The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

EIGHT
THE PYRAMID: LEVEL 2



61. BOB MCADOO

Resume: 14 years, 7 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’75 MVP … MVP runner-up: ’74, ’76 … ’73 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’75), top 10 (’74) … 3-year peak: 32–14–3 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 32–14 (22 G) … leader: scoring (3x), minutes (1x), FG% (1x), FT (1x) … bench player for two champs (’82, ’85 Lakers) … traded 3 times in prime
60. NATE ARCHIBALD

Resume: 13 years, 7 quality, 6 All-Stars … top 5 (’73, ’75, ’76), top 10 (’72, ’81) … 2-year peak: 31–3–10 … leader: points (1x), assists (1x), minutes (1x) … only player to lead NBA in points and assists (34.0, 11.4) … started for 1 champ (’81 Celts)
Remember when everyone called Ben Wallace underrated for so long that he became overrated, leading to the Bulls killing their franchise by giving away Tyson Chandler so they could sign Wallace to an unconscionable $60 million deal? The same thing happened to McAdoo from a historical standpoint. When the NBA left Mac off its 50 at 50 list and outraged every NBA junkie, the subsequent backlash turned out to be the best possible thing for McAdoo’s legacy. Now he’s a little overrated, if that makes sense. The case for McAdoo: For a three-year stretch in Buffalo, he was the best NBA player not named Kareem, averaging a 32–14 as an undersized center and scoring on anyone and everyone … because of his body (six foot nine, 210 pounds) and offensive game (unstoppable facing the basket, better with a fast pace), he had the misfortune of peaking in the wrong era (the slowdown seventies) … in fact, if you could pick any player to play center for the Nash/D’Antoni Phoenix teams, you’d pick McAdoo … you can’t blame him for getting traded to a series of awful teams (first the Knicks, then Boston, then Detroit, then New Jersey) … after Jersey traded him to the Lakers,1 Mac became a game-changing bench player for two title teams, submitting one of the single greatest sixth-man seasons in 1982: averaging a 15–5 in 21 minutes a game, then a 17–7 with 56 percent shooting in just 26 playoff minutes per game … and if you’re talking aesthetics, nobody in this Pyramid had a more fun name, few were cooler to watch (Mac played with a particularly detached, effortless, cooler-than-cool style), and few had a more distinct calling card (a beautiful and unblockable jumper released from the top of his head)2… again, he was a victim of his era more than anything—not just the style of play and his bad luck finding a good team, but that he peaked in the “it’s okay to get a huge contract, stop caring, and dabble in coke” era … it’s also worth mentioning that Dr. Jack Ramsay, a notoriously tough person to win over, coached Mac on those Buffalo teams, loved him, swore by him, and even told Sports Illustrated in 1976, “The thing to remember about Mac is that he is going to get much, much better. In every aspect of his game … He works hard. He takes care of his body so he’ll be around for a long time. He goes almost 48 minutes a night, always learning. Mostly, he wants to be the best who ever lived. He wants that very badly.” Or … not.
The case against McAdoo: He thrived during the weakest three NBA seasons of the past fifty years (that ’74–’76 stretch we keep bringing up) and Buffalo never made it past the second round with him … after the merger, his numbers dipped significantly and he developed such a selfish reputation that four teams dumped him in a five-year span … when Boston owner John Y. Brown dealt three first-round picks for Mac, Red Auerbach was so distraught that he nearly quit that spring to take over the Knicks (an honorable-mention what-if candidate) … Mac played for one .500 team in the next five years (’77–’81) before getting released by the Pistons3… if you’re really feeling cynical, you could call Mac the poster boy of a decade that nearly destroyed the league, the most renowned of the Talented/Overpaid/Selfish/Passionless Stars That Fans Disliked and Wondered During Games if They Gave a Shit and/or Were on Drugs.4
I would argue that McAdoo was overrated and underrated. Maybe he peaked in a crappy league and the merger exposed him, but he also peaked in the worst possible era for his personality and game. Give him credit for being a pioneer of sorts because, before McAdoo, nobody imagined that an NBA offense could revolve around a jump-shooting big man.5 Throw him in a time machine, stick him in the 2002 draft, give him to Chicago as its number two pick, put him under a rookie contract for five years and make him earn his next deal, and Mac would have evolved into a more unstoppable version of Dirk Nowitzki, especially if he’d found a coach like D’Antoni or Nellie along the way. And what if he learned to shoot threes? Yikes.
As for Archibald, you could call him Tiny McAdoo because they had such similar careers, right down to being relative pioneers, peaking early as superstars, bouncing around in relative obscurity and finding the Juvenation Machine (in Tiny’s case, on a few 60-win teams in Boston). After making a name for himself on the New York playgrounds, Tiny became a hero to every local point guard who followed him (Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury and Bassy Telfair, to name three). His career is remembered unfairly because everyone mentions the “only guy to lead the league in points and assists in the same year” first, which is like remembering Bruce Springsteen’s career by praising him for selling so many Born in the USA albums. If your point guard sets a dubious record like that, you probably didn’t win that many games (as the ’73 Royals proved by going 36–46). The thing that stood out about Tiny—and remains relevant now, even if you’re watching the ’81 All-Star Game or a Sixers-Celtics battle—was the complete control he wielded over every game. If playing point guard is like mastering Grand Theft Auto, then the final mission should include the following things: your handle is so superior that opponents would never even think of pressuring you full-court; you can dribble to any spot on the floor at any time of the game, and if you need to do it, you can always get to the rim and/or draw a foul if your team needs a hoop; no teammate would dare bring it upcourt if you’re on the floor; every teammate who grabs a defensive rebound immediately looks for you; and defenders play four feet off you at all times because they don’t want to have their ankles broken, which means you’re starting the offense between the foul line and the top of the key on every possession. Of all the point guards I’ve watched in person in my lifetime, only six completed that final mission: Tiny, Isiah, Kevin Johnson, sober John Lucas, young Tim Hardaway and Chris Paul. You never forgot any of those guys were on the court, not for a second.
One other thing about Tiny: when he separated his shoulder during Game 3 of the Eastern Finals in ’82, it robbed us of a fascinating Lakers-Celtics Finals. Boston had an 18-game winning streak that season and loved experimenting with a truly batty lineup: Parish, McHale, Tiny, Cedric Maxwell … and Larry Bird playing two-guard. (The Legend could pull it off because he was surprisingly quick back then, as evidenced by his three straight All-Defenses from ’82 to ’84, and besides, the league wasn’t stacked with athletic two-guards yet.) Meanwhile, the Lakers were running teams off the floor. Kareem and Wilkes still had their fastball, McAdoo had evolved into a supersub, Magic was playing three positions, and they had two elite ballhandlers (Magic and Nixon) and a deadly 1–3–1 press that wreaked havoc. So Tiny’s injury prevented the highest-scoring Finals of all time, and beyond that, Bird and Magic could have been playing two-guard and defending each other in crunch time. Now that, my friends, is a great injury what-if.
59. ROBERT PARISH

Resume: 21 years, 14 quality, 9 All-Stars … top 10 (’82), top 15 (’89) … started for 3 champs (’81, ’84, ’86 Celtics) and 2 runner-ups (’85, ’87) … 3-year peak: 19–11–3 … career leader: games (1st), rebounds (8th) … averaged a 15–9 or better 12 times
One of the tougher Pyramid calls. His longevity and durability were simply astounding; he played 14 seasons in Boston alone, missing just 42 games total and never playing fewer than 74 games during the Bird era. In five seasons from ’84 through ’88, when the Celtics made the Finals four times, Chief churned out 494 games (including playoffs) and limped around on a badly sprained ankle in the ’87 Playoffs. His consistency was uncanny—he never seemed to have good streaks or bad streaks, rarely exploded for the occasional 35–20, never yelled at officials, never got into fights or barked at teammates—to the point that he almost seemed like a cyborg. Hell, Parish even looked the same for his whole career.6 Except for his first Boston season when he grew a mustache, he never gained weight, changed his hair, grew weird facial hair or anything. I can see any eighties Celtics highlight and know the season immediately just from Larry Bird’s hair and mustache, just like how I could tell any Miami Vice season based on Don Johnson’s hair and weight.7 But Parish? From 1982 to 1993, there’s no way to tell. It’s impossible. He always kept himself in shape, alternately loping like a gazelle and limping around during dead balls like a creaky old man. Chief always kept you on your toes.
So what’s the problem? Parish was really, really good … but never great. His elite skills were big-game rebounding (you could always count on Chief for 15–20 boards in a Game 7), intelligent defense, a reliable turnaround jumper, a sneaky baseline spin move that worked like a Jedi mind trick (guys knew it was coming yet kept falling for it), fantastic picks (he was one of the first centers to thrive on high screens), high percentage shooting (54 percent or higher in every Boston season) and an unparalleled ability to outsprint other centers for easy layups and dunks. He didn’t mind being a complementary player (much like Sam Jones, he never wanted the pressure of carrying a team every night), didn’t care about shots and willingly did the dirty work for everyone else. Within a few years, Boston fans learned to appreciate him and started chanting “Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeef” every time he made a good play. If Robert Parish was your fourth-best guy, you were in fantastic shape. At the same time, he couldn’t have fallen into a cushier situation—a talented team that had elite low-post players (Maxwell, then McHale), one of the best offensive players ever (Bird), intelligent guards (Archibald, DJ, Henderson, Ainge) and above-average backup centers in every year but 1987 (Rick Robey, McHale, and Bill Walton, to name three), as well as a rabid fan base and media corps that would have ripped him if he’d coasted like he did with Golden State.8 We always hear about stars like Maravich who never found the right team; here’s a case where someone found the perfect team.
So I guess it depends on what you want from your big guy. From a talent standpoint, fourteen centers had better Pyramid resumes (we’ll get to them). During his prime, Boston fans were always hoping he neutralized better guys or played them to a relative standstill … and with the exception of the ’85 Finals, he usually did or came close. That made him more valuable than you might think. For instance, let’s say Bill Gates developed a computer program that allowed us to effectively simulate games with players from different eras (using not just statistics but intangibles) and we started a twelve-team sim league of all-time greats, with the draft going in snake fashion (last pick of the first round gets the first pick of the second round). I’d grab an elite scorer, a rebounder /low-post player, a point guard and a perimeter shooter with my first four picks (in some order), wait for everyone else to snap up the top twelve centers, then grab Parish with my sixth-round pick, knowing he’d thrive as a complementary player. So if I was picking fifth, I’d grab Bird in Round 1; Pettit, Malone or Barkley in Round 2 (unless Havlicek somehow fell to me); Isiah or Stockton in Round 3 (unless Kobe somehow fell to me); McHale in Round 4 (unless I needed a point guard, in which case I’d take Frazier or Nash); the best two-guard available in Round 5 (Drexler, Greer or someone like Sam Jones if he slid), then Chief with my sixth pick. In a dream scenario, I’m ending up with Bird, Malone, Isiah, McHale, Jones and Parish as my top six picks, then I’m gunning for a long-range shooter (Reggie Miller) and a hybrid guard (Joe Dumars?) from there. That’s a nice top eight: I have size, shooting, speed, low-post guys, defense, clutch scoring … everything you’d want from a team. And the key would be Parish holding his own at center and not caring that we stuck him doing all the dirty work. Not many Hall of Famers would accept that role, but he would, and that’s what made him so valuable.
One last Parish story: His defining moment happened after Bill Laimbeer clotheslined Bird, causing a brawl and getting the Legend tossed from Game 4 of the ’87 Eastern Finals. Game 5 shifted to the Garden and you could feel the collective hatred for Laimbeer. We wanted blood.9
Meanwhile, Laimbeer loved tormenting Parish and seeing how far he could push such a fundamentally serene guy, so the ensuing altercation was almost preordained. Late in the second quarter, Parish took a Laimbeer elbow to the ribs, and something snapped—it was like the Naked Gun scene when Reggie Jackson decides that he has to kill the queen, only there wasn’t a beeping signal triggering Chief, just fifteen thousand fans pining for vengeance. They ran down to Boston’s side for a fast break. Laimbeer had position on Parish for a rebound, only his left arm accidentally poked Parish in the chest. And the Chief—for the one and only time in his career—completely and totally lost his shit, doling out a one-two sucker punch from behind and belting Laimbeer to the floor as everyone else stood in shock.10 What did we do? We gasped … then we cheered. And we kept cheering. To this day, I’m convinced we willed the Chief to do it. We brainwashed him. I will believe that until the day I die.
(Follow-up note: Laimbeer was broadcasting a 2002 Playoff game in Boston when they started showing ’87 highlights on the scoreboard. From our seats, my father and I could see Laimbeer trying not to watch and inevitably getting sucked in. He watched the Bird clothesline/fight with an evil smirk on his face. He barely flinched when they showed Parish clocking him. When they showed Bird’s famous steal, he shook his head slightly and glanced away. He finally looked away for good as they showed the Celtics celebrating Game 7. You could tell the series still killed him fifteen years later. “That was great,” my normally unvindictive father said when it was over. “God, I hate that guy.” The lesson, as always: Bill Laimbeer was an a*shole.)
58. BERNARD KING

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’84 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’84, ’85), top 10 (’82) … 2-year peak: 29–6–3, 55% FG … leader: scoring (1x) … ’84 playoffs: 35–6–3, 57% FG (12 G) … missed 374 G and 60-plus G three times
I love Bernard too much to write a coherent take on him, so let’s describe him in unrelated, semihysterical, fawning clumps:
If you named a sandwich after Bernard, it would be a corned beef sandwich with Russian dressing, Swiss cheese, cole slaw and a dash of spicy mustard. Why? Because that’s the single greatest sandwich that nobody ever talks about, just like Bernard is the best basketball player that nobody ever talks about.11 He’s the player we hope Carmelo Anthony becomes someday, an inside/outside small forward with an unstoppable array of moves. Bernard’s first step was unparalleled. Nobody could block his turnaround jumper, and if they overplayed him on it, Bernard would show them the turnaround and spin the other way for an uncontested leaner, so you were screwed either way. His stop-and-pop jumper was exquisite, maybe the best of its kind. He single-handedly brought back the art of the running two-handed slam (especially on follow-up rebounds). And he was absolutely devastating in transition, which made it such a shame that he was stuck on Hubie’s plodding Knicks teams for those peak years.12
If we’re judging guys simply by how great they were at their apex, then Bernard has to be considered one of the five unstoppable scorers of the post-Russell era along with MJ, Kobe, Gervin and Shaq. From the fall of 1983 to the spring of 1985, nobody could guard him. Check out Game 4 of the Knicks-Celts series in ’84 on ESPN Classic sometime, when Bernard was triple-teamed by a soon-to-be champion and finished with 46. Awe-inspiring stuff.13 That series went seven even though Boston had Bird, McHale, Parish, DJ, Maxwell, Ainge, Scott Wedman, Gerald Henderson and M. L. Carr; Bernard was flanked by Bill Cartwright, Truck Robinson, Darrell Walker, Trent Tucker, Rory Sparrow, Louis Orr, Ernie Grunfeld and a six-foot-seven homeless guy that they found on 34th Street right before the series. How many players could have carried a lousy supporting cast to seven games against a loaded Celtics team? Other than Jordan and LeBron, I can’t think of another postmerger player who does it.
The new MSG opened twenty-five months before the “And here comes Willis!” game in February 1968. Bernard broke the building’s scoring record on Christmas Day, 1984, dropping 60 in a CBS loss to the Nets, each point coming in the flow of the game. The mark outlasted MJ, ’Nique, Wade, Shaq, Robinson, Bird, you name it. Knicks fans became attached to it. This would be the one way Bernard lived on. Well, until February 2009, when Kobe exploded for 61 against a run-and-gun Knicks team that didn’t have a conventional two-guard on its roster, breaking the MSG record in garbage time of a blowout Lakers victory. I watched the second half rooting against it; something seemed unsettling about Bernard’s record falling only because Kobe was having a field day against the likes of Wilson Chandler and Jared Jeffries. I wasn’t alone. The real Knicks fans were furious at New York’s sloppy defensive performance and lack of gumption to protect Bernard’s 60, as well as all the loud Laker fans who somehow snuck into the building and chanted “MVP!” William Goldman emailed me, “It was the worst night of maybe my life at the Garden,” and he’s owned season tickets since the Walt Bellamy days. One Knicks buddy emailed me the next day, “I literally didn’t sleep last night.” With the Boston Garden and Chicago Stadium gone, can you think of any other player/building combinations that would have endured like that in the NBA? Me neither.
Bernard was a notable semicasualty of a tumultuous era, battling substance abuse issues in the late seventies and early eighties, getting traded twice (once for Wayne Cooper and a second-round pick) before turning his career around after signing with the Knicks, then tragically blowing out his knee in 198514 while averaging 35 points a game. Had King came along twenty years later during the “just say no” and Dr. James Andrews eras, he would have become one of the thirty greatest players ever. It’s not even up for discussion.15
With the possible exception of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, no athlete and announcer were matched more perfectly than King and Marv Albert. Even the way Marv said his name was perfect: “Here’s King from the left side … yesssss! Forty … five points for … Bah-nard King!” His game resonated with New Yorkers to the degree that it’s impossible to imagine a better Bernard home base than MSG. Going to school in Connecticut during that stretch, I went out of my way to watch Bernard even though I hated the Knicks. He was that good.
If you were a kid in the early eighties, you had a Nerf hoop in your room, you loved basketball and you didn’t pretend to be Bernard on those running two-handed slams … well, I say you’re lying. That was one of the two identifiable traits that were unique to him—his fingerprint, if you will—along with the peculiar way he jogged up-court with his chest puffed out. And yes, everyone tried to imitate that barrel-chested gait as well.
You know how certain uniforms just look right on some guys? As good as Bernard looked in New York’s blue road uniform, I gotta say, remember the ’82-’83 season when the Knicks wore those wacky jerseys with the player’s number sitting on top of the team’s name? For whatever reason, that uniform gave Bernard superpowers; it was like how Dr. J could jump a foot higher when he had his ’fro. Hell, I would have bought that throwback by now if it didn’t say “New York” on it.
If that’s not enough, Bernard starred in one of my favorite movies, Fast Break,16 the only sports flick that can’t be remade because it’s so unbelievably inappropriate: there’s gay-bashing, a car ride where the players eat a pound of marijuana, a coach who encourages a white player to drop an n-bomb so it would trigger a bench-clearing brawl, a transvestite shooting guard, the glorification of players who have no business going to college and everything else. It’s one of those movies where you see the players toking up and know they used real grass for the scene. King plays Hustler, a pot-smoking pool shark17 who carries Cadwallader College to an undefeated season, and I mention this only because it’s the most entertaining performance by an NBA player in a movie—better than Doc in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, better than Malik Sealy and Rick Fox in Eddie, better than Kareem in Airplane, even better than Ray Allen as Jesus. I will never figure out two things about Bernard’s career: why the NBA left him off 50 at 50, and why he didn’t win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1979 over the little schmuck from Kramer vs. Kramer.
The good news? Bernard gets to live on in this book. And ESPN Classic. And my office, where I have a framed poster of Fast Break.
57. TOMMY HEINSOHN

Resume: 9 years, 8 quality, 6 All-Stars … ’57 Rookie of the Year … top 10 (’61, ’62, ’63, ’64) … 4-year peak: 22–10–2 … ’63 Playoffs: 25–9 (11 G) … started for 8 champs (’50s, ’60s Celtics) … Playoffs: 20–10, 40% FG (104 G)
56. PAUL ARIZIN

Resume: 10 years, 10 quality, 10 All-Stars … ’56 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’52, ’56, ’57), top 10 (’59) … 4-year peak: 24–8–2 … best player on 1 champ (’56 Warriors), averaged a 28–9 (12 G) … season leader: scoring (2x), minutes (2x), FG% (1x) … missed 2 years (war service)
Did you know Arizin was the first NBA player to employ something called the jump shot? That he was the best player and crunch-time guy for the last pre-Russell champion (the ’56 Warriors)? That he became the first player to average 20-plus points in nine straight seasons? That they called him “Pitching Paul”? That he struggled with a chronic sinus problem that left him wheezing and grunting as he ran up and down the court? That he made first-team All-NBA in his second season (’52) and missed the next two seasons because the Marines pulled him away for the Korean War? That he returned in ’54 without missing a beat and tossed up a 21–9? That he retired from the NBA after averaging a 23–7 in 12 playoff games for a Philly squad that nearly beat the ’62 Celtics, then played another three years in the Eastern Basketball League and averaged a 25–7 for Camden?18 Give him back those two Korean War years, pad his career totals by keeping him in the NBA through 1965, and suddenly we’re talking about one of the best careers by any forward.
If Arizin’s prime was cut short by his time in Korea, then Heinsohn’s prime was cut short by the countries of Nicotinea and Boozea. If you wanted to party with someone from the Russell era, really, it had to be either Heinsohn or Johnny “Red” Kerr. Heinsohn’s regular-season stats weren’t that overwhelming, although he was probably the best all-around forward other than Pettit and Baylor from ’57 to ’64, someone who defended bigger guys and provided a little muscle during a hockeylike era where everyone threw down. He also served a crucial chemistry role for those early Russell teams, not just because he was such a fun-loving jokester and prankster,19 but also because he served as a lightning rod for the press (who criticized him for shooting too much and called him “Tommy Gunn”) and Auerbach (who yelled at him constantly as a way to take out his frustrations about the entire team) and inadvertently directed negative attention away from everyone else.20 What really stood out was Tommy’s Playoffs record. For one thing, he played for nine years and won eight titles as either the third-or fourth-best player on those teams. (Find me a better title-per-seasons-played ratio. You won’t.) His Playoffs stats (20–9) were slightly better than his regular-season stats (19–9), and he carried the Celtics offensively in Cousy’s final playoff run with a sparkling effort (25–9, 46 percent shooting). During Game 7 of the ’57 Finals against St. Louis, as Cousy and Sharman stumbled to a combined 5-for-40 from the field, Heinsohn played one of the greatest games by a rookie: battling Pettit, he notched a startling 37 points and 23 rebounds as the Celtics prevailed in double OT. In 1980, Magic played a similarly memorable Finals clincher and everyone placed the game on a pedestal. Tommy? People only remember him sobbing into a towel after fouling out.
So why give Arizin the nod over Heinsohn? Because the NBA convened a panel in 1971 to figure out its Silver Anniversary Team, and here are the players they picked:21 Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, Bob Davies, Sam Jones (guards); Bill Russell, George Mikan (centers); Bob Pettit, Joe Fulks, Dolph Schayes, Paul Arizin (forwards). Since Arizin made the cut over Heinsohn, obviously, he should make the cut over Heinsohn in the Pyramid, right?
(Note: I can’t believe I’m boning over a Holy Cross grad like this. Let’s just move on.)22
55. DOMINIQUE WILKINS

Resume: 15 years, 11 quality seasons, 9 All-Stars … ’86 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’86), top 10 (’87, ’88, ’91, ’93) … leader: scoring (1x) … 3-year peak: 30–7–3 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 29–7–3 (30 G) … eight 2K-point seasons … career: points (10th)
If you made a Slipped Through the Cracks of History All-Star Team, ’Nique makes the starting five along with Westphal, Moses, Kemp, Gus Williams and sixth man Andrew Toney. Nobody ever mentions these guys anymore. It’s mystifying. Just remember these eight things about our man ’Nique.
His best teammates were Doc Rivers, Kevin Willis, Antoine Carr, John Battle, Spud Webb, a not-quite-there-yet Mookie Blaylock and a just-about-washed-up Moses. During ’Nique’s prime (’85 to ’94), only one teammate cracked an All-NBA team (Kevin Willis, a third-teamer in ’92) and just four made an All-Star team (Rivers in ’88, Moses in ’89, Willis in ’92 and Mookie in ’94). Of everyone in my top sixty with one exception (Bernard), ’Nique had the least help. It’s just a fact.
The Hawks won 50 games or more for three straight years (’86 through ’88) during the league’s strongest period, when there were only twenty-three teams, the Bird/Magic/Moses/Isiah generation was still thriving and the MJ/Hakeem/Malone generation was coming into its own. During that time, ’Nique averaged 30.0 points per game and doubled as his team’s only bona fide All-Star during a time when most contenders had two, three or even four All-Star-caliber guys. Quite a feat.
’Nique averaged somewhere between 26 and 31 points for a solid decade (’85 through ’94). The list of noncenters who can say that: Jordan, Iverson, West, ’Nique … and that’s the list.
MJ was better at controlling his body in the air and creating impossible shots, but ’Nique was the best in-game dunker of his generation. Nobody dunked on people as consistently and violently; he made it an art form and sought out victims. His single most identifiable dunk was the one where he jumped in traffic off two feet, brought the ball up like he was going to dunk it right away, brought it down again to buy himself an extra split second as the defender fell back to earth, then ripped it through the hoop. He did this over and over and over. Nobody blocked a ’Nique dunk. It just didn’t happen.23
Along those same lines, nobody fired up a home crowd more than ’Nique … and that lame Atlanta crowd in the eighties and nineties certainly needed the help. As former Hawks president Stan Kasten said once, “Dominique is a showman. People denigrate that, but it’s important. In the old ABA, coaches used to call a time-out whenever the Doc dunked. Don’t let the crowd get fired up. Coaches do the same thing against ’Nique.” There’s something to be said for that: only a few players could send their crowd into a near-frenzy, and ’Nique was one.
I know this has nothing to do with anything, but if you’re discussing his competitive spirit, it has to be mentioned that ’Nique gave MJ everything he could handle in the ’87 and ’88 Slam Dunk Contests and was absolutely robbed (that’s right, italics) in ’87 for reasons that remain unclear. That was the Dunk Contest equivalent of the ’06 Finals.24
’Nique had the single hippest poster of the entire 1980s: one where he casually finished off a reverse dunk in a just-about-empty Meadow-lands arena with empty seats cluttering the background behind him. It’s hard to properly explain how mesmerizing this was, so I’ll only say this: My basement was littered with every sports poster you can imagine. I practically had a sports poster fetish. Name any good one from the eighties and I guarantee it was hanging somewhere in that basement. The ’Nique poster was given the coveted spot right between the Ping-Pong table and pool table on the wall directly over my stereo. And that’s where it remained for the entire decade. Everyone who ever went down there loved it, commented on it and stared at it. In retrospect, the poster personified that era from ’81 to ’84 perfectly—the league was becoming cool, only the fans hadn’t caught on yet.25
Of the 600-plus NBA games I have attended, ’Nique made the single most spectacular play I’ve ever seen: During the ’88 playoffs, he bricked a jumper from the top of the key, jumped from one step in front of the foul line and rammed home the rebound over Boston’s entire front line. I can’t even properly describe it; everyone in the Garden made this low-pitched “oooooooh” noise when it happened, almost like a “swoooooosh.” We didn’t know what to do. He pulled a Bob Beamon. It seemed like he jumped 30 feet. This was a superhuman act and I will never forget it for as long as I live.
So why didn’t Wilkins get selected for the NBA’s 50 at 50? He never played in a Conference Finals, which hurt his cause unless you remember that his prime coincided with three Eastern juggernauts (the mid-eighties Celtics, late-eighties Pistons and early-nineties Bulls). He battled the stigma of being a “me first” guy throughout his career, someone who cared about getting his numbers, dunking on a few guys and that’s it.26 Doc Rivers once joked that you could stand in the huddle with Wilkins during the final 30 seconds of a one-point playoff game and ask him, “’Nique, how many points do you have?” and Wilkins would respond without missing a beat, “Thirty-seven, and I’d have 39 if they called that foul back in the second quarter.” Doesn’t sound like someone with a firm grasp of The Secret. And he never displayed the all-around brilliance of many contemporaries, always making for a better foil than anything. It’s fitting that his career highlights happened in the Dunk Contest and an eventual Game 7 loss (the famous duel with Bird). And he was a self-absorbed scorer who rarely moved without the ball and always seemed to be holding his right hand up in the “I’m open!” stance. I hated playing with those guys. But to claim that Wilkins wasn’t one of the best fifty NBA players ever in 1996 … that’s just absurd.
54. PAUL PIERCE

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … Finals MVP (’08) … top 10 (’09), top 15 (’02, ’03, ’08) … 3-year peak: 26–7–4 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 26–9–5 (26 G) … ’08 Playoffs: 20–5–5 (26 G) … leader: FTs (1x) … career: 23–6–4
The resume for Pierce: Out-dueled LeBron in Game 7 of the 2008 Cavs-Celts series, then outplayed Kobe in the Finals (major points there) … repeatedly raised his level of play in big games (dating back to the ’02 Playoffs) … finished the Double Zeros as the best small forward not named LeBron … exhibited remarkable durability over the past ten years, missing an extended stretch of games only once (during the ’07 season, when the Celtics shelved him while tanking for Oden or Durant) … a memorably tough competitor who didn’t miss a single 2000 preseason game after getting nearly stabbed to death two weeks earlier.27
Maybe I’m a little too close to it—after all, I probably watched 80 percent of his games, attended most of the home games for his first four years and spent an inordinate amount of time wondering about dopey things like, “Shit, why do I have a terrible feeling he was smoking dope with Ricky Davis until 5:45 a.m. this morning?” But after watching Pierce evolve from “guy with franchise potential” to “guy who led a championship team,” I realized his career was a microcosm of the modern NBA fan experience. After some early stumbles during the discouraging Pitino era,28 Pierce emerged as a potential stud, signed a six-year extension for $71 million, then led the Celtics to the 2002 Eastern Finals and submitted a heroic performance in Game 3 (a comeback win from 25 down) before Boston ultimately fell short. After that happened, he probably thought, “All right, I’m here. I made it. I knew this would happen. I’m one of the greats!” Then he started acting like a complete ass.29 He played on the ’02 World Championships team that disgraced itself, then returned with a petulant attitude (the scowling, chest-pounding, whining, and ref-baiting were insufferable), acting like a prima donna behind the scenes and partying way too much for anyone’s liking. And this just kept going on and going on, without anyone truly calling him on it—you know, because this was the post-Y2K NBA and guys could act like jerks with few or no repercussions—until everything crested in the ’05 playoffs when Pierce committed a boneheaded foul that got him ejected and nearly blew the Indiana series.
Boston fans found themselves in an all-too-frequent position for NBA diehards in the past two decades: we were tired of Pierce’s act, thought he needed a fresh start somewhere else and wondered if he was a lost cause, but we knew our team couldn’t possibly get equal value for him. So what do you do? Do you just keep crossing your fingers and hoping that a talented star who’s already made more money than he’ll ever need will suddenly realize, “You know, I’m wasting my potential, maybe I should straighten myself out”? Or do you admit he’s a falling stock and cash out? There’s no right answer. Teams that owned Baron Davis, Charles Barkley, T-Mac, Allen and C-Webber cashed out and eventually regretted it. Teams that owned Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury, Derrick Coleman, Larry Johnson and Kemp cashed out and never regretted it. And then there’s Boston and Indiana, who found themselves in similar predicaments with underachieving franchise guys—Pierce and Jermaine O’Neal—only both teams crossed their fingers and rode it out over trading them for 60–70 cents on the dollar, a decision that worked out spectacularly for Boston and unbearably for Indiana. You never know with this stuff. You really don’t.
The thing is, the Celtics wanted to cash out. That summer, they agreed to a tentative trade with Portland for Nick Van Exel’s expiring contract and the number three pick (planning to take Chris Paul)30 before Pierce caught wind of it and squashed the deal by playing the “I’ll make everyone in Portland miserable” card. Maybe that was the turning point. Maybe he matured in his late twenties like so many of us do.31 Maybe enough time had passed since the stabbing and he’d stopped being bitter. Maybe he caught an old Celtics game from the Bird era on ESPN Classic, noticed the Garden swaying and thought to himself, “It used to mean something to be a Celtic; I can do something about this.” Maybe he’d been partying too much and calmed down.32 Whatever happened, he became everything we ever wanted in the 2005–6 season, carrying a young Celtics team, outplaying opposing stars, lifting them in crunch time and doing everything with a smile. Remember when Angelina Jolie broke up with Billy Bob Thornton, stopped wearing a vial of his blood around her neck, stopped dressing like a goth harlot, started adopting third-world babies and fighting AIDS, turned Brad Pitt into Mike Brady and basically became Mother Teresa, and the transformation from “bad” to “good” was so seamless that there was something creepy about it? That was Pierce.33 By December, with rumors flying of a blockbuster trade to launch our umpteenth rebuilding effort, I started getting emails from season-ticket holders telling me, “I don’t care that we’re blowing close games, it’s been worth the money just to watch Pierce every night, we better not trade him.”
What usually happens when an NBA star finds himself stuck in a hopeless situation? He pouts and starts looking for his own stats. He wonders aloud if their team is truly “committed to winning.” His misses twelve games with a five-game hamstring injury. After a tough loss, he saunters off the court with an expression that says, Hey, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t ask to play with these shitheads. Eventually, he pushes to play somewhere else, only because he wants to be paid like a franchise player without the responsibility of actually carrying a franchise. But that was the beautiful thing about Pierce during those two depressing seasons before the Allen/Garnett trades: He wanted to be a Celtic. He wanted to be there when things turned around. He believed the Celtics were his team, for better or worse, that it was his personal responsibility to lead them. Everyone will remember his ’08 season, but Pierce’s greatest season had already happened, the year he accepted the responsibility of a franchise player and killed himself every night. The groundwork for everything that happened afterward was laid then and there. Where did it come from? I couldn’t tell you. But it’s the reason a team like Denver ends up keeping ’Melo for two extra years, because you never want a great player “getting it” as soon as he’s playing for someone else.
By the 2008 Playoffs, Pierce was right where we wanted him to be. Defensively, he pushed himself to heights unseen by giving LeBron everything he could handle in the second round, demolishing Tayshaun Prince in the Eastern Finals, and famously taking over Kobe duty during the 24-point comeback in Game 4. Offensively, he evolved into a game manager of sorts, picking his spots, keeping teammates involved and showing a knack for taking over at the right times. Spiritually, he became the heart of the team, the only one who seemed utterly convinced that they would win the championship. With ten minutes to go in Game 6 and Boston locked into the title, the Lakers called time out and Pierce turned to face the crowd behind the Celtics’ bench, watching fans dance to the arena sound system music and nodding happily. You could see him soaking in the moment. He wasn’t even doing it for the cameras; it was one of those times when you could study someone from a distance and read every single thing he was thinking. He was thinking about the past ten years, and all the bad things that had happened, and all the times he’d given up hope, and now he was reminding himself to enjoy the moment. You could see it. All of it.
I wrote a postgame passage that could have been written about twenty coulda-gone-either-way stars had the best-case scenario of their careers been realized:
We watched that guy grow up. We watched him become a man. We believed in him, we gave up on him, and we believed in him again. I don’t mean to sound like the old man in Pretty Woman,34 but part of me wanted to walk onto the court Tuesday night and just tell Pierce, “It’s hard for me to say this without sounding condescending, but I’m proud of you.” We spend so much time complaining about sports and being disappointed that our favorite players never end up being who we wanted them to be, but in Pierce’s case, he became everything we wanted him to be. When he held up the Finals MVP trophy after the game and screamed to the crowd in delight, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier for a Boston athlete. How many guys stick with a crummy franchise for 10 solid years, then get a chance to lead that same team to a championship? Does that ever happen in sports anymore?
53. DWYANE WADE

Resume: 6 years, 5 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’06 Finals MVP … top 10 (05, ’06, ’09), top 15 (’07) … 3-year peak: 26–5–7 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 25–5–6 (54 G) … ’06 Finals: 37–8–4 … ’09: 30–8–5, 2.2 steals, 49% FG (first scoring leader to finish top 16 in assists, steals, and blocks)
After a few injuries and some well-earned “Let’s hope he isn’t the next Penny Hardaway/Grant Hill” worries,35 Wade reclaimed top-five status in the 2008 Olympics and kept the momentum going with an extraordinary ’09 season, finishing third in the MVP voting and slapping up the best all-around statistical year from a two-guard since Jordan. I can’t remember an under-twenty-eight guard with a better blend of skills: he scores and creates for others; he’s an excellent defender; he never mails in games or quarters; he rises to the occasion when it matters; and most important, he straddles the line between “making everyone else better” and “it’s time for me to take over” as well as anyone. The Bulls didn’t enjoy playing with Jordan until 1991. The Lakers didn’t enjoy playing with Kobe until 2008. Wade’s teammates have always enjoyed playing with him. That quality sets him apart, as do the uncanny parallels between Wade’s career and Jack Bauer’s: not just their fearlessness and respective abilities to carry their own shows, but their career peaks and valleys from 2002–3 (Wade’s breakout at Marquette and Jack’s first two seasons of 24) to 2006 (the year they both peaked) to 2007–8 (when things fell apart and their shows nearly got canceled) to 2009 (redemption as franchise guys for both).36
And then there’s this: in Miami’s four Finals victories in 2006, Wade averaged 39.3 points and 8.3 rebounds, made 58 of 73 FTs and earned the following praise from me: “Sometime during the past four weeks, Wade matured into the single best player in the league, someone who instinctively balanced the line between deferring to teammates and taking over games (kinda like what we always wanted Kobe to be, only it never happened).” Put in simpler terms, it’s the single best Jordan impersonation ever done. In a 2008 feature about the fifty greatest Finals performances since 1977, John Hollinger ranked Wade’s thrashing of Dallas first37—partly because he finished with the highest PER rating, partly because Wade’s numbers were achieved during a slower-paced series, and partly because Hollinger may have made a bet with someone who dared him to write the single nuttiest column in ESPN.com history—and had the gall to write, “While it seems strange to have somebody besides Jordan in the top spot, the truth is Jordan never dominated a Finals to this extent. At the time, many called Wade’s performance Jordanesque. It turns out they might have been selling him short.”38
Here’s what scares me: as the years pass and fans rely on statistics for memories, fans might believe that Wade’s 2006 Finals performance surpassed anything Jordan did. So let’s put a stop to that. Before I kill someone. Forget about the obvious advantages in Wade’s era (no hand checking, no hard fouls); that series goes down as the biggest travesty in the history of NBA officiating. It was a damned disgrace. It turned people off on the league. After Game 5 played out like a WWE match, I probably received two thousand emails in twelve hours from frustrated fans, many of whom were ready to give up on the league because they felt like the results were preordained. The reality? The NBA was fighting through a fundamental crisis with its style of play that went beyond the whole issue of changing the hand check rules and speeding up play to get more scoring. Some teams were embracing the new rules, attacking the basket, pushing the ball and thinking outside the box; others were sticking to what had worked from 1994 to 2005, slowing down the pace, pushing themselves on defense, and revolving their offense around one guy. Miami and Dallas represented the old-school and new-school ways of thinking, respectively; after Game 5 of the Finals, I even wrote, “I’m starting to feel like the future of the NBA is at stake.” Nothing against Miami, but nobody wanted to watch a predictable offensive team anymore. We didn’t want to watch one guy create every shot in crunch time while everyone else stood around. We didn’t want to watch a team limit possessions and walk up the floor. We didn’t want officials deciding games based on their interpretations of the “superstar barrelling into the paint and trying to draw contact” conundrum.
For whatever reason, this series provoked some of my angriest writing ever. I belted out the following rant after Game 5:
Here’s what happens if Miami wins the title: New Jersey will say to themselves, “Hey, maybe this could happen to us with Vince”; Washington will say the same about Arenas; Boston with Pierce; the Lakers with Kobe; New Team X with Iverson; and so on and so on. But that’s just the thing … we went through this last decade. There was only one MJ; the formula couldn’t be replicated. Same with Wade; only LeBron can match him. And everyone else will fail trying, which means we can look forward to another decade of perimeter scorers going 11 for 32 in big games, teammates standing around while stars dribble at the top of the key waiting to challenge two defenders at once, and refs deciding every big game (like in Game 5) by how they interpret contact when the same guy is recklessly driving to the basket over and over again. Does any of this sound fun to you? As much as I enjoy watching Wade, a Heat title would erase all the progress of this spring…. Nothing against Wade (after all, it isn’t his fault his team sucks and he has to play this way)39 but seeing an individual triumph over a team YET AGAIN would erase every positive outcome from the 2005–6 season. Basically, the team with LeBron or Wade will win the next 10–12 titles, and it will come down to which guy made more 20-footers with two guys on him and which guy got the most cheap calls from the most spineless referees. That’s not basketball, it’s a star system. When my wife was asking why I was so ticked off after Game 5, it wasn’t because I had money on the game (I didn’t),40 or because I liked one team more than the other (I don’t). If Miami wins, we may as well go back to box haircuts again, because it’s going to be 1991 all over again—the “New and Improved” NBA will have been defeated, and the Old-School NBA will reign supreme.41
You know how things turned out: Miami prevailed in six as Wade attempted a startling 97 free throws. The combined effect of this disastrous Finals and Tim Donaghy’s scandalous firing made the powers that be finally realize that officials held too much sway. If you watched the 2008 Finals carefully, you noticed that Kobe never benefited from those star system calls that he absolutely would have drawn had the series been played two years earlier. (If anything, Kobe became so frustrated that it took him out of his rhythm to some degree.) In 2006? We hadn’t made that progress yet. Before the series, I wrote in my Finals preview that “no team depends on the refs quite like the Heat. When the refs are calling all the bumps on Shaq and protecting Wade on every drive, they’re unstoppable. When they’re calling everything fairly, they’re eminently beatable. If they’re not getting any calls, they’re just about hopeless. I could see the refs swinging two games in Miami’s favor during this series, possibly three. In fact, I’m already depressed about it and the series hasn’t even started yet.” That was an eerie prediction considering how it played out. Down two games to none and trailing by double digits in Game 3, Wade drew every call and willed Miami to a comeback victory. In Game 5, Wade attempted as many free throws (25) as the entire Mavericks team—how the hell does that happen?—and scored the game-winning points after Wade got sent to the line on an out-of-control drive where Bennett Salvatore called Nowitzki on a barely perceptible nudge from 40 feet away.42 There were your two swing games. So yeah, Wade did the best MJ impersonation of all time in that series. But we can’t forget what happened with the shoddy officiating. I won’t let you. For as long as I have my “Sports Guy” column, I plan on referring to that 2006 Heat team as the “Miami Salvatores.” And that’s that.
52. DENNIS JOHNSON

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’79 Finals MVP (23–6–6) … top 5 (’81), top 10 (’80) … All-Defense (9x, six 1st) … started for 3 champs (’79 Sonics, ’84, ’86 Celts) and 3 runner-ups (’78, ’85, ’87) … 3-year peak: 19–4–5 … ’87 Playoffs: 19–4–9, 41.9 MPG (23 G) … never played fewer than 72 games, missed 48 games total
Yet another reason why we need to blow up the Hall of Fame: Poor DJ passed away in 2007 before Springfield found a place for him, leading to the inevitable ceremony when he makes it posthumously and his peers pay tribute with a series of “It’s just too bad DJ couldn’t have been here to see this” comments. I hate when that happens. Either you’re a Hall of Famer or you’re not. This isn’t the Oscars or Emmys, where only a certain number of nominees can win each year. You shouldn’t have to “wait your turn.”
Here’s what we know for sure:
Johnson was the greatest defensive guard of his era, making nine straight All-Defensive appearances from 1979 to 1987 (first or second team) and becoming one of the only players ever described as “destructive” on that end. The Celtics traded for him before the ’84 season43 because Andrew Toney had been torturing them every spring. The Sixers never beat them again. And every Celtics fan remembers how the ’84 Finals turned when DJ demanded to guard Magic before Game 4,44 as well as DJ’s singular obliteration of Robert Reid in the ’86 Finals. An All-Defensive team for the past thirty years can only include four guys—DJ, Payton, Pippen and Hakeem—as well as a juicy argument between Garnett, Rodman and Ben Wallace for the power forward spot.
For the short list of best big-game guards, it’s Frazier, West, Miller, Jordan, Sam Jones, DJ and maybe Isiah (depending on how much you want to blame him for Bird’s steal). DJ played in six Finals and two other conference Finals, going down as the best all-around guard for 11 straight seasons on teams that won 47, 52, 56, 57, 46, 53, 62, 63, 67, 59 and 57 games. He averaged 17.3 points, 5.6 assists, and 4.3 rebounds for his playoff career, including an astonishing 23-game run for a banged-up ’87 Celtics team on which he averaged a 19–9 and 42 minutes per game guarding the likes of John Lucas, Sidney Moncrief, Isiah Thomas, Vinnie Johnson and Magic.
Larry Bird called him the greatest he ever played with, which seems relevant since the Legend played with McHale, Parish, Walton, Archibald, Cowens and Maravich (all Hall of Famers). Although I do feel like he was sticking it to McHale a little. More on this in a few pages.
In fourteen seasons, DJ played in 1,100 of a possible 1,148 regular-season games, missed more than 5 games just once (missing 10 in the ’89 season, near the tail end of his career) and played in another 180 playoff games (eleventh on the all-time list). The guy was built like an Albanian oak.
He made the all-time “We’ll never see anyone like this specific guy again” team. There’s never been a guard like DJ before or since.45
The last paragraph should have clinched his Hall of Fame spot. Could you compare Dennis Johnson to anyone else on the planet? He splashed onto the scene as a high-flying, physical two-guard for the Sonics, evolved into a scorer for Phoenix, reincarnated himself as a heady point guard in Boston and peaked as the ringleader of a loaded ’86 team that scored 114 points a game. He could defend anyone shorter than six foot nine and lock them down. He was such an intelligent player that Bird and DJ had a secret ESP play for six straight years, in which Bird would linger near the basket like he was waiting for someone to set him a pick, then DJ would whip a pass by the defender’s ears and Bird would catch it at the last possible second for a layup (and the only way that play happened was if they locked eyes). He was one of those classic only-when-it-counts shooters who could be riding a 3-for-14 game into the final minute, then nail a wide-open 20-footer to win the game. Every Celtic loved playing with him because of his competitiveness and the way he carried himself in big games with a noticeable swagger. Other than Bird, I can’t remember following anyone who enjoyed the actual process of winning more than him. There’s a great scene in the ’87 team video when the Celts are boarding the bus after a Game 6 shellacking in the Pistons series. Still sulking about Dennis Rodman’s antics, DJ sarcastically waves his hand over his head and says something like, “Yeah, okay, we’ll see what happens on Sunday.” Sure enough, the Celts pulled out an absolute slugfest of a seventh game, with DJ following Rodman around in the final seconds and sarcastically mimicking Rodman’s high-stepped gait while waving his hand over his head. The lesson, as always: don’t mess with Dennis Johnson.46
On a personal note, I loved so many things about watching him play: the way he’d suddenly strip an unsuspecting guard at midcourt (you never see that anymore) like a pickpocket swiping a wallet; the ESP plays with Bird; the supernatural way he rose to the occasion in big moments (like the game-winner in Game 4 of the ’85 Finals); his unsurpassed knack for grabbing big rebounds in traffic; the way he always made one huge play in a must-win game (my personal favorite was in Game 7 against the ’87 Bucks, when he went flying full speed out of bounds to save a loose ball in the final 90 seconds, then somehow whipped it off Sikma as he careened into the entire Bucks bench). Every time I get sucked into an old Celtics game from the eighties on ESPN Classic or NBA TV, there’s always a point in the game where I find myself saying, “Holy crap, I forgot how good Dennis Johnson was.”
Few remember his defining moment: the waning seconds of Game 5 in the ’87 Eastern finals, when Bird picked off Isiah’s pass and found DJ for the winning layup. Right after Bird snatched the ball from Laimbeer’s grimy hands, as everyone else was still processing what had happened, DJ started cutting toward the basket with his hands up. From the mid-seventies to right now, I can only pinpoint a handful of players who would have instinctively known to cut toward the basket there: MJ, Magic, Frazier, Stockton, Reggie, Mullin, Barry, Isiah (ironically, the one who threw the pass), Horry, Wade, Kidd, Iverson, Nash, Kobe and that’s about it. Nobody else starts moving for a full second after that steal happens. And by the way, if DJ had never made that cut, Bird would have been forced to launch a fall-away 10-footer over the backboard to win the game … which he probably would have made, but that’s beside the point. Don’t forget that DJ was chugging full speed as he caught the pass from his left, with Dumars charging from the right, meaning he had to shield the ball from Dumars, turn his body and make an extremely difficult reverse layup that came within a hair of missing (believe me, I was there). Of course, few people remember this, just as few remember how great a basketball player Dennis Johnson was. As my father said on the phone when DJ died, “He was the best guard on the best team I ever watched in my entire life.”
Agreed. DJ should have made the trip to Springfield when he was still alive. At least he lives on in this book.
51. BILL SHARMAN

Resume: 12 years, 8 quality, 8 All-Stars … top 5 (’56, ’57, ’58, ’59), top 10 (’53, 55, ’60) … started for 4 champs in Boston (’57, ’59, ’60, ’61) … leader: FT% (7x) … 3-year peak: 21–3–4 … best Playoffs FT shooter, 75+ games (91.1%)
The NBA’s best two-guard until Jerry West showed up; the first shooter to regularly crack 40 percent from the field and shoot 90 percent from the line; half of the most successful backcourt in the history of the league. Factoring in team success, individual careers, statistics and total games played together, we haven’t seen anything approaching Cousy and Sharman. (Lemme know when we’ll see two guards from the same team make first-team All-NBA for four straight years.)47 When Sharman retired in 1961, only twenty-two noncenters had played 500 games or more at that time. Of those twenty-two players, Sharman ranked first in free throw percentage (88 percent) and second in shooting percentage (42.6 percent, just behind Bob Pettit); he was the only guard to crack 40 percent from the field. So Sharman was significantly better than any other two-guard from his era; the numbers, awards, and titles back this up, as does the fact that Sharman held off Sam Jones for four solid years. The six-foot-two Sharman even moonlighted as a third baseman in Brooklyn’s farm system from 1950 to 1955, getting called up at the end of the ’51 season and being thrown out of a game for yelling at an umpire, becoming the only player in major league history to get ejected from a game without ever actually appearing in one. Bizarre. But that gives you an idea of his athletic pedigree. He was also infamous for being the first player to (a) study opponents’ tendencies and keep notes on them and (b) create a daily routine of stretching, exercising, and shooting and make a concerted effort to stick to that routine.48
What doesn’t live on historically was Sharman’s defense. By all accounts, he was that decade’s best lockdown defender and a feisty competitor who had more fights than Jake LaMotta. Jerry West once remembered being a rookie and making seven straight shots against an aging Sharman, then Sharman preventing an eighth shot simply by taking a swing at him. As West told the L.A. Times years later, “I’ll tell you this, you did not drive by him. He got into more fights than Mike Tyson. You respected him as a player.” Sounds like my kind of guy. I’d tell you more, but Sharman retired when my mother was twelve.
50. DOLPH SCHAYES

Resume: 15 years, 11 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’58 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’52, ’53, ’54, ’55, ’57, ’58), top 10 (’50, ’51, ’56, ’59, ’60, ’61) … leader: rebounds (1x), FT% (3x), minutes (2x) … career FT: 85% … 5-year peak: 23–13–3 … best player on champ (’55 Nats)
You have to love the days when NBA superstars had names like Dolph. Schayes excelled in two different eras (pre-shot-clock, post-shot-clock), won an Imaginary Playoffs MVP and a ring for the ’55 Nats, stuck around for an abnormally long time (fifteen years, which was like twenty-five years back then), exhibited a startling degree of durability (missing three games total in his first twelve seasons) and finished as the second most successful forward of the pre-Elgin era. Still, we have to penalize him for excelling as a set-shooting, slow-as-molasses power forward during an time when black players were few and far between. When Russell entered the league, Syracuse and Schayes won only two Playoffs in the next seven years. What would happen if he played now? Whom would he defend? How would he score? Would he have been better than Danny Ferry? I also couldn’t shake his shooting stats—Schayes only shot 40% in a season twice and finished at a deadly 38% for his career, well behind contemporaries such as Hagan (45%), Twyman (45%), Ed Macauley (44%), Pettit (44%), George Yardley (42%) and Arizin (42%). Maybe Cousy’s shooting stats were equally brutal, but his playmaking skills would have translated nicely to today’s game. In short, I’m just not seeing the Dolphster. But you can’t argue with five top fives and six top tens, so he had to crack the top fifty. Barely.49
49. ELVIN HAYES

Resume: 16 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … top 5 (’75, ’77, ’79), top 10 (’73, ’74, ’76) … second-best player on 1 champ (’78 Bullets) and 2 runner-ups (’75, ’79) … missed 9 games in his entire career … traded once in his prime … ’75 playoffs: 26–11 (17 G) … ’78, ’79 playoffs: 22–14 (40 G) … 3-year peak: 28–17 … 25K-15K Club
The Big E played 50,000 minutes exactly. (Yes, it was intentional.) He missed 9 games in a sixteen-year career and never played fewer than 80 games in a season. He scored over 27,000 points and grabbed over 16,000 rebounds. And in the last three minutes of a huge game, you wouldn’t have wanted him on the floor. We’ll remember Hayes as his generation’s Karl Malone, a gifted power forward with terrific numbers who played differently when the bread needed to be buttered … although Malone carried a little more weight with his peers and weaseled his way into two MVP awards, whereas Hayes never cracked the top two in the balloting. It’s worth mentioning that the Big E played his first four years for the Rockets,50 averaged a 27–16, and doubled as their franchise player when they moved to Houston, the same city where he memorably starred in college, only things deteriorated so badly that they gave him away before the ’73–’74 season for Jack Marin and cash considerations.51 Jack Marin and cash considerations? That was the whole trade? Other than eye-opening numbers and a memorable no-show in the ’75 Finals, Hayes stands out for five reasons:
My favorite basketball writer growing up, Bob Ryan, openly detested Elvin’s game and took shots at the Big E any time he could. Any time someone choked in the clutch or shrank from a big moment, regardless of the sport, you could count on Ryan to compare that player to Hayes. Since Ryan is one of the more rational writers around, as well as the best hoops writer of my lifetime, I’m trusting his judgment here.
You know the annoying “Emm Vee Pee!” chants that get serenaded on every top-twenty player in the league? All empirical evidence suggests that Elvin Hayes and the Bullets fans are to blame. Down the stretch of the ’79 season, when there were three favorites to win the award (Malone, Gervin and Hayes), Washington fans started chanting “Emm Vee Pee!” every time he made a good play. Now we get to hear that chant when the likes of Joe Johnson makes a three. Awesome. By the way, with players voting for MVP for the majority of Elvin’s career, the Big E cracked the top six only three times—fifth in ’74, third in ’75, third in ’79—which makes me wonder if the other guys respected him that much. I’m guessing no.
He certainly didn’t distinguish himself in the ’78 Finals, scoring 133 points in the first six games but only 19 in the fourth quarters, earning derisive comments in Curry Kirkpatrick’s SI Finals feature, like “Individualism overcame Elvin in yet another big contest,” “Hayes once more disappeared in the moments of crisis,” “In between his hiding and complaining to everybody about the officials,” and “[It’s] imperative for the Bullets that their only real ‘name’ player and 10-year All-Star justify his status by not dissolving at the end of the seventh game.” What happened? Elvin scored 12 points in Game 7 and fouled out with 10 minutes to play in a close game. They won the title on the road without him. I find this interesting.52
According to Filip Bondy in Tip Off, before Hayes’ final season with the Rockets in ’84, he made a big deal about mentoring prized rookie Ralph Sampson, causing Houston coach Bill Fitch to pull Sampson aside and tell him, “You stay away from that no-good f*cking prick.” Elvin Hayes, everybody!
Hayes’ signature shot? The fall-away/turnaround. My theory on the fall-away: it’s a passive-aggressive shot that says more about a player than you think. For instance, Jordan, McHale and Hakeem all had tremendous fall-aways—in fact, MJ developed the shot to save his body from undue punishment driving to the basket—but it was one piece of their offensive arsenal, a weapon used to complement the other weapons already in place. Well, five basketball stars in the past sixty years have been famous for either failing miserably in the clutch or lacking the ability to rise to the occasion: Wilt, Hayes, Malone, Ewing and Garnett. All five were famous for their fall-away/turnaround jumpers and took heat because their fall-aways pulled them out of rebounding position. If it missed, almost always it was a one-shot possession. On top of that, it never leads to free throws—either the shot falls or the other team gets it. Could you make the case that the fall-away, fundamentally, is a loser’s shot? For a big man, it’s the dumbest shot you can take—only one good thing can happen and that’s it—as well as a symbol of a larger problem, namely, that a team’s best big man would rather move away from the basket than toward it. Of the handful of differences that led Tim Duncan to become more successful than Garnett, the biggest has been their mind-set in close games. Duncan makes a concerted effort to plant his ass down low, post up and take high-percentage shots (either jump hooks, drop-step layups, mini-fall-aways or “I’m putting my shoulder into you and getting to the rim” layups) that might also lead to fouls, tip-ins, or put-back layups, whereas Garnett mostly settles for 18-footers and fall-aways.
So here’s my take: the fall-away says, “I’d rather stay out here.” It says, “I’m afraid to fail.” It says, “I want to win this game, but only on my terms.” In a related story, Elvin Hayes attempted more fall-aways than anyone who ever played in the NBA. Draw your own conclusions.
48. JAMES WORTHY

Resume: 12 years, 8 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’88 Finals MVP … top 15 (’90, ’91) … 2nd-or 3rd-best player for 3 champs (’85, ’87, ’88 Lakers) and 3 runner-ups (’84, ’89, ’91) … 2-year peak: 21–5–4, 55% FG … playoffs (143 G): 21–5–2, 54% FG (5th-best ever, 100+ games)
If you made an All-Star team of Guys Who Made a Jump Historically Because They Were Fortunate Enough to Play on Some Really Good Teams, here’s your starting five: Parish, Worthy, Scottie Pippen, Walt Frazier and K. C. Jones (who snuck into the Hall of Fame even though he couldn’t shoot). At the same time, each player had skill sets and personalities that lent themselves to semicomplementary roles on winning teams (we covered the benefits in Parish’s section), so it’s tough to penalize them for being that way. You can win titles with guys like Pippen, Frazier and Worthy. You know, as long as they aren’t the best guy on your team.
Worthy stood out for his athleticism (off the charts), transition finishes (as good as anyone), and signature freeze-the-ball-high-above, swooping one-handed slam (one of the five memorable signature dunks of the eighties, along with Doc’s tomahawk dunk, Bernard’s running two-hander, ’Nique’s windmill and MJ’s tilt-the-body one-hander). I already made this joke, but let’s tweak it: anyone who had a Nerf hoop in the eighties and claims he didn’t attempt Worthy’s swooping dunk or Bernard’s two-hander at least five hundred times is lying. Worthy had an unstoppable first step and absolutely abused slower defenders. Defensively, he played Bird better than any quality offensive player and helped swing the ’87 Finals that way. He wasn’t the greatest rebounder but had a knack for grabbing big ones in big moments. And you can’t forget Game 7 of the ’88 Finals, when he carried the Lakers with a 36–16–10 against a superior defensive team and rightfully earned the nickname “Big Game James.”53 Had he developed a three-point shot—and it’s unclear why he didn’t54—Worthy would have been unstoppable. We also can’t forget that he spent three years at Carolina and another seven playing for Pat Riley, a notorious practice Nazi, which explains why Worthy’s legs went so quickly after just ten quality NBA seasons. You can’t penalize him for a lack of longevity.
You also can’t discuss Worthy without mentioning the Wilkins/Worthy what-if and Worthy’s thank-God-it-never-happened Clippers career, which would be neat to simulate Sliding Doors-style if we had the ability to do so.55 One thing’s for sure: had Worthy gone second in the ’82 draft, he wouldn’t have cracked the top fifty of the Pyramid. You need some luck with this stuff and he had it. While we’re here, I’d like to honor him for two other things: being a starting forward on the All-Time Bearded All-Stars,56 and being the subject of Peter Vecsey’s funniest joke ever, after Worthy was arrested for soliciting two prostitutes and arranging for them to meet him in a Houston hotel room (Vecsey cracked in his New York Post column, “James always did have trouble scoring against double teams”). High comedy for 1991, I’m telling you.
47. BILLY CUNNINGHAM

Resume: 11 years, 8 quality, 5 All-Stars (1 ABA) … ’73 ABA MVP … ’69 BS MVP … top 5 (’69, ’70, ’71), top 10 (’72), top 5 ABA (’73) … 5-year peak: 24–12–4 … ’73 ABA: 24–12–6 … ’73 Playoffs: 24–12–5 (12 G) … career: 21.2 PPG, 10.4 RPG (both top 40) … Playoffs: 20–10–4 (54 G)
Billy was the starting small forward on the Guys I Would Have Loved if I Had Seen Them Play Team: a lefty small forward who played bigger than his size and had a game best described as a cross between Manu Ginobili’s and Shawn Marion’s, only with that superintelligent hoops IQ of a kid weaned in the New York schoolyards. Like Bernard’s, his career was derailed by a major knee injury. Unlike Bernard, he never really recovered. But Cunningham was the sixth man for one of the greatest teams ever (the ’67 Sixers) and the NBA’s best small forward for a five-year stretch (’68 to ’72) before winning the ABA MVP … and then he got hurt and that was that. Billy C.’s calling card was his Manu-like drives. He grew up in Brooklyn and played on an outdoor court where it was so windy that everyone was afraid to take 20-footers, so everyone adjusted by taking the biscuit to the basket in any way possible. (After researching this book, I’m convinced that the guy who surpasses MJ will be a poor kid with two parents and two older brothers who grew up playing on a clay court where it was too windy to shoot 20-footers. Mark my words, he will break every record in the book.) Billy also may have been MVP of the White Guys Who Played Like Black Guys team (we made it!), a massively important topic for Jabaal Abdul-Simmons. You can’t really define what it takes to make this hallowed team; it’s more of a “you know it when you see it” thing, although here are three good rules of thumb: Could the player in question have pulled a C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man and just pretended he was black without anyone noticing? Had the player actually been black instead of white, would his career (and the way we enjoyed it) have made more sense? In other words, did it almost seem like a mistake that he was white? And could the player do Billy Hoyle’s routine on an inner-city playground court and immediately win the respect of everyone there? Here are the Billy Hoyle All-Stars:
Starters. Dave Cowens, Chambers, Cunningham, Westphal and Jason Williams,57 or as I like to call them, the Honorary Brothers. You know what’s appealing about this group other than a complete lack of White Man’s Disease? They would have made a fantastic starting five! What would have been more fun than watching White Chocolate running the fast break with Cunningham and Chambers on the wings, or Westphal and Cowens running high screens in crunch time?
Sixth Man. Bobby Jones, among the confusing players in NBA history—a skinny, unassuming diabetic who played above the rim as much as any player black or white. Other than Big Shot Rob, no forward mastered the “run-the-floor, defend-the-rim, shut-down-a-hot-scorer, crash-the-boards, don’t-take-anything-off-the-table” role better than Bobby Jones. Even his name made him sound black.
Bench. Dan Majerle, Brent Barry, Bobby Sura, Raef LaFrentz (before his knee injury), Andrei Kirilenko and Chris Andersen. This would have been an entertaining nucleus for a modern team even if they would have given up 125 points a game.58
Coach. Doug Collins, who would have edged out Westphal for a starting spot had he stayed healthy as an NBA player. He’ll have to settle for coaching the Billy Hoyle All-Stars and serving as Mike Fratello’s assistant (along with Dick Versace and Jimmy Rogers) on the What the F*ck Did He Do to His Hair? All-Stars.59
46. HAL GREER

Resume: 15 years, 11 quality seasons, 10 All-Stars … top 10 (’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68, ’69) … 5-year peak: 25–5–4 … 2nd-best player for one champ (’67 Sixers) … ’67 Playoffs: 28–6–5 (15 G) … Playoffs: 20–6–4 (92 G) … 20K Point Club
During three summers spent researching this book, I loved learning about forgotten greats who played before my time—guys with whom I had no history whatsoever—and how after-the-fact portraits of them were colored by a collection of anecdotes and stories that always skewed one of six possible ways from players, coaches, and reporters who were there.
Gushing overcompensation. Everyone from Star X’s era feels like Star X doesn’t get his proper due, so their stories include hard-to-believe anecdotes like “One time, we were trailing the Hawks by two in a Game 7. They got a fast break and Russell sprinted full-court to block the game-winning layup, only he was going so fast that he landed in the twenty-seventh row of the stands—I swear to God, Sam Jones and I counted the rows after the game!” and impossible-to-prove statements that ignore all contrary evidence to the fact, like, “Look, if Oscar played now, he’d still be the best guard in the league, I can guarantee you that one.”60 You’ll also see this happen with druggies like Micheal Ray Richardson, Roy Tarpley and Marvin Barnes—yeah, we know those guys would have been good, but as the years pass, the ceiling was lifted for them, so now you’ll hear “as good as Magic” (for Micheal Ray), “as good as Barkley” (for Tarp) and “coulda been the greatest forward ever” (for Barnes). Pop a Quaalude and settle down.
Backhanded compliments. Everyone praises everyone else from their era (that’s just the way it works), but sometimes you find sneaky digs strewn in. Bird would always say things about McHale like, “If Kevin wanted to, he could be the top defender in the league” and “He’s so awesome on some nights, then other nights he’s just average. He makes it look so easy.” Translation: I wish he gave more of a shit. Or ex-teammates would describe a mercurial guy by saying something like, “Hey, what can I tell you, Wilt was Wilt.” Anytime you say someone’s name twice as a way to describe him, that means he was either annoying, unpredictable, a complete a*shole, a blowhard, as dumb as a rock, or some combination of those five things. If there’s ever a documentary about me and someone says, “Hey, what can I tell you? Simmons was Simmons,” I’ll kill myself.
Outright potshots. Only reserved for renowned cheap-shot artists (like Laimbeer or Clyde Lovelette), selfish gunners (like Mark Aguirre), holier-than-thou pricks (like Rick Barry), moody enigmas (like Adrian Dantley) and, of course, Wilt Chamberlain.
Totally biased evaluations of a teammate or former player. My favorite: Pat Riley deciding upon James Worthy’s retirement that Worthy was “the greatest small forward ever.” Had he said something like, “If you came up with twenty-five qualities for the perfect small forward, James would have had the highest number of them of anyone ever” or even “When God came up with the idea of a small forward, He was thinking of a guy like James Worthy,” I’d accept that. But you can’t tell me that James Worthy was better than Larry Bird, Rick Barry or Scottie Pippen and expect me to take you seriously after that. You just can’t. Same for Bird repeatedly claiming that DJ was the best player he ever played with. Um, you played with McHale at his zenith. You’re not topping that one, Larry. Sorry.61
Enlightening evaluations. Sadly, this never happens enough. Here’s an example of a wonderful critique of Marvin “Bad News” Barnes by Steve Jones, a former teammate of News in St. Louis, for Loose Balls:
Marvin just attacked the ball on the glass. If he was on the right side of the rim and the ball went to the left, he didn’t just stand there like most guys and figure he had no shot at it, he went across the lane and got the ball. When he was in the mood, he could get a rebound, throw an outlet pass to a guard, then race down the court and catch a return pass for a dunk as well as any big man in basketball. He had an 18-foot range on his jumper and a good power game inside. He had every physical ingredient you’d want in a big man and he had the killer spirit to go with it. He didn’t just want to beat you, he wanted to embarrass you. But so much of what Marvin did was counter productive to his career. He disdained practice. He stayed up all night. He didn’t listen to anyone about anything, but then he’d come out and play a great game. You’d see that and know that the gods had touched this man and made him a great player, only he had no idea what he had. And he kept pushing things and pushing things, like a little kid trying to see what he could get away with. He was the star and he knew it. Also, management gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted, and what he wanted to do was run amok.
You can’t do better than that. Steve Jones just summed up every memorable/tantalizing/tragic quality of Marvin’s career in exactly 248 words.62 The only way Jones could have done better is if he said, “Look, when you come into the NBA with the nickname ‘Bad News,’ you’re probably headed for a disappointing career.”63 Then again, that was the perfect storm of subject and speaker—Barnes messed up in the least forgivable way possible, which meant Jones could be candid about him, and Jones was an eloquent guy who worked as a broadcaster for thirty years (and counting). If our ninety-six Pyramid guys had Jones wrapping up their careers in 248 words, this book would have been much easier to write.
I-can’t-think-of-anything-memorable-to-say Cliché Bukkake. And now we’ve come full circle to Mr. Greer. By all accounts, he was either the second-or third-best guard of the sixties (depending on your feelings about Sam Jones), playing in ten straight All-Star Games, making seven second-team All-NBA’s, serving as a prototype for modern two-guards, hitting a high percentage of outside shots (career: 45 percent), rebounding a little (career: 5.0), scoring 23–25 a night in his prime, draining 80 percent of his free throws, playing good defense and taking as little off the table as possible. Greer retired in 1974 as the all-time leader in games played (1,122) and averaged a sterling 28–6–5 in the ’67 Playoffs for the Sixers. So it’s not like he lacked a top-fifty resume or anything. But check out these quotes from his “Top 50” profile page on NBA.com (the first three) and Tall Tales (the fourth one).
    Greer: “Consistency. For me, that was the thing, I would like to be remembered as a great, consistent player.”
    Dolph Schayes: “Hal Greer always came to play. He came to practice the same way, to every team function the same way. Every bus and plane and train, he was on time. Hal Greer punched the clock. Hal Greer brought the lunch pail.”
    Herald-Tribune: “If there were an award given for a player who is most respected by basketball insiders, while getting the minimum public appreciation, Greer could win hands down.”
    Al Bianchi: “We called Greer ‘Bulldog’ because he had that kind of expression on his face and it never changed.”
    Did you enjoy that round of Cliché Bukkake? I’d throw in this quote: “There’s never been an exciting guy named Hal ever, not in the history of mankind.” I could only unearth one interesting tidbit about Greer: everyone from that era raves about his gorgeous jumper.64 In Tall Tales, Alex Hannum calls it “the best medium-range jump shot ever” (hyperbole alert) and Bianchi gushes, “No one could ever stop and take a jumper faster than Greer.” In fact, Greer’s jumper was so reliable that he’s the only player who shot his jumper for free throws; remarkably, he finished his career shooting 80 percent from the line. See, I knew I could dig up something interesting about Hal Greer.
45. DAVE DEBUSSCHERE

Resume: 12 years, 10 quality, 8 All-Stars … top 10 (’69) … All-Defense (6x) … 4-year peak: 17–12–3 … Playoffs peak: 16–13–3 (41 G) … 3rd-best player for 2 champs (’69, ’73 Knicks) and 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks) … player-coach (’64, ’65 Pistons)
Two changes would have transformed Dave’s career historically. First, they didn’t create the All-Defense team until the ’68–’69 season. (From that point on, Dave made the first team every year until he retired.) Second, they didn’t create the three-point line until the ’79–’80 season. (Dave had been retired for six years, having spent his career shooting threes that counted as twos.) Add those tweaks and we’re looking at twelve All-Defenses, a career average of 20–11 and a well-earned reputation as the best three-point-shooting forward of his era. Even so, he left a borderline top-fifty resume, transformed the Knicks defensively, sparked countless “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” chants at MSG, banged bigger bodies, controlled the boards, made clutch shots and never cared about stats. Everyone remembers Willis sinking those first two jumpers in Game 7 of the ’70 Finals, or Frazier finishing with a magnificent 36–7–19, but nobody remembers DeBusschere finishing with 18 points and 17 rebounds and refusing to let Elgin breathe.65 I was always fascinated that he retired on the heels of his best all-around statistical season (18 points, 11 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 76 percent FT shooting), at the tender age of thirty-three, after the Knicks were smoked by Boston in the ’74 Eastern Finals. Maybe Dave thought he was slipping defensively. Maybe he wanted to go out on top when he was still good. I don’t know.
Sadly, every NBA fan under forty remembers DeBusschere for one thing and one thing only: when he was running the Knicks in the mid-eighties and practically passed out with joy during the Ewing lottery. That shouldn’t be the first thing we remember about one of the great winners of his era, one of the few guys you absolutely would have wanted in your NBA foxhole. And since he resonated with so many New Yorkers, I asked one of the most famous Knick fans to explain why DeBusschere mattered so much. Here’s William Goldman66 remembering his favorite Knick:
I thought it was a dumb trade, even for the Knicks. We get rid of our center, Walt Bellamy, who one season averaged 30 points a game and our rugged point guard, Howie Komives.
And for what? This guy from Detroit.
That’s all he was to those of us who lived in Magic Town back then. Oh, sure, we knew some stuff—none of it thrilling. Like he was the youngest coach in NBA history, and a total wipeout until he quit. And a major league pitcher. For a couple of years. No Koufax. There was no one, not one Knick nut in the city who predicted that our lives were going to shine till he retired six years later.
What we didn’t realize was that the greatest defensive forward in history had come to save us.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that Michael Jordan was the greatest player ever. Not just the championships or the stats, it’s this: We have TV. We can see him play. Plus he is still with us, young enough to spark rumors that maybe, just maybe, he might come back for one more year.
Not a lot of footage on Dave. Retired in ’74. Died five years ago, at an unfair sixty-two.
If you are reading this, obviously you have your all-time team. No one would attack you if your guys are West and Oscar, Magic and Elgin and Russ.
Here’s mine:
Michael and Clyde.67
Wilt.
Bird.
And Dave.
I was at his funeral and of course a lot of famous NBA people were there. You expected that. What was so shocking was how devastated they were. Not just the tears. It was the look of blind disbelief on their faces.
Because they knew this: Dave was the toughest of them all. And he would attend all their funerals.
None of them were meant to come to his….
44. NATE THURMOND

Resume: 14 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’67 MVP runner-up … All-Defense (5x) … started for two runner-ups (’64, ’67 Warriors) … ’67 Playoffs: 16–23–3 … 4-year peak: 21–20–4 … recorded the first-ever quadruple double (22–14–13–12)68
Congratulations, Nate! You’re the winner of the “Wow, I had no idea how good this guy was until I started busting my butt on this book!” award. Let the record show that:
You were the third-best center of the late sixties and early seventies, only you never made an All-NBA team because you had the misfortune of going against the Wilt/Russell combo, then Willis/Wilt and Kareem/Wilt. And that you averaged exactly 15.0 points and 15.0 rebounds for your career (kind of amazing).
You were a proven warrior whose career was altered historically by two decisions that had absolutely nothing to do with you: Rick Barry jumping to the ABA (crippling a Warriors team that would have contended for the next six or seven years), and Golden State trading you for Clifford Ray in a money-saving deal right before Barry peaked and they won the ’75 title. You landed in Chicago and lost an agonizing 7-game series in the West Finals to (wait for it) G-State. Not fair.69
The Warriors traded Wilt in his prime partly because they wanted to make you their center. And partly because Wilt was a selfish head case who made too much money. But still.
Wilt and Kareem called you their toughest defender in the early seventies. You averaged 2.9 blocks during the first year they kept track, when you were just about washed up, so who knows how many you were getting in your prime. God forbid we kept track of blocks until 1974. What were stat guys doing back then? Do you think Maurice Podoloff suggested blocks in the early sixties and the NBA’s lead statistician angrily responded, “Look, we’re f*cking overworked as it is—we have to keep track of points, rebounds, and assists! Get off our backs”?
You had the greatest bald-head/full-beard combo of anyone in the history of professional sports with the possible exception of Granville Waiters. So there’s that. We penalized you a few spots only because of your curiously terrible shooting: 42 percent for your career (other than Chris Dudley, the worst percentage by any center who played 750 games or more); 38 percent in the ’69, ’71, ’73, and ’75 Playoffs combined (35 games); 37 percent in the ’75 Playoffs (13 games).70 So you were like Dikembe Mutombo but better. Who wants to sex Nate Thurmond?71
43. CLYDE DREXLER

Resume: 15 years, 14 quality, 10 All-Stars … ’92 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’92), top 10 (’88, ’91), top 15 (’90, ’95) … 4-year peak: 25–7–6 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 23–8–7 (58 G) … 2nd-best player on one champ (’95 Rockets), best player on two runner-ups (’90, ’92 Blazers) … Playoffs: 20–7–6 (145 G) …’90 Finals: 26–8–6 …’95 Playoffs: 21–7–5 (22 G) … career: 22K-6K-6K … member of ’92 Dream Team
Gets the nod over Greer for one reason: during the most competitive stretch in league history (1990–93), Portland made the Finals twice with Drexler as its lone blue-chipper. We’ll remember him as the only basketball player other than Michael J. Fox who succeeded at a memorably high level even though he dribbled on fast breaks with his head down. We’ll remember him as the poor man’s ’Nique in the “ignite the home crowd with a fast-break dunk” department. We’ll remember him for battling male pattern baldness but refusing to shave his head like so many others. We’ll remember him for one of the truly great nicknames: “Clyde the Glide.” And we’ll remember him for being the fragile, too-unselfish-for-his-own-good leader of a memorably unpredictable Blazers juggernaut that consistently shot itself in the foot at the worst possible moments. Poor Clyde never seemed to make smart decisions at pivotal times, never seemed to understand when a game was slipping away and his team needed him to assert his will, and never grasped the basic premise of “Look, I’m good at a lot of things, and I’m not so good at other things, so maybe I should just do what I’m good at.”72
For instance, of any player who attempted at least two 3-pointers per playoff game, guess who has the worst percentage? That’s right—Clyde at 28 percent. Twenty-eight percent! That didn’t stop him from clanging 133 of 178 threes (23 percent) in Portland’s 58-game Playoffs run from 1990 to 1992. During the ’92 Playoffs, Clyde was 19-for-81 on three-pointers (23.5%) and 179-for-344 (53%) on two-pointers. If you were a Portland fan, what made you happier that spring, Clyde launching a three or Clyde either driving to the basket or pulling up for a 15-footer? He just didn’t get it. Ideally, Clyde should have been the second-best guy on a great team—like a McHale, Worthy or Pippen—an unselfish sidekick who wasn’t quite great enough to carry someone to a title. This finally happened when Houston reunited Clyde and Hakeem, leading to a rare “gunning for a ring late in his career” success story when the Rockets swept Orlando in the ’95 Finals. Because of that, I have Clyde ranked forty-third … and yet I feel terrible for him because his career was swallowed up by Jordan. The MJ shadows are everywhere. This goes beyond Clyde being the poor man’s Jordan, a rival shooting guard who filled the stat sheet 85 percent as well but wasn’t the same crunch-time guy or suck-the-soul-out-of-you competitive killer (and that’s an understatement). Consider three things:
Clyde started one year earlier than Jordan and showed enough promise that when Portland landed the number two pick in the ’84 draft, the Blazers decided, “We’re all set in the Exciting Perimeter Scorer department, so let’s pick a center with surgically repaired tibias.”73 Besides being the single greatest NBA what-if, did you know Portland allegedly offered that pick plus Drexler for Ralph Sampson? What if Houston had said yes? Can you imagine? How many titles would the Hakeem/Clyde combo have won? Would we remember Jordan’s career differently? And if Sampson had played in Portland and never injured his back in that freak fall in Boston, would we remember him as a top-thirty guy? The biggest loser of that near-trade was probably Clyde: he could have played with a Pantheon center for his entire prime. You know, instead of going to battle with Sam Bowie and Kevin Duckworth. Alas.
Clyde peaked as the ’92 Blazers blew through the playoffs (25–7–7, MVP runner-up, a slew of “Drexler has arrived!” features), with the defending champion Bulls waiting for a Finals that many believed was a toss-up. As the argument went, Drexler and Jordan could potentially cancel each other out—I know, heresy in retrospect—and Drexler’s supporting cast was deeper, giving Portland a legitimate chance as long as MJ didn’t destroy Clyde. That led to a few days of “Jordan or Drexler?” hype, which in retrospect, given everything we know about Jordan’s homicidal competitiveness, was like covering a screaming child in teriyaki sauce and waving it in front of a pissed-off Rottweiler. In Game 1, Jordan nailed six threes in the first half—the famous Shrug Game—obliterating the MJ-Clyde argument once and for all. As the series kept going, Drexler was pounded by a disappointed national media for “not taking over” and “not asserting himself” and “not standing up to MJ,” with Peter Vecsey angrily leading the way.74 The series stretched to a sixth game in Chicago with the Blazers taking a commanding 15-point lead in the fourth quarter, then giving much of it away with Drexler on the floor and Jordan resting on the bench. Chicago finished them off, Jordan easily won the Finals MVP and nobody ever mentioned the “Jordan or Drexler?” argument again.
One month later, Drexler and Jordan were both on the Dream Team, only MJ hadn’t fully resolved the “Jordan or Drexler?” argument to his liking. By all accounts, he attacked Drexler in scrimmages with particular relish and kept talking trash about the Finals; as the story goes, Magic pulled him aside and asked him to ease up before Clyde’s confidence was ruined for the Olympics. And apparently Jordan did ease up. But between that and the ’92 Finals, the psychological damage was done. Clyde slumped for the next two years, with his stats dipping to 19–6–5 in 112 combined games, his shooting percentage free-falling (49 percent from ’85 to ’92, 43 percent from ’93 to ’94) and the Blazers subsequently floundering (consecutive first-round exits). Was Jordan responsible for Drexler’s funk? It’s hard to figure a thirty-year-old suddenly dropping from the top five to barely an All-Star unless it was the late seventies and he was plowing through booger sugar. Anyway, it’s tough to remember one star affecting another star’s career in so many different and distinct ways. Even when Drexler finally climbed the mountain and won a title in Houston, it happened when Jordan had just returned from his wink-wink baseball sabbatical and couldn’t get past Orlando. Had that Bulls team somehow made the Finals and gotten thrashed by Houston, Clyde would have gotten his sweet revenge. Didn’t happen. Years later, many would discount those two Houston championships because they happened during Jordan’s baseball years. Shit, even Clyde Drexler’s ring has Jordan’s shadow looming over it.
42. JASON KIDD

Resume: 15 years, 12 quality, 9 All-Stars … MVP runner-up (’02) … top 5 (’99, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’04), top 10 (’03) … All-Defense (9x, four 1st) … 4-year peak: 16–7–10 … leader: assists (5x), minutes (1x) … best player on 2 runner-ups (’02–’03 Nets), 20–8–9 (40 G) … top 4 assists (12x) … traded 3x (once in prime) … career: assists (3rd), steals (8th)75
My buddy J-Bug fittingly summed up J-Kidd’s destiny three years into his career. We were attending a Suns-Celtics game and Kidd bricked three that never had a chance even as it was leaving his hand. After the shot clunked off the rim and nearly took Antoine Walker’s head off, a second passed and the Bug decided, “Every time I watch Jason Kidd play, initially it’s like seeing a girl walk into a bar who’s just drop-dead gorgeous, but then when he throws up one of those bricks, it’s like the gorgeous girl taking off her jacket and you see she has tiny mosquito bites for tits.”
Hey, I didn’t say it. But that was one of Bug’s better moments, right up there with the time he convinced someone at Sully’s Pub that he was a Formula One driver. Maybe Kidd was a smoking-hot girl in nearly every respect—fantastic defender, great rebounder for his size, impeccably smart on fast breaks, completely unselfish, someone who lived to make everyone else better—but if shooting ability were a bra size, he would have been wearing a 32A for his entire career. Any woman can drop five grand on saline implants and suddenly have a killer jump shot, so to speak. But a Hall of Fame point guard who can’t make a 20-footer? There isn’t plastic surgery to fix a bad jumper or a Wonderbra to hide it. For his career (through 2008), Kidd shot just 40 percent from the field,76 which would have been fine in the fifties if he were battling Cousy and McGuire every night. Of the post-1976 guards who played at least 600 games (through ’08), Kidd has the fourth-lowest shooting percentage. His playoff percentages are even bleaker: of the post-1976 guards who played 80-plus postseason games, Kidd currently ranks sixth from the bottom (39.5 percent, ahead of bricklayers Lindsay Hunter, Greg Anthony, Nate McMillan, Howard Eisley and Bruce Bowen),77 and just ahead of Drexler with the second-lowest three-point percentage of anyone who attempted at least two per game (30 percent). Much as Greg Maddux notched 355 wins without a heater, every other aspect of Kidd’s game had to be perfect to compensate for its one shortcoming. And for eight or nine years, that was pretty much the case.
Until he joined Dirk Nowitzki in Dallas, he had always been the best player on his team—not his fault, but still, if your best guy is a 40 percent shooter, you’re not winning a title. And as much as teammates loved playing with him, Kidd was somewhat of a handful behind the scenes, quietly wearing out his welcome with three different teams—Dallas, Phoenix and New Jersey,78 all of whom were anxious to dump him—feuding with Jimmy Jackson and Jamal Mashburn in Dallas, curiously bleaching his hair white-blond for the ’00 Playoffs, battling domestic violence charges in 2001, pushing Byron Scott out as Nets coach in 2004, plodding through an ugly (and public) divorce in 2007 and pushing for a 2008 trade (and getting it) in the messiest way possible. We never mention Kidd in any discussion of head cases of the last twenty years, even though all evidence points to him having a moody, enigmatic, unpredictable personality.
Did we confuse Kidd’s unselfishness with him being a good guy? Probably a little. Much of Kidd’s “struggles” were semiexplainable except for that bleached afro, which remains unexplainable and gets funnier over time. (It looked like Wesley Snipes’ hair in Demolition Man crossed with Jules’ afro in Pulp Fiction, minus the muttonchops.) The Dallas situation imploded for three reasons: three young stars were given too much money too soon; two feuded over singer Toni Braxton (who can rank splitting up the mid-nineties Mavs right up there with her six Grammy awards);79 and new Mavs coach Jim Cleamons decided to adopt Chicago’s “triangle” even though he had the most gifted open-court point guard since Magic Johnson. (I remember almost crying the first time I went to a game and saw Kidd completely shackled in that triangle. It was like paying for a Sharon Stone movie back then where she didn’t get naked.)80 The Phoenix situation deteriorated because of the aforementioned incident with his wife. The Jersey situation fell apart because Kidd couldn’t stand playing with Vince anymore, and really, can you blame him? Speaking of Vince, Kidd’s unfortunate luck with teammates was remarkable. Mashburn and Jackson were top-six lottery picks who didn’t pan out until after they were traded. Kidd played with a variety of name guys in Phoenix—Antonio McDyess, Danny Manning, Penny Hardaway, Rex Chapman, Kevin Johnson, Robert Horry, Cedric Ceballos, Clifford Robinson, Shawn Marion, Tom Gugliotta—but caught each at the wrong point of his career. Even during a successful run in Jersey, he turned chicken shit into chicken salad in his first two years, carrying a team with Keith Van Horn, Kerry Kittles, Kenyon Martin, Todd McCulloch, Lucious Harris and rookie Richard Jefferson to the Finals, then bringing the same group back a year later with an aging Dikembe Mutombo replacing Van Horn/McCulloch.
Which brings us to the strongest case for Kidd in the top forty-five of the Pyramid. Look at the teammates in the previous paragraph, then look at these records: 32–23, 56–26, 27–23, 53–29, 51–31, 52–30, 49–33, 47–35. The first five belong to Phoenix from ’97 to ’01; the last three belong to Jersey from ’02 to ’04. For those eight seasons, Kidd finished 137 games over .500, made five first-team All-NBA’s (and one second-team All-NBA) and made the Finals twice playing with one All-Star during that entire stretch (K-Mart in ’04). We always hear that KG never had a great supporting cast in Minnesota, but Christ, what about Jason Kidd? He also stands out for making every All-Star Game 20–25 percent more watch-able;81 for averaging an Oscar-like 20–9–8 and melting the Celtics in the ’02 Eastern Finals; for his Magic-like talent for grabbing a rebound, turning on the jets, going coast to coast, and getting to the rim; for subjecting us to forty thousand camera shots of his wife and young son during the ’02 and ’03 playoffs;82 for perfecting the “jump in front of someone and take a charge on a fast break layup” move that led to them putting a circle under the basket; and for having the “J-Kidd” moniker that (along with “C-Webb”) was responsible for the ensuing sports acronym craze that spiraled out of control and eventually led to Linda Cohn calling Pudge Rodriguez “I-Rod.” Looking back, I enjoyed the J-Kidd era as much as I enjoyed the Michelle Pfeiffer era—yeah, maybe they had small boobs, but they made up for it in other ways.
41. WES UNSELD

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’78 Finals MVP … ’69 MVP … ’69 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’69) … leader: rebounds (1x), FG% (1x) … 4-year peak: 15–17–3 … 3rd-best playoff rebounder (14.9 RPG) … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’78 Bullets) and 3 runner-ups (’71, ’74, ’79) … ’71 Playoffs: 13–19–4 (18 G)
Big Wes submitted the weirdest resume of anyone in the top seventy-five. His peers got carried away and voted him MVP as a rookie, then he didn’t make the All-Star team the following season (or another All-NBA team ever). He wrecked his knee during the ’74 season and dropped off the offensive map, averaging just 8 points per game for his last eight seasons. He was indisputably the worst shot blocker of any great center, someone who couldn’t have jumped over a picture of that Sunday’s Washington Post. He gained enough weight during the latter half of his career that his screens worked partly because defenders spent two full seconds making their way around this mammoth man.83 It’s hard to imagine him being nearly as successful today. A six-foot-six center who couldn’t score, run the floor, or protect the rim? How would that work? Even when Wes and the ’78 Bullets won their sole title, they stumbled into the trophy only because Bill Walton’s broken foot opened the door for every pseudo-contender in the playoffs.84
Then you delve into Wesley’s resume a little deeper. He injured his left knee during his second season and blew it out for good in Season 6, still averaging a 14–17–4 during his first five years. He played on four different Bullets teams that made the Finals in a nine-year span—a really good ’71 team that lost Gus Johnson before the Finals, a heavily favored ’75 team that the Warriors swept, and the experienced ’78 and ’79 teams that split with the Sonics—even though they didn’t have a traditional superstar (unless you want to count Hayes, and I don’t). Everyone remembers him as the enforcer of that era along with Willis Reed and Bob Lanier, the one guy you didn’t want to cross in any way, as well as the best team locker room guy other than Paul Silas. He cared not about statistics but about making everyone else better and his team’s success reflects that: not just four Finals appearances, but Washington finishing 176 games over .500 and making the playoffs for every one of Unseld’s first eleven years. His outlet passes were the single biggest strength of his game, only we didn’t have a way of measuring their impact—if he threw a crisp fifty-foot outlet pass to Monroe, leading to a two-on-one break and a layup for Kevin Loughery, only Loughery and Monroe were accounted for statistically, right?85
That brings up a larger point: our collective failure to come up with meaningful, easy-to-understand statistics to measure NBA players. I first complained about this on my old website a few years before the statistical revolution in baseball inevitably trickled over to the NBA and NFL. Back in 2001, I openly pined for the following stats:
Clutch FG and FT percentage. We have this now in various forms; 82games.com even tweaked it into “clutch” (last 5 minutes, three-point lead or less) and “super-clutch” (last 2 minutes, three-point lead or less). Manu Ginobili’s ’08 stats were absolutely mind-blowing: 61.9% FG super-clutch and 57.4% FG clutch. Why didn’t we have this when Karl Malone was in his prime? Damn it all.
Plus/minus. A hockey staple that the basketball community ignored until 82games.com launched it for the 2002–3 season, eventually leading to Eddy Curry setting the unofficial record for worst plus-minus for anyone who played at least 1,500 minutes in a season. During the ’07–’08 season, Eddy played 1,529 minutes and finished with a plus/minus of-10.1. In other words, Eddy made the team ten points worse just by stepping onto the court. Amazing.86
Nitty-gritties. I created this one to cover any time someone (a) takes a charge, (b) comes up with a loose ball in a crowd of two or more people, (c) saves a loose ball heading out of bounds by whipping it off an opposing player, or (d) tips a rebound to a teammate. Shane Battier would have led this decade in nitty-gritties, James Posey would have finished second and Tim Thomas would have been last.
Wide-open FG percentage. Tracks every wide-open jumper launched by a player from 15 feet and beyond. Not only do we have this stat now, but NBA teams separate shots into zones and rely on this information to help them target specific role players (usually point guards who sink a surprising number of open 18-footers from the top of the key or swingmen who drain threes from the corner with startling accuracy). One of the reasons I loved Cleveland’s 2008 trade for Mo Williams was because he had finished second in open FG percentage (51 percent) the previous season.
Dunks. Another underground stat that went mainstream over the past few years, although I’d break it down even further into subcategories like “Rebound Dunks,” “Dunks on Somebody’s Head,” “Alley-Oop Dunks,” “Dunks That Got the Home Crowd So Fired Up That the Opponents Needed a Time-out,” and “Dunks That Caused Every Black Player or Fan in the Building to Stand Up in Disbelief and Make the Face Where It Looks Like They Smelled a Life-Altering Fart.”
Ref bitching. Every time a player complains to a referee, that’s one RB. I was joking about this one at the time; back then I wrote, “We’re creating this just so Antoine Walker would finally get to hold his own record.” Now I’m wondering if this stat wouldn’t be wildly fun to monitor. Kobe would lead the league every season. There’s no question.
Unforced turnovers. In tennis, this covers every time a player messes up without any provocation. In basketball, that would cover every time someone screws up an easy fast break with a bad decision; commits a dribbling or palming violation; gets whistled for an offensive charge or a three-second violation; blows an uncontested layup or dunk; accidentally throws the ball out of bounds, commits an offensive goaltending, lane violation, or flagrant foul; or loses track of the shot clock and fails to get a shot off before the 24 seconds expires. That’s a wide range of inexcusable f*ck-ups we’re covering there. You’re telling me that wouldn’t be valuable?
Defensive stops. When a defender single-handedly prevents his opponent from scoring on an isolation play, a low-post play or a perimeter drive, that’s a stop. Cause a turnover or an unforced turnover in the process, that’s a superstop. By the way, I threw this idea at Houston’s Daryl Morey and his response was, “Why do you think we have Chuck Hayes?”87
Russells. Any blocked shot that immediately triggers a fast-break layup or dunk. We always hear about how many times Russell blocked a shot, kept it in play and launched a fast break. Why couldn’t we measure that? And conversely, wouldn’t this measure all the times Dwight Howard stupidly swats the ball out of bounds (and maybe convince him to stop doing it)?88
Mega-assists. I’m not resting until somebody breaks their ass and makes this a statistic. It would cover any pass that directly leads to an easy layup, an easy dunk, an alley-oop dunk or a teammate being fouled as the only recourse from stopping him from making an easy layup or dunk (and each free throw made, which counts as a half-mega-assist). The last part is crucial because, incredibly, we don’t credit playmakers for making great passes that led to “I had to hack him or else he would have scored” fouls. Larry Bird was the mega-assist master—by my unofficial calculations, he finished with 373 mega-assists in Game 6 of the ’86 Finals, which has to be a record—but Steve Nash would have given him a run for his money during the Seven Seconds or Less era. It’s bizarre that we haven’t figured out a better way to value assists. Imagine if baseball only kept track of hits and didn’t differentiate between singles, doubles, triples and homers, and if every official scorer counted hits differently. That’s how idiotic the NBA’s current assist system is.
Unselds. Let’s name it after Big Wes! Think of it like a hockey assist—any outlet pass past the opposing three-point line that creates an instant fast break (and ultimately a layup or dunk) counts as an Unseld. We’ll use Kevin Love as our test case over the next few years; if you’re a T-Wolves fan who watches every game, please, keep track of this for us. How many Unselds can Love come up with?89
    All of this sounds great, right? Just one problem: our statistical community is more obsessed with comparing players, chasing impossible-to-prove-objectively stats like “adjusted plus-minus” and pushing marketable formulas like PER or wages of wins. That mind-set works in baseball, an individual sport in which your teammates don’t matter unless they can help you get PEDs. (Sorry, I had to.) Every conceivable diamond talent can be measured objectively. I thought Derek Jeter was a great shortstop until the defensive stats told me otherwise. I thought Wade Boggs was wrong for a leadoff hitter; turns out that an OBP machine who drags pitch counts along is just what you want. But basketball isn’t baseball. When John Hollinger’s PER metric decides that Marreese Speights is the 30th most efficient offensive player in basketball while Shane Battier is 284th, obviously I’m dubious.90 So while the statistical community is trying to clone cows, NBA front offices are only worried about gourmet cheeseburgers. They spend millions figuring out hyperintelligent stats to measure defensive stops, shooting percentages from various offensive zones, Russells, Unselds and everything else, then hoard that information for themselves like it’s the Cold War or something. Fans like you and me could have a better idea of what we’re watching … only we don’t.
In my opinion, there’s no ironclad way to assign statistical value to every player when so much of an individual’s success (as well as his numbers) hinges on situations and team success, as well as his willingness to put the team ahead of himself. Look at the four-year effect Unseld had on Kevin Loughery, a starting guard in his late twenties when Wes joined the Bullets:


As Loughery told Elliott Kalb, “When Wes came to the Bullets, my scoring average jumped from 14 to 22, all because of him91 … He could grab a rebound and throw it all the way downcourt before it hit the ground. All of a sudden, I became Paul Warfield—a wide receiver catching passes ahead of the field.” Couldn’t we measure that impact in a tangible way? Instead of unearthing complicated formulas to evaluate seasons or careers, we should spend our energies making hyperspecific stats better (the gourmet cheeseburger analogy), then using that enhanced information and combining it with team success, our own educated opinions, and thoughts from players and coaches to piece together a complete picture. Basketball is an objective sport and a subjective sport, dammit. That’s what makes it so much fun to follow. So on the surface, yeah, it seems peculiar that Unseld cracked the top forty-five, or even that he took home the ’78 Finals MVP by averaging a piddling 9–12–4. But as teammate Mitch Kupchak explained to Ken Shouler, “Unseld was the consummate team basketball player; his only objective was to win. Statistics were never important to him. You can’t begin to imagine what he did to make his teammates better—set picks, made outlet passes, guarded the bigger center. He was the MVP of the [’79 Finals].” Wes Unseld earned this spot. But if I could have pointed to stats like “led the league in Unselds for 10 straight years” or “career leader in Unselds,” this section would have been a helluva lot easier to write.92
40. GARY PAYTON

Resume: 17 years, 10 quality, 9 All-Stars … top 5 (’98, ’00), top 10 (’95, ’96, ’97, ’99, ’02), top 15 (’94, ’01) … All-Defense (9× 1st team) … Defensive Player of the Year (’96) … leader: steals (1x), threes (1x) … 3-year peak: 23–5–9 … best player on runner-up (’96 Sonics), 21–5–7 (21 G) … five top-6 MVP finishes … career: assists (7th), steals (3rd) … 20K Point Club.
During the 2008 Finals, I wrote that Rajon Rondo brought a ton of stuff to the table and took a good share of stuff off it; in other words, he was bringing forks and plates and removing the knives and spoons, but you could still eat a decent meal with him because you had forks and plates. Well, Gary Payton was the all-time table test guy. He brought you sterling-silver forks and knives from Hoagland’s, with some gorgeous plates to match, only you didn’t have spoons for dessert and you had to drink wine out of paper cups because he broke all the glasses. Could you have a memorable meal with him? Absolutely. But you also left the meal saying, “Man, I wish we’d had spoons and wineglasses.” Here’s everything he brought to the table and took away from it:
Forks/knives/plates. The best all-around point guard of the nineties … top player on a 64-win Seattle team that grabbed two Finals wins from the ’96 Bulls … one of the legendary trash-talkers of all time … one of the five best defensive guards ever … his 1999–2000 season (24–9–7, 153 steals, 45% FG, 82 games, 3,425 minutes) ranks in the pantheon of Greatest Point Guard Seasons Ever … helped make the shaved-head thing popular in the early nineties, then stuck with it through thick and thin … probably should have been nominated for an Oscar for his turn in Eddie as an unnamed street player who battled the late Malik Sealy93… other than Oscar and Magic, the only superstar guard who developed a killer low-post game and punished smaller guards … defended MJ as well as anyone ever, holding him to 23.7 points in the last half of the ’96 Finals and a 5-for-19 performance in Game 694… GP and John Malkovich would have been been my all-time favorite cross-ethnic look-alikes if not for Britney Spears/Pedro Martinez and Harry Carson/Glenn Close … if Shawn Kemp hadn’t self-destructed, GP would have won at least one title … on a personal note, I watched Kidd, Stockton and GP in their absolute primes and thought GP was the most talented all-around player of the three (he just had no holes) … and you have to love anyone with an ego large enough to name his sons Gary Payton Jr. and Gary Payton II.
Missing spoons/glasses. Only played at a high level for ten years, a curiously low number for a modern superstar … traded by Seattle in 2002, strange because franchises normally don’t trade signature guys, right?… his last few seasons for the Lakers, Celtics and Heat were shamefully bad; I even suggested changing the name of “jumping the shark” to “pulling a GP” after the ’04 Finals … developed a well-earned reputation as a coach-killer and locker room lawyer, someone who fought or nearly came to blows with multiple teammates and had a knack for selling teammates out in times of crisis95… played with a volatile, trash-talking swagger that seemed to derail the Sonics almost as much as it helped them … definitely described by a few teammates like this: “What can I say? Gary is Gary” … nobody in the top fifty vacillated more times between “totally untradeable” and “we are definitely receptive to a trade.”
    So yeah, GP was more talented than someone like Stockton, as we witnessed in the ’96 Conference Finals when Payton did everything but stick a red ball in Stockton’s mouth, duct-tape him to a chair and introduce him to the Gimp. But ask anyone from that era whom they’d rather have as a teammate and nearly all would pick Stockton, simply because they wouldn’t have wanted to deal with Payton’s bullshit. Can you win a championship when your point guard has a gigantic ego and cares more about making himself look good than his teammates? Apparently not—Payton never won anything. Switch Payton and Stockton in ’92 and it’s hard to imagine Karl Malone having the same type of career; the first time he folded in a playoff game, Payton would have ripped him to shreds publicly and privately. As the years pass, nobody will remember this delightful trait: they’ll see his offensive numbers and defensive honors and assume Payton was his generation’s best two-way guard. And in a way, that was true. But Stockton gave his team a better chance to win, taking care of everyone, never rocking the boat, coming through in the clutch and always putting the team above himself. So I’d pick him. It’s not even close, actually. On the other hand, I remember betting the Phoenix money line for their first-round series against the heavily favored ’97 Sonics, nearly pulling off an upset, then losing simply because Payton played out of his freaking mind. I specifically remember making up a “Never bet against GP” rule right then and there. Stockton was good, but he was never that good.
One subplot with Payton’s career needs to be mentioned: after he bombed with the Lakers and Celtics and landed in Miami, his mini-renaissance as a role player was riveting because he figured out that he wasn’t good anymore and adjusted accordingly. That never happens, right? In Boston, a washed-up Payton was still trying to beat guys off the dribble, posting up, demanding to cover top scorers and sulking when he didn’t get the ball. It was like watching Jason Alexander order people around on the set of some crappy sitcom (“Don’t you realize who I am? I’m Jason Alexander!”) and failing to realize his time had come and gone. In Miami, Payton willingly took a backseat to Wade—with the exception of one “Don’t you do that to me, I’m Gary Payton!” blowup in the Chicago series where he flipped out on Wade on national TV—treating us to roughly 900 plays that started with a resigned GP flipping the ball to Wade in crunch time, then trudging up the court to stand in his spot near the corner, like a Wimbledon ball boy getting back into position between serves. When they needed his experience in the Finals, he dusted off the cobwebs and delivered two of the biggest plays of the series: an off-balance jumper that beat the shot clock and won Game 3, and an old-school lefty banker in the final 30 seconds of overtime in Game 5. The second one was funny because GP reacted to the chest bumps and high fives afterward with one of those “See, you guys forgot, I used to be pretty good!” looks on his face. Like he belted out the retro swagger.
Still, there was something distressing about Payton’s reincarnation as a middling supporting player, someone who could barely handle the likes of Jason Terry and surprised everyone with two clutch moments. Should we really have been surprised when Gary Payton made a clutch play? This was one of the ten best point guards of all time! Things had fallen to that level?96 Maybe we couldn’t blame GP for hanging on for a few more pay-checks or being unable to realize when it was over; after all, it’s his career and not ours, and most overcompetitive people have trouble determining the right time to call it quits. That’s part of what makes them overcompetitive in the first place. And since Payton earned crunch-time minutes for a championship team and contributed to its title, you couldn’t compare him to the ’89 version of Kareem or anything. But when I remember GP getting that ring that season, I always remember one thing: not the pair of clutch shots, but me being surprised when he made them. Was a championship ring worth sinking to that level of expectations? Only Gary Payton knows.
39. PATRICK EWING

Resume: 17 years, 11 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’86 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’90), top 10 (’88, ’89, ’91, ’92, ’93, ’97) … best player on 1 runner-up (’94 Knicks) … 2-year peak: 28–11, 3.6 BPG, 53% FG … ’90 Playoffs: 29–11 (10 G) … ’94, ’95 playoffs: 20–11, 2.8 BPG, 45% FG (36 G) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 20K-10K Club
Knicks fans did their damnedest to talk themselves into the Patrick Ewing era.97 Everyone believed Ewing was the Evolutionary Russell, a destructive defensive force who would own the league someday. Only it didn’t happen … and it didn’t happen … and then it seemed like it was happening, only it turned out to be a dick tease … and it didn’t happen … and at some point everyone except for the delusional Knicks fans realized that it was never going to happen. You know those movie scenes where a male character dies in a hospital bed and his wife stands over him talking like he didn’t die, and everyone else in the room feels awkward, and then finally someone comes over and says, “Honey, he’s gone” and tries to pull her away, so she starts screaming, “Nooooooo! Nooooo, he’s fine! He’s gonna wake up!” and then she collapses and has a crying seizure? That was every Knicks fan from 1995 to 1999. When Hakeem turned Ewing into ground beef in the ’94 Finals, Ewing dropped dead in a “This guy’s carrying us to a title someday” sense. But the Knicks fans kept standing there over the hospital bed waiting for him to wake up.
Eventually they decided that Ewing’s career was either “frustrating” (the glass-half-full take) or “phenomenally disappointing” (the glass-half-empty take). He peaked during the ’90 season, averaging a 29–11 with 4 blocks and 55 percent shooting for a 45-win Knicks team, saving the Knicks with a 44–13 in a must-win Game 4 against Boston, then leading them to a shocking upset in the decisive fifth game (31 points). Sitting in the Garden as Ewing took over and swished an improbable backbreaking three, I remember thinking, “Shit, he’s putting it all together; we’re in serious trouble.” But Detroit easily dispatched them in the second round and Ewing was never that good again. Why? Because of his knees. College Ewing prowled the paint like a tiger, jumped around like House of Pain and contested every shot within fifteen feet of the rim. NBA veteran Ewing picked his spots, jogged with huge strides and crouched before every jump. Never a great rebounder98 or passer, never someone with a treasure chest of low-post moves, that subtle erosion of athleticism turned him into an elite center who did everything well and nothing great. Actually, it was a little sad. Poor Ewing perfected his “intense” game face, bellowed at the MSG crowd, pounded his chest after big plays, played up the whole “I’m a warrior!” angle in interviews and even made a clumsy effort to become an intimidating enforcer. All of it kind of worked … but not really. The sophisticated Knicks fans saw right through him, endlessly debating his virtues and repeatedly coming back to the same conclusion: As long as this is our best guy, we probably can’t win the title.
That’s when Pat Riley nearly salvaged Ewing’s superstardom, remaking the Knicks into Bad Boys II, adopting thugball tactics to exact as much as he could from his secretly limited center (and nearly ruining basketball in the process). They lost back-to-back slugfests to Chicago before catching a break with Jordan’s “baseball sabbatical,” reaching the Finals behind a monster effort from Ewing in Game 7 (22–20–7 with 5 blocks and the winning tip against Indiana) before squandering a disheartening Finals. The following year, Reggie Miller ripped out their hearts in the Eastern Semis, with Ewing missing a series-deciding 6-foot bunny. And just like that the Ewing window had closed, although it took a few more years for everyone to realize it.99 Before the 2001 season, the Knicks finally cut the cord (and inadvertently destroyed their future) by turning Ewing’s expiring deal into a slew of horrendous contracts; then we watched Ewing slog through the “fifteen-year-old poodle with cataracts who starts going to the bathroom in the house and needs to be put to sleep” stage. Did we ever figure out why centers age in dog years once they hit their late thirties? They always have one final season where they gain 20 pounds, lose all hand-eye coordination, run in slow motion, and jump like their shoes are loaded with razor blades; all they have left is their turnaround jumper. It’s like an automobile being completely stripped except for the radio, which is left behind for some reason. That’s the turnaround jumper. For Ewing, that season happened twice, in Seattle and Orlando. And then he was done.
He hasn’t endured for a few reasons. Ewing lacked charisma and may have been the most uncomfortable postmerger interview other than Moses Malone.100 He had some legitimate weaknesses—horrendous hands, shaky at crunch time, dubious rebounder, awful passer out of double-teams, couldn’t make his teammates better—and he lacked a fan-friendly game that wouldn’t exactly be remembered fondly. Even Ewing’s shining moment (the ’94 Finals) turned into a train wreck: Ewing averaged 18.9 points and shot 36 percent, while Hakeem averaged a 27–9 with 3.9 blocks and 50 percent shooting. And it wasn’t even THAT close. Ewing ranks this highly because you could build a contender around him in his prime, and because he absolutely could have won the ’94 championship playing with Richmond, Rice, Miller, or really any good two-guard other than John Starks. Much like fellow Dream Team players Drexler, Robinson and Malone, we’ll remember Ewing as a second banana masquerading as a first banana, even if Knicks fans never wanted to admit it at the time. Now they do.101
One last Ewing thought: When I was writing for my old website, a reader named Dave Cirilli sent in his elaborate Ewing Theory, which centered around the inexplicable phenomenon that both the Hoyas and Knicks seemed to play better every time Ewing was sitting on the bench. After tinkering with it and finding various examples,102 Dave emailed me and we honed the language over the next few weeks, eventually deciding that two crucial elements were needed for any situation to qualify for Ewing status: a star athlete receives an inordinate amount of media attention and fan interest, yet his teams never win anything substantial with him; and that same athlete leaves his team (either by injury, trade, graduation, free agency, or retirement) and both the media and fans immediately write off the team for the near future (for either the rest of the season or the following season). I wrote about the theory and had some fun with it.103 A few months later, Ewing tore an Achilles tendon during Game 2 of the ’99 Eastern Finals. The heavily favored Pacers seemed like a mortal lock … only with Ewing himself involved, suddenly this had become the ultimate test of the Ewing Theory. Heading into Game 3, Dave was oozing with confidence and predicting in no uncertain terms, “Ewing’s injury is the best thing that ever could have happened to the Knicks; they’re definitely making the Finals now.” Incredibly, the Knicks won three of the next four and advanced to the Finals as I was playing up Dave’s Ewing theory prediction on my website! My three thousand readers at the time couldn’t have been more impressed. From there, Ewing Theory instances kept happening—Mo Vaughn (’99 Red Sox), Barry Sanders (’99 Lions), Trent Green (’99 Rams), Griffey and A-Rod (’00 and ’01 Mariners), Dan Marino (’00 Dolphins)—and I finally unveiled Dave’s Ewing Theory to a national audience on ESPN.com in 2001, predicting that Drew Bledsoe was the single most logical Ewing Theory candidate for the future. Only a few months later, Bledsoe went down, the ’02 Patriots won their first Super Bowl without him and I looked like Nostrasimbo. You have to admit, that was amazing. Since then, we’ve had some other classics (Nomar and the ’04 Red Sox and Tiki and the ’07 Giants being the best ones), but none could have happened without the great Patrick Ewing.
Here’s my point: If your prime inspired a sports theory that hypothesized why your teams played better without you, you probably shouldn’t crack the top thirty-five of a Hall of Fame Pyramid.
38. STEVE NASH

Resume: 13 years, 9 quality, 6 All-Stars … MVP: ’05, ’06 … ’07 MVP runner-up … BS MVP (’07) … top 5 (’05, ’06, ’07), top 10 (’08), top 15 (’02, ’03) … leader: assists (3x), FT% (1x) … 4-year peak: 17–4–11, 51% FG, 45% 3FG, 90% FT … 3-year Playoffs peak: 21–4–11, 49% FG, 40% 3FG, 90% FT (46 G) … career: assists (9th), 3-point FG% (5th)
The case for Nash cracking the top forty: Won back-to-back MVPs, a sentence that looks so unbelievable in print, my eyeballs just popped out of my head Allan Ray–style (only Bird, Magic, MJ, Russell, Wilt, Duncan, Moses, Kareem and Nash did it) … along with Larry Bird and Dirk Nowitzki, one of three living members of the 50–40–90 Club (and he did it twice)104… exceptionally fun to watch on the offensive end … willed himself into a Stockton-like crunch-time assassin … helped bring back three dying art forms: passing, fast breaks and crappy hair … four-time winner of the Guy Everyone in the League Would Have Killed to Play With award (’05, ’06, ’07, ’08) … replaced Wayne Gretzky as the most popular athlete in Canada after the Janet Jones gambling scandal … along with Mike D’Antoni, improved the careers of Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire by at least 35 percent … the only player this decade who inspired Tim Thomas to give a shit105… drew a handful of “that’s one bad-ass white boy” compliments from Charles Barkley over the past four years … probably would have played in a Finals if (a) Phoenix’s owner weren’t such a cheapskate, (b) Joe Johnson hadn’t broken his face early in the ’04 playoffs, (c) Tim Donaghy reffing Game 3 and the Amar’e/Diaw leaving-the-bench suspensions106 had never happened in ’07, (d) Tim Duncan hadn’t hit that crazy three in Game 1 of the ’08 Spurs-Suns series, and/or (e) Phoenix’s owner weren’t such a shameless cheapskate … you could call him the Evolutionary Cousy, like Cousy with a jump shot … the more he plays with his teammates, the better he gets (almost like Wayne Gretzky during his Edmonton days).
The case against Nash cracking the top forty: Struggled with a bad back during his first four seasons, missing 64 games in all (and rendering the first third of his career moot) … an ineffective defensive player who doesn’t get steals and can’t be hidden against elite point guards … looks like a cross between Jackie Earle Haley and James Blunt … the validity of his consecutive MVP trophies can be easily picked apart, although he probably should have won by default in ’07 … of all players who benefited from the rule changes before the ’05 season, Nash was number one on the list107… after seeing how Mike D’Antoni altered the statistical careers of many of the ’09 Knicks, coupled with Nash’s regression back to his Dallas numbers from ’01 to ’04, it’s hard to argue the theory that D’Antoni’s system made Nash to a large degree … creamed offensively in the playoffs by Mike Bibby (’02, ’04) and Tony Parker (’07, ’08), a huge reason for his team’s exits in those years … you have to wonder about the top-forty credentials of anyone who was offered a perfectly reasonable six-year, $60 million free agent offer by Phoenix in his prime, asked Mark Cuban to match that offer, and had Cuban basically say to him, “Sorry, that’s a little rich for my blood; we’d rather spend that money on Erick Dampier.” I mean, when Cuban wonders about the fiscal sanity of a contract, THAT is saying something.
So why stick Nash this high? For three reasons that went beyond everything we just mentioned. First, he played for a series of all-offense/no-defense teams in Dallas and Phoenix and never landed on a quality defensive team that protected him the way the Lakers protected Magic. His deficiencies were constantly exposed on that end, so we were always thinking about them. That’s not totally fair. If you think Nash sucked on defense, you should have seen Magic pretending to be a bullfighter in the late eighties and early nineties. Olé! Olé! But Magic’s teammates could protect him. When Nash’s opponents beat him off the dribble, they scored because he never had smart team defenders or a shot blocker behind him. It’s like Kate Hudson’s performance in Almost Famous—she’s a semi-abysmal actress, but give her a fantastic script and a great part and suddenly she’s getting an Oscar nomination. Had Nash switched places with Tony Parker (another lousy defender) for the past four years and gotten protected by Popovich and Duncan, we wouldn’t have complained about his defense as much. It’s all about situations. When we think about him historically, it has to be remembered that he would have been better on a smart defensive team with one good shot blocker to protect him. It’s just a fact.
Second, former teammate Paul Shirley argued Nash’s MVP credentials with me once by emailing me an excellent point about how valuable Nash really was to Phoenix, saying that Nash’s style was contagious to the rest of the Suns as soon as he showed up from Dallas. Within a few weeks, everyone started playing unselfishly and getting each other easy baskets, like his magnanimity had seeped into everyone else by osmosis … and when you think about it, that’s the single most important way you can affect a basketball team. In my lifetime, only Bird, Magic, Kidd and Walton affected their teams to that same degree. And Isaiah Rider, if this were Bizarro World.
Third, Nash’s magnificent performance during the ’07 season—ironically, the season when he didn’t win the MVP—pushed him up a level for me. He never had a killer instinct until that year; even when he dropped 48 in an ’05 playoff game because the Spurs were blanketing his teammates and daring Nash to score, he seemed sheepish about it afterward. But falling short in ’05 and ’06 hardened him; maybe he didn’t go to the dark side like Danny LaRusso during the Terry Silver era, but he developed a nasty edge that nobody remembered seeing before. My guess: Nash spent the summer mulling over his career and everything that had happened, ultimately realizing that he couldn’t do anything more other than win his first title. Then he thought long and hard about how to do it, ultimately cutting off his hair (feel the symbolism, baby!) and getting in superb shape so he wouldn’t wear down in the playoffs again. When he showed up for training camp and realized the Marion-Stoudemire soap opera would be an ongoing problem,108 Boris Diaw was out of shape, and new free agent Marcus Banks couldn’t help, something snapped inside him. Exit, nice Steve Nash. Enter, icy Steve Nash. Suddenly he was tripping guys on picks, barking at officials and getting testy with his own teammates, eventually righting the ship and leading the Suns to the highest level of offensive basketball we’ve witnessed in twenty years. Really, it was a virtuoso season for him as an offensive player and a leader; borrowing the same tactic that once worked so well for Magic, Isiah and Stockton, Nash used the first 40 minutes to get everyone else going, then took over in crunch time if the Suns needed it. Sometimes he’d even unleash the “Look, there’s no way we’re effing losing this game!” glare on his face, an absolute staple for any MVP candidate.
Somewhere along the line, he won me over. Once one of the harsher critics of the voting for his back-to-back MVPs, I ended up writing the following about Nash during the ’07 Playoffs: “Regardless of what happens in San Antonio, I love what happened to Nash this season; his competitive spirit, toughness and leadership reminds me of Bird, Magic, MJ and Isiah back in the day. That’s the highest praise I can give. At the very least, you know the Suns won’t get blown out—they’ll be in the game and fighting until the very end. You can count on that from them. He’s the reason.” You could go to war with Steve Nash, and really, that’s all that matters.
37. DIRK NOWITZKI

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 8 All-Stars … ’07 MVP … top 5 (’05, 06, ’07, ’09), top 10 (’02, ’03), top 15 (’04, ’08) … 3-year peak: 26–9–4 (51%-89%-41%) … best player on runner-up (’06 Mavs), 27–12–3 (23 G) … 2007 averages: 25–9–3, 50% FG, 42% 3FG, 90% FT … 9 straight 22–8 seasons
The NBA’s alpha dog almost ended up being German. Yup, we came that close in the 2006 Playoffs—if not for the heroics of Wade, Salvatore, Pay-ton and others, Germany would have made its biggest advancement on American culture since David Hasselhoff infiltrated the horny brains of teenage guys with Baywatch. Personally, I was terrified—this was the same country that started two world wars and deliberately injured Pele in Victory. Had Nowitzki grabbed the conch that spring, maybe Germany would have gotten its swagger back, maybe the bad blood would have gotten going again and maybe our lives would have eventually been in danger. Instead the Mavs fell apart in the Finals and so did Dirk, who secured his spot on the “Crap, It’s Just Not in Me” All-Stars along with Karl Malone, Drexler, KJ, Ewing and Sampson. How close did we come? Hop into the NBA Time Machine with me; we’re heading back to 2006. Dirk had just completed his finest regular season and made a run at becoming the toughest NBA player in the history of Europe.109 (Note: Dirk developed such a nasty streak that even when Ashton Kutcher punk’d him, it seemed like Dirk wanted to kick Ashton’s ass for a few seconds, which would have been the greatest and most random fight ever—but that’s a whole other story.) Although we liked following a cocky, snarling 7-foot German with a 25-foot range during a sublimely efficient offensive season, questions lingered about his crunch-time prowess and Dallas’ title prospects when its best player seemed soft and couldn’t guard anyone.110 After all, nobody ever won a title with an all-offense, no-defense guy leading the way. Then Dirk broke through with the following moments:
Game 7, San Antonio series (Round 2). Playing on the road against the champs, trailing by three in the final 20 seconds and still reeling from a gut-wrenching three by Ginobili on the previous possession, Dallas calls the season-deciding play for Dirk. He gets the ball and backs Bruce Bowen into the paint with a herky-jerky, grind-you-backward move developed the previous summer. With Bowen overplaying him, Dirk weasels past him and somehow avoids getting tripped, kicked, or punched in the balls. Then he barrels toward the basket, absorbs the contact from Ginobili,111 finishes a twisting layup, draws the foul and buries the free throw. Tie game! Remember, the Mavs were 20 seconds away from blowing a three-games-to-one series lead and a 20-point lead in Game 7; they never would have been the same after that. Considering the circumstances, shouldn’t that play rank with Magic’s sky hook against the ’87 Celtics, Bird’s steal-and-pass against the ’87 Pistons, MJ’s basket-steal-basket sequence to end the ’98 Finals, Jerry West’s half-court bomb to extend Game 3 of the ’70 Finals and every other “I need to come up big Right Now” clutch play in NBA history? And since they ended up winning in OT and eventually made the Finals, another question has to be asked: how many superstars single-handedly altered the course of the playoffs with one play? At this specific point in time, it sure seemed like Dirk was making a leap from franchise guy to potential Pantheon guy.112
Game 5, Phoenix Series (Western Finals). Dirk torches Phoenix with one of the best performances of the decade: 50 points, 12 rebounds and an unforgettable “there’s no effing way we’re losing” explosion in the second half (scoring 24 of 34 Dallas points to ice it). I remember being delighted that he made the necessary fundamental and philosophical changes to become dominant, realized it wasn’t okay to bitch out teammates, found a way to punish smaller defenders and unveiled a swagger that his team desperately needed. Could anyone guard him? Opponents couldn’t use taller Duncan/Garnett types because Dirk was beating those guys off the dribble or even worse, pulling them 25 feet away and shooting threes over them. The gritty Bowen/Raja types had no chance because of his creative high-post game (fueled by his deadly fall-away). Who was left? Lankier forwards like Shawn Marion had the best chance on paper because they could stay in front of him, make him work for his points and force him to settle for 16-footers,113 but Dirk learned to adjust when his shot wasn’t falling, adopting Larry Bird’s ploy of crashing the offensive boards and getting his points on putbacks and foul shots. So he was always going to affect a game offensively. At this specific point in time, with his confidence swelling, there wasn’t a way to fully shut him down. Here’s what I wrote: “Dirk is playing at a higher level than any forward since Bird…. He’s been a killer all spring, a true assassin, and I certainly never imagined writing that about Dirk Nowitzki.”
    To bang my point home that Nowitzki was better than anyone realized, I created something in that same column called the 42 Club. I was especially fond of the idea because of its simplicity. I added up the point, rebound, and assist averages for franchise guys during the playoffs, and if the number topped 42, that meant we were probably talking about a potential Level 4 (or higher) guy.114 To figure out the members, I allowed only guys who played 13 or more playoff games in one postseason, since that’s a legitimate sampling (more than a month of basketball at the highest level). Here were the 42 Club members from 1977 to 2008 (so we can include LeBron):
Michael Jordan (6x): 49.4 (’89); 50.7 (’90); 45.9 (’91); 46.5 (’92); 47.8
(’93); 43.8 (’97) Shaquille O’Neal (4x): 43.6 (’98); 49.2 (’00); 49.0 (’01); 43.9 (’02)
Larry Bird (4x): 42.0 (’81); 44.4 (’84); 43.4 (’86); 44.2 (’87)115
Moses Malone (2x): 43.0 (’81), 43.3 (’83)
Magic Johnson (2x): 43.8 (’86), 42.5 (’91)
Karl Malone (2x): 43.0 (’92), 42.9 (’94)
Hakeem Olajuwon (2x): 44.2 (’94), 47.8 (’95)
Tim Duncan (2x): 42.7 (’01), 45.4 (’03)
LeBron James (2x): 44.7 (’06), 43.6 (’08)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1x): 47.1 (’80)
Charles Barkley (1x): 44.5 (’93)
Kobe Bryant (1x): 42.8 (’01)
Allen Iverson (1x): 43.7 (’01)
Kevin Garnett (1x): 44.0 (’04)
Dirk Nowitzki (1x): 45.1 (’06 pre-finals)
There wasn’t a single fraud on that list with the possible exception of … well, I’m trying to be nice, but f*ck it—Karl Malone! Every other memorable spring from 1977 to 2008 is represented except for Walton in ’77 (didn’t score enough points), Bernard in ’84 (only played 12 games), Magic in ’87 and ’88 (barely missed), and Wade in ’06 (didn’t heat up until the last two rounds). Just like in real life, the best playoff seasons of Ewing, Robinson, and Drexler fell a tad short. Career-year/MVP seasons for KG, Barkley, and Iverson all qualified, as did Kobe’s ridiculous ’01 season when he quietly peaked as an all-around player. I also like that our most dominant player (MJ) leads with six appearances, and his precocious next-generation challenger (LeBron) cracked the 42 Club at the tender age of twenty-one. Everything about the concept checks out; there are no flukes, no aberrations, no injustices. It just works. I’d never imagined that Dirk could potentially crack a list of elite playoff performers; just two summers before, I’d skewered Dallas for refusing to part with Nowitzki in a Shaq trade. The 50-point game altered my opinion. As I wrote the next day, “He’s the most unstoppable player in basketball, a true franchise guy, and I think he’s headed for his first championship in about two weeks.”
So what happened? Dallas won the first two Finals games, carried a 13-point lead into the final six minutes of Game 3 in Miami … and collapsed faster than a Corey Haim acting comeback. Wade took over, the refs took over and the Mavs lost their composure. Even after Miami’s big comeback, Nowitzki (a 90.1 percent FT shooter that season) had a chance to tie the game with two freebies in the final three seconds. He clanked the first one. Ballgame. So much for making the leap. Dallas pulled a bigger no-show in Game 4 than Corey Haim in Fever Lake, then rallied in Game 5 before getting screwed by more dubulent116 officiating, although they did commit a number of brain farts down the stretch and Josh Howard missed two key free throws in overtime. By Game 6, they were more rattled than Corey Haim watching the coke scenes in Scarface. In retrospect, Miami deserved to win for being a tougher, more experienced team. Dallas got tight down the stretch; Miami stayed cool. Dallas complained for two straight weeks; Miami didn’t complain about anything. Avery Johnson looked tighter than a whipped husband afraid to get a lap dance at someone else’s bachelor party; Pat Riley always looked like he was getting ready for a postgame bottle of chardonnay on his boat. Even the body language of the two stars was different: Wade was cooler than cool, but Nowitzki was constantly frowning, yanking his mouthpiece out and acting more bitchy than Corey Haim when he was banned from the Lost Boys 2 shoot.117 Let the record show that Dirk sucked in all four of those losses while his teammates imploded around him. And in an amazing wrinkle for 42 Club purposes, Dirk finished the ’06 Playoffs with …
(Drumroll, please…)
A 41.6!
See? The formula never fails. The following season, Dirk stumbled into an MVP Award that was invalidated by the great Golden State Collapse of ’07. Now he’s hitting the latter half of his career and we can safely say that Dirk Nowitzki missed the boat as an alpha dog. Sure, he’s one of the best forty players ever. But he was never the dominant guy for an entire season, and as far as I’m concerned, America is safe.
1. Trading for an NBA player with baggage is like dating a girl with baggage: you might be happy for a few months, but 19 out of 20 times, it will end badly. (And I mean badly, as in, “Why does it hurt when I pee?” or “I wonder who left 59 hang-ups on my answering machine?”) The McAdoo/Lakers trade was the 20th time.
2. We’ve all played hoops with someone who had McAdoo’s jumper and we envied the guy for it. For me, it was my buddy House. When you have McAdoo’s jumper, it’s like being the one kid in high school who has a donkey dick. Everyone will remember you.
3. Pistons GM Jack McCloskey explained the release like this: “He could have given us 10 to 12 minutes a game. He said that he didn’t want to play part-time because it would drive the value of his next contract down. Prior to that, I might have been the only guy in Detroit who thought Bob McAdoo was really injured, but after he said that, I lost all respect.”
4. The complete list: McAdoo, Haywood, Thompson, John Lucas, Sidney Wicks, Pete Maravich, Robert Parish (G-State version), George McGinnis, Truck Robinson, Terry Furlow, Marvin Barnes, John Drew, Bernard King, Micheal Ray Richardson and yes … Kareem.
5. Another pioneer move by Doo: after his NBA career ended in ’86, he starred in Italy, playing another 7 years and averaging a 27–9 over there. When my friend Wildes recently moved from Manhattan (the NBA of hooking up) to West Hartford (the Italian League), I predicted he’d put up inflated numbers and started calling him Euro McAdoo. Then he quickly found a girlfriend. I think I put too much pressure on him.
6. He’s a charter member of the Tony La Russa All-Stars for Guys Who Have Looked the Same for So Long That It’s Almost Creepy.
7. FYI: if you’re flicking channels, come across Vice, and see a skinny Johnson with short hair, you’re in for a classic episode.
8. Parish played there from 1977 to 1980 and had a reputation for mailing it in and being a pothead; that’s how he became available in the McHale/Parish-for-Joe Barry Carroll hijacking. Also, Chief was arrested during the ’91 season for having a giant package of pot FedExed to his house. Did this affect his Pyramid ranking? Absolutely. I moved him up a few spots.
9. Only twice have I been part of a crowd that loathed an opponent to that degree—this game and Game 6 of the ’86 Finals, right after Ralph Sampson picked a fight with Jerry Sichting, when we caused his backbone to crumble as the game went along—and it’s an experience unlike anything else in sports. To be honest, it’s a little scary. Like being at a Jerry Springer taping with fifteen thousand people.
10. This includes referee Jack Madden, who stood under the basket watching the whole thing and never called a foul. Maybe the most astounding no-call in NBA history.
11. If you have a friend who wouldn’t enjoy both halves of the Bernard King sandwich, dump him from your life now because he can’t be trusted. My Mount Rushmore for sandwiches looks like this: the French dip, the turkey BLT, the Bernard King and homemade meatloaf on French bread with ketchup and spicy mustard.
12. GOE still blames Hubie for running Bernard ragged on a shitty team in a last-ditch effort to save his job, eventually causing him to break down. Had Bernard played on the Showtime Lakers, it would have been all over.
13. From the bible (aka Drive): “During that playoffs, Bernard was automatic—the best scoring machine I have ever seen. His release was amazing. You’d always come within a fraction of getting a piece of his shot, but he wouldn’t allow it. He always had you off-balance.”
14. That ’85 Knicks team ranked among the ugliest ever with Ken Bannister, Pat Cummings, Orr, Williams, Grunfeld and head coach Hubie Brown. When they played the Celtics that year, people passed out in the stands like the crowds that saw The Exorcist in 1973. I always pictured Bernard sneaking out after games to meet women so that none of his teammates would join him.
15. Bernard averaged 28.4 a game for the ’91 Bullets when he was 34. If only he and Dr. Andrews had crossed paths in time.
16. Quick rehash of the plot: The great Gabe Kaplan plays a New York basketball junkie who gets a coaching job at tiny Cadwallader State College in Nevada, where they pay him $50 for every win. His wife refuses to go—remember, this was the Wet Blanket Girlfriend era of sports movies—so Gabe ditches her and brings four local stars who couldn’t get into college: Hustler, D. C. Dacey (on the lam from the law, as well as an early prototype for Derrick Coleman’s game), Preacher (a reverend point guard fleeing from the mob) and Swish (a top female player playing in drag). They turn Cadwallader State College around and Hustler wins a ton of money from the Nevada State coach in billiards, agreeing to forgo the money if the two teams play a game. You can guess what happens next.
17. In retrospect, not a lot of acting here—Bernard landed in rehab a year later. Kaplan told me once that they shot the movie in 60 days and Bernard gave them 58 good ones. He didn’t elaborate.
18. Arizin left treadmarks fleeing from Wilt for a high-paying job at IBM, moonlighting in the Eastern League for his basketball fix. Isn’t it amazing that, as late as the mid-’60s, NBA stars left the league because they could make more money elsewhere?
19. The old Heinsohn stories are funny—you have to love an era when exploding cigars and sliced shoelaces were hysterically funny acts. Tommy sounds like the kind of guy who’d sneak into your hotel room, take a horrendous dump, not flush it and let it fester in there for 10 hours until you came back to your room and passed out. Needless to say, he would have been a fun person to have on your college hall. And where did he go to college? That’s right … Holy Cross!
20. Russell in Second Wind: “Tommy was so gifted and so smart that if he had made up his mind that he was going to play every night, the only forward who would have been any competition for him was Baylor. Not even Pettit could have come close to him.”
21. Only retired players were eligible for selection and had to have one All-NBA first team on their resume.
22. Back in the late-’90s, my old college roomie JackO and I ran into Tommy at the Four’s. Tommy had a cigarette in one hand and a Scotch in the other—just like we’d always imagined if the moment ever happened—so we quickly approached him, played the H.C. card and talked to him for 20 minutes. It’s my all-time “interaction with a famous person” moment. I’m not kidding. We were so happy afterward that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.
23. During the ’87 season, Larry Legend made the mistake of challenging ’Nique on a fast break and got dunked on so violently that the momentum sent him sprawling into the basket support like he had been struck by a car. This nearly caused a bigger Atlanta riot than the bomb that spoiled the ’96 Olympics. People went berserk. They almost charged the court.
24. ’Nique was ten times more bummed out than he should have been afterward. If you asked him whether he would have rather won the ’87 Dunk Contest or the ’88 duel against Bird, I’d bet he’d say Bird, but I’d also bet that he would pause for a split second.
25. I will never forgive my mother for throwing out all my hockey cards in the late-’70s or for throwing out my posters in the mid-’90s. What would I have done with them? I don’t know; they’d probably be in my attic gathering dust. It’s the principle, that’s all.
26. ’Nique’s porous defense was the turd in the punch bowl of the famous Bird-’Nique shootout in ’88. It’s just a fact. He was Ominique Wilkins that night.
27. Pierce cracked 4 teeth against the ’04 Suns, slipped in a mouthpiece and returned to win the game. The next day, he underwent seven hours of dental surgery. The next day, he played against Charlotte and made the game-winning shot. Tough dude.
28. Pitino changed the roster so much that by Christmas ’99, my dad and I were joking what it would be like if Pitino were Santa Claus: “We hated to give up Prancer, but when you have a chance to pick up a new sled and two elves, you have to do it.”
29. My take: Pierce came back too soon and never dealt with that near-death experience. Eventually, he just got angry and started playing that way. Throw in the pressures of a big contract and his conduct was explainable. Maybe it wasn’t likable, but it was explainable.
30. As much as I enjoyed the ’08 title season, would I trade it for 15 years of CP3? No. But I did think about it.
31. In my twenties, I drank too much, smoked too much pot and showed horrible taste in women, and that’s when I was broke. What if I were making $14 million a year, living in a mansion with buddies and sampling hot groupies every night? It would have been a disaster. I would not have handled it well. Also, this book would have been dedicated to my four illegitimate kids, Billy junior, Billy the second, DaBill and LeBill.
32. My money is on this “maybe.” Ricky could corrupt anybody. This should be a game show: Ricky Davis Can Corrupt Anybody. “This week, Ricky teaches a high school basketball team in Utah how to wash Patrón tequila down with Courvoisier!”
33. My thoughts from January 2006: “Pierce’s career season has been simply astounding to watch on a day-to-day basis—like having a brooding, underachieving teenage son who suddenly starts shaking everyone’s hand, taking out the garbage, cleaning up his room and bringing home A’s. You hope for these things, you keep your fingers crossed, you keep the faith, but you never actually expect it to happen.”
34. I’ll defend this reference even though it’s a chick flick: Julia Roberts’ performance was the movie version of Doc Gooden’s ’85 season, where you would have believed any outcome for her career after it was over (10 Cy Youngs, 10 Oscars, anything). When you can pull off the “sleazy Hollywood hooker becomes a trophy girlfriend for a zillionaire in 48 hours” premise, you’ve done something special. When she’s at the polo match wearing the brown polka dot dress and Gere confides to George Costanza that Julia is a hooker, you’re thinking, “My God, how could you do that?” even though she was a hooker. That they pulled off such a convoluted, manipulative premise and made it entertaining has to be considered one of the 10 greatest achievements in the history of modern film. So there.
35. In 2006 I wrote, “[Wade] takes an Iversonian punishment every game, only he’s not a freak of nature like Iverson was/is. If Wade doesn’t start picking his spots, he’ll go Earl Campbell on us and be gone from the league by 2011.”
36. Going even further: Gary Payton played with both of them in 2006, as G.P. on Miami and Wayne Palmer on 24.
37. I originally had “Wade’s assassination of Dallas” here for like 3 months before realizing the macabre double meaning. See, I’m a relatively thoughtful person! Right?
38. Either I am going to autograph a copy of this book for Hollinger or I’m going to beat him unconscious with it. I haven’t decided yet.
39. That’s when you knew I was getting carried away. Obviously Miami didn’t suck that year. I was riled up.
40. That was a complete lie: I had money on Dallas in the series. Hence, the vitriol.
41. After this column led ESPN.com, a frustrated Mark Cuban simply posted the link on his blog with the headline “Bill Simmons Is My Hero” and the note, “I never have to say a word again. Bill Simmons, as one of the 19 die hard [sic] says it all. It is so nice to know there are people who pay attention. thank you bill.” This was my favorite Cuban moment ever other than the time I watched him greet seedy Knicks owner James Dolan at the 2008 NBA Technology Summit by screaming, “Jim-mayyyyyyyy!” and giving him a big hug, like they hadn’t seen each other outside of a Champagne Room in like five years.
42. This was the game where Cuban stared down David Stern afterward and Joe House emailed me, “I don’t think I can take much more of NBA refs insisting on controlling the outcomes of the most significant games. The NBA is a disgrace and should be completely embarrassed. I hate this game.”
43. Seattle traded him for Westphal in 1980 and finished 22 games worse the following season; Phoenix traded him for Rick Robey in 1983 and finished 12 games worse. Nobody ever seemed to appreciate DJ until he was gone.
44. Really, KC Jones needed to watch three Finals games before realizing, “Maybe I should have the best defensive guard alive checking the key to L.A.’s offense?”
45. And then there’s this: apparently the guy was hung like a tripod. I knew someone who knew someone who worked in Boston’s clubhouse during the Bird era. (I know, one of those friend-of-a-friend stories, but in this case, the story is too bizarre and nobody could have made it up.) A former Celtic was visiting the locker room, saw DJ naked, was impressed by DJs, um, equipment, and said something like, “Damn, DJ, how the hell did you get that thing?” And as the story went, DJ responded, “I dip it in beans … human beans!” Then everyone cracked up. After hearing that story, I immediately named my fantasy hoops team “Human Beans.” How could a story that wacky be made up?
46. Wait, I’m not done talking about dicks. My buddy Gus worked for an Orlando TV station in the early-’90s and had the “guy who holds the boom mike for TV interviews right after games” job. He saw nearly every player naked and eventually made an All-Dick Team, the funniest list ever rattled off by any of my friends. You’re not gonna believe this, but there were no white guys. I don’t remember every starter, but I do remember Gus making Vinnie Johnson the sixth man. That killed me. His MVP? Orlando swingman Jerry “Ice” Reynolds—literally, he was a swingman—who dwarfed everyone else to the degree that Ice’s teammates discussed his icicle in reverential tones. I’m still disappointed we never got a SportsCentury about this.
47. A more interesting debate: what are the next five “greatest backcourt of all time” combos using that same criteria? I’d go with Isiah and Dumars, Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton, Frazier and Monroe, and Ginobili and Parker for the next five, with honorable mention going to Mo Cheeks and Andrew Toney and to D.J. and Gus Williams.
48. I love the thought of Sharman shooting extra free throws and doing jumping jacks after practice while Heinsohn sipped a beer, smoked a Marlboro and heckled him from the sidelines. You know this happened.
49. I’d be lying if I said Danny Schayes didn’t affect this ranking. Dolph’s genes produced one of the all-time stiffs of the ’80s.
50. SI from February 1974: “During his four years with the Rockets, Hayes was variously considered a ball hog, a rotten apple, a dumbbell and a guaranteed loser.” Well, then.
51. Marin was best known for a disorienting red burn mark that took up much of his right arm. I remember being patently terrified of him as a little kid. These days, he would have just cluttered that arm up with tattoos and we wouldn’t have noticed it. GOE adds, “He was also part of a great Bullets team that you’re overlooking with Unseld, Monroe, Kevin Loughery and Gus Johnson. A classic second-best team that is now forgotten.” That might be his grumpiest and oldest interruption yet.
52. During the postgame celebration, Hayes responded to a few needling questions about his Game 7 no-show by saying, “They can say whatever they want. But they gotta say one thing: E’s a world champion. He wears the ring.” The Sports Guy enjoyed E’s use of the third-person nickname tense on that one.
53. It’s hard to take that nickname seriously when he sucked in the ’84 Finals and basically blew the series with his backcourt lob that Gerald Henderson picked off in Game 2. Whatever, it rhymes. I like nicknames that rhyme—even “Never Nervous Pervis” made Ellison seem like 50 percent less of a bust.
54. In his first five seasons, Worthy missed 42 of 43 threes. In the next two seasons, he “improved” to 4-for-39. So for his first seven seasons, Worthy took 82 threes and missed 77 of them. That has to be some sort of record, right?
55. This has only been tried once, in an awful Nicolas Cage movie called Family Man, where he got to see what his life would have been like if he hadn’t gotten married. I don’t need a movie to know what my life would have been like: I would have been traveling to various sporting events every week, going to Vegas once a month and dating sideline reporters and my outdoor office would have 10 TVs instead of just 4. Also, I’d have a cold sore on my lower lip. And it would hurt when I pee.
56. The starting five: Bill Walton, Worthy, Jamaal Wilkes, Baron Davis and Walt Frazier, with Brian Winters as sixth man and Mike Newlin, Phil Jackson, Mike Gminski and World B. Free coming off the bench. I’m excluding Kareem out of sheer spite.
57. Not to be confused with Jay “I Shouldn’t Have Bought a Motorcycle” Williams or Jayson “I Didn’t Kill My Chauffeur” Williams.
58. Sura played so black that House (who fancied himself a black person, and still does) bought a game-worn Sura jersey on eBay and wore it in pickup games for a few years. They were like kindred spirits.
59. The starting five for that team: Jack Sikma, Rick Barry, Jason Kidd, Scottie Pippen and Anthony Mason, with Moochie Norris, Steve Nash, Chris Andersen, Darnell Hillman and Chris Kaman coming off the bench.
60. This category always seems to have over-the-top affirmations like “I swear to God,” “I can promise you,” and “I don’t have a doubt in my mind.”
61. I just ducked a lightning bolt.
62. Steve Jones’ nickname? “Snapper.” He refuses to reveal why they called him “Snapper.” He’s even ducked the question in NBA.com chats other than to say that two ABA teammates in New Orleans gave it to him and that there’s a story behind it. My guess involves a French Quarter hooker, a whip and hot beignets.
63. Earning the nickname “Bad News” as a professional athlete is like earning the nickname “One-Night Stand” as a sorority girl—really, there’s no getting around the implicit message.
64. If I could have anybody’s jump shot, I’d take Mike Miller’s. It’s perfect. It’s like seeing Halle Berry go topless in Swordfish for the first time—you don’t even know what to say while you’re watching it. Words can’t do it justice. Ray Allen’s jumper ranks second. Eric Gordon’s jumper ranks third. And Shawn Marion’s jumper ranks last.
65. Grumpy Old Editor’s favorite “nobody tried more than DeBusschere” memory: “Dave scored on a tip-in to put the Knicks ahead in Game 3 of the 1970 Finals. When West hit the 65-footer to tie it, Dave was somehow already under that basket—and dropped to the ground in shock like Michael Cooper.”
66. I feel funny even mentioning Goldman’s credentials: he’s the greatest living screenwriter, an Oscar winner, and the author or coauthor of three of my favorite books (Wait Till Next Year, Adventures in the Screen Trade, and Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade). He’s also been a Knicks season ticket holder for over 40 years. He is overqualified to discuss DeBusschere.
67. He means Frazier, not Drexler. There’s only one Clyde in New York.
68. This happened in ’75 after they started keeping track of blocks/steals. Odds are, Russell and Wilt would have had a few in their day. And by “a few,” I mean “a few dozen.”
69. The series ended with Norm Van Lier sprawled on his knees, his head hanging, unable to stand for Barry’s clinching FTs because he was so distraught. Bob Ryan says Chicago’s Van Lier/Jerry Sloan backcourt was the “physically and mentally” toughest backcourt that he’s ever seen. Chicago averaged 52 W’s from ’71 to ’75 and got swallowed up by Kareem’s Bucks and West’s Lakers in the West.
70. Of the 36 centers who played 75+ playoff games, Thurmond had the second-lowest FG% (41.6%), trailing only Jason Collins (37%). Russell was fourth-lowest (43%), Dave Cowens was seventh-lowest (45%) and Mark West was first (56.6%), so you can’t read too much into it. But still.
71. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. “Who wants to sex Mutombo?” is my favorite NBA urban legend other than “Are you ready for Maggette?”
72. The greatest example: In Game 1 of the ’92 Finals, after MJ’s fifth three-pointer, Clyde came back down and forced a three to “respond.” Air ball. So awkward when it happened. Nobody had less of a sense of the moment than Drexler.
73. I’m being generous with the “showed enough promise” compliment here; Clyde averaged 18 minutes and an 8–3–2. Not exactly MJ territory. On the other hand, anytime you have a chance to take a five-year senior who missed two years because of stress fractures, you gotta do it.
74. Vecsey’s take: “Enough of the gentlemanly behavior. Later for his nice-guy image. You can’t think about beating Jordan by being permissive or overly respectful.” Translation: “Grow some balls, Clyde!”
75. Did you know Eric Piatkowski has the lowest career APG of any guard who played at least 500 games? Pie played 789 games and finished with 778 assists (1.0 per game). His nickname should have been “Black Pie Hole.”
76. FG percentages of the best modern PGs: Tiny (47%), GP (47%), KJ (49%), Stockton (52%), Isiah (45%), Nash (49%), Mo Cheeks (52%), Mark Price (47%), Gus Williams (46%), Tim Hardaway (43%).
77. When they finally turn Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” into a movie, I want Hunter to play Montresor.
78. Jersey landed Devin Harris and two number ones in a trade that also cost Dallas $11 million (factoring in the luxury tax). It’s the worst non-Isiah trade of this decade other than Houston stealing T-Mac from Orlando.
79. This scandal led to roughly 200,000 Brandon-Kelly-Dylan jokes at the time.
80. Dallas did get Sam Cassell and Michael Finley back. Of course, Dallas f’ed up a year later with an eight-player deal that basically landed them Shawn Bradley and Robert Pack for Cassell, Jimmy Jackson and Chris Gatling. That same season, they dealt Mashburn for Sasha Danilovic and Kurt Thomas. So not only did Braxton implode the Kidd-Mashburn-Jackson nucleus, she eventually turned them into Finley and a load of crap. Thank you, Toni.
81. Kidd and Stockton should have been grandfathered into every All-Star Game until each turned fifty. Seriously, I’d rather watch a forty-eight-year-old Stockton run an All-Star offense than Gilbert Arenas or Chauncey Billups.
82. Comedian Guy Torry made fun of Kidd’s son at a Shaq roast, joking about his oversized head and little-kid mustache, comparing him to the Great Gazoo of The Flintstones and basically crossing every comedy line. When they showed Shaq sprawled over the dais laughing his ass off, supposedly Kidd was bitter and it’s been awkward with them ever since. I feel like you need to know these things.
83. My all-time team for Guys You Wouldn’t Have Wanted to Follow in a Bathroom Had They Been in There For a Half Hour or More”: Unseld (C), Hot Plate Williams (PF), Charles Barkley (SF), Micheal Ray Richardson (SG), John Bagley (PG). I picked Micheal Ray because he may have been too coked up to remember to flush.
84. The ’78 Bullets were easily the worst post-Russell champs, finishing 44–38 with a point differential of 0.9. During the regular season, their opponents finished better than them in FG%, FT%, steals, assists and blocks and averaged 2.5 fewer turnovers a game. Of their 38 losses, 14 of them came by double digits.
85. In Ken Shouler’s book, Bob Ryan raves, “No man in history ever began more fast breaks with 50-foot outlet passes than Wes Unseld did,” and Auerbach adds, “Wes was the greatest outlet passer of them all, the only one I’d rate better than Russell.”
86. That was the first Double Whopper Double: Eddy hit double figures in negative plus-minus and body fat. Eddy was recently hit with a gay sexual harassment suit by his chauffeur, who made a far-fetched claim that Eddy swung his dick at him and said, “You know you want to touch it, Dave.” (My buddy House immediately changed his fantasy team’s name to that quote.) Then Malik Rose defended Eddy by saying, “I know for a fact Eddy’s not gay,” spawning a few days of “How exactly do you know this, Malik?” chatter. Then we learned that Eddy had six kids by two different women … and those are the kids we know about. So maybe that’s how Malik knew. Or maybe he said, “Hey Eddy, in the mood for some gay sex tonight?” and Eddy turned him down. Or maybe they had a threesome together. Or maybe Eddy tried to boink Malik’s girlfriend. Did House and I spend fifteen minutes on the phone trying to figure this out? Of course we did.
87. Morey became the league’s first statistically savvy GM when Houston hired him in 2007. We became friends when he worked for the Celtics. He runs the Sloan Sports Analytical Conference every year (which I nicknamed Dorkapalooza), and when he invited me in 2009, once I saw him swarmed by MIT grads the way the paparazzi swarm Britney, I nicknamed him “Dork Elvis.” He admitted this was funny. Begrudgingly.
88. I initially called this Swing Blocks before realizing it sounded like a gay porn movie. Couldn’t you see an early-nineties VCR tape of Swing Blocks with all the NBA’s Duke grads on the cover dressed like construction workers?
89. I thought about creating another stat for successful screens and picks, but that seems too arbitrary. Sorry, Wes.
90. Hollinger is a great guy and we’ve had good-natured arguments about this. He admits his formula is a work in progress—it values “per-48-minute” production, rebounds, and FG% too much. But he still believes in it. If this were Lost, I’d be Locke and he’d be Jack. Neither one of us is right or wrong; that’s the great thing. Okay, that’s not true—I’m right. But the man does make me think.
91. Actually, it jumped from 15.9 to 22. What’s a little Wes talk without a dab of gushing exaggeration?
92. You would not have wanted him as your GM. I emailed House, a long-suffering Bullets fan, and asked him for his four favorite abominable Unseld moves. His return email via BlackBerry: “Traded Ben Wallace for Isaac Austin; [Mitch] Richmond for C-Webb; number one for washed-up Mark Price; acquisition/gross-overpay of Kevin Duckworth; $25 million for Jahidi White; traded our number one three straight years for shit; failed to lock up Juwan [Howard] the summer before his contract year, lowballed after Juwan put up big numbers, then paid $30–40 million more than the contract would have cost previous summer after Stern voided free-agent signing by Miami. Sure there’s more but I’m doing this off top of my head—playing golf right now. I love Wes but HE SUCKED!”
93. Payton was listed as playing “Rumeal Smith” in the closing credits, even though they never mentioned his character’s name in the movie. Really, they couldn’t have called him “Gary Dayton” or “Gary Parton”? How did they come up with Rumeal Smith? This has been bothering me for 13 years.
94. George Karl murdered Seattle by not switching GP onto MJ until Game 4. Karl goes down as the most overrated coach of his era—nobody had more guys quit on him, botched more games and series or made more excuses.
95. At halftime of Game 1 of the ’94 Nuggets series, before the Sonics infamously blew a 2–0 lead to an eighth seed, Payton and Ricky Pierce had an altercation that led to both guys threatening to get their guns before things calmed down. It was just like the fight Rick Reilly and I had at the 2008 ESPYs.
96. What would be the equivalent in other walks of life? Greg Maddux pitching as a setup man for the Yankees in 2009, then receiving congrats in the dugout because he extricated himself from a seventh-inning jam in the World Series? Springsteen getting a standing O at the Meadowlands after a rocking solo in his new gig as the harmonica player for Modest Mouse?
97. I have multiple New York friends who swear that Knicks fans were subconsciously predisposed to root against Ewing because so many Knicks fans love St. John’s and that was the height of the Johnnies-Hoyas Big East rivalry back then.
98. Ewing never cracked the top three in rebounding and currently has the 57th-highest career rebounding average, just ahead of Sikma (60th), Laimbeer (61st) and Rony Seikaly (70th).
99. Notice how I avoided any mention of the excruciating Knicks-Heat playoff battles? I always wanted a Bizarro ESPN Classic channel that featured programming like NBA’s Greatest Games: Miami 65, New York 56, SportsCentury and Beyond: Rusty Hilger, The Very Best of the Magic Hour, Games That Ended Prematurely Because Somebody Died, Actors Who Threw Like Women (hosted by Tim Robbins), Best Magic Johnson Comebacks, Inside Schwartz, NHL Instant Classic: Columbus at Minnesota and Nancy Lieberman’s 500 Most Awkward Sideline Interviews.
100. When Ewing became head of the Players Association, it was like finding out that Flavor Flav had been named the president of Viacom.
101. My favorite Ewing moment: When an Atlanta strip joint (Gold Club) was busted for drugs and prostitution, a number of celebs were revealed as pay-for-play customers in the ensuing trial, including Ewing, who made the following testimony: “The girls danced, started fondling me, I got aroused, they performed oral sex. I hung around a little bit and talked to them, then I left.” As Marv Albert would say, yes!
102. His original examples: Donyell Marshall (’95 UConn), Peyton Manning (’98 Tennessee), Keith Van Horn (’98 Utah), Don Mattingly (’96 Yankees), Bret Hart (’97 WWF).
103. Some enjoyable pop culture examples: Shannen Doherty (90210), David Lee Roth (Van Halen), Shelley Long (Cheers), David Caruso (NYPD Blue), Sonny Corleone (the Corleones), Craig Kilborn (Daily Show).
104. The 50–40–90 Club covers anyone who topped 50% FG, 40% 3FG and 90% FT shooting in one season. Not easy.
105. No small feat. Here’s how I described Thomas in 2008: “Is there an NBA forward alive who couldn’t average 31 minutes, 12 points, five rebounds and three assists, miss 70 percent of his 3-pointers and allow his guy to score at will? If baseball has VORP (value over replacement player), then basketball should have VOTT (value over Tim Thomas). He’s such a dog that PETA might protest this paragraph.” Ten months later, Basketball Prospectus unveiled a WARP stat that revealed Thomas scored exactly at replacement level for the ’08 and ’09 seasons. Stu Scott, give me a boo yeah!
106. We can’t use seatbelts, and we can’t put a rope around the bench because a player could go flying into the rope during play and get practically decapitated … but what about an electric-fence-type device where they’d get shocked if they ventured onto the court, like what people use with their dogs in the backyard? Wouldn’t that be worth it just to see Eddy Curry zone out, stand up to stretch and accidentally electroshock himself?
107. The hand check rule changes helped Nash. So did the speeding up of the games. And more than anyone else, he thrived once the refs started looking the other way on illegal screens.
108. They had an alpha dog battle that revolved around important stuff like “Why did he get the best seat on the charter last night?” and “Why is his locker in a better spot than mine?” Also, they fought over a chew toy once. Whoops, I’m thinking of my dogs. Sorry.
109. That’s like driving the nicest-smelling New York City cab.
110. The “soft” tag started in ’03 when Dirk refused to limp around with an injured knee in the ’03 Conference Finals. Strangely, nobody remembers this decision now.
111. Ginobili’s dumb foul takes its rightful place alongside Rasheed leaving Big Shot Brob in the ’05 Finals, Pau Gasol not helping Ray Allen on the game-clinching drive (Game 4, ’08 Finals) and no Kings fouling Shaq on the offensive rebound right before Big Shot Brob’s game-winning shot (Game 4, Kings-Lakers series) as one of the four dumbest defensive plays of the decade.
112. In a seven-game stretch from Game 3 of the Spurs series through Game 3 of the Suns series, Dirk averaged a 29–15. Yikes.
113. That’s how Stephen Jackson throttled him in the ’07 playoffs, although we didn’t know about that yet because we’re still in the NBA time machine, remember?
114. I also liked the idea of a 42 Club because it reminded me of the Five-Timer Club on SNL for five-time hosts, only there was no way to have a weak link like Elliott Gould. Everyone was Tom Hanks and Steve Martin.
115. If we made a Platinum wing in the 42 Club for any member who also topped 50% FG shooting and 80% FT shooting that same playoffs, our Platinum members would be Jordan (4x), Bird (2x) and that’s it. Also, please tell Patrick Ewing that the Platinum wing of the 42 Club isn’t a place for him to get blown.
116. I made up that word: “dubulent” is a cross between “dubious” and “fraudulent.” If Webster’s ever picks it up, they should just show Wade’s free throw numbers in the ’06 Finals as its definition.
117. I just felt like breaking the “most Corey Haim references ever made in one paragraph in a sports book” record. I was feeling it.