The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

SIX
THE HALL OF FAME PYRAMID



BY NOW, YOU’VE probably figured out that I love basketball. When you love something unconditionally, does that mean it’s perfect? Of course not. I find myself tinkering with ways to improve my favorite sport all the time, constantly asking, “Why don’t they do that?” or even better, “Why wouldn’t they do that?” Here, off the top of my head, are thirty-three suggestions to improve the NBA.
I wish the Finals would go back to the 2–2–1–1–1 format.
I wish we’d make a pact to agree that (a) there will never be another MJ, and (b) we’re not allowed to compare anyone to him anymore.
I wish we would change the NBA trade deadline to 4:00 a.m. on the Saturday night of All-Star Weekend, just so we’d have at least one megadeal per year consummated after 20 Jack-and-Cokes in the wee hours. Imagine seeing this scrolling across the ESPN news ticker in the wee hours: ESPN’s Ric Bucher reports that Portland GM Kevin Pritchard and Thunder GM Sam Presti just finished Patrón shots at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton’s main bar and made the bartender call up ESPN.coms trade machine.
Borrowing this idea from a Philly reader named Mike: I wish we’d abolish those hideous in-game coach interviews, simply because I can’t handle hearing someone like Nancy Lieberman get stoned by another coach after she asks what they have to do to stop the other team’s best player. They are running out of ways to say, “I have no idea, Nancy. If I knew that, we’d be winning the game.” This has to end. Like, right now.1
Come to think of it, I wish we didn’t have NBA sideline reporters. But if we have to have them—and really, I don’t see why—I wish we hired casual female fans like my wife. Why? Because casual female fans notice things during sporting events that nobody else notices. My buddy Strik once sent me a “Bruce Willis in da house!” text during a Clips game—I quickly relayed this information to the Sports Gal, who scanned the lower sections of the arena with the intensity of Jack Bauer looking for a terrorist in a crowded mall. Within about ten seconds she found Bruce sitting courtside to our right, like she had a homing device in her head. Then she spent the next thirty minutes watching him and making comments like “He seems nice” to the lady sitting next to her. So why couldn’t someone like my wife become a sideline reporter? Why pretend this is a serious gig? My wife would file reports from the Blazers’ huddle like, “Guys, Greg Oden seems sad, he just seems sad to me, I hope everything’s okay,” or “Phil Mickelson and his wife are sitting courtside, and guys, I do not like her roots,” or even “Guys, I’m still trying to get an answer as to why Amar’e Stoudemire is wearing that suit. Lime green is not his color, as we all know.”2
I wish Utah and New Orleans would switch last names so New Orleans could be the Jazz again. Let’s do the right thing here. America has suffered long enough.
I wish WNBA scores and transactions would be banned from all scrolling tickers on ABC and ESPN. I’m tired of subconsciously digesting tidbits like “Phoenix 52, Sacramento 44 F” and thinking, “Wait, that was the final score?” before realizing it was WNBA. Let’s just run their scores on NBA TV with pink lettering. And only between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m.
I wish we could agree on a universal fantasy league scoring system that everyone used. Here’s my vote: Has to be auction style; eight categories and double weight for points-rebounds-assists; $50 total for weekly free agent claims (highest bid wins each player); twelve-player roster with one injury spot; you have to start a PG, SG, SF, PF and C, with four extra starting spots for a guard, SG/SF, PF/C and a ninth man; extend fantasy through the real NBA playoffs, with weekly head-to-head play wrapping up at the end of the regular season (winner taking home 35 percent of the pot and second place getting 15 percent), then the top four advance to the playoffs (same 35/15 payout), keep six players and fill out their rosters with players from other fantasy teams that didn’t make it in a straight draft (with number one drafting first each round). Not only did I just solve fantasy basketball in one paragraph, but as the postseason drags on and teams drop out, by the NBA Finals, it would be like the last scene of Rollerball: just a few fantasy owners heroically skating around and trying not to get struck by a flaming motorcycle. You have three Celtics, I have two Hornets, let’s fight to the death. It also brings us closer to our ultimate goal as fans: playing fantasy 365 days a year. Yes, we can.3
I wish we could choose two teammates to combine for fantasy purposes every season. Back when they played on the Pacers together, I always wanted to combine Antonio Davis and Dale Davis into one roto monster called über-Davis for my fantasy league. Now I’m thinking that, before every season, we could vote on ESPN.com for a pair of teammates to be combined for fantasy purposes to make drafts more interesting. For instance, Oden and Joel Przybilla could become “Joreg Pryzboden” with an ’09 average of 14–16 with 2.4 blocks. You wouldn’t have enjoyed rooting for Joreg Pryzboden?
I wish every vote for the major awards and All-NBA teams would be made public. Again I am against anonymous incompetence in all forms.
I wish all footage from the lockout season would be destroyed. As well as tapes of every Knicks-Heat playoff game from the nineties. And any Pistons-Nets playoff game from 2000 on. I am against celebrating bad basketball in all forms.
Stealing a premise from Rasheed Wallace, I wish the defending champion’s coach would wear a WWE-style championship belt to every game. If his team loses the title at the end of the season, the incumbent would then hand over that belt to the winning coach (hopefully sobbing like Johnny Lawrence at the end of the 1984 All-Valley Karate Tournament).
Remember my wish for a program that explained the origin of every NBA tattoo? I also wish the league would designate tattoo shops in every NBA city as an “Official NBA Tattoo Store,” load those stores with cameras, then require players to get inked only in those thirty stores. Why? For our new NBA TV reality show, Where Ink Happens. This can’t miss. “Coming up on Where Ink Happens, Michael Beasley stops by to get ‘Beas Breeze’ tattoed on his neck!”
I wish teams weren’t allowed to play music during game action. I don’t need to hear the Jaws theme as the Spurs are trying to stop Kobe with two minutes to go. I really don’t. Also, if your announcer feels obligated to pump up fans with in-game comments like “Get on your feet!” or “Lemme hear it—Deeee-fense! Deee-fense!” then you shouldn’t have a basketball team. It’s really that simple.
I wish we would change the NBA’s championship trophy back to a hockey-like cup (which was the case through the late seventies). I also wish we wouldn’t name that trophy after Larry O’Brien, who nearly ran the NBA into the ground and was so shortsighted that his staffers had to talk him into the Slam Dunk Contest. Screw him. Let’s make it a cup and call it the David Stern Cup. He carried O’Brien for those last few years, anyway.
You know how every member of an NHL champion team gets to spend one day with the Stanley Cup during the summer? I wish every member of an NBA championship team spent one day with the David Stern Cup. Talk about a mortal lock for potential comedy … can you imagine certain NBA troublemakers in brief control of the Stern Cup? Would the thing even come back in one piece? Would they lose it? Would they try to smoke pot from it? Who would be the first guy to lose it for a few hours?
During the first three quarters of NBA games, I wish all made baskets from mid-court and beyond were worth four points. Give me one reason why this shouldn’t be a rule. You can’t.
I wish Isiah Thomas would be given his own reality TV show where he takes over businesses, stores and companies and runs them into the ground (like a cross between 30 Days and Wife Swap). In one episode, he could take over a popular Starbucks and immediately fire the most popular barista, raise the prices of chewy marshmallow squares and trade the store’s only espresso machine for a six-month supply of soy milk. The following week, he could become a casino pit boss in Vegas and immediately raise every blackjack table to $25, ban smoking, get rid of every American-born blackjack dealer and force the waitresses to wear more clothes. On and on it would go.4
I wish NBA cameras would no longer be allowed to zoom in within eighteen inches of somebody’s face. I don’t need any more unpopped whiteheads, acne scars and dangling nose hairs in my life.
I wish Allen Iverson would start a charity so he can hold a celebrity golf tournament. Why? Because what would be more entertaining than the First Annual Allen Iverson Celebrity Golf Tournament? Anything? Anything at all? Imagine AI showing up five hours late for his 9 a.m. tee time. How would he be dressed? How would he react if he missed a four-foot putt? Or imagine a terrified Kyle Korver in a foursome with 50 Cent, Ron Artest and Ice Cube. What about Jim Nantz saying, “Let’s go to Verne Lundquist on sixteen, where there’s apparently been some gunfire again”? I might devote the rest of my life to making this tournament happen. If Michael Douglas can have a celebrity golf tournament, why can’t Allen Iverson?5
For the NBA League Pass package, I wish we always had the option of watching our favorite team’s telecast with our favorite team’s announcers and local commercials. What’s the point of shelling out two bills a year for the NBA or baseball and not getting your own guys every game? I want Tommy Heinsohn screaming after every call that goes against the Celtics. I want the Foxwoods and Giant Glass commercials. Don’t deprive me!
I wish that if a parent brings a young child to courtside seats at an NBA game and that poor kid subsequently gets trampled by a gigantic basketball player diving for a loose ball, then that parent should lose parental rights and Angelina Jolie or Madonna gets to adopt the kid.
I wish we would dump double technicals. If two players have a non-punching altercation, or they keep jawing at each other to the point that they have to be separated and the referees can’t keep the game moving … yes, I can see it. But NBA refs hand out double technicals if two players look cross-eyed at each other.6 What’s wrong with allowing the competitive juices to flow? Isn’t a reasonable amount of trash-talking part of what makes the NBA so much fun?
For NBA All-Star Weekend, I wish we had a H-O-R-S-E contest, a half-court shot contest and a dunk contest with a rim that keeps rising like a high jump bar, and I’m not resting until all three things happen.
I wish we had the option of dumping the Evil Box. Other than Viagra and the Internet, the most dangerous development for marriages in the past two decades has been the Evil Box—that constant score/time box that remains in the corner of our TV screens during games. Once upon a time, you could just tell your wife/girlfriend, “Two more minutes, the game’s almost over” and she’d be totally fooled. It could have been the start of the fourth quarter and she’d never know, except for those dreaded moments right before a commercial when the huge score graphic would come flying out of nowhere. Now? When you pull the “two more minutes” routine, they immediately glance at the Evil Box and know you’re lying. The whole thing sucks. As soon as technology advances to the point that our Internet service is connected to our televisions and everything is controlled by one remote, I’m giving viewers the option to dump the Evil Box if they’re trying to deceive their ladies.7
I wish the South Park guys (Matt Stone and Trey Parker) would purchase an NBA team. We need them in the league for comedy’s sake. Let’s give them the Nuggets at a steep discount.8
Stealing this idea from Louisville reader Jason Willan: During the lottery, I wish every team sent a representative who makes no basketball sense but has an obscure tie to the city or franchise. Representing the Memphis Grizzlies … Lisa Marie Presley! Representing the New Jersey Nets … Joe Piscopo!9 Representing the Miami Heat … Philip Michael Thomas!”10
I wish we’d dump the rule that teams can call another time-out following a time-out, since the last three minutes of a game shouldn’t take twenty-five minutes. Why not prevent teams from calling consecutive time-outs unless the ball has been inbounded? Wouldn’t that reward good defense and penalize offenses too inept to call a good play? Wouldn’t the games flow much better? I also wish we made a rule that no team could call time trailing by more than six points with less than 20 seconds left.
I wish the All-Star Game would be changed to the following format: best two players in the league buck up for first choice, then proceed to pick their teams like they’re on a playground. And while we’re here, same goes for the NBA Playoffs: you win the number one seed in your conference, you get to pick your opponent for the first round; then number two makes a pick; then number three. Imagine the bad blood that could transpire.
I wish NBA TV would buy the rights to SNL’s “Referee Pittman Show” sketch and bring it back with various NBA referees—just a half-hour show of a serious studio audience asking Dick Bavetta and Bennett Salvatore matter-of-fact questions like “What’s it like to referee with your head all the way up your butt?” and “My boy and I were wondering—we know you have no soul, but what takes its place? Is it human excrement or dog excrement?”
I wish we would give out the Mokeski, given annually to the best American-born white player in the league. Last year’s winner would have been … David Lee? Kevin Love? See, you’d be fascinated by the Mokeski award.11
I wish we would shorten the regular season by six games, guarantee the top six seeds in each conference, then have a double-elimination tourney for the seventh and eighth seeds between the remaining eighteen teams. I suggest this for five reasons. First, it would be entertaining as hell. In fact, that’s what we’ll call it: the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament. Second, I’m pretty sure we could get it sponsored. Third, the top twelve teams get a reward: two weeks of rest while the tournament plays out. Fourth, a Cinderella squad could pull off some upsets, grab an eighth seed and win fans along the way. And fifth, with the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament giving everyone a chance, no team could tank down the stretch for draft picks without insulting paying customers beyond repair. Why are we paying full price to watch forty-eight minutes of garbage time as four starters pretend to be injured on the bench?12
I wish we could blow up the Basketball Hall of Fame and start over.
I care about the thirty-third wish more than the other ones. Why? Because few arguments cause more problems than this one: Come on, that’s the way we’ve always done it! When those nine words become the sole reason for keeping something intact, it’s a bigger red flag than the one Nikolai Volkoff waved. Change is good. Change leads to hockey masks for goalies, wheels for suitcases, baby seats for little kids and seats atop the Green Monster. Change leads to iTunes, breast implants, Madden video games, Tommy John surgery, plasma televisions, Black-Berrys, podcasts, JetBlue and Patrón tequila. Change leads to Vegas casinos making decisions like “What if we put a blackjack section outside next to a topless pool?” If you don’t keep moving, that means you’ve stopped.
With the Basketball Hall of Fame, we stopped. The place doesn’t work. It’s been a failure for twenty-five years and counting. Consider the following true story: Of all my friends, only my buddy House loves the NBA as much as me. We’ve been buddies since my freshman year in college, road-tripped numerous times, smelled each other’s farts, eaten hundreds of meals together, had thousands of inane sports calls … hell, we even ran the high screen like Stockton and Malone once upon a time. We’re probably in the top 0.0000000000000001 percent of NBA fans, as evidenced by me writing this book and House owning game-worn jerseys of Tom Gugliotta, Manute Bol, and Bobby Sura.13 If two college students in Massachusetts ever would have declared, “Screw class today, let’s road-trip to Springfield,” it would have been us. Even after college, when I lived in Boston for the next decade, House visited me twice a year and we were only a brisk ninety-minute drive from Springfield.14
Well, from 1988 to 2002, guess how many times we went to Springfield together? Zero. Zero! We didn’t go once!
You know what that tells me? That the Basketball Hall of Fame doesn’t work. Cooperstown works because of the gorgeous drive through upstate New York, a throwback trip that makes you feel like you’re traveling in a Volkswagen Bug with Ray Kinsella and Terence Mann. The trip works because there’s no easy way to get there; the closest airport is an hour away, making it more rewarding since it’s a sacrifice just to get there. It works because they built a gigantic hotel in Oswego and flanked it with a fantastic golf course. It works because of 150 years’ worth of baseball memories and memorabilia, and because of the generational twinge with any Cooperstown trip. My dad took me there because his dad took him there, and now I’m taking my son there. You know, the whole Field of Dreams angle. If you’re fortunate enough to sire a son, you’d feel like an inadequate father if you didn’t take him to Cooperstown. Like you were cheating him.
Springfield doesn’t work that way. There’s no father-son angle because the NBA hasn’t been popular long enough. There’s no beautiful ride, just a bunch of ugly highways and a downtrodden city that battles a complex about being the poor man’s Hartford.15 The Hall itself is constantly being renovated and re-renovated; because it attempts to “celebrate” the history of basketball, college basketball and professional basketball, the end result feels like three different agendas competing at once. Back in 2002, they opened a $45 million, 80,000-square-foot home near the old one—the third by my count—and surrounded it with retail stores and restaurants. Did it work? Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. There’s been too much residual damage, like a restaurant that burned its customers with too many bad meals over the years … and now they’ve reached a point where they could hire the best chef on the planet and it wouldn’t make a difference for me. So why hasn’t the NBA dumped Springfield and built its own Hall of Fame? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it! Hence the problem: what you’re about to read, for all intents and purposes, is a pipe dream. It will never happen. The NBA would never do it—they’re too invested in the Springfield location, just like they’re too invested in the WNBA.16 This is the closest you will ever come to a pure NBA Hall of Fame: a pipe dream.
How would it work? Well, we need the right location. Only one place works. Only one.
(Think about it.)
(Keep thinking, it will come.)
(And … time!)
Indiana.
Has to be Indiana, right? That’s the basketball capital of the world. They filmed Hoosiers there. The Basketball Jesus grew up there. Bobby Knight coached there. They have the most rabid basketball fans on the planet. If you’re looking for the same elements that make Cooperstown work—an out-of-the-way destination, the Field of Dreams drive, a sense that basketball matters more than anything else—then Indiana should be the place. Personally, I’d stick it in French Lick. Bird grew up there, they already have a casino (seriously, they have a f*cking casino)17 and there’s something exciting about road-tripping to a place named French Lick. It just feels right. All of it. The heart of Indiana doubles as the heart of basketball. That’s where the NBA Hall of Fame should be.
We also need a hook that separates it from Springfield and every other Hall of Fame before it. That brings me to an idea that first trickled into my columns in 1997, the same year baseball launched interleague play, when I drove to Shea Stadium for the first ever Red Sox-Mets regular-season series with my buddy Gus Ramsey and his father, Wally (two die-hard Mets fans whom I’ve known forever). On the way to the game, Wally came up with a brainstorm to inject some much-needed life into baseball’s Hall of Fame voting.18 Ideally, the Hall of Fame should be a place where someone could stroll in, spend weeks walking around and absorb everything about the game; by the time they departed, they would know everything there is to know about that particular sport. Cooperstown, Springfield and Canton are more interested in showcasing as much stuff as possible; even their Hall of Famer plaques are randomly showcased with no real thought given to each player’s specific place in history. It’s like having a Hall of Fame for models and putting the plaques for Gisele Bundchen and Christie Brinkley right next to the one for the “before” model from the first “before/after” Weight Watchers ad. Shouldn’t careers be weighted in some way? We spent the rest of out ride figuring out the number of levels (settling on five in all, with Level 5 being the highest) and arguing topics like “Was Koufax an L4 or an L5?” and “Was Nolan Ryan even an L2?” That’s when I knew the Pyramid idea could work. Anytime a brainstorm immediately leads to heated arguments in a sticky rental car, and any time cool abbreviations manifest themselves organically like “L4” and “L5,” you know you’re on to something. So screw it—if we’re building an NBA Hall of Fame from scratch, why not make it a five-level pyramid (like a mini-replica of the Luxor casino in Las Vegas,19 only without cigarette burns on the carpets) where great players aren’t just elected to the Hall of Fame but elected to a particular level depending on their abilities?
Pour yourself some scotch and break out a stogie … this is about to get good. Imagine you fly to Indiana, rent yourself a car and make the ninety-minute drive to French Lick. You check into the Larry Bird Luxury Golf Resort, drop your stuff off, head over to the Pyramid and buy your ticket. They direct you to the second floor of the basement (everyone starts their tour there), where you can find relevant memorabilia from seven NBA decades: old jerseys and exhibits, seats from the old Madison Square Garden, pieces of the parquet from the Boston Garden, all the different basketballs and sneakers used over the years, the first 24-second shot clock, the evolution of NBA video games and everything else of that ilk. Consider this the most historical floor on the building. From there, you take the escalator up to the top floor of the basement, where you find special sections devoted to the greatest games and playoff games, as well as plaques to recognize five distinct groups of players. None of them would be considered Pyramid guys, but we couldn’t have a Hall of Fame without them. Remember, the goal is to learn everything you possibly can about the history of the NBA, as well as who mattered and what happened.20 So here are those five groups:
GROUP 1: THE PIONEERS

Celebrating the greats who launched their careers between 1946 and 1956, when the league was still evolving into what it eventually became. Think George Mikan, Bob Cousy, Joe Fulks, Ed McCauley, Bill Sharman, Dolph Schayes, Bob Pettit, Arnie Risen, George Yardley, Vern Mikkelsen, Dick McGuire, Harry J. Gallatin, Ed Macauley, Buddy Jeanette, Larry Foust, Cliff Hagan, Neil Johnston, Bobby Wanzer, Clyde Lovellette, Al Cervi, Tom Gola, Slater Martin, Johnny Kerr, Jim Pollard, Bob Davies, Richie Guerin, Bob Feerick and Max Zaslofsky.21
GROUP 2: THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS AND OTHER AFRICAN AMERICAN PIONEERS

I’m not nearly black enough to write this paragraph. But here’s what I’m thinking: tributes to pioneers like Sweetwater Clifton, Chuck Cooper, Ray Felix, Cleo Hill, Don Barksdale and Earl Lloyd; a “History of the Globetrotters” memorabilia section and video room; talking holograms of President Obama, Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and others discussing the effects of the pioneers on their games and their lives; and the documentary Black Magic playing on a twenty-four-hour loop. Also, we could probably hire down-on-their-luck stars from the sixties, seventies, and eighties like Marvin Barnes and Spencer Haywood to work there as congenial ushers and pay them an obscene rate like $50 an hour. This would clearly be Jabaal Abdul-Simmons’ favorite floor in the Pyramid.
GROUP 3: GREATEST ROLE PLAYERS

Celebrating underrated players with specific skill sets who were inordinately valuable for good playoff teams. I’d start with these twenty-five: Michael Cooper, K. C. Jones, Frank Ramsey, Horace Grant, Bobby Jones, George Johnson, Don Nelson, Satch Sanders, Al Attles, Ben Wallace, Eddie Johnson, Vinnie Johnson, John Paxson, Bill Laimbeer, Bill Bradley, Kurt Rambis, Paul Pressey, Ricky Pierce, Bruce Bowen, Steve Kerr, Paul Silas, Rudy LaRusso, James Posey, Downtown Freddie Brown and Jack Haley.22 We could vote a new one in every three years. Also, Bowen’s plaque could come with a device that accidentally trips people as they walk by.
GROUP 4: THE RECORD HOLDERS

Guys like Scott Skiles (dished out a record 30 assists in one game), Elmore Smith (a record 11 blocks), Larry Kenon (13 steals), Frank Layden (58 nose picks), Rasheed Wallace (41 technicals) and Wilt Chamberlain (20,000 sexual partners) get their due.
GROUP 5: THE COMETS

Potential Hall of Famers who suffered a career-crippling injury or were derailed by personal problems, extenuating circumstances or even death. I’d start with these eighteen: Micheal Ray Richardson, Andrew Toney, Penny Hardaway, James Silas, Marvin Barnes, Gus Johnson, Ralph Sampson, Brad Daugherty, Maurice Stokes, John Lucas, Sam Bowie, Terry Cummings, Roy Tarpley, Reggie Lewis, Grant Hill, Alonzo Mourning, Drazen Petrovic and Tim Hardaway.23 We’re leaving out Lenny Bias only because I’d end up staring sadly at his plaque and screaming, “Why? Whyyyyyy?” for ten to twelve hours before security pulled me away.
Okay, we’re done with the basement. After wading through the lobby on the ground floor—which features an oversized NBA Pro Shop; Bennett Salvatore’s new steakhouse, Two Shots for Wade; Rik Smits’ Dutch Oven Pizza; and an NBA-themed diner owned by Hubie Brown called the Tremendous Upside Café—we start climbing the levels of Pyramid guys. Please pay attention because this is super-duper important. Here are those five levels:
LEVEL 1 (GROUND FLOOR)

Just-made-it Hall of Famers or better, either because of the David Thompson Factor (great career, not long enough), the Dan Issel Factor (very good for a long time, never great) or the Pete Maravich Factor (memorable career, never won anything). This will all make sense in a few pages.
LEVEL 2 (SECOND FLOOR)

No-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers who couldn’t crack Level 3 for one of five reasons: they never won a title as an elite guy; something was missing from their career totals; they never peaked for two or three years as a top-five guy; at least two or three guys played their position at the same time and were better; or their careers were shortened by injuries and/or rapidly declining skills. To fill out this floor, we’re adding sections devoted to the twelve greatest teams of all time (as voted by our Hall of Fame Committee), along with screening rooms so fans could sample our extensive video library.24 We’ll also have a giant section devoted to everything you ever wanted to know about the ABA.
LEVEL 3 (THIRD FLOOR)

No-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers who ranked among the best for a few years with every requisite resume statistic to match; no MVP winner can drop below Level 3 unless there is a fantastic reason. To fill out this floor, we’re adding sections devoted to influential coaches, referees, writers, owners, and innovators. That’s right, Danny Biasone and Borsalino hats finally get their due! Maybe we can even hand out complimentary $24 bills with Biasone’s face on them. In fact, let’s do this. It’s my elaborately fake idea that will never happen. Done and done.
LEVEL 4 (FOURTH FLOOR)

Basically L3 guys, only there’s something inherently greater about them. Possible tip-offs: Do they have to be considered in any “best of all time” discussion? Did they have transcendant games or memorable moments? Were they just dominant at times? Will you always remember watching them play, even when you’re ninety years old and peeing on yourself? Are they in the mix for some all-time benchmarks? To fill out this floor, we’re also throwing in sections devoted to the four NBA commissioners—Kennedy, Maurice Podoloff, O’Brien and Stern—as well as the Scottie Brooks Hadlen Memorial Library and Bookstore featuring every relevant NBA-related book ever written. Including this one. On its own shelf. Just dozens and dozens of copies. And maybe even a six-foot cardboard cutout of me. What, you’re going to deny my self-serving participation in my own fake idea? How dare you!
THE PANTHEON (PENTHOUSE)

Take a deep breath. We’re at the top of the Hall of Fame Pyramid, literally and figuratively. These are the twelve greatest players of all-time, the best of the best … the Pantheon.25 There would be windows on all sides, a few balconies and maybe even a view of lovely Indiana from all directions. I’d have a conference room with seats where famous people could give speeches or presentations, or even a Q & A, just so they could make announcements like “Ladies and gentleman, just a reminder, Elgin Baylor will be taking questions on the Pantheon Floor at three o’clock.” We also need a bar that opens at five every night (with a Happy Hairston Hour) and eventually turns into a hopping nightclub called Pantheon, equipped with one of those special elevators that take you from the ground floor right to Pantheon (like they have in the Palms). All right, I’m getting carried away. But here’s what I love about the Pyramid model:
Fans and writers would (I hope) argue about which players belong on which levels; it would become the “Jessica Biel vs. Jessica Alba” of sports debates. Is Shaq an L4 or a Pantheon guy? Does Reggie Miller make it past L1? Does Kobe crack L4? Where does Elgin land since he never won a title? What about Oscar, the greatest guard before MJ and Magic? Was Cousy great enough to be an L4? You get the idea.
After we decide on the Pyramid guys—remember, we’re dumping some current Hall of Famers into the basement in the “Pioneer,” “Role Player,” and “Comet” exhibits—a special selection committee would reassign levels to every player who made the cut. Let’s say the committee features fifty well-known former players, journalists, and broadcasters. Each would vote on levels for every existing Hall of Fame member from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest); the average score for each member (rounded up) would determine his level; and each person would have to vote for twelve players (no more, no less) for the top level of the Pyramid. Makes it a little more interesting, no? Especially when we make the votes public. If you’re the dimwit who kept Scottie Pippen from being an L3 because you voted for him as an L1, everyone needs to know that you’re a dimwit
The Pyramid structure would look cool. Besides the aesthetic benefits of a five-story building housing every meaningful nugget of NBA history and resembling an actual Egyptian pyramid, can you imagine climbing each level as the floors get smaller and smaller … and finally reaching the Pantheon? Unbelievable. I’m getting chills just thinking about it.26 Even if it can never happen, that’s the great thing about pipe dreams … you can still have fun with them, right?27 So here’s how my levels would break down and why, and if you think this wasn’t a convoluted excuse to rank the best NBA players in reverse order from 96 to 1, well, you don’t know me well enough. These rankings were weighed by the following factors:
How well did he grasp The Secret?
Did he make a difference on good teams? Did he get better when it mattered? If your life depended on one game, would you want him out there trying to win it for you? Would you trust him completely and totally in the final two minutes of a do-or-die game? In short, would you want to be in an NBA foxhole with him?
Would he have been not-so-fun, semifun, fun or superfun to play with? We’ll explain this in the Nash section.
Did he get traded at any point in his prime? If so, why? This doesn’t matter as much with Level 1 or Level 2, but I need a really good reason to forgive trading a Level 3, 4 or 5 guy in his prime.
As a personal preference, I value someone who was great for a short period of time over someone who was good for a long period of time. Give me two transcendent years from Bill Walton over fourteen non-transcendent years from Walt Bellamy. I’m not winning a championship with Bellamy; I’m winning one with a healthy Walton. So I’d rather have two great Walton years and twelve years of patchwork nobodies than fourteen straight Bellamy years, if that makes sense.
(Note: Bellamy’s career exemplifies why we need the Pyramid. He averaged a 29–17 during his first three seasons—1961–63, before the league changed color and got bigger—and never made another All-Star team after ’64. He’s one of nine players to finish with 20,000 points and 14,000 rebounds, only Wilt owned him to the degree that the Dipper once shook his hand before an opening tip, promised Bellamy that he would get demolished, destroyed him for an entire half, then told him before the second-half tip, “Okay, now you can score.” His teams never won—in fact, Bellamy’s teams won just two playoff series and dealt him twice in his prime. When the ’68 Knicks traded Bellamy and Howie Komives for Dave DeBusschere, the deal quickly turned them around and ushered in a six-year run of contention. The great George Kiseda28 even wrote, “Walt Bellamy is the skeleton in the closet of the 20,000-Point Club.” Clearly, Bellamy missed his calling—if he’d come along thirty years later, he would have been revered by fantasy owners and remembered in an entirely different light. Same for Jerry Lucas.)29
6. How deceiving were the guy’s stats? Issel’s numbers look fantastic until you remember that he couldn’t have guarded the best guy on a WNBA team.30 Karl Malone’s gaudy stats don’t reflect how his face looked like he’d been given a monster Botox injection at the end of every big game. You have to factor this stuff in. Statistics are extremely helpful, they fill in a lot of holes, but that’s it. Beyond that, how much did the guy’s era affect his stats? Remember the lessons from the “How the Hell?” section.
7. Did he have at least two memorably remarkable qualities about his game? We’ll explain in the Pippen section.
8. Was he a great teammate, a decent teammate, a forgettable teammate or a gaping a*shole? We’ll explain in the GP section.
9. Did he make at least one first or second All-NBA team in his career? If the answer is no, we need a reason that makes sense, like Nate Thurmond falling short only because Kareem, Wilt, Cowens, Unseld and Reed peaked during his prime. We’ll call this the Bill Laimbeer Corollary because I was looking for any possible reason to keep him out of the Pyramid—after all, he was a world-class douche and that was the best reason that worked. Screw him.31
10. Did he resonate on a level beyond stats? Did he connect with fans on a spiritual level or an “I’ve never seen anyone in my life like this guy” level? Was he an original prototype? Could he ever be re-created? Think Earl the Pearl.
11. If it’s a player from 1946 to 1976, how well could his game have translated to the modern era?
That last question is a biggie. Say we brought ’61 Wilt to 2009 and matched him against a slew of modern athletes with strength and speed. Wouldn’t they handle him or slow him down? He might average a 20–10 or even a 25–14 nowadays, but with superior talent, smarter defenses, complex coaching strategies and unfavorable-for-him rule changes, hell would freeze over before ’62 Wilt scored 100 in a single game.32 From the tapes I watched, Wilt notched such brow-furrowing numbers mainly because he was a superathletic big man feasting on undersized, overmatched stiffs. You could say he was before his time physically. Do we credit him for that? Do we ignore the fact that 2000 Shaq may have surpassed Wilt’s stats in 1962? Wasn’t Wilt fortunate for not having been born ten years later? Russell had a much better chance of thriving in 2009 because of his competitiveness and defensive instincts, even if he was built like Thaddeus Young. Would he dominate like he did in 1959? Of course not. You can’t forget that twenty-first-century stars are evolutionary versions of the best guys from the fifties and sixties. Take Steve Nash and Bob Cousy. (Note: Let’s make sure that there is a team of doctors surrounding Tommy Heinsohn before he reads these next few lines.) Nash is a much better shooter, he’s in better shape, he plays harder, he tries harder on defense, he’s more technically sound … he’s just better. But he didn’t have anything close to Cousy’s career, nor did he match Cousy’s impact on his generation (as a player, personality, winner, and innovator). So how do we judge which guy mattered more? Really, it’s like comparing an ’09 Porsche with a ’62 Porsche: the ’09 would easily win a race between them, but the ’62 was a more groundbreaking car. So the Nash model wins the “Who were the most talented players ever?” question, but the Cooz model wins the “Who were the most groundbreaking players ever?” question. And both matter.
That’s why I made the following decision: you can’t effectively compare players from different eras unless both players thrived after 1976, when basketball fully evolved into the sport we’re watching now. A few of the early stars would be effective today, but too many of them would flounder to the degree that it’s difficult to project them being better than eleventh or twelfth men (if that). Take Dolph Schayes, the best player on Syracuse’s ’55 title team and a member of the NBA’s Silver Anniversary Team. Could a slow white guy who played below the rim and lived on a deadly set shot succeed at a high level in 2009? Would Dolph be more useful in 2009 than Steve Novak? Um … I don’t know. I really don’t. After careful deliberation, I bumped nearly every pre-Russell star from the Pyramid for two big reasons. First, basketball didn’t totally become basketball until they created the shot clock in 1954. Second, there was a center in the fifties named Neil Johnston who finished with the following resume:
Eight years, 6 quality, 6 All-Stars … top 5 NBA (’52, ’53, ’54, ’55), top 10 (’56) … second-best player on champ (’56 Sixers), averaged a 20–14 (10 games) … 4-year peak: 21–12 … season leader: points (3x), rebounds (1x), minutes (2x), FG percentage (3x).
Pretty good, right? For the league’s first decade, Johnston was its most effective all-around center other than Mikan: a six-foot-eight 210-pounder who thrived as long as everyone played below the rim and you could unleash clumsy hook shots without getting them swatted away. Then Russell showed up and ruined everything. Satch Sanders jokes that Russell terminated the careers of Johnston, Harry Gallatin, Ed Macauley, Charlie Share and every other old-school center (translation: white guy). Sifting through the stories and anecdotes, unleashing Russell in the mid-fifties sounds like what might happen if Dwight Howard joined the WNBA. (By the way, this is the only scenario that would get me watching the WNBA other than my daughter joining the league someday. It’s really those two and that’s it.) Send the likes of David West or Hedo Turkoglu to the early fifties in Doc Brown’s time machine and they’d win four straight MVPs. Sorry, every reader over sixty years old, but it’s true. Also, remember not to get carried away with scoring/rebounding stats from 1959 to 1967, or how they allowed variations of offensive goaltending until 1966. (FYI: When Wilt dropped 73 on the ’62 Knicks, the Dipper got himself an extra 22 points and 13 rebounds just from offensive goaltending and redirecting shots.)33 And all information from 1970 to 1976 (stats, All-Star nods, All-NBA nods) should be taken with three hundred grains of salt, so if you’re wondering why someone like Spencer Haywood (two top fives, two top tens, a five-year peak of 24–12) or Lou Hudson (four-year peak: 25–6–4, 51% FG) didn’t make the cut, or why Bob McAdoo and Tiny Archibald are ranked as L1 guys … well, that’s why.34
Last thought: I kept the cutoff at ninety-six for The Book of Basketball, first edition. Why? Because we need to leave spots open for Kevin Durant, Al Jefferson, Yao Ming, Derrick Rose, Carmelo Anthony, Ricky Rubio35 or whoever else might emerge over these next few years. Which four will sneak in? Who knows? I’m excited. For now, we’re sticking with 96 Pyramid guys and 96 only.
Also, this pyramid had to be finalized for editing reasons in April 2009, so we weren’t able to account for career-altering moments by Dwight Howard, Ray Allen, LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant in the final order. I did add a few afterthoughts when necessary.
1. When I’m running ESPN in a few years, I’m going to bring back Roy Firestone’s old half-hour interview show and hire Nancy to host it. The show will be called Up Close and Uncomfortable with Nancy Lieberman. You’re gonna love it.
2. You know how horse racing always has the best postgame interviews because the reporter has to ride next to the winning jockey? Takes a certain amount of skill to juggle two things at once, right? I wish there was a way to incorporate that in the NBA. I also wish we made foreign players live up to the stereotypes of their respective countries. For instance, after Michele Tafoya grabs Tony Parker, he should quickly slip on a beret, start chain-smoking and say rude things to her.
3. The biggest problem this system solves: you won’t lose your fantasy playoffs because someone suffered a dumb injury in April, or because the other guy’s team had 4 more games than you. How is that skill?
4. Speaking of failed GMs, a Philly reader named Adam had an awesome idea once: “I saw Sixers GM Billy King in a restaurant in Philly recently and thought, ‘Does he order food the same way he signs NBA players?’ If he ordered the steak, if it’s an okay steak but nothing fantastic, does he offer to pay double or triple the market value for it? Maybe there could be a show where Billy King negotiates car prices for people who stand by dumbfounded as he offers $27,000 for a 1987 Toyota Camry with 167,000 miles.”
5. Douglas’ tournament gave us some of the funniest moments of the last decade: Douglas high-fiving with a grown-up Haley Joel Osment after big putts. They made Tiger’s high-fives with his caddies look smoother than LeBron and Mo Williams celebrating something.
6. Riley’s Knicks went overboard with trash-talking MJ’s Bulls, everyone followed their lead, and Team Stern had to step in before we had the first-ever locker room drive-by shooting. Now players can’t talk shit anymore. So sad. Nearly every problem that plagued the NBA in the past two decades, minor or major, can somehow be traced back to Riley’s Knicks. I am convinced.
7. Interesting note here: when a guy tells a girl, “There’s only two minutes left” (and it’s actually fifteen minutes in real time), that equals the same amount of time as when a girl tells a guy, “I’ll be ready in five minutes” (and it’s really fifteen).
8. Matt’s response (via email): “We’d only be able to afford a minority share unless there is a foreclosure on the Grizzlies soon. And I’d have to talk Trey into it because he’s more of a football fantatic. Just know that we would be way worse than [Mark] Cuban as far as mouthing off about refereeing and other shit and we’d average 400K a week in fines. There is just no way me and Trey can keep our mouths shut. Good for the league, bad for our wallet. So it probably can’t happen.” The good news? I think I just gave them an idea for BASEketball II.
9. The Nets used Piscopo as their PA announcer for a 2002 Finals game, leading to my favorite running streak in sports: no NBA team that ever used Joe Piscopo as an announcer in the Finals has gone on to win the title.
10. Miami should do this, anyway. Imagine Thomas sitting between Mike Dunleavy and Donnie Walsh at the lottery in a white linen suit with a huge smile on his face.
11. And don’t forget about my Eff You Award. I love that one. The winner of the 2009 Eff You Award was definitely Elton Brand.
12. I came up with this idea during Tankapalooza 2007 as multiple teams tanked for Durant/Oden.
13. That wasn’t a joke. One of House’s biggest regrets in life: not winning a bid for a Lloyd Daniels game-worn.
14. That’s a 2-hour drive unless I’m behind the wheel. Ask any of my friends: if they’re 2 hours from a destination, need to arrive in 90 minutes and could pick one friend to drive, they’d pick me. I’m the same guy who once drove from my dad’s old house in Wellesley to my mom’s house in Stamford in 2:04—that’s a 185-mile drive with a toll booth stop and 10 minutes of back roads. I was four minutes away from becoming the Roger Bannister of that drive. By the way, this was my life highlight of 1995 other than sucking face with Lizzie Baker, writing a back-page story for the Boston Herald and buying my first bong. Not a strong year.
15. Before you say “So long to your Springfield book signing,” I am pro-Springfield and my dad’s best friend (superhero lawyer Roy Anderson) lives there. I will always defend Springfield and Worcester. I just think the Hall of Fame needs a fresh start.
16. And we’re stuck with the WNBA, too.
17. You know how casinos can only be built in Nevada, in Atlantic City, or on Indian reservations if they’re on land, but you can have gambling as long as there’s water around? In French Lick, they built a casino with a man-made mini lake around it; you go inside by walking over a moat. And you thought people in Indiana were dumb.
18. We didn’t realize we were inadvertently borrowing Bill James’ plan to redefine Hall of Famers and “weigh them” for importance. Regardless, I’m 100 percent positive that Wally invented the Pyramid concept in that day. I came up with the part where it would look like a mini Luxor. And Gus just did a lot of nodding.
19. The Luxor pisses me off. How do you turn a sleek Egyptian pyramid into White Trash Central? They had the second-best casino concept (topped only by Caesars Palace) and completely f*cked it up. Now it’s called “PH” (for Planet Hollywood), or as my friends and I call it, “Phhhhh.”
20. This is what pisses me off about Pete Rose’s ban from Cooperstown. It’s a museum. The goal is to teach people about baseball history. Just put on Rose’s HOF plaque: GAMBLED ON BASEBALL WHILE MANAGING THE REDS, DISGRACED OUR SPORT. What’s the big deal?
21. A few of these players also crack the Pyramid as true Hall of Famers. Stay tuned.
22. Haley created the Overjoyed and Oversupportive High-Fiving Twelfth Man role that became a staple on NBA benches in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to someone deciding that it would be a good idea to make Mark Madsen and Brian Scalabrine multimillionaires. Keep an eye on Boston’s Billy Walker, aka “Black Haley,” the most supportive, gregarious, happy-to-be-there 12th man in Celtic history. During the ’09 playoffs, he would have chest-bumped Ray Allen after a big three even if Allen were covered in radioactive chemicals and raw sewage.
23. I love this idea: anytime a star player or troubled draft pick is suffering from personal problems, we could make “The only way they’re making the Hall of Fame is the Comets section” jokes.
24. I also want dorky teenage video clerks like the ones that work in Blockbuster, only they’ll all be six foot four with oversized appendages, as if they just had a growth spurt the night before. And we’ll make them wear referee uniforms like they’re working at Foot Locker. That’s an essential.
25. Extending the Pantheon to a twelve-man roster and leaving it open means we can add LeBron someday and kick out one of the original twelve like it’s a Bachelor episode.
26. The NBA won’t sell sponsorship banners on my Pyramid because it’s in bad taste. In real life? You’d be visiting the Volkswagen Touareg NBA Pyramid or something. Just shoot me.
27. One good thing about pipe dreams: there’s always a 0.0003 percent chance they can come true. In the late ’90s, I forget what sparked this—maybe it was a Friends episode—but every couple in America made their top-five lists for Celebs You’d Let Me Sleep with if I Had the Chance. Tiffani Amber-Thiessen was number one on my list. We moved to L.A. a few years later and my wife befriended a friend of T.A.T’s. For our five-year anniversary, she got me a signed T.A.T. photo that read, “I heard I’m on your list, too bad you’re married.” I called T.A.T. to thank her, one thing led to another and we ended up banging in the back room at Mel’s Diner because it was the closest thing to the Peach Pit. Okay, I made that last part up. The point is, you never know with pipe dreams.
28. Kiseda was the first great NBA writer; he covered the league for its first 20 years before becoming sports editor for the L.A. Times. Tragically, he never wrote an all-encompassing NBA book. Even weirder, the next great NBA writer (Bob Ryan) hasn’t written a great one either. But hey, when you can spend your Sundays arguing with Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica in HD instead of writing a book, I guess you have to do it.
29. Grumpy Old Editor (GOE): “Walt Bellamy had the smallest head of any seven-footer ever. He was built like the Washingon Monument. And played that way.”
30. That should have read “best girl.” Wanted to make sure you were paying attention.
31. Other reasons: he only had 7 double-double seasons; he couldn’t pass, run, jump, or dribble; and again, he was a douche bag. With that said, I would have loved him if he’d played for the Celtics.
32. GOE claims, “Today, Wilt would be like one of those hapless Georgetown centers throwing up bricks and racking up dumb fouls (except, of course when he got four and went to sleep). Without an offensive game more than five feet from the hoop, he’d be lucky to rack up 12 and 9.” Yeesh.
33. Trust me, I watched the tape. Every “big” Knick looked like a prehistoric version of Brian Scalabrine. Do you think Dwight Howard could score 73 points in one game if offensive goaltending was allowed, if he shot 50 times, and if he was being guarded by prehistoric Scalabrines? I say yes. Also, I’m naming my next fantasy team the Prehistoric Scalabrines.
34. The ten toughest cuts: Walter Davis, Laimbeer, Hudson, Chet Walker, Tom Gola, Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway, Jack Sikma, Paul Silas, Gus Williams. Toughest cut: Sikma. Easiest cut: Chuck Nevitt.
35. Can’t stick Greg Oden in here. I just can’t. When I handed in this book in April ’09, Oden was averaging 9.0 fouls per 48 minutes (the highest total since Stanley Roberts in ’91), couldn’t stay healthy and walked like Fred Sanford. I don’t think that’s a good thing. Unless he’s aging backward like Benjamin Button. I wouldn’t rule this out.




SEVEN
THE PYRAMID: LEVEL 1



96. TOM CHAMBERS

Resume: 16 years, 10 quality, 4 All-Stars … top 10 (’89, ’90) … ’87 All-Star MVP … 2-year peak: 26–8–3 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 24–9–3 (28 G) … played for 1 runner-up (’93 Suns) … 20K Club
YET ANOTHER THING that bugs me about Hall of Fames: they refuse to weigh the impact of each inductee, so there’s never a cutoff guy for each position—aka the guy who barely made it, the “wall” everyone else needs to climb—so you can’t evaluate a power forward’s candidacy simply by asking, “Was he better than Tom Chambers?” Along with the next four guys for their respective positions, we’re using Chambers to create the line for power forwards. Even though his eighties hairdo (blondish brown hair parted in the middle with some girth in the back) made him look like a cross between Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff and every women’s softball player from 1985 to 1989, and even though he was so bland that he never earned himself a nickname,1 Chambers filled the wing splendidly on fast breaks, scored effectively in the half-court, and shone during the single most competitive stretch in NBA history (’86 to ’93, an era that included twelve of the top twenty-four guys on this list and nineteen of the top fifty) as the go-to guy on three conference finalists (’87 Sonics, ’89 Suns, ’90 Suns). Even on his last legs, he played crunch time for the ’93 Suns, quite possibly the best single-season team that didn’t win a title post-merger. Despite his notoriously uninspired defense,2 Chambers deserves bonus points for two things:
He’s the starting power forward on the White Guys Who Played Like Black Guys Team. Of the ten greatest in-game dunks ever, Chambers is the only white guy who makes the cut: for the two-hander where he dunked over Mark Jackson, got propelled upward, ended up on Jackson’s chest and looked like he was throwing down on an eight-foot rim.3
Not only was Chambers named MVP of the greatest All-Star Game ever (1987), scoring 34 and outscoring MJ, ’Nique, Barkley and Hakeem combined, but Magic kept pick-and-rolling with him down the stretch and the Eastern stars couldn’t stop it. Now I’m wondering what would have happened if Chambers and Worthy had switched teams in 1982 and Chambers had spent the ensuing decade playing with Magic. Would he have taken the ’88 Finals MVP, made the Hall of Fame and cracked the NBA’s top fifty instead of Worthy? It’s not inconceivable, right?4
95. JO JO WHITE

Resume: 12 years, 7 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’76 Finals MVP … Top 10 (’75, ’77) … 3-year peak: 22–5–5 … Playoffs: 22–5–6, 83% FT, 42.9 MPG (80 G) … 3rd-best player on two champs (’74, ’76 Celtics)
A postseason ace whose career playoff averages exceeded his three-year regular season peak, Jo Jo finished as the best guard on two title teams plus a 68-win team. Two things stood out other than his playoff heroics and overwhelming evidence that he may have knocked up Esther Rolle to create David Ortiz. First, he logged seven straight regular seasons of 3,200-plus minutes and averaged 600 playoff minutes from ’72 to ’76.5 From ’72 to ’77, Jo Jo averaged 43 minutes while playing 90, 95, 100, 93, 100, and 91 games. No wonder his legs gave out after ’77 and robbed him of two or three twilight years of stat padding. And second, Jo Jo finished with a 33–9 in the legendary triple-OT game, played an obscene 60 minutes and sank one of the most dramatic free throws ever.6 Right after Havlicek “won” the game in double overtime with his running banker, everyone charged the court and the happy Celtics hopped to their locker room. Even as a full-scale celebration/riot was unfolding around them, the referees decided that one second remained on the clock. By this time, Jo Jo had already taken off his uniform and removed the tape from his ankles. After everyone returned to the court, Paul Westphal hatched the brilliant idea to call an illegal time-out, sacrificing a technical but allowing them to inbound the ball from midcourt—meaning a cooled-down Jo Jo had to sink the technical after a fifteen-minute delay in which everyone already thought they won, with nobody else on the floor and a mob of drunken maniacs crammed around the court. If he missed that freebie, the Celtics would have lost on Gar Heard’s ensuing miracle turnaround at the buzzer. Nope. Swish. All things considered, that has to be one of the ballsiest free throws ever made. Jo Jo also sank the clinching freebies in the third overtime, even though he was so exhausted by that point, he was sitting down on the court when Phoenix shot free throws. If your life depended on it, you wanted Jo Jo out there. Period.
(His biggest problem in retrospect: it’s tough to take a grown man named Jo Jo seriously as one of the greatest players of his era. If his name were Luther White or Julius White, he’d be remembered the same way Walt Frazier was remembered. Instead, he sounds like one of LC’s catty friends in The Hills.)
94. JACK TWYMAN

Resume: 11 years, 7 quality seasons, 6 All-Stars … top 10 (’60, ’62) … season leader: FG% (1x), FT% (1x) … 3-year peak: 29–9–3 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 20–8–2 (26 G)
One of my favorite random moments writing this book: spending a solid hour picking between Cliff Hagan and Twyman for the “white forward from the fifties and sixties” cutoff spot, then deciding Hagan was slightly better because he won a title and was elected to the Hall five years before Twyman in 1978 (even though he retired four years after Twyman). Honestly, those were my only two reasons. Besides, Twyman’s finest contributions came off the court: after teammate Maurice Stokes was felled by a career-ending illness, Twyman and his family took Stokes in, cared for him, raised money to pay his bills and were eventually immortalized in the 1973 movie Maurie, as well as a phenomenal Twyman/Stokes video exhibit in Springfield that I watched during every visit as a kid.7 Throwing in the racial wrinkle (Twyman was white, Stokes was black) and social climate at the time, this has to rank among the better feel-good sports stories. So how does everyone remember Brian’s Song and nobody remembers Maurie? Well, one movie had Billy Dee Williams and James Caan; the other had Bernie Casey and Bo Svenson. ’Nuff said.8 Twyman also became the league’s first recognizable former star turned below-average TV analyst—I mean, when you’re the first on that storied list, you know you’ve had an impact, right? The man paved the way for Russell, Magic, Isiah, and everyone else. Although he was fortunate enough to interview Russell right after the ’69 Finals, when Russell couldn’t answer “How does it feel?” and eventually just broke down. Since it’s my single favorite championship moment other than Boston mayor Ray Flynn’s teenage son somehow interjecting himself in the middle of the entire ’86 trophy celebration,9 you have to give Twyman credit for being involved.
93. KEVIN JOHNSON

Resume: 12 years, 7 quality, 3 All-Stars … top 10 (’89, ’90, ’91, ’94), top 15 (’92) … 4-year peak: 22–4–11 (50% FG, 85% FT) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 22–4–11 (28 G) … 2nd-best player on one runner-up (’93 Suns) … 5th in most Playoffs assists (8.9 APG, 115 G)
My father and I attended a Cavs-Celts game during Johnson’s rookie year when KJ played like a terrified ninth-grader bombing in a varsity game. Given that he was the seventh pick, we were stunned by how helpless he looked compared to teammate Mark Price.10 A few months later, we thought Cleveland fleeced Phoenix when they swapped KJ in a megadeal for Larry Nance. How could they turn that stiff into Larry Nance? KJ transformed Phoenix into a playoff contender within a year, leading them to the ’89 Western Semis and the ’90 Western Finals and matching nearly everything we’ve seen from Chris Paul these last three years. And that’s how my father and I learned never to give up on young point guards.11 Two things submarined KJ historically. First, he couldn’t stay on the court, missing 15-plus games in five of eleven seasons and sparking rumors that his dysfunctional hammies were made out of papier-maché. (Important note: If there was a Fantasy Hall of Fame for the most frustrating roto basketball players ever, he’d be the point guard. By the mid-nineties, if you took KJ in the first five rounds of your draft, the other guys openly mocked you. Soon only a rookie franchise would pick KJ within the first ten rounds of a fantasy draft, and whenever it happened, everyone else would smile knowingly. KJ was like the high school slut who spends time with everyone on the football team … then a new transfer comes in senior year, starts dating her and everyone on the team gets a big kick out of it. That’s what KJ was like. We all went a few rounds with KJ. I miss having him around for comedy’s sake.) And second, he helped blow the ’93 Finals by choking so memorably during Phoenix’s first two home games, Suns coach Paul Westphal actually had to bench him for Frankie Johnson in crunch time at the end of Game 2. By the time KJ pulled it together in Game 3, the Suns had squandered their home-court advantage and had no realistic chance of coming back—nobody was beating MJ in four out of five games during Jordan’s apex.
Now, many have gagged in the Finals (John Starks in ’94, Nick Anderson in ’95, Magic in ’84, Elvin in ’75, Dirk in ’06, etc.), but I can’t remember someone melting down to the degree that it seemed as if he was throwing the game like Tony in Blue Chips. That’s how awful KJ was. Since it happened during his defining showcase as a player, we have to penalize him for it. On the other hand, no point guard brazenly attacked the basket, dunked on bigger guys and destroyed guys off the dribble quite like KJ in his prime; it wasn’t that opponents couldn’t stay in front of him as much as how they instinctively backed up before he made a move. Had KJ peaked post-2004—when they started whistling hand check fouls, stopped whistling moving screens and made it so much easier for guards to get into the paint—he would have averaged a 30–15 and beaten out Steve Nash for consecutive MVPs. Well, unless his hammies exploded first.
92. BOB LANIER

Resume: 14 years, 8 quality, 8 All-Stars … 4-year peak: 24–13–4 … Playoffs: 19–9–4 (67 G) … won 2 Playoffs in his prime … 20K Point Club
Lanier and his size 21 sneakers narrowly edge Sikma12 and his kick-ass blondafroperm for the cutoff center spot, only because Sikma was blessed with talented Seattle/Milwaukee teams and poor Lanier was stuck in NBA hell (Detroit) for the entire seventies. He even introduced Dick Vitale to friends as “my coach and GM” for two especially putrid years.13 By the time Milwaukee traded for Lanier during the ’80 season, the NBA community reacted the same way Texans react after a trapped child is rescued from a well. The Lanier-Sikma battle comes down to this: Both were traded to Milwaukee right after their primes. Lanier’s price was Kent Benson (the number one pick in ’77) and a 1980 number one; Sikma’s price was Alton Lister and number ones in ’87 and ’89. In other words, Lanier was worth more. But not by much. We’ll remember Lanier for his tough lefty hook, his sneaky fall-away, those giant sneakers and how he replaced Willis as the league’s premier “I’m a nice guy, but if you cross me, I will beat the living tar out of you in front of everyone” center.
(To recap: Our Hall of Fame cutoff guys are Chambers, Jo Jo, Twyman, KJ and Lanier, or as they’re known from now on, the Cutoff Guy Starting Five. For future generations arguing about this stuff, make sure any potential Hall of Famer was at least 0.000001 percent better than these five guys. Thank you.)
91. DWIGHT HOWARD

Resume: 5 years, 4 quality, 3 All-Stars … top 5 (’08, ’09) … 2-year peak: 21–14, 2.5 blocks, 58% FG … ’08 + ’09 Playoffs: 20–16, 2.9 blocks (33 G) … All-Defense (2x) … Defensive Player of Year (’09) … leader: rebounds (2x) … career RPG: 12.5 (highest since Rodman and Moses) … best player on 1 runner-up (’09 Magic)
90. CHRIS PAUL

Resume: 4 years, 4 quality, 3 All-Stars … top 5 (’08) … top 10 (’09) … Bill Simmons approved MVP (’08) … MVP runner-up (’08) … 2-year peak: 21–5–11, 2.7 stl, 49% FG, 4:1 asst/TO ratio … All-Defense (2x) leader: assists (2x) … ’08 Playoffs: 24–5–11, 50% FG (12 G)
We’re bringing in the Young Guns right away. Howard’s shot blocking improved so dramatically (from 2.1 blocks in ’08 to 2.9 in ’09, not to mention all the shots he challenged) that I expanded the Pyramid from 95 to 96 just for him. He’s clearly the most important under-thirty center right now, as well as his generation’s “Good God, that guy is a freaking specimen” big man. I will believe he’s serious about winning a title once he stops competing in the Dunk Contest, stops smiling so much and stops swatting blocked shots into the fourth row instead of tipping them to his teammates. Somebody please make him read the first chapter of this book and Russell’s Second Wind. Thank you.
(Mid-June addition: Howard led Orlando to a shocking cameo in the 2009 Finals. I probably would have nudged him into the mid-eighties had I known this was going to happen. Then again, I wouldn’t have gotten slaughtered gambling on the ’09 playoffs either.)
Meanwhile, the Evolutionary Isiah (Paul) just spent the last two years submitting the best statistical stretch of any point guard since Oscar.14 He played the position with particular pizazz, controlling the tempo of every game, getting to any spot he wanted and converting a dizzying number of alley-oop passes with high degrees of difficulty. My favorite CP3 moment happened in 2008: after blowing clinching free throws in Orlando and sweating out a Turkoglu miss at the buzzer, Paul was too disappointed in himself to celebrate. His teammates and coaches trickled over and rubbed his head, slapped his back and did everything else possible to let him know how important he was to them. There’s a difference between genuine affection (the way Paul and his 2008 teammates interacted) and contrived affection (the way Kobe and his 2008 teammates interacted), and over everything else, that’s what stood out about Paul as much as his talent. Nobody meant more to his teammates. When Paul appeared on Kimmel’s show near the end of last season, the other Hornets sat in the audience to support him. After the show, when Kimmel asked him to film a comedy bit and Paul agreed, his teammates tagged along and attended the shoot instead of hitting Hollywood for a night out. They all left together. These are the stories I want to hear about my Pyramid guys. He’s only twenty-four. We will see where this goes.
(Request for the Pyramid gods: please give Paul and Howard the longevity of Stockton and Kareem instead of Penny and Sampson. We don’t ask for much.)
89. SHAWN KEMP

Resume: 14 years, 8 quality, 6 All-Stars … top 10 (’94, ’95, ’96) … 3-year peak: 19–11–2–2 … ’96 Playoffs: 21–10–2–2, 57% FG … ’96 Finals: 23–10, 55% FG … best player on 1 runner-up (’96 Sonics)
We thought Kemp would end up on thirty different posters. Instead, he became the poster boy of an unlikable era defined by overpaid, overhyped black superstars who grabbed their crotches after dunks, sneered after blocks, choked coaches, quit on teams, sired multiple kids by multiple women and didn’t seem to give a shit. (Important note: I’m just stating the unfair general perception, not the reality. Although Kemp’s generation did have a knack for turning off casual fans.) When you mention Kemp’s name to most NBA fans in twenty years, they will remember the way he dunked in traffic, how personal problems (drugs, alcohol and conditioning) sidetracked a potential Hall of Fame career, and the “seven kids by six different women before he turned 30” revelation (a bombshell at the time that provides comedic mileage to this day).15 Here’s what they won’t remember:
After Moses Malone, another fourteen years passed before another high schooler thrived in the NBA without playing college ball.16 You could say Kemp paved the way for KG, Kobe, LeBron and everyone else. He even paved the way for Ndudi Ebi.
With the notable exceptions of Howard and Young Shaq, there hasn’t been a force of nature like Young Kemp: he ran the floor better than any big man ever, finished off alley-oops from every conceivable angle (and some that hadn’t been conceived yet) and dunked on everyone in sight (his ’92 playoff dunks on Alton Lister and Chris Gatling reside in the Dunk Pantheon). We haven’t seen anyone like him before or since. He also had one of the better nicknames of the past thirty years: “Reign Man,” definitely the name of his sex tape if he ever releases one.17
Kemp was Seattle’s dominant big man on teams that averaged 58 wins from ’93 to ’97, including a ’93 team that lost Game 7 of the Conference Finals when Phoenix shot 68 free throws (Tim Donaghy alert), as well as a ’96 team that won 64 games and lost to Chicago in the Finals. In the ’96 playoffs, he outplayed Hakeem in a sweep of Houston, bested Mailman in the Jazz series, and thrived in the Finals against Dennis Rodman. Then Seattle signed semi-stiffy center Jim McIlvaine, for the reprehensibly dumb figure of $33 million. Kemp was saddled with a crummy contract and coming off a breakthrough spring in which he nearly busted down the Pyramid door like a SWAT cop. Instead of using excess cap space to fix Kemp’s deal, Seattle paid a backup center twice as much. A bitter Kemp wiped the gym every day with the much wealthier McIlvaine, eventually falling into a drugs/weight/bad attitude spiral and prompting Seattle to swap him for Vin Baker.18 I doubt that McIlvaine’s contract single-handedly turned Kemp into a VH1 special. But it didn’t help.
Whatever. Just watch a game from the ’96 Finals sometime. During MJ’s title run (’91–’93 through ’96–’98), Kemp gained steam as the series went along (remember, Seattle won Games 4 and 5) and caused Sonics coach George Karl to proclaim afterward, “He was the best player on the court. No one can say otherwise.” So if we’re giving players like Bill Walton the benefit of the doubt in this Pyramid from a “what could have been” standpoint, Kemp deserves the same courtesy even if he was probably predisposed to losing his marbles. Really, the late-nineties Sonics should have controlled the West just like the Sampson/Hakeem Rockets should have controlled the late eighties. Then the McIlvaine signing sent Kemp into the tailspin, Houston’s teams with Barkley and Hakeem never quite gelled, Shaq’s Lakers didn’t put everything together yet … and suddenly those Stockton-Malone teams were title contenders. Ridiculous. Kemp and GP should have played in four or five straight Finals together. These are the dopey realities that keep me awake when I’m watching ESPN Classic at two-thirty in the morning.19
88. GAIL GOODRICH

Resume: 14 years, 8 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (74) … 3-year peak: 25–3–5 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 25–3–5 (27 G) … leader: FTA (1x) … 3rd-best player on 1 champ (’72 Lakers) and 1 runner-up (’73 Lakers) … left unprotected in ’68 expansion draft
One of the better-scoring guards from the confusing ABA/NBA era, the crafty southpaw gets bonus points for being a top-three player on a 69-win Lakers team and abusing Earl Monroe in the ’72 Finals, as well as having an unorthodox low-post game, punishing smaller guards down low, and attacking the rim like a crazed Manu Ginobili (attempting 550-plus FTs four different times). Near the tail end of his prime, Goodrich carried enough weight that Utah forked over number ones in ’77 and ’79 to team him with Pete Maravich.20 Goodrich played 27 games, injured his knee, and never really recovered. Since the Lakers grabbed Magic with one of those picks, Goodrich was actually responsible for six Laker titles, as well as the incredible game of Moses Hot Potato detailed. Part of me wonders if we never took him that seriously from a historical standpoint because his name made him sound like an LPGA golfer. But if we ever slapped together an all-time team of lefties, he edges Ginobili as the shooting guard.21
87. CONNIE HAWKINS

Resume: 9 years, 4 quality, 5 All-Stars (1 ABA) … ABA MVP (’68) … top 5 NBA (’70) … 3-year NBA peak: 23–9–4 … best player on ABA champ (’68 Pipers), 30–12–5 in Playoffs (14 G)
86. ARVYDAS SABONIS

Resume: 7 years, 1 quality, 0 All-Stars … 1-year peak: 16–10–3 … 2-year playoff peak: 11–8–2 (29 G) … career threes: 135–415 (33%) … best player on Russia’s ’88 Gold Medal team … four-time European Player of the Year
We’re exercising the “what could have been” clause here. Eligible for the ’63 draft, Hawkins didn’t join the NBA until the ’69–’70 season because of a college fixing scandal back in 1961, when the NBA dubiously banned everyone involved under their “no taint” rule (even a misguided soul like Hawkins, who never actually fixed a game). Hawkins spent the next few years toiling away in failed pro leagues, minor leagues and playground games before becoming the ABA’s first superstar and suing the NBA for blackballing him. When writer David Wolf (who eventually released Foul!, a superb account of Connie’s ten-year odyssey to make the NBA) wrote about his plight for Life magazine in 1969, public sentiment swung behind Hawkins and the league settled with him for the startling sum of $1 million, then assigned him to Phoenix, where he peaked by making first-team All-NBA in 1970.22 Although we’ll never know how good Hawkins could have been, he was the first modern power forward with athleticism and length (a good seven to ten years ahead of Gus Johnson and Spencer Haywood), a prototype for the Kemps and Garnetts, someone who played above the rim before his knees started going on him. His freakishly large hands allowed him to palm basketballs like tennis balls; Hawkins waved the ball over his head and found cutters with laser passes, and when he drove to the basket, nobody stripped him because the ball was embedded in his giant paw. But Connie’s lack of college coaching and skinny body (he weighed 200–205 pounds in his prime) led to effort/defense issues at every stage of his career, so his game couldn’t have translated to success in the Playoffs unless he played with a shot blocker like Russell or Thurmond. Had he played a full NBA career, it probably would have resembled what Adrian Dantley or Alex English did: big offensive numbers, more than a few first-round Playoff exits. Regardless, it’s all so tragic. Connie’s whole career played out like a bad White Shadow episode.
You can’t play the what-if game with Hawkins without bringing up Sabonis, potentially one of the great centers if his legs hadn’t betrayed him. By 1995, poor Sabonis ranked just behind Artis Gilmore on the Moving Like a Mummy Scale. Thank God for YouTube, where a young and healthy Saba lives on breaking backboards, draining threes and throwing no-look passes; there’s a reason everyone compared him to Walton with 25-foot range.23 You might remember a twenty-three-year-old Sabonis carrying the Soviets to the 1988 gold medal (even though he was recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon), outplaying David Robinson in the semifinals, controlling the game on both ends and putting himself on the map as an “all right, they weren’t kidding when they said he was great” guy. Portland took a first-round flier on him in 1986, then spent an eternity luring him over before succeeding in 1995 (well after knee/foot injuries sapped his quickness). Lumbering up and down the court in what looked to be concrete Nikes, Sabonis still played a key role on a ’00 Blazers team that choked away a potential championship. Considering he couldn’t run or jump and remained effective, imagine how great he could have been in his prime. In fact, that nearly made the what-ifs chapter: what if Portland had signed Sabonis in ’89, once Russia fragmented and he was allowed to leave the country, when he shockingly signed with Spain over joining the Blazers? Remember, Portland made the Finals in ’90 and ’92 and the ’91 team won 63 games with Kevin Duckworth starting at center. Imagine swapping Duck for one of the best centers of that era. If Hawkins makes it on the coulda-been premise, then we can’t leave out Saba.24
85. ROBERT HORRY

Resume: 16 years, 0 quality, 0 All-Stars … 4-year peak: 10–5–3 … 2-year playoff peak: 13–7–3, 40% 3FG, 78 threes (45 G) … played for 7 champs (’94, ’95 Rockets, ’00, ’01, ’02 Lakers, ’05, ’07 Spurs) … leader: Playoffs games (244) … played for ten 55-win teams and eight teams with a .700-plus winning percentage … played for 1 team that won fewer than 47 (’97 Suns, 40–42)
And we can’t leave Big Shot Rob out of a Pyramid that hinges on The Secret. It’s impossible. If you want to know why, here’s a trimmed-down version of a Horry column I wrote after Game 5 of the 2005 Finals, when Big Shot Brob25 turned the series around in Detroit with a number of big shots (including the game-winning three in overtime). The title? “Big Shot Bob Bangs Another One.”
Somebody needs to go through Robert Horry’s playoff games, pluck out all the big plays and shots, then run them in sequence for like 10 straight minutes with one of those cool sports video songs playing (like Aerosmith’s “Dream On” or Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song”). Who wouldn’t enjoy that? I bet Horry nailed at least 20 to 25 humongous shots over the years. Seriously.26
You might be asking yourself, “Wait, that opening paragraph sounded a little familiar.” It should. I wrote it two summers ago. See, we would have remembered Big Shot Bob for life even before he saved his defining moment for Sunday night, throwing a rattled Spurs team on his back in Detroit and making … I mean … it would almost demean what happened to write something like “some huge 3-pointers” or “a number of game-saving plays.” Considering the situation (a budding Spurs collapse that seemed eerily reminiscent of the ’04 Lakers series), the circumstances (nobody else on his team was stepping up) and the opponent (a terrific defensive team playing at home), Horry’s Game 5 ranks alongside MJ’s Game 6 in 1998, Frazier’s Game 7 in 1970 and every other clutch Finals performance. If Horry hadn’t scored 21 of his team’s last 35 points, the Spurs would have been “Dead Man Walking” heading back to San Antonio. Instead, they’re probably going to win the title Tuesday night.
Forget about saving the season; Horry possibly altered Tim Duncan’s career. If the Spurs blew that game, they would have eventually blown the series and everyone would have blamed Duncan all summer, mainly because his epic stink bomb down the stretch brought back memories of Karl Malone and Elvin Hayes. Now he’s just another great player who had an atrocious game at the wrong time. That’s the power of Big Shot Bob. And if you think a rejuvenated/relieved/thankful Duncan isn’t throwing up a 35–15 Tuesday night, you’re crazy.27
My favorite thing about Sunday night’s game: When Horry drained a go-ahead three at the end of the third quarter, it was like sitting at a poker table with a good player who plays possum for an hour, then suddenly pushes a stack of chips into the middle. Uh-oh. He’s making his move. You could just see it coming. The rest of the game played out like that—the Spurs always seeming like they were one mistake away from blowing it, then Horry bailing them out again and again. By the time he jammed home that astounding lefty dunk in overtime, everyone knew the game would somehow end up in Horry’s hands. Well, everyone but Rasheed Wallace. We’re always too quick to demolish athletes who make dumb plays or screw up at the worst possible times, from Byner’s fumble to C-Webb’s time-out to poor Bill Buckner … but at the same time, I feel like ’Sheed’s brain fart will somehow get swept under the rug in the afterglow of such an electric game. Let the record show that Wallace’s decision to leave a scorching-hot Horry to double-team Ginobili in the final nine seconds of OT was the single dumbest play in the history of the NBA Finals. For sweeping significance and staggering inexplicability, it cannot be topped. You can’t leave Robert Horry alone in a big game. You just can’t.28
Horry’s career has always been a nice litmus test for the question, “Do you understand the game of basketball or not?” Nearly all of his strengths aren’t things that casual fans would notice, and he’d be useless on the “And 1” tour. He’s a terrific help defender who constantly covers for his teammates. He’s big enough to handle power forwards and quick enough to handle small forwards. He picks his spots and only asserts himself in big situations when his team truly needs him. He doesn’t care about stats or touches—at all—which gives him something in common with maybe 2 percent of the league. And he gets better when it matters. What more would you want from a supporting player? I once compared him to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, explaining that “Nobody ever talks about him, but he’s always there when you need him, just like the Peebee and Jay.” I compared him to Nate Dogg, John Cazale29 and every other famous person who flew under the radar screen but always ended up in good situations.30 When someone asked me in a recent mailbag whether I would have Horry’s career (multiple rings and rich) or Barkley/Malone’s careers (no rings and obscenely rich), I opted for Horry’s career and didn’t think twice. Imagine playing on five (soon to be six) championship teams, ending up with a cool nickname, making $50 million, earning the everlasting respect of everyone who ever played with or against you … and you didn’t have to deal with any of the superstar BS? Have a great game, everyone notices you. Have a terrible game, nobody notices you. And that’s your life. Doesn’t that sound like the ultimate gig? In a league loaded with guys who believe they’re better than they actually are, Horry understands his own strengths and limitations better than anyone. That’s what makes him so great. And that’s why I like the poker analogy for him. He’s the guy sitting at the table with a towering stack of chips, the guy who never chases a bad hand, the guy who makes your heart pound when he’s staring you down. You never remember the hands he lost, but you always remember the ones he won. And when he finally cashes out and gets up from the table, you hope you never have to see him again.
Does that make him a Hall of Famer someday? Instead of making Horry’s case in full, I’m telling you a story that hasn’t even happened yet. Maybe it will be this summer, maybe next summer, maybe 15 years from now. But when ESPN Classic shows Game 5 of the 2005 Finals some day and I’m calling my buddy House just to tell him, “Turn on Classic, they’re showing the Robert Horry game,” I can pretty much guarantee his response: “Which one?”
84. CLIFF HAGAN

Resume: 13 years, 7 quality, 6 All-Stars (1 ABA) … top 10 (’58, ’59) … 4-year peak: 23–10–4 … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’58 Hawks) and 2 runner-ups (’60, ’61) … ’58 Playoffs: 28–11, 50% FG (11 G) … 5-year Playoffs peak: 23–10–3
A valuable playoff piece for St. Louis during their underrated playoff peak (one title, four Finals appearances). If you played for ten years in the fifties and sixties, peaked for five, and starred for a champion and a couple of runner-ups, that was a really good career during the Mad Men era, when everyone traveled coach, shared hotel rooms with roommates, smoked butts and drank coffee, got plastered after games, didn’t work out, didn’t eat right, didn’t take care of their bodies and banged bodies like they were playing rugby. One positive for the Hagan Experience: If the Best Damn Sports Show Period31 ever did a countdown of the top fifty racists in sports history, Hagan’s Hawks teams would have ranked up there with Jimmy the Greek, Al Campanis, Dixie Walker, Tom Yawkey and everyone else.32 In an extended section about Lenny Wilkens in Breaks of the Game, it’s revealed that Hagan was the only Hawks teammate who reached out to Wilkens and treated him like an equal. As Chris Russo would say, “That’s a good job by you, Cliff!” Twyman and Hagan were definitely the starting forwards for the twentieth-anniversary White Guys You Would Have Wanted on Your Team if You Were Black team in 1966. You know, if they had one.
83. VINCE CARTER

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 8 All-Stars … ’99 Rookie of the Year … top 10 (’01), top 15 (’00) … 3-year peak: 26–6–4 … 10 straight 20+ PPG seasons … Playoffs: 26–7–6 (42 G) … Playoffs record: most threes in one half (8)
I’ve never been a fan of gifted offensive stars who couldn’t defend anyone, screwed over entire cities and thrived in dunk contests versus playoff games. In a related story, Vince has played eleven years without making it past the second round. Even weirder, his cousin Tracy McGrady never made it past the first round. No truth to the rumor that their annual family softball game only goes six innings before it abruptly stops. But Vince’s career has been particularly annoying for a variety of reasons. His most famous moment? The time he leapfrogged Frederic Weis for a monster throwdown in the 2000 Olympics. (Anytime someone’s career highlight involves Fred Weis, really, what more can be said?)33 His breakout playoff season? The spectacular ’01 showdown against Allen Iverson, when they swapped 50-point games in Games 3 and 4 and the series came down to Vince’s missed three at the buzzer in Game 7. (That was the same day that Vince famously chartered a plane so he could attend his UNC graduation in person, then flew back to Philly afterward. It’s the perfect Vince Carter story—he put himself ahead of his team. And they lost.) His enduring trait? He milked injuries and collisions like nobody we’ve seen and brought the phrase “acting like he just got shot” to another level. (Nobody in NBA history had the words “Get up, you p-ssy!” screamed at him by more fans. Nobody.) His legacy? He’s the premier “so talented, shoulda been so much better” guy of his generation.
Whatever. That’s not what turned me against him for life. During the ’05 season, a disenchanted Vince tanked so hellaciously in Toronto—killing his trade value for reasons that remain unclear—that the Raptors were forced to settle for Jersey’s offer of Alonzo Mourning (who had to be bought out), Eric Williams, Aaron Williams and two nonlottery picks. You could have predicted when it happened (and by the way, I did) that Toronto damaged its future by not clearing cap space or getting any quality youngsters or picks back.34 But that’s how desperate they were. Rarely has a professional athlete shown more callousness toward his fans. Here’s what I wrote after watching Vince tank a Raps-Clippers game weeks before the trade:
During the pregame “Everyone bunch into a circle and jump up and down” ritual, Chris Bosh accidentally bumped Vince in the head, so Vince dramatically took three steps back to make sure he was OK, then rejoined the circle with a sarcastic frown. He made his first five jumpers, banged his shooting hand on a collision with Maggette, then spent the rest of the game touching the hand, examining it and swearing to himself … only he would not-so-coincidentally forget to do this every time he made a basket. When he was angry after not getting the ball before one timeout, he stormed towards the bench and brushed off a high-five from Donyell Marshall. It went on and on. Forget about the fact that Vince doesn’t play defense; that he doesn’t bother to box out; that he’s shooting pretty much every time he gets the ball (23 shots in 26 minutes against the Clips); that he avoids contact even on drives. His moodiness affected everyone on that team. He’s clearly trying to get himself traded—playing just hard enough so nobody thinks he’s dogging it, but acting up just enough so everyone knows he’s unhappy. At one point, I honestly thought Rafer Alston was going to punch him.
Three months later, Vince hooked himself up to the Juvenation Machine in Jersey and admitted that he had stopped trying for Toronto—no joke, he admitted this—presumably to force a trade, which had to have been one of the most depressing revelations in recent sports history.35 Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book: fifty years from now, we wouldn’t want an NBA fan to flip through some NBA guide and decide that Vince Carter was a worthy basketball star. He wasn’t. Instead, he’s the guy who prompted me to write the following in 2004:
Now that the Sox have won the World Series, here’s my new sports wish for 2004: Just once in my lifetime, when this situation unfolds like with Vince and the Raptors, I want to see the team say, “You know what? Screw you. You signed a contract to become our franchise player, and now you don’t want to live up to that obligation? Fine. You’re sitting on the bench. Don’t worry, we’ll pay you. You’ll get your checks. You’re just getting a DNP for the next five years. We’re making an example out of you. You will never play for us again. And you won’t play anywhere else, either.” Imagine that. Vince banished to the bench, game after game, month after month, until he shapes up and stops bitching about playing for Toronto. It would be the sports equivalent of sending a prisoner to the hole. Like every NBA fan wouldn’t be rooting for the Raptors after that?
There’s a happy ending to this story. Every time Vince plays in Toronto, they boo him like it’s Bernie Madoff returning to ring the bell of the NYSE. They boo him for the whole game. They never stop booing. For whatever reason, this brings out the best in Vince—he plays with passion and pride and even sank a few game-winners against them. It’s the perfect epitaph for his career—the guy who could only get inspired by a fan base that actively detests him—along with the fact that Vince got an enormous amount of respect from other players, not for what he delivered but for his gifts themselves. Of anyone in the league over the past fifteen years, his peers felt like Vince Carter was the one who could do anything. Well, except give a shit on a consistent basis. You will regret what happened one day, Vince. You will.36
82. CHRIS MULLIN

Resume: 16 years, 8 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’92), top 10 (’89, ’91), top 15 (’90) … 4-year peak: 26–5–4 (52% FG, 88% FT) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 27–7–4, 54% FG (16 G) … league leader: minutes (2x), 3FG% (1x) … member of ’92 Dream Team
After throwing away his first three NBA years because of a drinking/weight problem, a postrehab Mullin shaved his hair into a military flattop, got himself into sick shape and embarked on a rollicking five-year peak before a variety of injuries sidetracked him. Even though he crested a little late, few modern players were more entertaining or intelligent on the offensive end; he was like a left-handed, miniature version of Larry Bird, only with worse hair, paler skin and an accent that made him sound like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Mike Francesa. You couldn’t hide him defensively, but at least he wreaked havoc from the blind side and jumped passing lanes like Bird, averaging 2-plus steals three different times. He’s also on the all-time team of Modern Guys Who Seemed Like They Were the Most Fun to Play a Game of Basketball With (along with Bird, Magic, Nash, Walton, Duncan, Kidd, Pippen, Stockton, Horry, Bobby Jones and C-Webb).37 According to Cameron Stauth’s underrated Golden Boys, after Chuck Daly was selected to coach the Dream Team, his wish list for a roster looked like this (in order): Jordan, Magic, Robinson, Ewing, Pippen, Malone, Mullin. So the NBA’s top coach at the time ranked Mullin behind Jordan and Pippen as the third-best perimeter player during the deepest run of talent in NBA history. The selection committee eventually sent out eight initial invites: Bird/Magic/MJ (locks to launch the team as a threesome), Pippen, Robinson, Malone, Ewing and Barkley. Mullin received the ninth invite. John Stockton was tenth. (Drexler and Christian Laettner38 weren’t added until the following spring.) Here’s the point: Chris Mullin was really freaking good.
81. DAVE BING

Resume: 12 years, 8 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’67 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’68, ’71), top 10 (’74) … 4-year peak: 25–5–6 … leader: scoring (1x) … never won a Playoff series
Bing rode the ABA/expansion statistical surge and put up impressive numbers during his offensive peak (’67 to ’73), when he played with the likes of Dave DeBusschere and Bob Lanier and only made the Playoffs once. Following his eighth season (19.0 PPG, 7.7 APG in ’75), Detroit traded him to Washington along with a future first-rounder for Kevin Porter. Kevin Porter? How good a player could Bing have been? And how could he possibly make the NBA’s 50 at 50 in 1996 over nos. 53, 57, 58, 63, 64, and 65 on this list? Because he was a good guy.39 Call it the Bob Lanier Corollary: if someone is loved and respected as a person by fellow players and media members, his actual talents rarely match the way he’s evaluated. Bing’s two first-team All-NBA’s help his historical cause more than anything, but both were dubious: in ’68, Bing slipped in because Jerry West missed 31 games; in ’71, Bing made it over Walt Frazier, who only tossed up a 21–7–7 on a 52-win Knicks team and doubled as the league’s best defensive guard. Given a choice between Bing in his absolute prime (playing on a fifth-seeded team in the West), versus Clyde in his absolute prime (playing on a number one seed in the East) … the voters chose Bing. Absurd. Was Bing even better than Sweet Lou Hudson? They both peaked from ’67 to ’76 and finished with similar career numbers (a 20–4–3 with 49% FG for Hudson, a 20–4–6 with 44% FG for Bing), but Hudson played for seven straight teams that made the Playoffs (’67–’73) and Bing made the Playoffs once in that stretch. Who was more effective? I couldn’t tell you because I wasn’t there. I just know that Bing shouldn’t have made the top fifty.40
80. BAILEY HOWELL

Resume: 12 years, 10 quality, 6 All-Stars … top 10 (’63) … 4-year peak: 22–12–2 … started for 2 champs (’68 and ’69 Celts)
79. BOBBY DANDRIDGE

Resume: 13 years, 9 quality, 4 All-Stars … top 10 (’79) … 5-year peak: 20–7–3 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 22–7–5 (38 G) … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’78 Bullets) and 2 runner-ups (’74 Bucks, ’79 Bullets), 3rd-best player on 1 champ (’71 Bucks) … career Playoffs: 21–8–4 (98 G)
Dandridge remains my favorite “lost great” from the seventies, a small forward who played bigger than his size, lacked any holes and drew the following compliment from SI’s Curry Kirkpatrick in 1979: “All Dandridge is—a fact known to his peers for a couple of years now—is the best all-round player at his position.” You could call Bobby D. a cross between Caron Butler and Big Shot Brob, someone who did all the little things, drifted between three positions, defended every type of forward (famously outdueling Julius Erving in the ’78 Playoffs) and routinely drained monster shots (like the game-winner against a triple-team in Game 7 of the ’79 Spurs series, which happened after he had been switched to a scalding-hot George Gervin and shut Ice down for the final few minutes). Unquestionably, he was the fourth-best small forward of the seventies behind Erving, Rick Barry and John Havlicek, as well as one of the signature greats from an all-black college who made it big in the pros.41 The late Ralph Wiley wrote that while Hayes and Unseld were widely remembered for winning Washington the ’78 title, “it was the sweet j of Sweet Bobby D. true aficionados recall,” calling him a “grizzled, bearded, incommunicado jazz soloist” and adding that Bobby D.’s “sweet j ranks with Sam Jones, Dave Bing, Lou Hudson, Jerry West and Joe Dumars.” I’m guessing that Ralph would have had Bobby D. in his top seventy-five.
So what about Howell? Well, he was the Dandridge of the sixties and played a big role on two title teams. It took Howell twenty-seven years to make the Hall of Fame. Dandridge still hasn’t made it. The lesson, as always: the Basketball Hall of Fame sucks.42
78. PAUL WESTPHAL

Resume: 12 years, 5 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’77, ’78, ’80), top 10 (’79) … 5-year peak: 23–3–6, 52% FG … best player on 1 runner-up (’76 Suns), averaged 21–5–3, 51% FG (19 G)
Red Auerbach was the most successful NBA GM ever, so take the following with a grain of salt because it’s impossible to nail every major roster decision. (Or in Billy King’s case, any of them.) But Red gave away at least one title with two boneheaded decisions: swapping Westphal for Charlie Scott before the ’76 season and replacing Paul Silas with anti-Celtics Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe before the ’77 season. Both were financially motivated moves by a stubborn guy who couldn’t accept where the league was headed yet. Had Red kept Silas and Westie, Boston could have won in ’77 and possibly ’78. But here’s why Red was the luckiest bastard ever (and I mean that as a compliment): As the ’77–’78 team was self-combusting in Havlicek’s final season, Auerbach swapped Scott for Kermit Washington, Don Chaney and a number one pick. A few months later, Boston had the number six and number eight picks in the ’78 draft. With their own pick (number six), they rolled the dice on a junior-eligible named Larry Bird. With K.C.’s number eight pick, they took a prolific scorer named Freeman Williams to replace Havlicek.43 Without that extra pick, would Red have “wasted” the number six pick on someone who couldn’t play in Boston for a year? Getting the number eight pick in the Scott trade allowed him to use the number six pick on Bird. Like always with Red from 1950 to 1986, even when something like the Westphal/Scott trade didn’t work out, eventually it worked out.44
Westphal would have been just another forgotten great player if not for a heroic performance in the triple-OT game—a game that lives on forever on ESPN Classic and NBA TV—when he single-handedly saved the Suns more than once with a superhuman performance (crazy steals, ludicrous reverses for three-point plays and his trademark 360 banker, when he drove left at breakneck speed, planted about 8 feet from the basket, then did a 360-degree twirl and banked it home as his incredulous defender was twisted in nine different directions). If Havlicek had missed that running banker in the second OT, Phoenix could have clinched the title at home and Westphal could have joined the hallowed list of Best Guys on a Championship Team (and jumped thirty spots on this list). Instead, he’s remembered as the league’s best guard for five years (’76 to ’80), as well as a memorably entertaining All-Star Game performer and the starting two-guard on the White Guys Who Played Like Black Guys team (don’t worry, we’re getting there).
77. DAN ISSEL

Resume: 15 years, 13 quality, 7 All-Stars (6 ABA) … top 5 ABA (’72), top 10 ABA (’71, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76) … 3-year peak: 29–11–2 … ABA leader: scoring (1x) … ABA Playoffs: 24–11–2 (80 G) … 2nd-best player on ABA champ (’75 Colonels) … 25K-10K Club (25K-plus points, 10K-plus rebounds)
76. ARTIS GILMORE

Resume: 17 years, 12 quality, 11 All-Stars (5 ABA) … ’72 ABA MVP and Playoffs MVP … ’72 ABA Rookie of the Year … top 5 ABA (’72, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76) … 5-year peak: 22–17–3 (ABA) … season leader: rebounds (4x), FG% (6x), mins (3x), blocks (2x) … all-time NBA/ABA leader, FG% … best player on two ABA champs (’72 and ’75 Colonels) … 20K-15K Club
I couldn’t put Issel ahead of Artis for one reason: After Kentucky won the ’75 ABA title, the Colonels needed to trade a big guy (Gilmore or Issel) to save money. Which one did they keep? Gilmore. So that settles that. Issel thrived for six ABA seasons but only made one NBA All-Star team after the merger. That’s a little telling. Still, there’s something to be said for a perimeter center who never missed games and gave his teams somewhere between a 19–8 and a 25–11 every night, averaging 29.9 points as a rookie in ’71 and 19.8 as a fourteen-year veteran in ’84. You can’t blame Issel for a lack of NBA playoff success because the ’78 Nuggets came within two games of the Finals (losing to Seattle), then fell apart because of David Thompson’s drug problem and one of the single dumbest trades in NBA history: Bobby Jones straight up for George McGinnis.45 On a personal note, Issel was one of my favorite visiting players because he was missing his front four teeth—every time he walked by us in the Garden tunnel, he looked like a vampire. These are the things that delight you when you’re eight.
Meanwhile, Artis would have started at center for the Looks Better on Paper All-Stars if not for Bellamy. I’m barely old enough to remember Artis in his NBA prime, when he was a mountain of a man (seven foot two, 300 pounds) with a mustache/goatee combo that made him look like a half-Chinese, half-black count.46 He looked intimidating until the game started and you realized that (a) his reactions were a split second slow (eventually earning him the nickname “Rigor Artis”), (b) he only took shots he could make (dunks, layups, and a lefty jump hook), and (c) it was unclear if he had a pulse (Artis made Kareem look like Kevin Garnett after twenty Red Bulls). Artis grew up so poor in Florida that he wore sneakers two sizes too small in high school, so there was always something beaten-down about him, like his confidence didn’t match his physique. Fans believed he should dominate more than he did and tougher players pounded him with no repercussions.47 Without any big rivals who could handle him in a quicker ABA, Artis dominated just like the token tall guy dominates an intramural game in college. He never enjoyed the same success in the NBA, but there are worse things than a center giving you a 20–12 every night, clogging the paint, shooting 60 percent and looking like he’s about to film a Dracula movie. If that’s not enough, he appeared in the opening credit sequence of The White Shadow. Top that, Issel.
75. TRACY MCGRADY

Resume: 12 years, 7 quality, 7 All-Stars … top 5 (’02, ’03), top 10 (’01, ’04, ’07), Top-15 (’05, ’08) … 4-year peak: 28–8–5 … leader: scoring (2x) … ’03 season: 33–7–6 … Playoffs: 29–7–6, 43% FG (38 G) … never won a Playoffs
A resume jarringly similar to Pete Maravich’s even if McGrady was significantly better defensively. Both were better known by nicknames (“T-Mac” and “Pistol”). Both carried lousy teams for much of their primes. Both were ridiculously gifted offensive players who had unusual weight with their peers, although McGrady was never discussed reverentially like Maravich was and is. Both suffered bad luck at pivotal points of their careers—Pistol not getting Doc as a teammate, T-Mac losing a hobbled Grant Hill for his entire Orlando tenure. Both were traded in their primes, although Houston underpaid for T-Mac and New Orleans overpaid for Maravich. Both were original prototypes: T-Mac was the first six-foot-eight guard with three-point range (an Evolutionary Gervin crossed with a touch of Dr. J); Pistol was simply unlike any guard before or since. And honestly? Both of them were ten to twelve spots too high on this list until the last stages of this book-writing process, when McGrady tarnished his legacy so badly during the 2008–9 season that I had to drop him seven spots. Originally I had projected the rest of his career and assumed he would enjoy two or three more quality seasons, even if the words “never won a Playoffs in his prime” stick out more egregiously than Jaye Davidson’s dick in The Crying Game.48 It was hard to imagine anyone ever taking his career that seriously if he never played in a second-round game, right? Then he murdered the ’09 Rockets so completely and totally that he prompted me to craft this one-paragraph drive-by shooting in a February column about the collapsing NBA economy (and I stand by the venom):
Nobody loves basketball more than me. I mean, nobody. But when an NBA player with two years remaining on his contract for a total of $44 million shows up for the season out of shape, complains most of the year, lets down his teammates and fans again and again, lands in some trade rumors and decides, “Instead of getting traded to a team I don’t like, I’m going to announce that I’m getting microfracture surgery four days before the trade deadline and kill any potential trade, and even better, I’ll be healed by next spring, just in time to showcase myself for another contract,” and successfully pulls this off—with no repercussions from anybody—then yes, the system is broken and needs to be fixed. Because that was disgusting. Tracy McGrady, you are officially indefensible for the rest of eternity. Even your cousin Vince wouldn’t have done that. And that’s saying something.
74. JOE DUMARS

Resume: 14 years, 7 quality, 6 All-Stars … ’89 Finals MVP … top 10 (’93), top 15 (’90, ’91) … All-Defense (5x) … 4-year peak: 21–2–5 … 2nd-best player on two champs (’89, ’90 Pistons)
73. SIDNEY MONCRIEF

Resume: 11 years, 5 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’83), top 10 (’82, ’84, ’85, ’86) … All-Defense (5x) … Defensive Player of the Year (’83, ’84) … 4-year peak: 21–6–5, 51% FG, 83% FT … 3-year Playoffs peak: 21–6–5 (33 G)
Here’s why we need a new Hall of Fame, Part XXXVII: The real Hall inducted Joe D. in 2006 even though Westphal, Moncrief, and Dennis Johnson hadn’t made it yet. Why Dumars and not the others? Because of the Lanier Corollary: Dumars was the one decent soul on those bad-boy squads, a splendid team player who lifted his game when it mattered, a gifted defender who handled MJ better than anyone except John Starks. When the Association struggled with character issues in the mid-nineties, Joe D stood out for his class and professionalism. Watching him coexist with the crotch-grabbing jerks on Dream Team II was like seeing Nic Cage stuck traveling on the Con Air plane. (There was a famous story about two of the Dream Team IIers—definitely Shaq and someone else, I can’t remember the second guy—pulling the players together before a key Olympic game and Dumars thinking, “Great, they’re finally going to take this seriously.” Then the two guys started singing a rap song they had written for the game. Poor Dumars.) And after his career, Dumars remained in the limelight by building Detroit’s ’04 championship team, remaining classy and manipulating the media as well as anyone except Donnie Walsh.49 But Dumars was never a franchise player or a transcendant one (again: left off the Dream Team), and that ’89 Finals MVP happened after a four-game sweep against an aging Lakers team that lost Magic and Byron Scott midway through the series. During certain pivotal playoff games (Game 5 of the 1990 Finals, for instance), Dumars sat for Vinnie Johnson in crunch time. When the Pistons aged so quickly after the ’92 playoffs, Dumars became the alpha dog on teams that won 40, 20 and 28 games. There’s no possible way, under any criteria, that anyone can prove Dumars was superior to Moncrief or Dennis Johnson. In my opinion, he was the worst of the three. But the other two have been rejected by the Hall. Repeatedly. Which is why we need to blow that baby up.50
Meanwhile, Moncrief was one of the defining what-if guys. If not for chronic knee problems that eventually derailed his career, Moncrief would have been the best all-around guard of the eighties and one of the top forty-five Pyramid guys. Before the days of arthroscopic surgery and ligaments that could be transferred from corpses, you were never the same after an ACL tear and that was that. In Moncrief’s case, he jumped out of the building to the point that he gave us my beloved Sports Illustrated cover (the tomahawk dunk from Arkansas), but by the time the ’87 Playoffs rolled around, he was limping around on one leg like a war veteran. Too bad.51 A healthy Moncrief would have been a more polished, less combustible version of Dennis Johnson. And that’s saying something. Instead, he’ll have to settle for no. 74, as well as being the second-greatest Sidney of all time—just behind Sidney Crosby and just ahead of Sydney the whore from Melrose Place and Sidney the lawyer from Midnight Run. Sidney, siddown, relax, have a cream soda, do some f*ckin’ thing.
72. CHRIS WEBBER

Resume: 14 years, 6 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’94 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’01), top 10 (’99, ’02, ’03) … 3-year peak: 25–11–5 … leader: rebounds (1x) …’02 playoffs: 24–11–5 (16 G) … played 70 or fewer games in 9 seasons, missed 294 games total
Of all the great talents who never fulfilled their promise, Webber was the only NBA player without a legitimate excuse. On paper, he had everything you’d ever want from a power forward: superior athletic ability, great footwork on the block, soft hands, the rebounding gene, even the passing gene. His background couldn’t derail him because Webber hailed from a middle-class, two-parent family, attended a respected Detroit prep school, and learned quickly how to juggle a Jonas Brothers–like public persona with a much more urban private persona. He shone in the biggest spotlight possible at Michigan and helped create the iconic “Fab Five,” who became genuine trendsetters with their chest thumping, yelping, baggy shorts and everything else. Everything that happened during his first twenty years seemed to be shaping an influential and successful professional career, a sure thing along the lines of Shaq, Ewing and Robinson.
So what happened? You wouldn’t say C-Webb had an atrocious career or anything. He made five All-Star teams, an All-NBA first team and three All-NBA second teams. He won Rookie of the Year and a rebounding title in 1999. Starring for a series of memorably entertaining Sacramento teams from 1999 to 2003, he was the league’s second-best power forward and submitted a three-year peak of 25–11–5. He also earned a staggering amount of money; the Warriors, Bullets, Kings and Sixers paid him more than $185 million combined, more money than anyone other than Jordan, Shaq or Kevin Garnett. But like with Billy Corgan and Michael Keaton,52 we’ll always wonder why his career didn’t turn out differently. During his prime (1994 to 2004), he played 70 games or fewer in nine different seasons, missed 283 of a possible 850 games and battled a never-ending assortment of injuries, culminating with a knee tear in Sacramento that robbed him of his explosiveness and forced him to change his style on the fly (although he remained relatively effective). Webber left us with two mildly fascinating what-ifs beyond the obvious “What if he stayed healthy?” question. We already covered “What if Orlando had just kept his rights?” Here’s a smaller-scale one: “What if the Warriors hadn’t stupidly given C-Webb a massive contract with an opt-out clause after one year?”
Webber entered the Association just when it stupidly started giving youngsters too much negotiating power (the era when inmates were running the asylum), a few years before the powers that be smartened up and pushed for a rookie salary scale. Although many promising careers were affected—including those of Kenny Anderson, Coleman, Vinnie Baker, Larry Johnson, Glenn Robinson, Juwan Howard, Rasheed Wallace, Jason Kidd, Marcus Camby, Antoine Walker, Stephon Marbury and Tim Thomas—Webber remains the biggest and most disappointing casualty. Armed with that opt-out clause, he wanted no part of Don Nelson’s abrasive style53 even though there’s never been a better big man for Nellieball. When Webber threatened to opt out of his contract and sign somewhere else, the Warriors panic-traded him for Tom Gugliotta and three number ones. Instead of leading a perennial contender and playing a style that enhanced his talents, Webber found himself carrying a way-too-young Bullets team, developed bad habits and a lousy attitude, injured his knee, missed 116 games in four years and got shipped to Sacramento in a “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” deal for Mitch Richmond and Otis Thorpe.54 When he finally found another freewheeling offensive team, he was twenty-six years old. What a shame.
Much of his career came down to bad timing: seven years earlier or seven years later, a conventional rookie contract would have trapped him on the Warriors (where he belonged all along). His Kings teams had the misfortune of peaking during the apex of Shaq, Duncan and KG, respectively, suffering crushing Game 7 defeats in ’02, ’03 and ’04, and if there’s a complaint against Webber, it’s this one: he wanted no part of the ball in big moments. Here’s what I wrote about Webber after Sacramento’s meltdown against the ’02 Lakers, when every King except for Mike Bibby looked more terrified than the camp counselors at Crystal Lake:
Webber officially grabbed the torch from Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, Ralph Sampson and Elvin Hayes as “The High-Priced Superstar Who’s Great to Have on Your Team Unless There’s Three Minutes Left in a Big Game.” None of this was really a surprise, but watching C-Webb figure out ways to eradicate himself from crunch-time possessions was the most intriguing subplot of the playoffs. Didn’t it crack you up when Webber would receive a high-post pass, spin 180 degrees so his back could face the basket—Don’t worry, I’m not shooting, have no fear!—then desperately look to shuffle the basketball to the nearest available King? Has anyone even played Hot Potato to that degree?
So how will we remember Webber? Ever since Calvin Schiraldi and Bob Stanley self-destructed in Game 6 of the ’86 World Series, I’ve been a big believer that microcosms mean more than you think in sports. Yeah, the Red Sox might have been one more out and fourteen different pitches away from winning the title—hold on, I’m gonna slam my head against the desk for old times’ sake (owwwwwwwww!)—but Boston’s cruddy relievers tortured Sox fans all season. Losing the title because the bullpen collapsed wasn’t exactly a shock to any Red Sox fan. And when you examine what happened in the 2002 Western Finals with a superior Kings team playing the increasingly dysfunctional Lakers, you see that the series hinged on three games: Game 4 (when Horry made a game-winning three-pointer because nobody on the Kings grabbed the initial two rebounds), Game 6 (the worst and most unfairly officiated game of this decade), and Game 7 (when the Kings had multiple chances to close the game and couldn’t get it done). Webber couldn’t have done anything about Game 6 short of killing Dick Bavetta with his bare hands, but he didn’t exactly dominate those last two games. Presented with a chance to define his career once and for all, he couldn’t get it done. It just wasn’t in him. Did he lose his confidence in big games after the infamous “time-out” game in college? Did his unhappy Bullets tenure prevent him from developing the necessary crunch-time chops until it was too late? Did he lack killer instinct in the first place? We’ll never know.
Here’s what we do know: Webber never took over when it truly mattered, even if he had more than enough talent to do so. That’s his legacy. If Webber’s career were a video game, I’d love to press the reset button, start over with Orlando never making that risky trade and see what happens. But that’s the thing about real life: you don’t have a reset button, and if you make a couple of poor decisions along the way, those decisions sometimes end up shaping the player or person you become. We will remember Webber as one of the best seventy-five NBA players ever, but we’ll also remember the potential for so much more.55 In an interesting twist, Webber retired and quickly emerged as a special talent for TNT and NBA TV: candid, handsome, eloquent, passionate, funny, capable of sounding “blacker” or “whiter” depending on his supporting cast. I remember watching one of his first appearances after he signed with TNT in 2008 and thinking, “Holy crap, C-Webb could be a fantastic TV guy!” And I was right. Although it was fitting that, right after Chris Webber retired, people were still wondering about his potential.
71. LENNY WILKENS

Resume: 15 years, 9 quality, 9 All-Stars … ’68 MVP runner-up … leader: assists (1x) … 4-year peak: 21–5–9 … Playoffs: 16–6–6
We can only place so much stock in All-NBA teams; after all, Latrell “Future Coach Choker” Sprewell goes down in history as one of the five best players in 1994. But how could Wilkens finish second in the ’68 MVP voting without making first-or second-team All-NBA that same season? Isn’t that impossible? I caught a few of Lenny’s games on tape (mostly All-Star contests back when everyone tried) and thought he had a fine command of those games, but they also illuminated why he’s the only NBA 50 at 50 member who failed to make an All-NBA team, or why he missed the Playoffs for each of his last seven seasons. Wilkens was very good and not great. The statistics and win totals back that up, and that’s before we tackle how the ABA/expansion dynamic skewed everyone’s stats from 1969 to 1976. Check out Lenny’s career arc and remember that he turned thirty right before the ’67–’68 season:
Wilkens (?66–’68): 18–5–7, 43% Wilkens (’69–’73): 20–5–9, 44%
So wait … from age thirty-one to age thirty-five, Lenny got slightly better? I doubt it. If Lenny was a B-plus for eight years, he jumped to an A-minus in a depleted/diluted league. Which is fine. But he shouldn’t have made 50 at 50 over Dennis Johnson, a better all-around player who achieved more success in a tougher era. If you’re giving him credit, congratulate Wilkens for being the last effective player-coach; he pulled double duty for the Sonics in his prime and led their ’72 team to 47 wins as their second-best player. Which leads us to a tangent: why hasn’t a team tried a player-coach since Dave Cowens did double duty on the ’79 Celtics? I believe it could work for four reasons. First, real coaches get fired all the time, relentlessly, over and over again. So we’re doing something wrong. (From 2004 to 2005, every coaching job in the East changed hands within eighteen months. Hire an NBA coach and there’s an overwhelming chance he’ll be gone within three years. The same guys seem to get passed around like a beer bong at a keg party, only nobody questions the wisdom of spending millions on someone who failed elsewhere.56 Just a few stand out every season: usually Gregg Popovich, Jerry Sloan and two other guys. Eighty percent of the coaching fraternity always seems interchangeable, ranging from half decent to “I wouldn’t hire that guy to manage a McDonald’s.”) Second, Russell won two titles as a player-coach so it can’t be that hard. (Sure, the game is more technical now and you have to break down game film and scouting reports. But couldn’t quality assistants handle 90 percent of that? It’s not football; only five guys play, game plans are fairly simple, and common sense usually prevails. Look at Phil Jackson: he’s been more spiritual adviser/caretaker/relationship therapist than X’s-and-O’s teacher and the dude has nine rings. The best NBA coaches don’t overthink things, which is perfect for a player-coach since you don’t have time to overthink.) Third, coaches usually get fired because they “stop reaching their players” or because “the team needs a spark.” Would a player ever tune out one of his best teammates, someone who leads by example on the floor each night? It’s the foundation of all teams: two or three players rising as alpha dogs, everyone else falling in line. Who knows the strengths and weaknesses of players better than someone playing with them? It’s no different from George Clooney directing a movie, right? And even though the CBA prohibits teams from paying a player for a nonplaying job, a team could convince a player to coach for free and make the “real” head coach his lead assistant.
The fourth and last reason is simpler: what better way for a moribund franchise to get their fans talking? No random coaching move would get a run-of-the-mill team more publicity and attention short of hiring Whoopi Goldberg or reuniting Spree and P.J. Besides, is it really dangerous to experiment with a job that already carries an 80–85 percent rate of failure? Of all the kooky NBA nuances that long ago disappeared—players smoking at halftime, players on the floor when they’re coked up, players inexplicably punching each other in the face—the player-coach is the one that should have endured. As soon as some billionaire reader buys me an NBA team to run, I’m bringing it back.57
70. DAVID THOMPSON

Resume: 9 years, 5 quality, 4 All-Stars (1 ABA) … top 10 ABA (75), top 5 NBA (’76, ’77) … 2 All-Star MVPs … 3-year peak: 26–5–4 … best player on ABA runner-up (76 Nuggets), averaged a 26–6–3 (11 G)
Lacks a conventional resume but aces the “Did he connect with fans on a spiritual level?” and “I’ve never seen anyone in my life like this guy!” tests. I remember attending a postmerger Nuggets-Celtics game and being so blown away by Thompson that my father’s innocuous comment, “Too bad we only get to see him once a year,” left me profoundly disappointed. Since we didn’t have SportsCenter or DirecTV back then, for all I knew, Thompson was dunking on everyone’s head ten times per game and I was missing it.
We’ll remember Thompson as the Intellivision to Jordan’s PlayStation 2, an original prototype for every high-flying two-guard who followed. Blessed with a lightning first step, a reliable jump shot, and a 44-inch vertical leap that had him handling jump balls for North Carolina State (not strange until you remember that seven-foot-four behemoth Tom Burleson played for them), Thompson had everything you’d want in your shooting guard except height. Listed at six foot four, Thompson was closer to six foot two and looks noticeably shorter than his contemporaries on tape. Didn’t matter. The dude soared through the air like a Bud Light daredevil bouncing off a trampoline.58 What really separated him was his zero-to-sixty explosiveness in traffic. Surrounded by four or five taller players, time and time again Thompson took your breath away by springing four feet to block a shot or dunk on someone’s head. He didn’t need a running start and didn’t need to bend his knees. Honestly, it was like watching a squirrel. In thirty-five years of attending NBA games, I’ve never seen anything remotely approaching the sight of Thompson’s leaping ability in person; he made you feel like you were watching a lousy sports movie with bad special effects where the lead character gets magic sneakers or something. You don’t earn the nickname “Skywalker” unless there’s a really good reason. I just wish someone had told this to Kenny Walker.
The defining Thompson story: During the same afternoon as Havlicek’s final game, Thompson was battling Gervin for the 1978 scoring title.59 Back then, the Boston Garden’s PA announcer rattled off NBA scores during time-outs (remember, we didn’t have T-shirt cannons and JumboTrons back then), so after giving the Nuggets-Pistons halftime score, he added, “David Thompson has 53 points,” and everyone gasped in disbelief. I remember thinking, “He’s gonna break 100! He’s gonna beat Wilt!” He ended up with 73 points, but the fact remains, Thompson was so explosive that an eight-year-old NBA fan honestly believed he could score 100-plus points in a game.60 So what happened to him? He developed a monster coke problem like so many other rich celebs in the late seventies, battled a variety of injuries and eventually blew out his knee after falling down a Studio 54 stairwell.61 When Jordan arrived in November 1984, Thompson was already gone. And maybe it’s impossible to capture the magnitude of Thompson’s premature demise, but screw it, let’s try. David Thompson was …
The most underrated superstar of the past thirty-five years
The single biggest NBA tragedy other than Lenny Bias
Two strong statements, right? Since you bought my book, I feel obligated to back them up. During the first two postmerger seasons (’77 and ’78), Thompson averaged a 27–5–4, shot 52 percent and made consecutive first-team All-NBA’s during one of the richest talent stretches in league history.62 How old was Thompson when he finished third in the MVP voting and nearly brought the Nuggets to the 1978 Finals? Twenty-three. Check out his numbers from ages twenty-two to twenty-four compared to other famous two-guards for that same age span:
63



So MJ, Kobe, Iverson,64 T-Mac, and Wade made the leap from twenty-three to twenty-four, but Thompson took a step backward. Why? Two words: nose candy. I can’t explain why twenty-four becomes such a pivotal age for athletic shooting guards,65 but that’s the year things apparently fall into place from a physical and mental standpoint, and drugs robbed Thompson of reaching his true potential. Since he couldn’t have possibly peaked at age twenty-three—that would defy everything that’s ever happened historically—if you include his hypothetical leap year at age twenty-four, here are Thompson’s first five seasons with drug-free projections:


Based on those numbers, we’re talking about a “top-three shooting guards ever” ceiling, which makes it so painful that the wheels came off. Imagine if Jordan had started doing loads of blow after the ’87 season, blew out his knee during a Mars Blackmon shoot and was effectively washed up at twenty-eight? That’s basically what happened to Thompson. I’m using the word “basically” because it’s unclear if Thompson had the same fiery competitive streak as Jordan; it’s also unclear if he was victimized by the cocaine era and/or too weak to handle fame and success. So let’s figure that out once and for all.
1973. Thompson popularizes the alley-oop and leads the Wolfpack to an undefeated record; they’re ineligible to play in the NCAA Tournament.66
1974. The Wolfpack outlast Maryland in triple OT to earn the ACC’s only NCAA bid (one of the most famous college games ever); shock Bill Walton’s UCLA in the semis, with Thompson hitting the game-winner in double overtime (another of the most famous college games ever); and thrash Marquette for the title, with Thompson winning the ’74 tourney MVP. That’s one of the greatest seasons ever by a college player, right up there with Princeton’s Bill Bradley (1965), Houston’s Elvin Hayes (1969), Kansas’ Danny Manning (1988) and Holy Cross’ Steve “Air Hermo” Herman (1990).67
1975. Wins every conceivable Player of the Year award but can’t carry the depleted Wolfpack past North Carolina for the lone ACC bid. Great story from this season: In one of the dumbest ideas in the history of mankind, dunking was outlawed in many college conferences thanks to the idiotic Lew Alcindor Rule. In Thompson’s last home game, he broke the rule with a thunderous second-half dunk, leading to the obligatory technical as well as near euphoria in the stands. By all accounts, this was one of the most randomly exciting moments in sports history. By the way, how much did Kareem suck? He even inadvertently caused a no-dunking ban.
1976. Wins ABA Rookie of the Year, gives Doc a worthy challenge in the watershed Dunk Contest, carries Denver to the Finals and makes Denver’s franchise enough of an asset that they get picked over Kentucky as one of the four merger teams.
1977. With everyone expecting Doc to take the postmerger NBA by storm, Thompson makes a bigger splash, beating Doc statistically and leading Denver to a league-high 50 wins before falling to Portland (the eventual champs) in the first round.
1978. After 48 wins and Thompson missing his first scoring title by a fraction of a point, Denver becomes the first ABA team to win a playoff series before falling to Seattle in the Conference Finals. That summer, Thompson signs the biggest contract in the history of professional sports: five years, $4 million. A shitload of money in 1978.
(Hold on …)
(Cue up the ominous Behind the Music music …)
And that’s when everything turned.
You can guess how the next few years turned out. I failed to find anything from 1973 to 1978 that made me think Thompson was anything other than Jordan before Jordan (a winner with a flair for the moment). He also understood something that Kobe and Jordan didn’t know right away: namely, that his team would win more if he sacrificed some of his numbers to make everyone better. In NBA TV’s Thompson documentary, Skywalker, Issel made the following testimonial: “All of his teammates loved him because he helped you win games, and he was the type of player that made everyone on the court better, not a player who subtracted from everyone else on the team to get his stats.”68 The biggest difference between Thompson and Jordan: Thompson’s vice (drugs) was infinitely worse for basketball than Jordan’s vice (gambling). Had Thompson skipped coke and gambled away millions on golf every summer, we’d be looking at a top-twenty guy historically, someone who would have altered the Western landscape and broken through with shoe commercials, mainstream marketing and everything else. Do Magic’s Lakers win five titles with Jordan before Jordan thriving in Denver and Walton’s feet holding up in Portland? I’m going out on a limb and saying no. What a shame. And that’s why Thompson’s abrupt career ended up being the NBA’s biggest tragedy except for Lenny Bias.
69. DENNIS RODMAN69

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 2 All-Stars … top 15 (’92, ’95) … leader: rebounds (7 straight times), FG% (1x) … All-Defense (8x, six 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’90, ’91) … 4-year peak: 7–18–2 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 8–14 (32 G) … played for 5 champs, started for three (’96, ’97, ’98 Bulls) … career: 13.2 RPG (13th)
Statistically, he’s one of the three greatest rebounders ever (along with Russell and Chamberlain) because he grabbed such a significant percentage of his team’s boards.70 As the years pass, nobody will remember that those numbers in San Antonio and Detroit spiked partly because Rodman never strayed from the basket and cared more about rebounding than anything else, even if that meant not helping a teammate who had just been beaten off the dribble. I’d rather have the Rodman from ’87 to ’91 (when he was such a destructive rebounder/defender off the bench) and ’96 to ’98 (when he cared about defense again and played Karl Malone so effectively in back-to-back Finals). Still, nobody will remember his considerable talents since Rodman’s legacy centers around abject insanity, colored hairdos, piercings and tattoos, an affair with Madonna, his Bad as I Wanna Be book, the time he kicked a cameraman, the indefensible way he screwed up the ’95 Spurs in the Conference Finals71 and the fact that he’s probably going to be found dead in a seedy Vegas hotel room within the next five years. Could the ’96 Bulls have won 72 games with Robert Horry instead of Rodman? No way. And doesn’t he deserve credit for fitting in so seamlessly with two pathologically competitive, historically unique teams (Isiah’s bad-boy Pistons and MJ’s postbaseball Bulls)? That’s why I have Rodman ranked fifteen spots higher than Horry. Four other notes augment Rodman’s case beyond five rings and jaw-dropping rebounding numbers.
He played for ten conference finalists in three cities, ten 50-win teams, and five 60-win teams, and he missed the Playoffs once in his career (a 40-win Pistons team in ’93). From his rookie season in Detroit through his final Bulls season in ’98, Rodman’s teams finished 574–298 in the regular season and 118–54 in the playoffs. Wow.
He guarded Larry Bird better than anyone. Nobody else came close. Other than Kevin McHale, nobody could defend so many different types of players effectively: Magic, Bird, Malone, Kemp, Barkley, Worthy, Jordan …
When the ’89 Pistons won their first title, Rodman averaged 24 minutes and 10.0 rebounds in 17 playoff games and doubled as the best defensive player in the league. On those two Pistons title teams, he was their third most indispensable guy behind Dumars and Isiah.
During his last good season on the ’98 Bulls—at age thirty-six, when he was partying incessantly, to the point that MJ and Jackson had an intervention with him—Rodman played 80 regular-season games (15.0 RPG), then another 20 playoff games (11.8 RPG), logging nearly 3,600 minutes in all. The man was a physical freak. We’ll see another fifty Horace Grants before we see another Dennis Rodman. And thank God. I think one was enough.
68. PETE MARAVICH

Resume: 10 years, 7 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’76, ’77), top 10 (’73, ’78) … 3-year peak: 28–5–6 … leader: scoring (1x) … never won a Playoffs in his prime
Any late-night-cable junkie has stumbled across a Steve Prefontaine movie and felt excited (because it’s the one with Billy Crudup) or bummed out (because it’s the one with Jared Leto). If I see Crudup or Jack Bauer’s dad, I’m in. If I see the cockeyed blonde from Melrose Place or Leto wearing one of those awful wigs, I’m out. Either way, I always ask myself the same question: “Why did Hollywood feel the need to release competing biopics about a long-distance runner who finished fourth in the 1972 Olympics?” One would have been plenty, right? When competing Maravich biographies hit the bookstores in 2007, that seemed similarly strange because Pistol had died nineteen years before, never won anything other than some scoring titles and never played in the Final Four or past the second round of the NBA playoffs. We always hear that Bird and Magic saved the NBA from the depressing seventies. Doesn’t that mean they saved it from players like Maravich?
Then you remember that two documentaries and a movie were made about him; that fans tell Pistol stories and trade Pistol tapes to this day; that he seduced a whole new generation of fans on YouTube; that he may have been the greatest H-O-R-S-E player ever; that he destroyed an aging Frazier for 68 points in 1977 (and would have broken 70 if they hadn’t whistled him for two cheap fouls in the final two minutes);72 that he blew out his knee in ’78 and was never the same; and that, out of all the pre-1980 stars, it was Pistol whose career would have been transformed most by a three-point line. That thing was made for him. Hell, he was shooting threes before they were threes.73 Not only would the line have boosted his offensive stats, but opponents would have been forced to defend him 25 feet from the basket (inadvertently opening the floor for him). In every conceivable way, Pistol Pete was ahead of his time. Seeing him in person was like seeing twelve Globetrotters rolled into one: no pass was too farfetched, no shot too far away. He’d glide across the court—all rubbery limbs, ball attached to his hand like a yo-yo, blank expression on his face—and you never knew what would happen next, just that the scoreboard never mattered as much as the show. Kids from that era remember his appearances on CBS’s halftime H-O-R-S-E contests more fondly than any of his games. Even his basketball cards were cool, like the one from 1975, when he sported an extended goatee and looked like a count.
You can imagine my delight when Auerbach plucked an end-of-the-line Pistol off waivers during Bird’s rookie season. We picked up the Pistol for nothing? I hadn’t seen him in a while, though. Woefully gaunt and out of shape, limping on a bum knee and wearing a godawful perm that made him look like Arnold Horshack, Pistol struggled mightily to blend in with his first good NBA team. The Garden crowd adopted him anyway. Every time he jumped off the bench to enter a game, we roared. Every time he sank a jumper, we went bonkers. When he shared the court with Bird, Cowens, and Archibald—four of my top seventy—there was always a sense that something special could happen.74 But like an abused dog from the pound, there was too much damage and too many bad habits picked up over the years. After Bill Fitch buried him in the ’80 playoffs, Pistol retired the following fall and just missed playing for the ’81 champs. I remember being particularly crushed by the whole thing, like I’d been given an expensive TV for free and it broke down after two months. I never knew that there was substantial evidence that he was a drunk and a loon, one of the first athletes pushed too far by an overbearing father,75 someone who believed in UFOs and couldn’t find peace until he retired and found Christianity in 1982. When he dropped dead at age forty, it was, fittingly, while playing a casual game of pickup hoops.
Even those who loved watching him have trouble putting his career in context. At dinner in Boston two years ago, my father was perplexed about the existence of two Maravich books until we spent the next few minutes remembering him and inadvertently making their case. Dad recalled that there was usually one nationally televised college game a week in the 1960s and “you tuned in every weekend praying LSU was on.” When my wife asked which current player reminded us of Maravich, Dad’s answer was simply, “There will never be another Maravich.” We tried but couldn’t express the experience of watching someone play on a completely different plane from everyone else. He made impossible shots look easy. He saw passing angles his teammates couldn’t even imagine. He was the most entertaining player alive, and the most tortured one as well. You marveled at Pete Maravich, but you worried about him, too.
Stick Pistol in the modern era and he’d become the most polarizing figure in sports, someone who combined T.O.’s insanity, A-Rod’s devotion to statistics and Nash’s flair for delighting the crowds. Skip Bayless would blow a blood vessel on Cold Pizza (now called ESPN First Take) screaming about Pistol’s ball hogging. The SportsCenter guys would create cute catchphrases for his no-looks. Bloggers would chronicle his bizarre comments and ghastly hairdos. Fantasy owners would revere him as if he were LaDainian Tomlinson or Johan Santana. Nike would launch a line of Pistol shoes. He’d be the subject of countless homemade YouTube videos and have a trophy case filled with ESPYs. Yup, it’s safe to say the Pistol was ahead of his time in every respect. And when Hollywood makes a big-budget movie about him someday, I hope they stop at one.
67. EARL MONROE

Resume: 13 years, 7 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’68 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’69) … 3-year peak: 24–4–5 … 2nd-best player on 1 runner-up (’71 Bullets), started for 1 champ (’73 Knicks) and 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks)
You could make a case for bumping Pearl down to a spot in the mid-eighties. He only made one All-NBA team and four All-Star teams. He got torched by Goodrich in the ’72 Finals and averaged just a 16–3–3 over 16 games in the Playoffs for the ’73 Knicks (his only ring). His knees and hips started going on him within his first few NBA years, transforming him from a gifted all-around player to a scorer and that’s it. But can you blame Pearl that his career started late? After graduating from high school in South Philly and failing to get scholarship offers from any major colleges, Monroe worked as a shipping clerk for a year before making a “comeback” at Winston-Salem College, a tiny black college in North Carolina, spending the next four years ravaging his knees but delighting fans in nontelevised college games and soon-to-be-legendary summer playground games in Philly and New York. Much like Maravich, the Pearl wasted two potential All-Star years in college because NBA teams were only allowed to draft four-year seniors. By the time he joined the Bullets, the Pearl was twenty-three years old and carrying God knows how much asphalt mileage on his knees.76
Doesn’t matter. We’re invoking the Walton Corollary here: even if a guy peaked for just two or three years as a truly great player, that’s more appealing than someone who never peaked at all. You know someone was great when he had two playground nicknames (Black Jesus and Magic) and a mainstream nickname (Earl the Pearl); moved Woody Allen to write a famous magazine profile about hanging out with him; invented a specific signature move (the spin move);77 became immortalized in He Got Game even though the movie was released twenty-five years after his prime; and owned such an unconventional offensive game based on spins and herky-jerky hesitation moves that nobody has replicated it since.78 Ask any over-forty-five NBA junkie about Pearl and they practically have a John-Madden-raving-about-Brett-Favre-level orgasm about him, as well as the famous Pearl/Clyde duels that forced the Knicks to say, “Screw it, we can’t stop this guy, let’s trade for him.” So maybe his career wasn’t much different statistically from those of Hudson, Jo Jo, Jeff Malone, Rolando Blackmon, Calvin Murphy or Randy Smith. But none of those guys had their improvisational skills compared to a jazz musician’s—the most frequent analogy used to describe Pearl’s style—or inspired stories like the one David Halberstam captured in Breaks through the eyes of Maurice Lucas.
One day Earl Monroe, then at the peak of his fame as the star of the Baltimore Bullets (and before Julius Erving had replaced him, a special kind of hero to black fans and players since he could do what no one else could do), showed up. The word had been out for several days that Monroe would play and the crowd was much bigger than usual. When Monroe missed the start of play the disappointment among the other players and the crowd was tangible. Then, ten minutes into the game, a huge beautiful car, half the length of the street, had shown up—it was a Rolls, Luke had known instinctively—and out had come Earl Monroe. He was wearing the most ragged shorts imaginable, terrible ratty sneakers and an absolutely beautiful Panama hat. That, Luke knew immediately, was true style, the hat and the shorts and the Rolls. The crowd had begun to shout Magic, Magic, Magic (his playground nickname, different than his white media nickname which, given the nature of sportswriters who like things to rhyme, was the Pearl). Monroe had put on a show that day, dancing, whirling, faking, spinning, orchestrating his moves as he wished, never any move repeated twice, as if to repeat was somehow a betrayal of his people. Luke had watched him, taking his eyes off Monroe only long enough to watch the crowd watching him. The Black Jesus, he had thought, that’s what he is—the Black Jesus.
(That’s right, Daddy. Earl Monroe was pretty good.)
66. ADRIAN DANTLEY

Resume: 15 years, 12 quality, six All-Stars … 1977 Rookie of the Year … top 10 (’81, ’84) … leader: scoring (2x), minutes (1x) … career: made FT (6th) … 30-plus PPG (4x) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 28–8–3 (21 G) … career: 54% FG (20th), 6,382 FT made (6th) … traded five times … 20K Point Club
65. ALEX ENGLISH

Resume: 15 years, 9 quality, 8 All-Stars … top 10 (’82, ’83, ’84) … 3-year peak: 29–5–4 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 29–8–3 (21 G) … leader: scoring (1x), FG (3x) … 3 teams before prime79… won just 2 Playoffs in his prime … eight 2K-point seasons … 25K Point Club
There was common ground here beyond the whole “scoring forwards with androgynous first names” thing. Dantley and English entered the league in 1976, bounced around early in their careers, peaked on Western contenders that could never get over the hump, gave up almost as many points as they scored and can’t be compared to any current players. Dantley was a six-foot-three low-post guy (number of guys fitting that description today: zero) who reached the free throw line so frequently, Bob Ryan decided after one particularly goofy Dantley game that any weird box score line should just be called a “Dantley.”80 Few were more efficient offensively, as evidenced by Dantley retiring with the highest field goal percentage (54 percent) of any noncenter. And English was a lanky forward who never seemed to get hot—he’d score 7–8 points per quarter and end up around 30 every game, only you barely noticed him except for the fact that he never seemed to miss. We’ll probably see twenty more Englishes before we see another Dantley, only because Dantley’s physical, unorthodox style isn’t something taught at basketball camps and AAU scrimmages, where every quirk and idiosyncracy get banged out of every player by the time he turns fifteen.
What were the deciding factors for English getting the nod? Dantley was a pain in the bum, wearing out his welcome with five teams (all of which accepted 30 to 80 cents on the dollar to get rid of him).81 Everyone loved English. That’s the biggest reason. If you’re looking for a dumb but karmic reason, neither guy played for a champion, but English filmed a hauntingly bad movie called Amazing Grace and Chuck in which his character “starred” for the ’86 Celtics.82 For one “game” scene in that movie, English donned a Boston uniform and played 20 minutes with Bird, Parish, McHale and DJ in an exhibition game at the Garden. This actually happened! That’s right, five of the top sixty-four guys on this list played in a legally sanctioned NBA contest together, and not just that, but English’s cameo happened with one of the greatest teams ever. Top that one, Adrian Dantley. My favorite part of this story: the NBA allowing an All-Star player to play significant minutes for another team—kind of a big deal, when you think about it—just to accommodate one of the twenty worst sports movies ever made. Didn’t anyone in Stern’s office read the script? Or the scripts for Celtic Pride, Eddie, and Like Mike, for that matter? I always pictured Stern seeing Chuck, then immediately firing everyone involved in the English decision.
Anyway, there are two types of great players: guys we’ll see again, and guys we’ll never see again. Any rational fan would agree that Jordan was the greatest basketball player ever. (Crap, I just spoiled the ending to Chapter 10. Oh, well.) But we’ll see another Jordan again. Why do I say this with such confidence? Because we’ve seen variations of Jordan already. Jordan was an evolutionary version of Thompson (his hero, by the way), and Kobe and Wade have re-created Jordan’s game reasonably well. We’ll see a few more superathletic, hypercompetitive shooting guards who are built like wide receivers, jump like kangaroos and possess the innate ability to control their bodies in midair. We won’t see another Jordan, but we will see someone every ten years who brings many of his best qualities to the table. Okay, so when will we see another Dantley? Really, a six-foot-three post-up player83 with a hundred different upfakes and herky-jerky moves who creates wiggle room in the paint with his abnormally gigantic ass? He was the J-Lo of NBA players. I’m seeing that again in my lifetime? There might be another Jordan, but there will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be another Dantley. In his honor, here’s an All-Star team of players from the post-Russell era whose like will never be seen again, for genetic or physical reasons.
Starters: Kareem, Bird, Barkley, Magic, Gervin
Sixth man: McHale
Bench: Dantley, Maravich, Iverson/DJ,84 Manute Bol, Spud Webb, Paul
Mokeski Injured List: Darko Milicic, Kurt Nimphius, Ken Bannister
Since the first ten players cracked the Pyramid and earned love in this section, we’ll concentrate on the last six guys and why they made it.
Manute. Let’s just say there haven’t been too many seven-foot-six, 200-pound Sudanese centers from the University of Bridgeport with tribal scars on their foreheads. You’ll think I’ve been drinking again, but the facts back me up: Manute happened to be an underrated backup, getting decent minutes for five different playoff teams, averaging 5 blocks as a rookie, cracking 300 blocks three times and contributing significantly (20 minutes a game, 5.8 rebounds, 4.3 blocks) for the TMC Warriors that made the second round of the ’89 Playoffs. More importantly, of all the players I watched walk by me in the Boston Garden tunnel, only four stood out: Michael Jordan (because he was so overwhelmingly famous), David Robinson (we’ll get to why later), Larry Bird (ditto) and Manute. He was breathtaking in person, and not just because of his surreal height and skin so dark that it made him seem purple.85 When Manute emerged from the tunnel, we’d stop talking and gawk with our mouths agape, like everyone watching the aliens emerge from the Close Encounters UFO. It was incredible. I would have bought a ticket just to watch Manute Bol stroll by me.
Spud. We’ve seen effective tiny/pesky/speedy point guards before, but Spud was the only one with game-changing ups. If he made an above-the-rim play at home, his crowd would get more charged up than a red-hot craps table. Know what else? For a change-of-pace backup with a puncher’s chance of completely screwing up the other team for a few minutes, you’re not finding anyone better than the Spudster: playing for quality Atlanta teams in ’86 and ’88, Spud averaged 19 minutes, 10 points, 6 assists and at least one “Holy shit!” play in over 21 games in the Playoffs. I always thought he was a genuine asset.86
Mokeski. I wrote about the “power of Mokeski” so many times for ESPN.com that I’m now prominently featured on his Wikipedia page. A backup center who somehow lasted for twelve seasons, poor Mokeski was extraordinarily unathletic and ran like he had two prosthetic legs; if that weren’t enough, he tried to bring back the curly-perm/wispy-mustache combo that should have died in the early eighties. Throw in male pattern baldness and a disappearing chin and Mokeski looked like a Jersey cop who should have been standing in a donut line. So you can only imagine how bizarre it was that he had a semieffective game—physical defender, decent banger, reliable 18-footer, never did anything he couldn’t do—and averaged 20 minutes for a 59-win Bucks team in 1985. I loved Mokeski to the degree that I spent three solid years searching for his game-worn jersey on eBay before finally giving up.
Darko. A seven-foot Croatian teenager with the upside of a cross between Derrick Coleman and David Robinson gets drafted too high by the wrong team, faces impossible expectations,87 folds from the pressure, starts looking more pale/depressed/overwhelmed/bitter than a postpuberty Macaulay Culkin, then self-combusts to the point that he’s completely and hopelessly useless before even turning old enough to legally rent a car? This will never happen again. I am almost positive.
Nimphius. Imagine Jon Bon Jovi’s middle part from the Slippery When Wet world tour merged with George Clooney’s extended mullet from The Facts of Life, with a dash of late-eighties Tommy Byron thrown in for good measure. Then make him a seven-foot twelfth man and put him in tight blue eighties warm-ups on Detroit. There you go.
Bannister. I’m not sure how Bannister, a forward with the Knicks in the mid-eighties, got the nickname “the Animal.” But I think I have a few ideas. Every time Kenny Bannister walked through the Garden tunnel, everyone went quiet, like something awful was happening.88 He’s the captain of the Thank God They Didn’t Have HD Back Then All-Stars, which include Dennis Rodman, Greg “Cadillac” Anderson, Gheorge Muresan, Brook Steppe,89 Tyrone Hill, the Cummings brothers (Terry and Pat), Mokeski, Anthony Mason, David Wesley, Ervin “No Magic” Johnson, the ’87 Celtics, the ’02 Kings, and the immortal Popeye Jones, about whom I once wrote, “Much like the Grand Canyon and the Sistine Chapel, you really have to see Popeye in person.”
64. JERRY LUCAS

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … top 5 (’65, ’66, ’68), top 10 (’64, ’67) … 4-year peak: 21–19–3 … leader: FG% (1x) … played for 1 champ (’73 Knicks), started for 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks, averaged a 19–11 in 16 Playoffs G) … traded twice in prime
What do we make of this guy? His teams never won in his prime. He was traded twice in his prime: once for Jim King and Billy Turner (after Lucas had averaged an 18–18 for the season, no less), once straight up for Cazzie Russell. He was infamous—repeat: infamous—for chasing down end-of-the-quarter heaves and ripping down uncontested free throw misses to pad his rebounding stats. Of the NBA 50 at 50 guys, he’s one of the few who never generate feedback like “Man, you should have seen Lucas play” or “You know who was something? That Jerry Lucas!” In today’s era of superskilled power forwards who can run the floor and play above the rim, it’s hard to imagine Jerry averaging an 18–10 in 2008, much less a 20–20. For instance, let’s say we grabbed Tyler Hansbrough before his rookie season and planted a chip in his brain that gave him Lucas’ rebounding instincts. Where do you see his career going? Does he average a 20–12 every game? I honestly don’t know. So that’s the question with Lucas—were those numbers accomplished because of the style of play (run-and-gun, lots of possessions) and lack of athletic forwards? Partially, yes. Still, those numbers were mildly mind-blowing: Lucas nearly averaged a 20–20 for four straight years, giving Oscar a running mate when the Royals extended Boston to two deciding games. During a five-year stretch in a loaded league (1964–68), he made three first-team All-NBA’s and two second teams. He also had a deadly one-handed push shot from 20-plus feet, so if you’re projecting him historically, it has to be mentioned that Lucas would have been more valuable with a three-point line. We’ll remember him for his photographic memory,90 a storied college and Olympics career, and an NBA career in which he was basically Truck Robinson91 with a better career peak. If we’re picking power forwards from that era, I’d rather have Dave DeBusschere.
63. RAY ALLEN

Resume: 13 years, 10 quality, 9 All-Stars … top 10 (’05), top 15 (’01) … 3-year peak: 22–5–4, 43% 3FG, 88% FT … ’01 Playoffs: 25–6–4, 48% 3FG (18 G) … ’05 Playoffs: 27–4–4 (11 G) … ’08 Finals: 20–5–4, record 22 threes … career: 21–4–4, 40% 3FG, 89% FT … career leader: threes (2nd)
Gave his career a historical boost by playing so brilliantly in Boston’s last 8 games of the ’08 Playoffs, averaging a 21–5–4, shooting 52 percent, making 30 of 56 threes, sparking Sasha Vujacic’s chair-punching tantrum in Game 4 (after nearly breaking Sasha’s ankles on his game-clinching basket), playing surprisingly stellar defense on Rip Hamilton and Kobe Bryant, making the biggest shots in Game 5 against Detroit and Game 4 against L.A., then finishing off the Lakers in Game 6 with a barrage of second-half threes.92 Already considered one of the best clutch shooters of his generation, Allen cemented that reputation despite struggling so badly in the first two rounds that one idiot writer (okay, it was me) deemed his third-round matchup with Wally Szezerbiak a wash. My take after the Finals: “I can’t remember another Playoffs in any sport quite like the one Allen had; it was like watching a dead person climb out of a coffin at an open-casket funeral like nothing ever happened.” A rejuvenated Ray-Ray kept it going the following season, when he was the most consistent star on another 60-plus-win team (18–4–3, 49% FG, 41% 3FG, 95% FT and a number of clutch shots) and vaulted himself up another few Pyramid spots. He’s showing no signs of decline with his mid-thirties looming. None. So assuming he continues to thrive in that role of three-point threat, clutch shooter, veteran leader and cooler93 like Reggie Miller did (and Miller did it well into his thirties), Allen might jump another eight to ten spots before everything is said and done. Amazing.
(Post-2009 Playoffs Addition: Allen pulled to a dead heat with No. 62 on this list after a sparkling performance in Round One, starring in three ESPN Classic games, sinking a game-winning three and two game-tying threes, scoring 51 points in Game 6 and earning some long overdue, “Wow, Ray Allen is really good” national chatter.)
For his nine-year prime (1999–2007), Ray-Ray was remarkably efficient (23–5–4, 45% FG, 40% 3FG, 90% FT), had the prettiest jumper of any star player, and rarely attempted anything he couldn’t do. If he were a baseball player, he would have been Wade Boggs—not a franchise guy, but someone with a few elite skills (milking pitch counts, getting on base, stroking singles and rarely missing a game, in Boggs’ case) that made him a genuine asset as long as you surrounded him with other quality players. Allen played on only two contenders in his prime (the ’01 Bucks and ’05 Sonics), which makes me wonder how we’d remember him if he’d thrived on Miller’s Indiana teams from 1994 to 2004 … or, conversely, how we’d remember Reggie had he spent his prime relying on low-post scoring, shot blocking, and rebounding from Ervin Johnson, Jerome James, Pre-drag Drobniak, Armon Gilliam, Tractor Traylor, Scott Williams, Reggie Evans, Jason Caffey, Danny Fortson, Vitaly Potapenko, Nick Collison, Johan Petro, Robert Swift and a washed-up Anthony Mason.94 You can’t blame Allen for never sniffing the Finals until 2008, especially when the NBA rigged the 2001 Eastern Finals so Iverson could advance to the next round. But that’s for the next book.
One more thing: big props to Ray-Ray for giving a startlingly capable performance as Jesus Shuttlesworth in He Got Game. Sure, he was no Bernard King (we’ll get to him), but his acting chops were solid and he even carried off a threesome with real-life porn stars Chasey Lain and Jill Kelly, as well as one of the better sequences in any recent sports movie: Allen’s climactic one-on-one game with Denzel Washington (playing his father) that wasn’t scripted by Spike Lee, leading to an incredible turn of events where Denzel scored the first four points of the game off an increasingly pissed-off-in-real-life Allen, who quickly scored the next ten and saved himself from getting mocked by the camera crew for the rest of the shoot. Do you think Pearl or Maravich could have pulled off Jesus Shuttlesworth? That’s just enough to sneak him into the low sixties in the Pyramid. While we’re here, allow me three more thoughts on Ray/Jesus:
You know how NBA teams use movie clips to get fans fired up during games? For years, I’ve had a running joke about which clip would be the worst possible choice, finally deciding it would the scene from The Shining when Jack Nicholson comes flying out of nowhere and buries an ax into Scatman Crothers’ chest. I always thought that would lead to forty-five seconds of horrified silence. But imagine a big Allen three-pointer, followed by a visitor’s time-out and the crowd going bonkers, abruptly followed by the JumboTron playing Ray’s threesome from He Got Game … actually, what am I saying? That would lead to even more cheering! Nothing will ever top the Jack/Scatman scene.95
With Denzel in the house, L.A. missed a chance to screw with Allen before Game 5 of the 2000 Finals: they should have shown Denzel scoring those four He Got Game baskets on the JumboTron, then cut to a grinning Denzel sitting courtside. They even could have had him dressed like Papa Shuttlesworth just to mess with Ray’s head—he could have worn a fake afro, the red and black Nike outfit and an electronic tracking bracelet on his right sneaker, then sat between Lain and Kelly. You can’t tell me Allen wouldn’t have been freaked out. Why don’t teams think of this stuff?
My theory about why Game turned out to be so disappointing: In the spring of ’98, Spike delivered a 136-minute cut of Game to four Touchstone studio executives. All of them liked the movie. All of them thought it was about thirty-five to forty minutes too long and needed to be chopped down. All of them agreed that the subplot with Denzel and the hooker was depressing and should be jettisoned. They also asked Lee to reshoot the ending, since the original (Denzel getting double-crossed and going back to jail) made them want to inhale a garageful of carbon monoxide. And they wanted Spike to stop kidding around and use a real soundtrack, because obviously the movie was dying for hip-hop and droning jazz made about as much sense as Garth Brooks. So Spike agreed to everything. Begrudgingly The Touchstone execs promised to stay in touch, then flew back to Los Angeles … only their plane was struck by a meteor and they were never seen again. Meanwhile, Spike still had a movie to release. Someone else from Touchstone called to check in, leading to this exchange:
EXEC: How’s the movie coming?”
SPIKE: Good, good. Just finished the final cut.
EXEC: Great! You incorporated the notes from the meteor guys, right?
SPIKE (smiling): Ummmmm … yeah. Fixed everything.
EXEC: Fantastic! Can’t wait to see it!
And that’s how we ended up with the all-time “that should have been better” sports movie. Potential can be a dangerous thing. And yet I digress.96
62. REGGIE MILLER

Resume: 15 years, 11 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 15 (’95, ’96, ’98) … 3-year peak: 22–3–3 … 2-year playoffs peak: 24–3–2, 89 threes, 42% 3FG (33 G) … leader: FT% (5x), threes (2x) … Playoffs: 20.6 points, 89% FT (144 G) … 80-plus games (10x) … career: threes (1st), Playoffs threes (1st), 88.8% FT (9th)
If you’re from Indiana, take a deep breath before we proceed. Then take another one. And another. Think happy thoughts. Get yourself into a good place. I’ll wait for you.
(Twiddling my thumbs.)
(Humming happily to myself.)
You ready? Try not to take the following few paragraphs personally; I have no interest in feuding with Indiana, the same place that gave us Hickory High, David Letterman, Larry Legend and my hypothetical Pyramid. I want you to like this book. Every decision, comment and argument has been carefully made and thought out in an unbiased way (even with regards to that ninny Kareem). Please know that I have nothing against Reggie Miller other than his refusal to sell Marv Albert’s jokes on TNT. That bugs me. Nothing during his career annoyed me other than the way he flopped to get calls (hey, he wasn’t the only one). Even his pansy dance after draining a game-winner against Chicago in the ’98 Eastern Finals didn’t bother me. I liked watching Reggie play. I really did. Which makes what you’re about to read so painful. I’ll even put it in italics to soften the blow a little.
Reggie Miller was the most overrated “superstar” of the past thirty years.
(Exhale, people from Indiana. Work with me. We’re gonna get through this. Did I mention that Breaking Away is one of my favorite sports movies?)
Here are the facts. Reggie played for sixteen seasons (1988 to 2005), his prime coinciding with the weakest stretch of talent since the merger (1994–98). Twenty-one superstars or near-superstars crossed paths with Reggie, all mortal locks for the All-Star team at their peaks, all of whom could be recognized by one name: Jordan, Bird, Barkley, Magic, Isiah, Hakeem, Robinson, Mailman, Moses, Shaq, Kobe, Garnett, Iverson, Payton, Nash, Nowitzki, Stockton, Pippen, Ewing, Duncan and ’Nique. For Reggie to earn the title “superstar,” his career should have been just as successful and substantial as those of everyone else on that list, right? So why did Reggie end up with the lowest number of All-Star Game appearances of anyone on that list (five; nobody else had fewer than seven)? Also, Reggie was the only one who didn’t make at least three combined appearances on first-second-team All-NBA’s. Oh, wait … he didn’t have any.
Here’s what that means: At no point was Reggie considered one of the NBA’s top ten players for a single season. Nine of his contemporaries at shooting guard made All-NBA (first or second): Jordan, Drexler, Dumars, Latrell Sprewell, Mitch Richmond, Kobe, T-Mac, Iverson and Ray Allen. Reggie only made third-team All-NBA three times (’95, ’96 and ’98). That’s it. And his reputation as a “great” Playoffs player has been slightly overblown. The Pacers were bounced from the first round in his first four trips to the Playoffs.97 During their extended ’94 Playoffs run, everyone remembers Miller’s trash-talking duel with Spike Lee (25 points in the fourth quarter of Game 5 at MSG), but nobody mentions Game 7, when he went 2-for-10 in the second half, air-balled what would have been the game-winning 20-footer with 5 seconds remaining, then accidentally committed a flagrant foul on John Starks and killed their last chance.98 During the ’95 Playoffs, Reggie came up big in Game 7 of the Knicks series (29 points) but no-showed in Game 7 when Orlando won by 21 points. During the ’99 Eastern Finals, New York’s Allan Houston torched Reggie and the heavily favored Pacers in a deciding Game 6. Like always with beloved athletes, we tend to forget bad memories and remember the good ones. Let the record show that Indiana was 9–15 in elimination games and 3–5 in deciding Game 5’s or Game 7’s during Reggie’s career. I’m just saying. That’s why Miller headlines an extensive group of Guys Who Had Great Careers but Weren’t Quite Franchise Players. On the flip side, Reggie’s flair for The Moment stood out over everyone else from his era except Jordan. We’ll remember him as an accomplished clutch player, as well as a historically good three-point bomber and free throw shooter, someone capable of being the crunch-time scorer on a top-five team (which Indiana was in ’94, ’95, ’98 and ’00). If Indiana was protecting a lead in the final minute, you couldn’t foul Reggie because he was a world-class cooler and a mortal lock to drain both free throws. And nobody—repeat: nobody—received more ridiculous calls than Reggie over the last twelve years, so either the officials enjoyed watching him or David Stern made the desperate order after Jordan’s baseball sabbatical: “We need more superstars—from now on, Reggie Miller gets every call!”99
Here’s the problem: superstars affect games even when they’re missing shots, but Reggie was a mediocre defensive player who couldn’t rebound or create shots for teammates, someone who needed an offense constructed in a specific way so he could succeed. Since he couldn’t consistently beat good defenders off the dribble, the Pacers sprinted him around a series of picks—almost like a mouse going through a maze—to spring him for open looks, which meant their big men needed to keep setting picks, their point guard needed to kill time waiting for him to get open … basically, everyone else tailored their games to his game. Can you win a title that way? Obviously not. And if you want to get stat-dorky, seriously, how difficult could it be to play 36 minutes and C-plus defense and finish with a 21–3–3 every night? That’s what Reggie averaged from 1990 to 2001. You can win a title with your second-best guy giving you those stats, but not your best guy. In fairness to Reggie, Indiana always asked him to do too much—at the end of close games, you always knew the ball was going to him, something he embraced and enjoyed, but still. Unlike Stockton, McHale, Worthy, Drexler, DJ and Pippen, Reggie never played with anyone better than him (the biggest reason Indiana never won a title).100 He wins points for excelling over an exceptionally long period of time, and since he was a unique player, it felt like his historical impact was bigger than it was. Nobody had bigger stones in big moments, a crucial quality that unquestionably lifted his teammates. He made enough game-winners that NBA TV ran a Reggie mini-marathon during the 2005 season. And he pretty much saved professional basketball in Indiana, which is why everyone loves him so much there.
Still, how does what’s described in the previous paragraph make you a superstar? During his best Playoff run in 1995, Reggie averaged 25.5 points over 17 games as the Pacers fell one game short of the Finals.101 In the 2000 Playoffs, he averaged 24 points over 22 games as the Pacers lost to the Lakers in six. He was what he was: a streaky shooting guard who scared opponents when it mattered but didn’t do much else. On a very good team, he could be the difference between 45 wins and out in the first round and 55 wins and playing in the third round, which doesn’t make him any different from fifteen other guys of his era. Reggie was really a poor man’s Sam Jones: a genuine asset on a good team, a crunch-time killer and someone who couldn’t win a title unless he played with someone better than him. Does that make you a superstar? I say no. Of course, you might disagree, like my old friend Eric “Toast” Marshall did: “I think it depends on your definition of the word ‘superstar.’ He’s been the marquee player for a good team for seventeen years. That qualifies in my book. He has been a devastating player, one whom the entire other team always has to be conscious of. Someone should do a study on the shooting percentage of the guy guarding Reggie in playoff games. I’ll bet it’s like 37 percent. That kind of work away from the ball is as valuable as being a great passer or great rebounder because it creates shots for everyone (think Rip Hamilton). Also, the Indiana offense benefited greatly by his movement without the ball. Many mediocre players were successful playing with Reggie. Name one significant player on the team who got better after leaving the Pacers (Best, Davis, Rose, etc). You can’t.”
All great points. Unfortunately, it’s my book. I say that Reggie wasn’t a superstar. On the other hand, he was memorable enough to earn nearly 1,400 words and become our cutoff guy for Level 1. Now if he’d only start selling Marv’s jokes.
1. I would have gone with Tom “the Middle Part” Chambers, eventually shortened to just “the Part.”
2. Bird delighted in torching Chambers, Alex English, Kelly Tripucka and Kiki Vandeweghe. If he had played for a West Coast team in the mid-’80s, you could have added 3 PPG to Bird’s averages from those four guys alone.
3. His character had an unstoppable dunk move in the Lakers vs. Celtics video game, which counts for … something. Not sure what.
4. Worthy’s career stats: 17.6 PPG, 5.1 RPG, 52% FG, 77% FT, two third-team All-NBA’s. Chambers’ career stats: 18.1 PPG, 6.1 RPG, 47% FG, 81% FT, two second-team All-NBA’s. I’m just sayin’.
5. No guard played more than 30 playoff games and averaged more minutes than Jo Jo’s 42.9 except Allen Iverson, who averaged 45-plus but only played 10-plus playoff games twice.
6. In Game 6 of a ’74 series in Buffalo, Jo Jo got fouled at the buzzer of a tie game, then calmly drained the winning FT (and another for good measure) to clinch the series. Only a Buffalo team could lose like that.
7. Back in the late ’70s, this was the single best exhibit in the Hall of Fame, as well as the precursor to Chris Connelly’s tearjerker features on SportsCenter. Let’s hope I didn’t give Connelly any ideas. Uh-oh, he’s driving to the cemetery to interview Maurice Stokes’ coffin … somebody stop him!
8. You might remember Svenson starring as vigilante sheriff Buford Pusser in the classic ’70s action trilogy, Walking Tall. Or maybe you don’t. I just felt like writing the name Buford Pusser.
9. This kid was the real-life Spaulding Smails. There’s a significant chance he drove his family’s boat into a Charlestown pier later that night.
10. Price would have been a potential Pyramid guy if he hadn’t blown out his knee. Even then, he still made a top five and three top fifteens and brought the Cavs within two wins of the Finals. He gets my vote for Most Underrated Guy of the Nineties.
11. One of my great regrets in life is that I never had a chance to tell Rick Pitino this story when he was thinking about trading Celtics rookie Chauncey Billups after fifty f*cking games.
12. Sikma’s resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 7 All-Stars; starter on 1 champ (’79 Sonics) and 1 runner-up (’78); 5-year peak: 19–11–4; ’79 playoffs: 15–12–3 (17 G); fourth-best blondafroperm behind Ian Ziering, Larry Bird, and Tweety’s buddy in Bad Boys (narrowly edging Dan Gladden, Wally Backman, and Sid Vicious). When Glenn Close wore a blond perm for The Big Chill, she told her hair stylist, “Give me the Sikma.”
13. Dickie V. holds a special place in Celtics lore after trading M. L. Carr and two number ones for Bob McAdoo before the 1979–80 season. Boston ended up with the number one overall pick and shipped it to Golden State in the famous Parish/McHale trade. OHHHHH! OHHHHHHHH! THAT TRADE WAS AWESOME, BABY! OHHHH-HHH!
14. In 2009, CP became the first top-ten scorer to lead the league in assists/steals and came within 12 points of becoming the fourth player to average 23-plus points and 11-plus assists in one season. Only 5 players led the NBA in steals and assists since 1974; he did it in consecutive years. In 2009, he even shot 50 percent from the field and 87 percent from the line. If he stays healthy, he could have a 25–12 season with a steals title and 50–40–90 percentages in him. It’s in play.
15. If Kemp was like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, then Travis Henry brought the sports fertility record down to the 3:35 range when we learned that he’d sired 9 kids by 9 different women, the highest kids-per-partners rate (100.0) for anyone with more than 7 kids since Elias Sports Bureau started keeping track of this stat in 1973. I’m rooting for 10-for-10 because it would give him a double double.
16. Moses stopped at the ABA for a year: Kemp enrolled in community college for a year, but too late to play in games.
17. I just became the first writer ever to use the word “conceived” in a paragraph about Shawn Kemp without mentioning his kids. Thank you.
18. In retrospect, trading Kemp for Baker was like trading Six Flags stock for AOL stock in 2006. What a debacle.
19. Poor Kemp went off the deep end Gary Busey-style in Portland. Here’s how I described him in December ’01: “With all the weird faces and gestures Kemp makes, it’s like a constant cry for help. Have you ever been riding the subway when a crazy person jumps on and starts doing Crazy Guy things—loud whoops, deranged eye contact, inexplicable pointing and so on—and everyone moves to the other side of the subway car to get away from him? That’s what Shawn Kemp does during Blazers games. He acts like the crazy guy on the subway.”
20. Dozens of horrible contracts and free agency decisions followed, and yet it’s weird that we never topped “Let’s dump Moses so we can sign an aging Goodrich and give up two picks, one of which will turn into Magic.”
21. Fine, I’ll do it. Russell, Chris Bosh, Cunningham, Goodrich, Tiny Archibald (starters); Manu Ginobili (sixth man); Cowens, Michael Redd, Lamar Odom, Sarunas Marciulonis, John Lucas, Lanier (bench). I always wanted a GM to intentionally build a left-handed team because opponents always have trouble remembering that a guy is left-handed. Always. It would be a 25-point advantage each game.
22. Walter Kennedy handled this situation appallingly. The commish didn’t investigate Connie’s “involvement” in the scandal (which amounted to him being given $200, then giving it back) and blindly assumed he was a crook.
23. Casual NBA fans remember Saba for two things: his unbelievably gigantic head which made him look like a pro wrestler, and his wife getting two DUIs during the height of the Jail Blazers era, allowing everyone to make the “Even the spouses of the players get in trouble on this team!” joke.
24. Dino Radja’s take in ’95: “Without his injuries [Saba] would have been better than David Robinson. Believe me, he was that good. In 1985, he was a beast. He ran the floor like Ralph Sampson. Could shoot the three, dunk. He would have been an NBA All-Star 10 years in a row. It’s true, I tell you.” Okay, Dino, okay! Settle down.
25. During the ’05 Playoffs, there was confusion about whether we should call Horry “Big Shot Bob” (the prevailing thought) or “Big Shot Rob” (Horry’s preference). I went back and forth and even called him “Big Shot Brob” at one point.
26. Later, Horry made the pivotal play of the ’07 Suns-Spurs series by knocking Nash into the press table at the end of Game 4, leading to suspensions for Amar’e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw (for coming off the bench). Even washed up, Horry could turn a series around.
27. That didn’t happen. Only in the ’05 Finals did a team win with its best player (Duncan) playing semipoorly, although Detroit’s defense (and the Wallaces) had something to do with it. With the exception of Game 5, all tapes of this series should be destroyed. Like, right now.
28. Rasheed is a great example of the Sliding Doors analogy. If he hadn’t landed on the Pistons, he’d be remembered for the 41-technical season, being the face of the Jail Blazers, and being another “shoulda been better” guy. And if the Pistons hadn’t won the year before, he’d be remembered for leaving Big Shot Rob open.
29. Cazale played Fredo Corleone and had crucial roles in five movies before dying of cancer: The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Deer Hunter, The Conversation and Dog Day Afternoon. Would you rather have Cazale’s career or be a bigger star who wasn’t respected as much (someone like Patrick Swayze or Rob Lowe)? For me, it’s no contest—I would rather be Cazale (except for the cancer part), and I would rather be Horry than Karl Malone. Just like Cazale, nobody would have fit in with those Rockets-Lakers-Spurs teams like Horry did, and only true fans appreciate him. So there you go.
30. Some other members of the Horry/Dogg Hall of Fame: Mario Elie, Danny Ainge, Joe Pantoliano, Claude Lemieux, Don Cheadle, Johnny Marr.
31. This is a Fox Sports cable show helmed by Chris Rose, a likable talent saddled with a worse supporting cast than Moses with the ’81 Rockets. Usually they give up and just start counting shit down. Wise move.
32. The famous racist Hawks story: Southerners Pettit and Clyde Lovellette froze out college legend Cleo Hill so blatantly that coach Paul Seymour got fired for standing up to them. Hill was eventually blackballed from the league. See Black Magic for the details.
33. We knew we were in trouble when former teammate Keon Clark called Vince overrated and pointed out that the ’02 Raptors played best without him (a fact, by the way). It’s not like Keon was sitting around taking shots at people; he barely knew where he was half the time. This is the same guy who got arrested for marijuana possession during the summer of ’02, leading to one of my favorite conceivable NBA scenarios ever: Keon’s agent juggling $20 million free agent offers, then getting a phone call from Keon, who tells him, “Um, this is my one phone call, so don’t hang up …”
34. You’re not gonna believe this, but GM Rob Babcock was fired shortly afterward.
35. Right before the playoffs, I wrote the following: “My buddy Gus asked the other day, ‘Has anyone ever won the Comeback Player of the Year award for their performance in the same season?’ I say we give him that award, along with the Most Sobering Reminder That We’re Idiots for Caring About Professional Sports award.”
36. Well, after I wrote this section for the book, I attended a Clips-Nets game with my buddy Sal. Vince came out like gangbusters and finished with 42. At one point Sal said matter-of-factly, “Wow, Vince is trying tonight.” When fans notice if you’re trying, there’s a 100 percent chance you failed to reach your potential as a player.
37. Underrated playoff game: Magic and Mullin “guarding” each other in Game 2 of their ’91 series, with Magic dropping 44 and Mullin getting 40 as both teams said, “Screw it, they’ll cancel each other out.” G-State prevailed, 125–124, in the last great moment of the TMC era.
38. Golden Boys is worth a read if only for the no-holds-barred “Is this dude gay or what?” section on Laettner, which almost seems brazen now. I don’t think Laettner was gay; he just went to Duke.
39. Bing took care of himself, dealt wonderfully with the media, did a ton of charity work, became one of the country’s leading black businessmen, founded the NBA Retired Players Association and was named Detroit’s Humanitarian of the Year in 1985.
40. Bing battled eyesight problems and eventually went legally blind in one eye. Spike Lee claims in his NBA memoir that Bing measured jump shots not by looking at the basket but by glancing down at his position on the court because he couldn’t see the rim. Seems more far-fetched than the ending of He Got Game.
41. Bobby played at Norfolk State with Pee Wee Kirkland, Hooker Grant and Mad Dog Culpepper. Have there ever been three greater nicknames on the same team? What chain of events needs to happen for someone to earn the nickname “Hooker” again? And how can I help?
42. Grumpy Old Editor reports that Howell may have been the ugliest player of the ’60s: “He looked like he should have had bolts in his neck.”
43. Owner Irv Levin swapped franchises with John Y. Brown that summer, sending Washington, Wicks, Kevin Kunnert, and Williams’s rights for Marvin Barnes, Billy Knight, Tiny Archibald, and two second-round picks without telling Red, a colossally one-sided deal that, as always, somehow worked out for Red: Williams was a bust, Archibald revived his career, one second-rounder became Danny Ainge, and Red dealt Knight for Rick Robey, who eventually netted Dennis Johnson. So in a roundabout way, the awful Westphal trade was responsible for Bird, Ainge, Tiny, and DJ becoming Celtics.
44. If Boston passed on Bird, Portland was picking next, then the Lakers. Let’s say Portland passed on Bird because they wanted immediate help given Walton’s uncertain injury status. Had the Lakers taken Bird and waited for him—a good possibility with Jerry West in charge—they would have landed Magic a year later and had Bird, Magic and Kareem. Holy shit.
45. That type of trade happened routinely in the ’70s and ’80s: a team stupidly deciding, “Hey, let’s trade our best all-around player and the heart of our team for an overrated star who’s a bigger name and might be able to sell more tickets.” Now teams just wait until the overrated star becomes a free agent, then they overpay him and kill their cap space. This counts as progress in the NBA.
46. Fun Artis fact: after Kentucky signed him, they measured him for reporters at the press conference. Artis was seven-foot-eight when they included his mammoth afro. Seven-foot-eight!
47. Artis snapped at Maurice Lucas once and chased him across the court, cornered him, then got decked by a roundhouse right. The punch put Lucas on the map and reinforced the whole “Artis is a big p-ssy” argument.
48. Through 2008, T-Mac ranked fourth in career playoff scoring, at 28.5. Not as good as it sounds. His career playoff record: 16–27.
49. Walsh’s close friends include Peter Vecsey and Dan Klores (the latter a documentary filmmaker and formerly powerful PR guy in New York). There’s a reason you’ve never read a negative Donnie Walsh piece.
50. Now you’re asking, “Why put Dumars at no. 75, then?” Because he was a winner, he was clutch, and he would have been fun to play with. By the way, the Pistons took him 18th in the ’85 draft, one spot ahead of Boston. The Celts were one Detroit brain fart, one coke binge, and one heart malfunction away from getting Dumars, Lenny Bias and Reggie Lewis in consecutive drafts and dominating the ’90s. Alas.
51. Tim Hardaway was the first perimeter guy who blew out his knee and came back relatively the same. Nobody before him ever fully recovered. The six most tragic examples: Billy Cunningham, Marques Johnson, Bernard King, Maravich, Moncrief and Elgin Baylor.
52. Remember, Keaton had a slight lead over Tom Hanks heading into their second decade of the Funny/Cool/Hip Guy Who Can Also Get Serious competition; then poor Keaton fell off the face of the earth and Hanks started winning Oscars. Now Hanks looks at him like Mariah Carey looks at Whitney Houston: “Yeah, maybe you won the first battle, but I won the war. Handily. Now go do some more crack, bitch!”
53. Poor Nellie learned a valuable lesson: you can’t ride rookies when they’re making ten times as much money as the coach.
54. I went to one Bullets-Celtics game where I was absolutely and totally convinced that C-Webb was stoned during the game. I was with a buddy who was smoking a ton of pot at the time and he felt the same way; you tend to notice when other people seem high. It’s like being in your own personal ESP Club.
55. Considering Webber earned nearly $200 million, can you call him disappointing? He ended up being no. 72 instead of no. 28 … is that the worst thing in the world? I think it comes down to one issue: You know when you go to a car wash and they offer you the “everything” package? Only a few NBA players are chosen every generation for the “everything” package. If they f*ck it up even a little, it’s disappointing. So yeah, Webber finished no. 72. But he still goes to sleep every night knowing he could have been forty or fifty spots higher. And if he doesn’t think about it, then that explains everything.
56. My funniest example: Orlando fired Brian Hill in 1997. Vancouver hired him and he led them to a sizzling 31–123 record before getting fired in 2000. Five years later, you know who hired him again? Orlando! The NBA coaching situation is so abysmal, teams rehire guys they already fired. Does that happen in any other walk of life? That’s like CBS announcing in 2013 that they’ve decided to give Craig Kilborn his own late night show.
57. I love this fourth argument. It’s the same reason why Milwaukee should have hired me as its GM in 2008, or why the Clips should have done the same in 2009. Why the hell not? You’re going nowhere anyway! Why not make the fans feel like they have a man of the people in charge? Why not get people talking? What’s more likely to lead PTI for a week in May: “Bucks Hire John Hammond as GM” or “Bucks Hire ESPN Columnist as GM”? Wouldn’t that become one of the biggest sports stories of the year? Now that’s a hiring that definitely passes the Mom Test.
58. Growing up in Carolina, Thompson shot hoops on a dirt surface in his backyard. Some wonder if this led to his freakish jumping ability, especially since MJ grew up playing on a dirt court. If my son shows any promise at all with hoops, I’m building a clay basketball court in my backyard.
59. That was one of the great random sports days: Havlicek’s final game, Thompson exploding for 73 (a record for noncenters for 28 years), Gervin responding with 63 and Gary Player coming back from seven strokes to win the ’78 Masters. If ESPN Classic had ever started a show called The Greatest SportsCenters We Ever Could Have Had, April 9, 1978, would rank right up there.
60. Another weird fact about April 9, 1978: Thompson broke Wilt’s record for most points in a quarter (32) and held it for five hours until Gervin broke it (33). Also, Thompson made 20 of his first 21 shots in the game. Strangely, everyone agrees that he wasn’t forcing shots or gunning for the title. He just had it going.
61. The Studio 54 incident happened in 1984, well after the likes of Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli had stopped hanging out there. Had Thompson’s career ended in ’79 because he got flung down a Studio 54 stairwell by Bianca Jagger’s boyfriend or something, now that would have been cool.
62. In ’77, Thompson bumped fellow ABA stars Doc and Gervin to second-team All-NBA. In ’78, he bumped Westphal, Maravich and Walter Davis. Thompson was not messing around.
63. I included FT attempts per game because it gives you a good idea for how someone was attacking the rim. Average 8 or more and you’re attacking the rim. I love making blanket statements.
64. Iverson peaked at 25 and not 24. I made the executive decision to bump Iverson’s age down a year because he spent five months in jail and missed his senior year of high school. You know when a boxer gets described as a “young 35,” it’s really code for “he spent 8 years in the joint”? Iverson may have been 25 during the ’01 season, but it was a “young 25.” So there.
65. Spree and Penny made first-team NBA’s for the first time at 24; Vince made second-team for the only time at 24. If you’re drafting a fantasy team this year, look out for those 24-year-olds!
66. ACC teams were notorious for overpaying players in the ’70s. The famous Thompson recruiting story (possibly apocryphal): he grew up in Carolina dreaming of playing for UNC, only NC State offered his family boatloads of cash, leading to Dad saying “Yes!” and a devastated Thompson sobbing through the ensuing press conference.
67. Hermo walked onto the Saders in 1990 like Mark Wahlberg in Invincible, only if the ending never happened and Wahlberg had Brian Scalabrine’s game and looked like a beefier Kurt Nimphius. (By the way, these are all compliments. I loved Hermo. Anyone who could go from intramurals to Division I without cutting down his keg party appearances was right in my wheelhouse.) His biggest mistake was missing the Internet by 15 years; I would have absolutely started a www.airhermo.com blog and probably gotten kicked out of school. I guarantee he’ll bring this book into a New York City bar within 2 weeks of its release and show 75 complete strangers this footnote, followed by everyone doing a series of shots. Please have one on me, Hermo.
68. In that same documentary, Issel blamed the pressure of being the “$800,000 Man” for expediting Thompson’s demise: “I think David changed when he got his big contract.” This part was only missing a “Push It to the Limit” montage of Thompson taking friends to the bank, marrying someone while wearing a white tuxedo (à la Tony Montana), then bringing the wedding party over to look at a tiger.
69. I had Rodman ranked at no. 69 for two months before realizing the unintentional significance.
70. The ’92 Pistons averaged 44.3 rebounds a game; Rodman grabbed 42% of them. Russell’s highest percentage for one season was 35%; Wilt’s highest was 37%.
71. Rodman acted up throughout the playoffs, got suspended for a game and removed his sneakers during crunch time in one big moment in the Rockets series. He wasn’t a distraction as much as a dirty bomb. Let’s just say that Madonna (his flame at the time) was a bad influence on him. Also, I think they created four new forms of VD together.
72. The referee who called Pete’s 5th foul that night? You guessed it—the guy who was serenaded by more “Bull-shit” chants than anyone ever, Mr. Dick Bavetta! Only Dick could help eject someone going for 75 points.
73. In the 68-point game, Maravich makes six or seven jumpers from three-point range like he’s shooting free throws.
74. Seeing Maravich on the Celts reminded me of the White Shadow episode when street legend Bobby Magnum (played by former UCLA star Mike Warren, who later starred in Hill Street Blues and played Preacher in Fast Break—now that’s an IMDb.com page!) joined Carver High and removed the team’s ceiling for a few days before bookies from Oakland found him, then he tried to steal Coach Reeves’ TV and everything went to shit. By the way, when I say “reminded me,” I mean “reminded me even as it was happening when I was only ten.” Even back then, I was making convoluted comparisons between sports and pop culture.
75. Press Maravich made Marv Marinovich, Richard Williams and J. D. McCoy’s dad seem like Joey, Danny and Uncle Jesse by comparison. And you thought I was kidding about convoluted comparisons.
76. Another legend fitting this “lost years” criteria: Bird quit IU as a freshman, spent the next year playing pickup ball and being a garbageman and eventually came back for ISU. He entered the NBA a year later than he should have (maybe two) had he been happy at Indiana.
77. Grumpy Old Editor: “Monroe’s spin move paved the way for misdirection dribbles of all kinds and arguably changed the way traveling was called, for better or worse.” Um … I say this is a good thing!
78. Dave DeBusschere told William Goldman once that he watched everyone’s eyes when he defended them, never buying any fakes until they actually looked at the basket … but Pearl was the one guy who never looked at the basket until right when he was releasing the ball, making him impossible to defend. Thought that was interesting.
79. Indiana signed English as a free agent and stupidly traded him for George McGinnis. That was one of my favorite makeup trades ever—the previous year, Denver had stupidly traded Bobby Jones for McGinnis. Poor McGinnis was like the shittiest gift in a Yankee swap; you never wanted to be the one who ended up with him at the end of the night.
80. These were the days when newspapers ran box scores with FGs made, FTs made, total points and that was it. Ryan’s favorite “Dantley” ever: “9–28–46.” When Kevin Durant went 24-for-26 from the line in a 46-point effort against the Clips in January ’09, I immediately thought, “That’s a great Dantley!”
81. The worst of the deals: L.A. gave him away for a washed-up Spencer Haywood right before Magic’s rookie year, Dantley averaged 28 in Utah, L.A. won the title anyway, and Haywood didn’t make an impact other than probably snorting the most lines at Jack Nicholson’s house that season.
82. The plot for Chuck: An annoying Little League star (Chuck) stops pitching because he’s concerned about the threat of nuclear war. Inspired by Chuck’s noble stance, a few famous professional athletes (led by Amazing Grace, played by English) decide to stop playing as well until some antiweapon legislation is passed or something. By the end of the movie, you’re actually rooting for a nuclear holocaust just so Chuck will die. It’s that bad.
83. Dantley was listed at six foot five. No way. Dennis Johnson was two inches taller.
84. I couldn’t pick between them. Sorry. So yes, it’s actually a thirteen-player team with a three-man injured list, impossible under the current roster rules. Sue me.
85. Our country is so uptight that this point might be considered racist. Here’s my defense: Manute Bol was f*cking purple. I don’t know what else to tell you.
86. Crazy Spud facts: Did you know he played for 14 seasons? Or that he started for six years—two in Atlanta, four in Sacramento?
87. Darko should sue Chad Ford for raising everyone’s expectations too high, most famously with a 2002 column (look it up for comedy’s sake) when he printed the following quote from Pistons scout Will Robinson: “That kid’s going to be a star. He’s a 7-footer that plays like a point guard. That kid’s something special.” Also from Robinson: “He’s going to own the game. Own the game. We’re going to have to build a new arena. The only thing that could destroy a kid like that is a woman.” And a lack of talent and confidence. That, too.
88. That only happened for three people: Bannister, Cadillac and Popeye. They were the Bird, Magic, and MJ of ugly.
89. Here’s how ugly Steppe was: in high school, I used to sneak one of those Zander Hollander NBA yearbooks (the ones with all the profiles and pictures) into math class, then pull out the page with Steppe’s picture intermittently during math class to crack up my buddy Bish in the back row. Always worked, too.
90. Strange Lucas fact: his photographic memory was so remarkable that he ended up writing a couple of memory books. There’s a chance he’s memorizing this page right now.
91. During a supercompetitive ’77–’78 season, Truck averaged an astonishing 23–16 for the Jazz and made first-team All-NBA with Doc, Walton, Thompson and Gervin. Since he bounced around so much (four teams in his first five seasons) and got traded in ’79 while averaging a 22–14, it’s possible Truck got his nickname by threatening to run over his coach in a truck or doing truckloads of blow.
92. Ray-Ray should have won Finals MVP. I flew back to Boston for Game 6 and sat one row in front of Allen’s father and a family friend. We ended up talking for a few minutes. Mr. Allen complained that Doc Rivers had benched his son too long in Game 5 and said angrily, “He didn’t want him to win Finals MVP, that’s what that was about!” Don’t you love when parents are irrational about their kids? There should definitely be a PTI-type show where parents of various star athletes argue sports-related topics and eventually turn everything back to irrational arguments about their kids.
93. That’s my nickname for elite FT shooters who ice games at the line; they’re almost like closers in baseball with how they protect leads. You can’t win a title without a cooler. As Rick Adelman’s Blazers teams will tell you.
94. That’s the complete list of relevant centers and power forwards who played on Allen’s team from 1999 through 2007. Ray Allen will now light himself on fire.
95. Three other things I want to see during an NBA game: the wave going in opposite directions (would it cause an earthquake or something?), the arena going dead silent before a key FT attempt from an opponent (would totally psych out the other team), and the crowd rattling an opposing FT shooter by screaming, “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!”
96. Three scenes make Game kinda-sorta worth it for me: Denzel waxing poetically about Pearl, the Denzel-Jesus game, and the aftermath when a winded Denzel hands the letter of intent to Jesus, who drops it in disgust. The next few seconds were more in Denzel’s wheelhouse than Tim Wakefield trying to sneak a fastball past Albert Pujols. He shakes his head, just a beaten man headed back to prison who needs to get one final message across, finally keeping eye contact with Allen and telling him, “You get that hatred out of your heart, or you’re just gonna end up another nigger … [pause] … like your father.” Now that, my friends, is a chill scene.
97. Two of those exits came at the hands of Reggie Lewis and Boston. In the summer of ’93, Lewis died and MJ went to play baseball; suddenly Miller had gotten rid of his toughest foes in the East. Miller couldn’t have guarded Lewis unless he was allowed to hand-check him with a taser.
98. A shady call and more evidence that the NBA was determined to get New York in the ’94 Finals. Let’s just say that from 1993 to 2006, the NBA may have dabbled in pro wrestling tactics a little. I tried to sweep it under the rug in this book because that’s what people do when they’re in love with someone: they lie for them. And I love the NBA.
99. Don’t rule this out.
100. Then again, Ray Allen would have given his left nut to play with the likes of Rik Smits and Jermaine O’Neal.
101. Not a footnote as much as an asterisk—that year they stupidly shortened the three-point line. Check out YouTube to see where Reggie fired those back-to-back threes (they were 21-footers at best). That might have been the NBA’s most memorable “we didn’t think this through” panic rule other than the “can’t leave the bench even if your star just got hit by a tire iron right in front of you” rule.