by Simmons Bill
“So that’s the secret,” Isiah said. “It’s not about basketball.”
The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.
These are the things you learn in Vegas.
When I was talking to Isiah that day, his affection for those Pistons teams stood out almost as vividly as the pair of exposed nipples eight feet away. This didn’t surprise me. I remembered his appearance on NBA’s Greatest Games, 18 when he watched Game 6 of the ’88 Finals with ESPN’s Dan Patrick. The ’88 Lakers couldn’t handle point guards who created shots off the dribble, as we witnessed during Sleepy Floyd’s legendary thirty-three points in one quarter in the first round. 19 If someone like Sleepy gave them fits, you can only imagine how they struggled against Isiah Lord Thomas III when he needed one more victory for his first title. Smelling blood in the third quarter at the Forum, he dropped fourteen straight points with a ridiculous array of shots, doing his best impression of Robby Benson at the end of One on One… right until he stepped on Michael Cooper’s foot and crumbled to a heap. Poor Isiah kept trying to stand, only his leg wouldn’t support him and he kept falling to the ground. At the time, it was like watching those uncomfortable few seconds after a racehorse suffers a leg injury, when it can’t stop moving but can’t support itself, either. Anyone who ever played basketball knows how an ankle sprain feels at the moment of impact: like Leatherface churning his chain saw against the bottom of your leg. You don’t come back from a badly sprained ankle. Hell, you can’t even walk off the court most times. Isiah didn’t stand for ninety seconds before getting helped to his bench. You could practically see Detroit’s title hopes vanishing into thin air.
Except Isiah wouldn’t let the injury derail him. He chewed on his bottom lip like a wad of tobacco and transferred the pain. When the Lakers extended their lead to eight, Isiah hobbled back into the game, fueled on adrenaline, desperately trying to save Detroit’s title before his ankle swelled. He made a one-legged floater. He made an off-balance banker over Cooper, drawing the foul and nearly careening into the first row of fans. He drained a long three. He filled the lane for a fast-break layup. With the final seconds of the quarter ticking away, he buried a turnaround 22-footer from the corner—an absolutely outrageous shot—giving him a Finals record 25 for the quarter and reclaiming the lead for Detroit. This was Pantheon-level stuff, win or lose. CBS
headed to commercial and showed a slow-motion replay of that aforementioned layup: Isiah unable to stop his momentum on that ravaged ankle, crashing into the photographers under the basket, then gamely speed-hopping back downcourt as his teammates cheered from the bench. On the Goosebump Scale, it’s about a 9.8. We always hear about Willis Reed’s Game 7 cameo against the Lakers, or Gibson taking Eckersley deep in the ’88 World Series. Somehow, Isiah’s 25-point quarter gets lost in the shuffle because the Pistons ended up losing the game (and the series). 20
Seems a little unfair. Nobody was more of a warrior than Isiah Thomas. In retrospect, that was his biggest problem: maybe he cared a little too much. If that’s possible. Actually, that’s definitely possible. Because when ESPN finished rerunning that third quarter, they returned to the studio and Isiah Thomas was crying. He had never seen the tape before. He couldn’t handle it.
What followed was breathtaking. Just know that I watch all these shows. I watch every SportsCentury, every Beyond the Glory, every HBO documentary, everything. I eat this stuff up. And with the possible exception of the Cooz breaking down during Bill Russell’s SportsCentury, no moment ever matched what transpires after Patrick asks a simple question about Game 6: “Why does it bother you?”
The words hang in the air. Isiah can’t speak. He dabs his eyes, finally breaking into a self-conscious smile. The memories come flooding back, some good, some bad. He’s overwhelmed. Finally, he describes how it feels to play for a championship team. To a tee. And he does it off the top of his head.
“I just … I … I never watched this,” Isiah mumbles, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. “You just … you wouldn’t understand.”
Patrick doesn’t say anything. Wisely.
Isiah takes a second to collect himself, then he keeps going: “That type of emotion, that type of feeling, when you’re playing like that, and you know, you’re really going for it … you’re going for it. You put your heart, your soul, you put everything into it, and …”
He chokes up again. Takes another moment to compose himself.
“It’s like, to look back on that, to know that all we went through as a team, and the people, and the friendships and everything … you just wouldn’t understand.”
He smiles again. It’s a weird moment. In any other setting, he would come off as condescending. But he’s right: somebody like Patrick, or me, or you … none of us could understand. Not totally, anyway.
Isiah keeps going. Now he wants Patrick to understand.
“You know, like you said, to see Dennis, the way Dennis was, to see Vinnie, to see Joe, to see Bill, to see Chuck, and to know what we all went through and what we were fighting for … I mean, we weren’t the Lakers, we weren’t the Celtics, we were just, we were nobody. We were the Detroit Pistons, trying to make our way through the league, trying to fight and earn some turf, you know, and make people realize that we were a good team. We just weren’t the thing that they had made us.”
Patrick steps in: “You weren’t Show Time, you weren’t the Celts, you were the team that nobody gave credit to.”
“Yeah,” Isiah says, nodding. Now he knows. He knows what to say. “And seeing that, and feeling that, and going through all that emotion, I mean, as a player, that’s what you play for. That’s the feeling you want to have. When twelve men come together like that, you know, it’s … it’s …”
He struggles for the right words. He can’t find them. And then, finally:
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He’s right. We wouldn’t understand. And as it turned out, even Isiah didn’t totally understand. He took over the Knicks in 2003, failed to heed the lessons of those Pistons teams, and got replaced five years later.21 Of all the unbelievable things that transpired during the “Thomas error”—no playoff wins, a sexual harassment suit, two lost lottery picks, four straight years with a payroll over
$90 million, fans protesting inside and outside MSG in his final season—what couldn’t be explained was Thomas’ willingness to overlook precisely what worked for his Detroit teams. How could such a savvy player become such a futile executive? How could someone win twice because of chemistry and unselfishness, then disregard those same traits while rebuilding the Knicks? Once upon a time, Detroit couldn’t find a prototypical back-to-the-basket big man to help Thomas offensively, so GM Jack McCloskey smartly surrounded him with unconventional low-post threats, effective role players and streak shooters. When McCloskey realized they still couldn’t outscore the Celtics or Lakers, he shifted the other way and built the toughest, most athletic, most flexible roster possible. By the ’87 Playoffs, the Pistons went nine deep and had an answer for everyone. On paper, it’s the weakest of the superb teams in that 1983–93 stretch. But that’s the thing about basketball: you don’t play games on paper. Detroit captured two titles and came agonizingly close to winning two more.
Again, Isiah was there. He watched McCloskey build that unique team. He knew there was more to basketball than stats and money, that you couldn’t win and keep winning unless your players sacrificed numbers for the greater good. So why place his franchise’s fate in the hands of Stephon Marbury, one of the most selfish stars in the league? Why give away two potential lottery picks for Curry (an immature player and a liability as a rebounder and shot blocker) and compound the mistake by overpaying him? Why keep adding big contracts like he was running a high-priced fantasy team? What made him believe that Randolph and Curry could play together, or Steve Francis and Marbury, or even Marbury and Jamal Crawford? Why ignore the salary cap ramifications of every move? It made no sense. He had become Bizar
ro McCloskey. Every time I watched Isiah sitting glumly on the Knicks bench for that final season with a steely “There’s no way I’m qutting, I’m not walking away from that money, they’re gonna have to fire me” mask on his face, I remembered him sitting at the Wynn’s outdoor pool utterly convinced that a Curry-Randolph tandem would work. How could someone learn The Secret for that long and still screw up?
I have been obsessed with that question ever since. Year after year, 90 percent of NBA decision makers ignore The Secret or talk themselves into it not mattering that much. Fans overlook The Secret completely, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, it’s a secret. (That’s why we live in a world where nine out of ten basketball fans probably think Shaquille O’Neal had a better career than Tim Duncan.) Nobody writes about The Secret because of a general lack of sophistication about basketball; even the latest “revolution” of basketball statistics centers more around evaluating players against one another over capturing their effect on a team. When, in February 2009, Michael Lewis wrote a Moneyball-like feature for the New York Times Magazine about Shane Battier’s undeniable value, he listed a bunch of different anecdotes and subtle ploys, as well as decent statistical evidence that explained Battier’s effect defensively and on the Rockets as a whole, but again, it was nothing tangible. (Although Lewis unknowingly came up with two corollaries to The Secret: one, that your teammates are people you shouldn’t automatically trust because it’s in each player’s selfish interest to screw his teammates out of shots or rebounds; and two, that basketball is the sport where this is most true.) You couldn’t quantify Battier’s impact except with victories, opponent’s field goal positions, plus-minus variables, statistics that hadn’t been created yet, 22 and his high ranking on the unofficial list of Role Players That Every Peer Would Want on Their Team. And that’s what I love about basketball most. You don’t need to watch a single baseball game to have an opinion on baseball; you could be stuck on a desert island like Chuck Noland, 23 have the 2010 Baseball Prospectus randomly wash up on the shore, devour every page of that thing, and eventually have an accurate feel for which players matter. In basketball? Numbers help, but only to a certain degree. You still have to watch the games. Check out Amar’e Stoudemire, who scores 22 to 25 points a night for Phoenix, grabs two rebounds a quarter, screws up defensively over and over again, botches every defensive switch, doesn’t make anyone else better, doesn’t create shots for anyone else and doesn’t feel any responsibility to carry his franchise even as Phoenix pays him as its franchise player. Did Amar’e get voted by fans into the West’s starting lineup for the 2009 All-Star Game with the Nash era imploding and the Suns shopping him more vigorously than Spencer and Heidi shopped their fake wedding pictures? 24 Of course he did.
The fans don’t get it. Actually, it goes deeper than that—I’m not sure who gets it. We measure players by numbers, only the playoffs roll around and teams that play together, kill themselves defensively, sacrifice personal success and ignore statistics invariably win the title. The 2008
Lakers were 3-to-1 favorites over Boston and lost the Finals; to this day, Lakers fans treat the defeat like it was some sort of aberration, like a mistake was made and never corrected. We have trouble processing the “teamwork over talent” thing. San Antonio was the most successful post-Jordan franchise and nobody understands why. Duncan was the best post-Jordan superstar and nobody understands why. But here’s the thing: We have the answers! We know why! Look at how McCloskey built those Pistons teams. Look at how Gregg Popovich and R. C. Buford handled the Duncan era. Look at how Red Auerbach handled the Russell era. Look at why so many fans (myself included) still remember the ’70 Knicks 25 and ’77 Blazers. Here’s what we know for sure:
1. You build potential champions around one great player. He doesn’t have to be a super-duper star or someone who can score at will, just someone who leads by example, kills himself on a daily basis, raises the competitive nature of his teammates, and lifts them to a better place. The list of Best Players on an NBA Champ Since Bird and Magic Joined the League looks like this: Kareem (younger version), Bird, Moses, Magic, Isiah, Jordan, Hakeem, Duncan, Shaq (younger version), Billups, Wade, Garnett. It’s a list that looks exactly how you’d think it should look with the exception of Billups.26
2. You surround that superstar with one or two elite sidekicks who understand their place in the team’s hierarchy, don’t obsess over stats, and fill in every blank they can. The list of Best Championship Sidekicks Since 1980: Magic, Parish/McHale, Kareem (older version), Worthy, Doc/Toney, DJ, Dumars, Pippen/Grant, Drexler, Pippen/Rodman, Robinson, Kobe (younger version), Parker/Ginobili, Shaq (older version), Pierce/Allen. You would have wanted to play with everyone on that list … even Younger Kobe. Most of the time. 3. From that framework, you complete your nucleus with top-notch role players and/or character guys (too many to count, but think Robert Horry/Derek Fisher types) who know their place, don’t make mistakes, and won’t threaten that unselfish culture, as well as a coaching staff dedicated to keeping those team-ahead-of-individual values in place. 4. You need to stay healthy in the playoffs and maybe catch one or two breaks.27
That’s how you win an NBA championship. Duncan’s Spurs push the formula one step further, pursuing only high-character guys as role players and winning just once with a squeaky wheel (Stephen Jackson in 2003, and he was jettisoned that summer). Popovich explained their philosophy to Sports Illustrated in 2009: “We get guys who want to do their job and go home and aren’t impressed with the hoopla. One of the keys is to bring in guys who have gotten over themselves. They either want to prove that they can play in this league—or they want to prove nothing. They fill their role and have a pecking order. We have three guys who are the best players, and everyone else fits around them.” In a related story, Duncan’s teams have won 70 percent of their games for his entire career. This can’t be an accident. But how do you keep stats for “best chemistry” and “most unselfishness” or even “most tangible and consistent effect on a group of teammates”? It’s impossible. That’s why we struggle to comprehend professional basketball. You can only play five players at a time. Those players can only play a total of 240 minutes. How those players coexist, how they make each other better, how they accept their portion of that 240-minute pie, how they trust and believe in one another, how they create shots for one another, how that talent/salary/alpha-dog hierarchy falls into place … that’s basketball. It’s like falling in love. When it’s working, you know it. When it’s failing, you know it. Bill Russell (in Second Wind) and Bill Bradley (in Life on the Run) played for famously magnanimous teams and described their inner workings better than anyone:
Russell: “By design and by talent the Celtics were a team of specialists, and like a team of specialists in any field, our performance depended on individual excellence and how well we worked together. None of us had to strain to understand that we had to complement each other’s specialties it was simply a fact, and we all tried to figure out ways to make our combination more effective … the Celtics played together because we knew it was the best way to win.”
Bradley: “A team championship exposes the limits of self-reliance, selfishness and irresponsibility. One man alone can’t make it happen; in fact, the contrary is true: a single man can prevent it from happening. The success of the group assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around. Yet this team is an inept model, for even as people marvel at its unselfishness and skill involved, they disagree on how it is achieved and who is the most instrumental. The human closeness of a basketball team cannot be reconstructed on a larger scale.”28
Russell: “Star players have an enormous responsibility beyond their statistics—the responsibility to pick their team up and carry it. You have to do this to win championships—and to be ready to do it when you’d rather be a thousand other places. You have to say and do the things that make your opponents play worse and your teammates play better. I always thought that the most important mea
sure of how good a game I’d played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.”
Bradley: “I believe that basketball, when a certain level of unselfish team play is realized, can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of the community prevail over selfish personal impulses. An exceptional player is simply one point on a five-pointed star. Statistics—such as points, rebounds, or assists per game—can never explain the remarkable interaction that takes place on a successful pro team.”
In different ways, Russell and Bradley argued the same point: that players should be measured by their ability to connect with other players (and not by statistics). Anyone can connect with their teammates for one season. Find that connection, cultivate it, win the title, maintain that connection, survive the inevitable land mines, fight off hungrier foes and keep coming back for more success
… that’s being a champion. As Russell explained, “It’s much harder to keep a championship than to win one. After you’ve won once, some of the key figures are likely to grow dissatisfied with the role they play, so it’s harder to keep the team focused on doing what it takes to win. Also, you’ve already done it, so you can’t rely on the same drive that makes people climb mountains for the first time; winning isn’t new anymore. Also, there’s a temptation to believe that the last championship will somehow win the next one automatically. You have to keep going out there game after game. Besides, you’re getting older, and less willing to put up with aggravation and pain … When you find someone who at age 30 or 35 has the motivation to overrule that increasing pain and aggravation, you have a champion.” 29