incident), their 24–58 stink bomb netted Buffalo the number four overall pick—only the Braves had already traded it away (along with their 1979 number one) in the disastrous Tiny Archibald deal.67 Buffalo moved to San Diego that summer, so if you’re scoring at home, technically, the fact that they dumped Moses for nothing could qualify as their “curse of the Bambino” moment; from that day on (October 24, 1976), only horrible things happened to them. And deservedly so. What I can’t understand is this: with unhappy Buffalo star Bob McAdoo grumbling about a new contract all summer, why didn’t they keep Moses around as insurance when it looked like they might be trading their star center? Six weeks after the Moses deal, they sent Big Mac packing for John Gianelli and cash. And the seeds of three-plus decades of Clippers futility were planted.
So if you’re scoring at home, Moses Hot Potato ended up swinging the destinies of six franchises in fewer than five months: New Orleans (never recovered, moved four years later); Los Angeles (landed Magic, won five titles with him); Portland (gave away Walton insurance and God knows how many titles); Buffalo (never recovered, moved within two years, jinxed even today); Houston (made the ’81 Finals with Moses, eventually traded him to Philly, and made the Hakeem-Sampson era possible); and Philly (acquired Moses in ’82, won a title with him). We also nearly witnessed the destruction of one of the most talented players ever: by all accounts, Moses moved so many times from 1974 to 1976 that he was practically broken by the time he reached Houston; it took the Rockets an entire season to rebuild his confidence. Eventually he became a Hall of Famer and haunts three teams to this day. And to think, it all started because Butch van Breda Kolff decided that Gail Goodrich wore his years well.


4. What if the 1960 Lakers hadn’t crashed
in the perfect cornfield?

January 18, 1960. The Lakers are flying back to Minneapolis after a day game in St. Louis. They’re riding in their own DC-3. It starts to snow. The plane loses its power. The heat goes off. The pilots can’t communicate with anyone. The plane bounces around in the snow for a few hours, with the pilots opening a side window every few minutes to scrape snow off the windshield so they can see. They have about thirty minutes of gas left and can’t find an airport, so finally they decide to land the plane on the best available cornfield in Carroll, Iowa. They keep trying to land but can’t find an area that isn’t flanked by power lines, so the pilots keep having to jerk the plane up and trying more attempts. At this point, police cars, fire trucks and even the town’s mortician are doing their best to follow a plane they can barely see. Finally, the pilots find the perfect snowy cornfield, cut the engines and land the plane smoothly on about four feet of snow. Everyone cheers. To this day, it’s the closest we’ve ever come to losing a professional sports team.68
It would have been the biggest tragedy in NBA history and a crippling blow to a league barely making it at the time. And that’s just the start of it. We lose one of the fifteen greatest players ever (Elgin Baylor) midway through his sophomore season, as well as the most athletic forward of that era and someone who was in the process of knocking down the “basketball can also be played in the air” door. The Elgin/Jerry era never happens. We endure roughly five hundred documentaries, TV features, books and magazine features about that fateful night had it turned out morbidly.69 The ’60 Lakers either fold immediately or suspend play, then regroup for the ’61 season after filling out their roster with expansion players and extra draft picks … which only means we’re now re-doing every part of NBA history from 1961 to 2008, including fifteen different Finals. Finally, another owner grabs that Los Angeles market if the Lakers fold. Would we be watching the Los Angeles Warriors right now? What about (gulp) the Los Angeles Celtics? In the biggest understatement of this entire book, I say it’s a good thing that the plane landed safely.


3. What if ABA commissioner George Mikan
didn’t screw up the Lew Alcindor sweepstakes?

When Alcindor finished his UCLA career in the spring of 1969, his family assembled a team of agents and advisers and spent the next few months debating between the ABA and NBA. Both leagues needed him desperately: the NBA because he was the biggest star to enter the league since Oscar Robertson, the ABA because Big Lew would have legitimized their league, gotten them a TV contract, and forced a merger down the road. If anything, the ABA should have overpaid for Alcindor and hoped to recoup the money with ticket sales and TV money.
Now here’s where it gets crazy. Without ever tipping his hand publicly, Alcindor decided privately that he wanted to play in the ABA. Milwaukee held his NBA rights, but Big Lew was more interested in the Nets; he grew up in New York, loved the idea of playing near family, found the city’s Muslim population appealing and understood the value of a big market. Milwaukee did nothing for him. How do we know this? He confessed as much in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps70—everything I just told you—and fled Milwaukee as soon as a window opened after the ’75 season. He wanted to play for the Nets. But he wasn’t interested in spending the summer playing the leagues against each another, so Big Lew’s team told the ABA and NBA the same thing: We will meet you once, we will listen to one offer, and that’s that. Do not lowball us. Give us your best possible offer first. The jackasses running the ABA somehow came up with one of their only shrewd ideas: When we meet Alcindor, we’ll give him a certified check for $1 million up front as part of whatever offer we make. Not only will that check prove that we’re serious and we don’t have financial troubles, but it will burn a hole in his pocket and he’ll eventually say yes.
You have to admit, that’s a great plan. Desperate, but great.
Okay, so the NBA goes first and makes an offer that Kareem would later call “extremely good” in Giant Steps. Mikan met Alcindor’s people next. They talk numbers. They talk about sticking Lew in New York and maybe even flanking him with a few of his old UCLA teammates. Money gets discussed. Some figures are thrown around. For whatever reason, Mikan never gives Alcindor that check. It stays in his pocket! Either he freezes or he forgets. There’s no in-between.71 On top of that, they lowball him with a shitty offer. So Alcindor’s team leaves the meeting wondering why the ABA didn’t totally step to the plate. Alcindor feels insulted and vows never to play in the ABA. The ABA owners flip out when they realize that Mikan never gave him the check. Milwaukee swoops in and signs Alcindor for a record $1.4 million. And Mikan gets canned within a year. As Kareem wrote later, “The Nets had the inside track and had blown it.”
Let’s say Mikan didn’t mess up and Big Lew signed with the Nets. Maybe he steals New York thunder from the ’70 Knicks. Maybe the Nets trade for Rick Barry one year later and become a superpower. Maybe the merger happens sooner than later, maybe the Nets become the team of the seventies, and maybe Lew/Kareem never ends up playing with Magic and the Lakers. Three things definitely don’t happen: the Bucks don’t win the ’71 title, Oscar never ends up in Milwaukee, and we have NBA MVPs in ’71, ’72 and ’74 not named Alcindor or Abdul-Jabbar. I mean, George Mikan could have gone on the Tonight Show, thrown on his goggles and sodomized Johnny Carson on live TV and not done more damage to the ABA than he did by not giving Alcindor that check. My head is spinning.


2. What if Len Bias hadn’t overdosed?

I still haven’t gotten over this one. How can you calculate the short-term and long-term damage? The Celtics had just finished one of the greatest seasons in NBA history and were adding Len Bias. You couldn’t have drawn up a better young forward for that particular team, someone who played like a more physical Worthy, but with Jordan’s athleticism, if that makes sense. (Other than MJ and ’Nique, no eighties player attacked the basket like a young Len Bias. It’s true.) If you sat down on June 19, 1986, right after the Celtics thrashed Houston for the title, and drew up a wish list for the perfect rookie to add to the ’87 Celtics, you would have come up with five wishes: an elite athlete capable of playing either forward spot; an overcompetitive MFer with a mean streak; a scorer capable of carrying Boston’s offense for extended stretches off the bench; a rebounder who could bang with young bucks like Barkley and Malone; and just for the hell of it, someone who loved ramming home alley-oops as Bird’s new toy. You would have settled for a forward who hit three of those check marks; four would have had you high-fiving yourself; five would have made you pass out.
Well, this was too good to be true. Bias dropped dead within forty-eight hours of the draft. Coke. And this is one of those what-ifs where the damages are easy to define. You can see them clearly. They stand out. The NBA lost a potential signature player and faced its biggest drug crisis yet. The Celtics wouldn’t fully recover for another twenty-one years. Long-term, they were just screwed. Pull Pippen from the ’87 Bulls, Malone from the ’85 Jazz or Duncan from the ’97 Spurs—just make believe they never played a game—and that’s how much Bias’ death meant.72 Short-term, we missed out on seeing an ’87 Celtics team that would have been the greatest of all time. One of the three greatest teams ever with one of the five best players ever and the greatest front line ever was adding one of the three best forwards of that decade? That’s a lot of greatests and bests. Medium-term, Bird and McHale were forced to play big minutes without Bias; neither of them would be the same after killing themselves that season. Bird’s body finally gave out a year later (first the heels, then the back); McHale injured his foot before the ’87 Playoffs, came back too soon because they didn’t have anyone else, broke the foot, kept playing on it and never really recovered. Bias cuts down everyone’s minutes, keeps everyone from playing injured, makes the actual games easier … it would have been the difference between Bird and McHale traveling 200,000 hours a year in coach or 125,000 a year in first class.
Some other things we missed: a sneering Bias banging bodies with the bad-boy Pistons from ’87 to ’92; a fascinating three-headed Barkley-Malone-Bias rivalry; Bias upping the stakes in any playground game against the Blazers and Hawks; Bird treating Bias like his prized new toy and tossing him as many alley-oops as humanly possible;73 the Celtics improbably becoming “cool”; and an Eastern Conference star who would have stood up to Jordan without blinking or being intimidated. It’s the last point that hurts the most. There was a particular brashness about Bias, a swagger, a playground vibe that nobody else had. These were still the days of tight shorts and awkward high fives; few players were cool and the ones who were (’Nique, Worthy, Jordan, Bernard) kept their emotions in check for the most part. Jordan might have embraced that playground demeanor had he attended a school other than North Carolina, where Dean Smith frowned on anything that could be perceived as showing up the opposition, but the Carolina influence tempered his bluster to some degree. Maybe Jordan landed the sneaker commercials and posters, but Bias was the one who brought the streets to big-time hoops. He resonated with black fans much the way Hawk, Pearl and Doc did back in the day.
When Len’s playground swagger became more fashionable in the ’90s—thanks to UNLV and the Fab Five, postdunk woofing, baggy shorts, trash talk and everything else—that style seemed more contrived, like the players were doing it only to say “Hey, look at me!” Trust me, nothing about Len Bias was contrived. He went out of his way to dunk on people, not because it made him seem cool but because it sent a message and established a tone for the game. He grabbed rebounds in traffic and spat out an occasional “Arrrrrrggggggghhhh!” just to make sure everyone knew who was boss. He barked at teammates, referees and opponents alike. If fans booed Maryland during a road game, he fed off that noise like so many other greats and learned to channel it to shut them up, then thrived on that respectful silence when the game was wrapping up. He played with passion and heart. He showed a mean streak at times but never made you feel like he didn’t give a shit. Quite simply, he stood out. If Bias had arrived on the scene seven or eight years later, I’m sure he would have been wearing baggy shorts and woofing it up just like everyone else, but that’s the beautiful thing: not just that Bias made it big when he did, but that he wasn’t contrived. Bias was ahead of his time. He really was. We spent so many years searching for an archrival for Jordan—the Frazier to his Ali, someone who’d bring out the best in him—when really, that player was probably Len Bias. We were robbed. And so were the Celtics.
(The good news: Bias’ overdose combined with Robert Downey Jr. performing gay tricks for his coke dealer in Less than Zero fostered a fear of cocaine in nearly every American male growing up between 1986 and 1994. To this day, I haven’t tried cocaine or even thought about trying it. Just would have been hypocritical, you know? I guess that’s a silver lining. No pun intended.)


1. What if the 1984 draft turned out differently?

Oh, and you thought no. 1 would simply be “What if Portland had taken MJ over Bowie?” This draft was so complicated that it inspired Houston and Chicago to create the concept of “tanking” during the regular season. Once Houston won the coin flip and locked into Hakeem, all hell broke loose. Here’s what we know for sure:
Both Portland (second) and Chicago (third) would have swapped their picks for Sampson, although that wouldn’t have been enough of a return for a much-hyped rookie center who possessed the third-highest trade value behind Magic and Bird that summer.74 Years later, Dr. Jack Ramsey told Sam Smith, “We had to have a center. We would have done that [trade].” I sure hope so. In his 1996 autobiography Living the Dream,75 Hakeem claims that Houston nearly traded Sampson to Portland for Drexler and the number two pick, writing, “From 1984 until today, the Rockets could have had a lineup with me, Clyde Drexler and Michael Jordan, developing together, playing together, winning together. But the Rockets never made the move.” Whether that’s true or untrue, I don’t blame Houston for turning that down because Drexler hadn’t exactly lit the NBA on fire as a rookie. Still, Hakeem, Jordan and Drexler playing their entire careers together? Just staggering. It’s like imagining what would have happened if Microsoft and Apple had merged in 1981.
The sharks circled a crappy Chicago team for Jordan, giving credence to the “Portland seriously blew that pick” argument. Dallas offered Mark Aguirre straight up for the pick. Philly offered an aging Doc straight up for the pick; they also offered the number five pick plus Andrew Toney. Trades with Seattle (Jack Sikma) and Golden State (Joe Barry Carroll) were discussed. Eventually, the Bulls started feeling like they were sitting on a winning lottery ticket. And they were.76
Patrick Ewing nearly entered the draft before changing his mind and returning to Georgetown. Had Ewing thrown his hat in the ring, he would have gone first, Hakeem second (to Portland) … and then-Bulls GM Rod Thorn told Flip Bondy that Chicago had Jordan rated higher than Bowie because they were afraid of his injury track record.77 Obviously if Hakeem had landed in Portland, we’d enter the Marty McFly Zone and have to reconceive everything that happened in the NBA from 1985 to 1998 (different Finals, different champs, no Ewing in New York, etc. etc.). I started trying to figure it out and my nose started bleeding. I took this as a sign to stop.
Jordan’s potential was unclear because he played for Dean Smith in the pre-shot-clock era. Everyone knew he was good, but how good? His ceiling didn’t start leaking out until the ’84 Olympic tryouts, which Jordan dominated to the point that U.S. coach Bobby Knight called his buddy Stu Inman (Portland’s GM) and implored him to take Michael.78 When Inman demurred and said that Portland needed a center, Knight reportedly screamed, “Well play him at center, then!” We also know that Nike (based in Portland) built an entire sneaker line around Jordan before he played an NBA game. So for anyone to play the “We didn’t know how good Jordan would be” card just isn’t true.
It’s a myth that Portland “desperately” needed a center. A 48-win team with a perfectly decent center combo—Mychal Thompson (16–9 in 33.5 minutes) and Wayne Cooper (10–6 in 20.5 minutes)—they also possessed trade chips like Drexler, Jim Paxson (second-team All-NBA and a restricted free agent), Fat Lever (an up-and-coming point guard), Calvin Natt (a bulldog forward) and Cooper. What they really needed was a rebounder; Natt and Kenny Carr were both undersized power forwards. For instance, San Diego shopped scorer/rebounder Terry Cummings all summer and finally dealt him for Marques Johnson after the draft. Why didn’t Portland overwhelm the Clippers with a Cummings offer (like a Drexler-Natt package) and take Jordan second? You got me.79 Instead, they sent Lever, Cooper, Natt and their ’85 first-round pick to Denver for Kiki Vandeweghe, an accomplished terrific scorer (29.8 PPG in ’84) who also happened to be the worst defensive player alive. Here’s how lopsided and shortsighted that deal was: Denver jumped from 38 wins to 52 wins and the ’85 Western Finals solely because of that trade. As for Portland, they probably met in the first week of June and debated two potential courses of action:
Door No. 1: Jordan (most exciting college guard of the decade), Lever (twenty-three, named second-team All-NBA just two years later), Cooper (twenty-seven, averaged a 13–8 the next two years in Denver), Natt (averaged a 23–8 in ’85) and an ’85 number one pick (ended up being fifteenth)
Door No. 2: Vandeweghe and Bowie.
Anyone in their right mind goes with Door No. 1 unless they’re reasonably certain that (a) Bowie was a sure thing, and (b) Jordan wouldn’t come back to haunt them. I am assuming that Portland’s brain trust felt “reasonably certain” of those two things. And to hammer home how dumb, indefensible and reckless that feeling was, let’s bang out a retroactive diary of the first twenty-two minutes of the ’84 draft. Our announcers? Al Albert and Lou Carnesecca for the USA Network.
0:02. Albert hypes the proceedings by claiming there are “six bona fide superstars” ready to get picked. Apparently he’s counting 296-pound Charles Barkley twice.
0:03. Peering over a pair of black eyeglasses, Carnesecca fidgets with a pen, rambles uncomfortably for forty solid seconds and does everything possible not to look at the camera. He looks like a priest being questioned by police about an assault on an altar boy. Glad he’s here.
0:07. USA scrolls the order of the entire first round accompanied by some phenomenal eighties porn music. I half expected them to come out of that scroll with Ginger Lynn riding Al Albert on a waterbed. That’s followed by David Stern stepping to the podium for his first NBA draft, only he’s wearing Gabe Kaplan’s mustache from the 1977 season of Welcome Back Kotter. Forget about NBA TV—why don’t they rerun this draft on Comedy Central?
0:10. One of the two guys sitting at Houston’s draft table has a mullet and a bushy mustache. Gotta love the eighties. As we watch them gabbing on the phone, the following exchange happens:
AL: The Rockets timing has been impeccable. Last year, number one with Ralph Sampson coming out; this year, Hakeem Olajwon decided to come out early, and that’s just in time for Houston.
(Three seconds of silence pass.)
LOU (barely audible): The postman did ring twice.
0:11. Hakeem goes first, although he spelled it “Akeem” back then. He’s rocking the low-cut Jheri curl, a black tuxedo and a maroon bow tie. Fantastic.80
0:12. Eddie Murphy borrowed his accent for Prince Akeem in Coming to America from the draft interview Akeem just did with Bob Doucette. There is no doubt in my mind. He even named the character after him.
0:16. Stern utters one of the most unforgettable sentences in NBA history—“Portland selects Sam Bowie, University of Kentucky”—as the camera shows the reps at Portland’s table with dueling “Yikes, I hope we didn’t f*ck that up” looks on their faces.81 That’s followed by Bowie ambling to the stage as Al narrates, “Sam Bowie, the young man who came back from a stress fracture injury, the left shinbone, he was out for two seasons, redshirted, he has come back, he returned strong at Kentucky.”
(So a team that just lost its franchise center six years early with repeated stress fractures in his feet just took another center who missed two full college seasons because of his stress fractures? And he’s three years older than the sure thing about to get picked right after him? Sounds encouraging!)82
0:17. During a less than enthralling package of Bowie highlights, Al tells us again that Sam has recovered fully from his stress fractures before adding unironically, “He passed up the Olympics.” High comedy. Every major college player tried out for that team except for Sam. Seem like a red flag to you? Nahhhhhhhh.
0:18. The Bowie highlight package finishes with a frozen picture of Bowie and a graphic with his ’84 stats: 10.5 points, 9.2 rebounds, 52% FG, 72% FT. In other words, his college stats were worse than Mychal Thompson’s NBA stats. What an upgrade!83 Meanwhile, Al and Lou have the following exchange.
AL: And Lou, what do you say for a young player who sat out two formative years and has come back to regain it?
ME: “Don’t pick him”?
LOU: Well, I think it shows the type of perseverance that he has, that he was able to withstand all that misery and come back and perform, and look where he is now.
(Note: nothing gets fans more fired up than words like “perseverance” and “withstanding all that misery.” Screw that Jordan guy and his stupid dunking!)
0:18. Doucette interviews Bowie, who seems like a tragic figure in retrospect; it’s like watching Jackie Kennedy at LBJ’s swearing-in with JFK’s blood all over her dress. Their first exchange:
DOUCETTE: Sam, um, courage has been your middle name, you’ve had to really fight back from some adversity, and I know a lot of folks particularly yourself are happy to see this day arrive.
SAM: Right, I had a two-year layoff with my leg injury, but if I didn’t have the support of the community of Lexington and the state of Kentucky, I don’t know if I would have been able to do it without their help.
(Imagine being a Blazers fan and watching this. Mad props to Sam for defying the odds and coming back, but why take a “defying the odds” guy with a sure thing on the board? Why even risk it? Why? Why? Answer me! Why?)
0:19. It’s only getting better …
DOUCETTE: [The Blazers] tell me that they put you through an extensive physical before they made a decision on you. And the end result was a good one?
SAM (smiling sheepishly): Well, I went up to Portland and they gave me about a seven-hour physical, they didn’t let anything out, so, uh, I don’t know if that’s referring back to the Bill Walton situation, I know he had a stress fracture, but as far as I’m concerned I’m 100 percent sound.84
(Waitasecondwaitasecondwaitasecond … a seven-hour physical? This is like watching the Hindenburg take off.)
0:20. Cut to both Chicago reps smiling happily at Chicago’s table85 as Al sets up number three by taking a dramatic pause, lowering his voice and finally saying, “Michael Jordan seems to be the next one up.” For the first time in twenty minutes, Lou seems like he might be awake: “Mmmmmm, everyone’s excited about that one. He really captures the imagination.” Then again, you could say the same about a seven-hour physical.
Now it gets really good …
AL: You know, there was a question a little earlier perhaps, Portland toying with the idea of the great, can’t-miss talent of Michael Jordan against Sam Bowie, who, uh, who of course, coming off the injury, he says he is sound, Portland has checked him out through a seven-hour test, but the question is Bowie going now over the course of an 82-game schedule.
LOU (nodding): It is a calculated risk.
(Note: At this point, every Blazers fan in 1984 had thrown up in their mouth at least a little.)
0:22. A giddy Stern: “The Chicago Bulls pick Michael Jordan, from the University of North Carolina.”
The crowd applauds and cheers. They know already. That’s followed by a montage of exciting early MJ highlights with Al telling us, “This man is a can’t-miss” and a suddenly lively Lou adding, “You know, he makes them when they count, he can do it in traffic, he can do it under tremendous control, he’s a great, great creator, in the mold of a Dr. J, not as big, but is in that class, Michael is gonna make a great, great player, he’s what you call the People’s Player, people love to see this young man perform.” Al caps it off by saying, “He is star material, a great shooter, superb athletic ability, there are many teams that tried to pry that third pick from Chicago.”
I mean …
Just read everything from 0:16 to 0:22 again. We’ve seen a revisionist history in recent years that Bowie’s selection was defensible because the NBA was size-obsessed back then. But how can any team roll the dice with red flags like “calculated risk,” “seven-hour physical,” “two-year layoff” and “adversity/courage/perseverance” and pass up white flags like “can’t-miss talent,” “great, great player,” “star material,” “sure thing,” “in the mold of a Dr. J,” “great, great creator” and “People’s Player”? Incomprehensible. Totally, completely incomprehensible.
Which brings us to a special bonus what-if. On the day of the draft, what if Portland’s decision makers took a collective breath, said to each other, “Wait, are we crazy?” and reconsidered everything one last time? It’s like the second-to-last scene in All the President’s Men, when Woodward and Bernstein wake up Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in the middle of the night to urge him to run their controversial report about corruption spreading all the way through Richard Nixon’s White House. Afraid that Bradlee’s house has been bugged, they bring him outside and fill him in on the front lawn.86 The boys haven’t slept in two days; Bradlee is wearing a bathrobe and looks pissed off since they just screwed up the same story a few days before. Finally Bradlee lets them write the story, but not before telling them, “You guys are pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath, rest up, fifteen minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We’re under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment, the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys f*ck up again, I’m gonna get mad. Good night.”
If Ben Bradlee had owned the Blazers in 1984, he would have put the fear of God in everyone deciding on that pick and they would have gravitated toward the sure thing. Blazers owner Larry Weisberg was reportedly enamored of Jordan, but he was also an unassuming, low-key real estate tycoon who didn’t evoke that same Bradlee-like trepidation in his staff. They weren’t afraid of him, and they weren’t afraid of the repercussions. That’s why the Blazers plowed ahead with Sam Bowie … and that’s why they f*cked up. But hey, nothing was riding on it except for the future of the NBA, hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, somewhere between four and ten squandered championships, and a lost opportunity to employ the greatest basketball player of all time.
1. High schoolers, go west or south: Duke, Virginia, Vanderbilt, UNC, UCLA, Rollins, Pepperdine, Arizona, ASU, Miami and my personal favorite, UC Santa Barbara. Stay warm. Just trust me.
2. I threw this idea at William Goldman. His two favorites: George Raft turned down Bogie’s part in Casablanca, and they went after Brando and Beatty for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid before settling on Redford and Newman. “Nobody knows anything in Hollywood,” he wrote me. “Never forget that.” Sounds like the NBA.
3. Please don’t think I liked Titanic—it’s a chick flick and it’s too long.
4. I would have thrown Billy Crudup in there, but he’s like Vince Carter—all the talent in the world and he just didn’t want it.
5. My friend Chris Connelly disagrees and believes that Leo didn’t have the raw sexuality to pull off Diggler believably. This is a nice way of saying that Leo is too much of a skinny sissy.
6. I tried to answer it in a 2002 mailbag and even got my stepfather involved because he’s watched The Godfather 25,712 times. We went with De Niro. Barely.
7. It’s like the Lennon-McCartney problem—you can’t have two alpha dogs in a band or a basketball team. It will implode. It will.
8. I love calling San Francisco “San Fran” even if everyone in the Bay Area bristles in disgust. Why should I have to keep typing “Francisco” when I can save 5 letters? What about my fingers? This book is 250,000 words! You can’t give me the “San Fran” thing?
9. When the expansion Bulls joined in ’67, they were placed in the West and Baltimore finally moved into the East. Although they did briefly considering keeping Chicago in the East and then moving Boston into the West.
10. According to Leonard Koppett, scouts worried that Barry was too skinny to handle the pro game. Even back then, scouts were dumb.
11. Actual Chad quotes from that column: “Darko is really one of a kind”; “What sets Darko apart is his toughness in the post”; “[Carlos Delfino] reminds me of Michael Finley”; “I don’t like [Kendrick Perkins] for the Celtics, I’m not sure how it helps them in the short term or the long term”; “[Maciej Lampe at number thirty is] the steal of the draft.” I love the ESPN.com archives. As long as I’m not looking up my own humiliating predictions. (Emeka Okafor over Dwight Howard, anyone?) Then I hate them.
12. Had Detroit traded down and gotten Wade, now we’re talking about multiple titles. That’s not a fair what-if. Regardless, landing Darko in a top five with Bron, Wade, Bosh and ’Melo was like reaching into a brown paper bag filled with two checks for $100 million, two checks for $10 million, and a check for $10, and pulling out the check for $10.
13. Dallas got suckered by a textbook contract run: for the last 3 months of ’04, Damp averaged a 13–13 and 2 blocks, highlighted by back-to-back 19–21 and 16–25 games in the final week. Take away ’04 and his career average is an 8–7. Good guy.
14. Charles Smith played for Boston a year later and threw up enough bricks to build a three-bedroom condo in Charlestown. Another underrated mistake: cutting Glen Rice and Sean Elliott, which reared its ugly head when Hawkins got hurt in Seoul and Richmond was suddenly the team’s only reliable shooter. And on top of it, they cut Kerr despite an international three-point line. John Thompson, everybody!
15. Let’s chisel this on Thompson’s Hall of Fame plaque: SCREWED UP ’88 OLYMPICS, COST USA GOLD right above the spot where it says HAD MOURNING AND MUTOMBO AT SAME TIME,
16. My favorite awful Chris Wallace moves: tying up Boston’s cap space for three years with an alcoholic making the max (Vin Baker); taking Denver’s 11th pick in ’01 when he could have kept rolling that pick over, then picking Kedrick Brown; trading a number one for Juan Carlos Navarro; trading Joe Johnson and a number one for Rodney Rogers and Tony Delk without signing Rogers to an extension first; picking Joe Forte over Tony Parker; spending $21 million on Darko Milicic; giving away Gasol in a garage sale and getting his younger brother, which was like trading Sly Stallone in 1988 for 3 young character actors and Frank; buying Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban for 3 billion. Yeah, I know he didn’t do the last one, but it just seemed like something he would have done.
17. Hold on, I’m not done with Wallace. My buddy House and I ran into him in a Boston bar after I slammed the Baker deal on ESPN.com. He tried to explain the logic, which was nice of him—but the explanation ended up being so brainless that House pretended to go piss and never came back. The highlight: when Wallace claimed Shammond Williams was the key to the deal. When I asked why Wallace didn’t at least swap first-rounders with Seattle once over the next five years—which they would have done because, you know, they were desperate to get Baker and all—Wallace briefly had a look on his face like, “Shit, why didn’t I think of that?” It was surreal. Thank God I had a witness in House.
18. How you know an event qualifies: Will you always remember where you watched it? (Check.) Did you know history was being made? (Check.) Would you have fought anyone who tried to change the channel? (Check.) Did your head start to ache after a while? (Check.) Did your stomach feel funny? (Check.) Did you end up watching about four hours too long? (Check.) Were there a few “can you believe this”–type phone calls along the way? (Check.) Did you say “I can’t believe this” at least fifty times? (Check.)
19. That game is the NBA’s version of the 18 missing minutes of the Watergate tapes. If you try to watch it, you could die like the characters in The Ring.
20. The lowlights: Reggie Miller retired; O’Neal morphed into an overpaid under-achiever with a bad attitude and was sent packing to Toronto; Jackson and Jamaal Tinsley were peripherally involved in a strip club shooting; their fans grew to loathe the postmelee team so passionately that the Pacers panicked and sent Al Harrington and Jackson to Golden State for a Mike Dunleavy/Troy Murphy pu-pu contract platter; and they lost a reported $30 million in 2009 and might be a threat to relocate. Not even the Basketball Jesus can save them.
21. I don’t think they win the ’04, ’05 or ’07 titles with Kidd. He peaked in ’02 and ’03 and would have been blamed if they didn’t win, which only would have made things worse.
22. Well, unless you’re Mark Cuban—he gave up two number ones and $11 million for the right to pay Kidd three times as much as Devin Harris (a 2009 All-Star).
23. Orlando never got properly skewered for this one. Who overpays for an NBA star recovering from a fractured ankle? I hope every wannabe GM learns one lesson from this book: don’t mess with broken feet and broken ankles.
24. I’m wired differently: I would have been like, “Good luck, everybody! Thanks for the memories!”
25. A great parallel: Billy Corgan started out just as fast as Cobain; by 2001, he was an egocentric bald guy who made music nobody bought. Nobody cares that Smashing Pumpkins vs. Nirvana was a semilegitimate argument in 1994, or that the 12 best Pumpkin songs might be better than the best 12 Nirvana songs. The fact remains, Nirvana came first and paved the way. It’s like comparing David Thompson to Dr. J. The stats might back you up, but you still can’t do it.
26. My dad still complains about the refs in Game 4, when the Knicks rallied from a 16-point deficit with help from Jack Madden and Jake O’Donnell and won in double OT. Heinsohn chased the refs into the MSG tunnel afterward. When Madden screwed the ’91 Celtics on a bogus offensive goaltending call to end the Detroit series, my dad yelped, “Jack Madden hates us! He’s been screwing us ever since you were born!”
27. This one gnaws at me. Bird was riding the biggest hot streak of his career: back-to-back buzzer-beaters in January, the 60-point game and memorable ass-whuppings of Cleveland and Detroit in the Playoffs. He showed up for practice before Game 3 of the Philly series with a heavily bandaged right index finger and started throwing up bricks. Averaging a 30–10 on 52 percent shooting before Game 3, the Legend floundered to a 21–7 with 40 percent shooting for his last 9 playoff games. Both the Globe and Herald connected the dots that summer, reporting that between Games 2 and 3 of the Philly series, Bird got into a fight at a Boston bar called Chelsea’s and punched out a bartender named Mike Harlow (eventually settling out of court with him). So much for the ’85 title. Mike Harlow came thissssssssss close to getting his own what-if in this chapter.
28. I mistakenly attempted the “fourth person singular tense,” as perfected by Will Leitch during his reign as Deadspin editor. We don’t know why he wrote that way, but we always found it interesting.
29. The smoking gun: Kobe was represented by Rob Pelinka, who orchestrated Carlos Boozer’s sleazy move from Cleveland to Utah.
30. Devil’s advocate view: maybe Kobe just realized, “What the hell am I doing? It’s the Clippers! Am I crazy?”
31. During the ’80 season, idiot Cavs owner Ted Stepien traded Butch Lee and his ’82 number one for an ’80 number one (destined to suck since the Lakers were a top-four team) and Don Ford, a run-of-the-mill swingman who looked like a cross between Craig Ehlo and Ted McGinley. With the exception of Mike Bratz, there has never been a worse player traded for a franchise-altering number one.
32. Worthy averaged a 16–6 and shot 57 percent as a UNC senior; Wilkins averaged a 21–8 and shot 53 percent as a University of Georgia junior. ’Nique got knocked out of the Final Four; Worthy shined in the title game with a 28–17.
33. Worthy could have played with Bizarro Worthy (Tom Chambers) on the ’83 Clips. I will explain.
34. Yes, I wrote this at the time. Repeatedly. For anyone reading this book from 2030 on, the guy Atlanta took instead was a forward named Marvin Williams who couldn’t start for UNC the previous year. I thought this was a bad sign.
35. In consecutive drafts, Hawks GM Billy Knight took Marvin Williams over Paul and Shelden Williams over Brandon Roy. There’s a 17 percent chance he just sold you this book at an Atlanta Borders or Barnes & Noble. Tall, late ’40s, black, seemed sad … was that him?
36. I would have said “next decade” but supposedly Roy’s knee ligaments are made out of this book. By the way, there’s a 98.5 percent chance that “What if Portland had taken Durant over Oden?” will crack The Second Book of Basketball in 2016.
37. Remember when the Texans took Mario Williams over Reggie Bush and everyone gave them copious amounts of shit? It was the best thing that ever happened to Williams; he killed himself to prove everyone wrong. NBA examples along the same lines: Paul, Karl Malone, MJ, Paul Pierce, Rashard Lewis and Caron Butler. Most underrated example: Tom Brady.
38. Even weirder: the Knicks bought Bob McAdoo from Buffalo 20 games into the season and gave him the same money they would have given to Doc. Huh? Wilt flirted with a Knicks comeback that same summer—potentially, the Knicks could have trotted out Wilt, Haywood, Doc, Frazier and Monroe.
39. This also ranks among the great what-ifs if you were a dealer living in Manhattan in the early ’80s. No Micheal Ray in New York?
40. This was like Marbury for Kidd, only with the Russian roulette aspect of “each guy has battled serious coke/alcohol problems and will either make or break our franchise.” And yes, the Warriors were broken. They dumped him to Jersey for Sleepy Floyd four months later.
41. Hold on, this gets better. Your 2005 NBA Executive of the Year? That’s right, Mr. Bryan Colangelo! I love the NBA.
42. I’m not totally absolving Johnson here. So they dicked him around a little. When you’re playing with Steve Nash, do you know what that means? You’re playing with Steve Nash! Why give that up unless you have to?
43. They downgraded from Deng or Iguodala to Rondo to Fernandez to nothing … which means they traded a number seven pick in a loaded draft for $4.9 million, less than they paid Banks to sit on their bench in ’07. Well done!
44. My buddy JackO and I have been joking about that workout for years. Unless Penny was making half-court shots while stepping on broken glass and swinging his genitals like a lasso, there’s no effing way that one workout should have swayed the Magic from a Webber/Shaq combo. None.
45. I hate the Magic, Jazz, the Heat and everyone else for the whole “It feels funny using ‘they’ when you write about a team whose name doesn’t end in an s” conundrum.
46. Poor Carter ended up signing a two-year, $1.5 million deal with San Antonio, with Duffy’s agency repaying Carter the lost wages from the Miami deal. One of my top-12 can’t-be-proven NBA conspiracy theories ever: Miami paid Duffy to “forget” to send that letter.
47. When the Lakers re-signed Kobe that summer, a secret handshake promise to trade Shaq ASAP was part of the deal. I know this for a fact. Let’s just say I had a few drinks with the right person once.
48. I took this section from a February ’08 column. Within ninety minutes of it being posted, an enterprising reader made a homemade version of the ad and posted it on YouTube. I’ve never been prouder.
49. Browne Sanders was the fellow Knicks employee who sued Isiah for sexual harassment and won. Isiah could have settled out of court but couldn’t even pull that deal off.
50. During the Browne Sanders lawsuit, it was revealed that Stephon Marbury had boinked a female MSG intern named Kathleen Decker outside a strip club in his SUV. The Daily News showed a picture of the SUV on its front page with the headline, “Truck party!” Basically, the name for my 2007–8 fantasy hoops team fell out of the sky. Also, Decker’s father won the 2007 Most Horrified Dad ESPY.
51. “Wait a second, there’s a Jack Twyman section?” you ask. You’re f*ckin’-A right there’s a Jack Twyman section!
52. You have to love a draft that had two of the top 20 what-ifs playing off the same scenario. I hope you fledgling GMs learned something in this chapter: don’t trade number one picks five years down the road for guys like Don Ford and Otis Thorpe. By the way, the guy who made those trades and helped kill professional basketball in Vancouver—Stu Jackson—was improbably hired by Stern and given a perplexing amount of power this decade. I had two different connected NBA friends inadvertently make the same joke: if Stern is Michael Corleone, Stu is definitely Fredo. In Fredo’s defense, I don’t think even he could have ruined basketball in Vancouver that quickly. Either way, I hope Stu turns down every one of Stern’s invitations to go fishing.
53. In retrospect, we should have known that a guy named Ralph wasn’t going to be one of the best centers ever. Had he embraced the Muslim faith and changed his name to Kabaar Abdul-Sampson or Raheem Sampson, he’d have been unstoppable. Look at the names of the best players ever: they’re all great names that you’d give a sports movie character. Michael Jordan. Bill Russell. Magic Johnson. Jerry West. Larry Bird. Moses Malone. You’d never name the lead of a sports movie Ralph Sampson or Darko Milicic.
54. Two of Sampson’s three defining moments involved Boston anyway: his scary fall in March ’86 (it happened in the Garden, so it makes you wonder if ghosts were involved), and the punch he threw at six-foot-one Jerry Sichting in Game 5 of the ’86 Finals, leading to Boston’s fans rattling his confidence in Game 6 (and the debut of the Ralph Sampson “I hope I get out of here alive” face).
55. This was the second-best buzzer-beater other than Jerry West’s half-court shot in the 1970 Finals. How many series end on a twisting, 180-degree fling shot that happens in under a second? And they diagrammed it in a huddle to boot!
56. Houston won Games 2, 3 and 4 by 10, 8, and 10, with Hakeem scoring 75 in Games 3 and 4. Pat Riley later lamented, “We tried everything. We put four bodies on him. We helped from different angles. He’s just a great player.” The Rockets badly outrebounded L.A. in their four wins. As SI’s Jack MacCallum wrote afterward, “The Rockets headed into [the Finals] secure in the knowledge that they had gone over, around and through the Lakers. And everybody else knew it, too.”
57. Lloyd was devastating in transition and startlingly efficient: from ’84 to ’86, he averaged a 16–4–4 on 53% shooting. He’s also the starting two-guard on the “Now that I’m watching this game 20 years later on ESPN Classic, I can totally see him failing a drug test—he’s got crazy eyes!” All-Stars.
58. Sampson went up for a dunk, got blocked, got twisted awkwardly and crashed to the ground so violently that the Garden made an ohhhhhhh sound and went deathly quiet. He landed right on his head and back, almost like he fell out of a bunk bed while sleeping. They carried him off on a stretcher a foot too short, so his mammoth legs dangled off it. Here’s how bad the injury looked when it happened: I actually remember where I was when I watched it live (my mom’s bedroom—she had a great TV). You know it’s a watershed moment when you can remember where you watched it.
59. Personally, I think the Lakers should retire the number of Houston’s coke dealer, as well as the Celtic who fouled Sampson in that ’86 game in Boston.
60. It’s really too bad that ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack wasn’t around then—he would have been more visible than Mel Kiper Jr. during the month of the NFL Draft.
61. Charlie Scott and Mel Daniels bailed on the league during the ’73 season and got away with it. So it did happen. The ABA only had the legal resources to pick their spots and block bigger stars like Rick Barry.
62. You have to love the way the NBA operated in the mid-’70s. The Jazz said, “Um, hey, we’ve been thinking about it—we’d love a mulligan on that Moses decision,” and Commissioner O’Brien’s office said, “No problem—here’s your number one back!” Given how haphazardly things were run back then, it makes you wonder if they called O’Brien, he was on the other line, his secretary asked what the call was about, the Jazz told her, she said “Hold on” and passed the message on to O’Brien, and he waved her off by saying “Fine, fine, just tell them yes” before getting back to his phone call with Ben Bradlee or Walter Mondale.
63. Yes, the Jazz probably wouldn’t have earned the number one overall pick three years later had they just kept Moses, since he won the MVP 3 years later. That “Moses and Magic” line just looked imposing on paper, you have to admit.
64. This part kills me. How did they decide on $232,000? Somebody needs to write a book detailing every f*cked-up thing that happened in the NBA in 1976. It could be 1,200 pages.
65. The Buffalo pick ended up being number three overall in ’78: Portland sent it to Indiana along with Johnny Davis for the number one overall pick, taking Mychal Thompson as Walton insurance. Maybe Thompson wasn’t a Pantheon center, but he was good enough to get his own goofy Nike poster: just Thompson wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a parrot while sitting by a tropical pool. The implication being … I don’t know.
66. On January 25, 1977, one week after SI wrote a “Look at how Moses has ignited the Rockets” feature, Tates Locke (the guy who quickly buried Moses in Buffalo) was fired as the Braves’ head coach. This was not a coincidence. For the Lost fans out there, three-plus decades of bad luck for the Braves/Clippers started right after they fired Jack and replaced him with Locke.
67. New Jersey traded the pick a fourth time, leading to the Micheal Ray era in New York. Sadly, I am out of cocaine jokes. I’m tapped.
68. Nowadays, we have a Catastrophe Rule: an emergency expansion draft in which every team can only protect four or five guys. Then that team gets the top pick of the next draft (plus its own pick). It’s a good thing this isn’t widely known because an irate Knicks fan would have tampered with the team’s charter during the Isiah era.
69. And one sappy Disney movie in the late ’90s with Samuel L. Jackson playing Elgin and Matthew McConaughey playing Hot Rod Hundley in a film called Cornfield of Dreams or Final Flight.
70. I bought this book for $6 online; the highlight was reading it, gleaning all the information I needed, then starting a bonfire with it in my backyard. In the words of Marv Albert, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is on fire!”
71. Looking back, it’s the biggest NBA turnover ever other than Isiah’s pass that the Legend picked off (1987) and Mail Fraud getting stripped right before Jordan’s last shot (1998). It’s too bad the ABA didn’t have George McGinnis hold the check; he would have turned it right over.
72. Remember, Bias was supposed to take the torch from Russell, Havlicek and Bird. That’s how good he was. Also, there was a cap in place by ’86 and owners like Ted Stepien weren’t stupidly giving away number one picks anymore. It was significantly tougher to improve. F*ck.
73. I know I mentioned this twice but it continues to kill me. Remember, Bird routinely got bored during games, spent entire halves shooting left-handed and once played an ’86 game where he and Walton tried to figure how many different ways they could run a play where Bird threw it in to Walton, then cut toward the basket and caught a return pass from Walton. You’re telling me he wouldn’t have said, “I want to see if I can get Len 15 alley-oops tonight”? I am shaking my head.
74. My hypothetical top ten: Bird, Magic, Sampson, Isiah, Bernard, Moses, ’Nique, Moncrief, McHale, Buck Williams.
75. I found this information online—I refused to buy Living the Dream because it sounded so awful. A strong statement from someone who bought Give ’Em the Hook by Tommy Heinsohn.
76. Philly’s offer never became public. One year later, Harold Katz tried to swap Doc for Terry Cummings before Doc called him out and the entire city of Philadelphia turned on Katz. Although that’s not saying much. Philly would turn on me just for making fun of them in this footnote. Crap, there goes another book signing.
77. They had just been burned by two questionable high draft picks: Ronnie Lester (bad knees) and Quintin Dailey (bad soul). They wanted a sure thing.
78. The two best players in prolonged tryouts that included every relevant name from the ’84 and ’85 drafts? Jordan and Barkley. Chuck ended up getting cut after Knight told him to lose weight and Barkley went the other way. Other cuts: Malone, Stockton, Joe Dumars, and Terry Porter. Guys who made it: Jeff Turner, Joe Kleine, Steve Alford and Jon Koncak. I think Chris Wallace and David Duke were advisers to Knight that summer.
79. Or they could have overwhelmed Houston for Sampson: the number two, Drexler and Fat Lever.
80. You know what’s interesting? Houston just passed up the greatest player ever and I still feel like they made the right pick. You always go with a sure-thing center over a sure-thing guard. Always.
81. Stern always said the entire franchise’s name during this draft except this one time: He skipped the “Trail Blazers” part, like he was trying to get off the stage as fast as possible. You can’t blame him.
82. During the same summer The Sure Thing with John Cusack was released. Coincidence? I say no!
83. Did Bowie’s staggeringly unstaggering college stats remind you of anyone else? I’m thinking an OSU center, number one pick, looked 20 years older than his age, also played for Portland …
84. Worth mentioning: Sam was extremely polished and handled himself well. I feel bad for the guy. I mean, it’s not his fault they drafted him over Jordan, right? And he was a quality center when he was healthy. Which was only 54 percent of his career, but still.
85. If you ever get a chance to watch this clip, check out the look on the guy who’s on the phone for Chicago—he’s so delighted, it looks like he’s getting blown under the table. We’ll never know for sure.
86. Jason Robards won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Bradlee in one of my favorite performances ever. He owns every scene of a movie with Redford and Hoffman in it. Within seven years, he was playing the lead in Max Dugan Returns. I don’t get Hollywood.