Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  “saving” part has been totally overblown. 89 Which it probably was. Remember, the Dallas Mavericks joined in 1980–81 for a cool expansion fee of $12 million, finishing 15–67 that season and spawning countless “Yeesh, maybe they should have had J. R. Ewing coach the team” jokes that were hysterically funny twenty-eight years ago. How bad could things have been if rich guys were throwing out $12 million checks to join the NBA?

  Still, here’s how much the NBA/CBS relationship had deteriorated: Despite being given two appealing Conference Finals in 1980 (Boston-Philly and L. A.-Phoenix), CBS showed only three games live, broadcast another three on tape delay and completely ignored the other four (including a pivotal Game 4 in Phoenix).90 When they landed Kareem, Magic and Doc in the Finals, they made the Lakers and Sixers play Games 3 and 4 back-to-back on a Saturday/Sunday, then gave affiliates the option of airing Game 6 (a potential clincher) either live or on tape delay at eleven-thirty at night. Since it was a Friday during May sweeps, nearly every affiliate opted for reruns of The Incredible Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, with only the Philly, L.A., Portland and Seattle markets carrying the game live. That meant one of the most famous basketball games ever played (Magic starting at center in place of an injured Kareem, then carrying the Lakers to the title) happened well after midnight on tape delay in nearly every American city. Think how many young fans could have been sucked in for life. On the other hand, can you really blame the CBS affiliates there? I mean, both The Incredible Hulk and Dukes of Hazzard plus Dallas to boot? That was a murderer’s row! After a three-minute Googling frenzy, I can report that Dallas and Dukes were the top two shows in 1980; Dukes had about 21 million viewers and Dallas had a jaw-dropping 27 million. Obviously they weren’t dumping those shows for an episode of The League with Overpaid Black Guys Who Do Drugs.91 That’s just a bad business decision. So yeah, it stinks that nobody watched Magic’s famous 42-point game live. But it stinks more that the NBA screwed up by not scheduling that game for Saturday afternoon so everyone could see it. 92

  One year later, the unthinkable happened: even though a star-studded affair between Philly and Boston doubled as the greatest Conference Final ever played, CBS aired only nine of a possible fourteen Final Four games (six of those nine were tape-delayed) and showed four of the six ’81

  Finals games on tape delay (including the clincher). In a related story, the broadcast of the ’81

  Finals was the lowest-rated in history (6.7)93 and an improbable ’81 Western Finals matchup between the 40–42 Rockets and 40–42 Kings probably made CBS consider the first-ever tape delay of a tape-delayed telecast. 94 So yes, the NBA needed cable. Badly.

  1979–80: THREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  Do you realize that it took the three-point line eight solid years to fully establish itself? A quick timeline:

  1980. The old “dipping the toes in the water” mentality takes hold. Only Brian Taylor (239) and Rick Barry (221) attempt more than 200 threes, only twelve players attempt more than 100 for the season, only five players finish at better than 38 percent, and the average NBA game features fewer than six attempted threes. For the Celtics, I remember Chris Ford emerging as our

  “three-point threat” (nailing 43 percent of them) and feeling like this run-of-the-mill shooting guard suddenly had real value for us. Every time he made one, the crowd went crazy. So something was happening. We just weren’t sure yet.

  1981. A slight backlash. Mike Bratz leads the league with just 169 attempts; only Brian Taylor shoots better than 34 percent (38.3 percent to be exact); the league average drops from 28 percent to 24.5 percent; and attempted threes drop to four per game. Bizarre. Although we do have our first signature three: in Game 6 of the Finals, Bird nails a back-breaking three to clinch the title, then cements it with a joyous fist pump that was exciting even on tape delay when I was half asleep at one-thirty in the morning.

  1982. Still nobody biting. Only four players attempt more than 100 threes. We did have another signature moment in Game 5 of the Celtics-Bullets series: Frankie Johnson and Gerald Henderson got into a fourth-quarter fight, then a pissed-off Johnson drained three treys (including a 30-foot bomb) to push the game into overtime before Boston prevailed in double OT. That game was televised live by USA, so it’s the first documented time anyone went into eff-you mode with threes. 95

  1983. Crickets. Only four guys attempted more than 100 threes and the league’s average was a paltry 24 percent. Of the leaders who qualified, Mike Dunleavy finished first (34 percent) and Isiah Thomas was second (28 percent), ironic since he’s the worst long-range shooter of any modern point guard.

  1984. There’s a little traction when Utah’s Darrell Griffith leads the league in attempts (252), makes (91) and percentage (36.1 percent). How’s that for irony? A guy nicknamed Dr. Dunkenstein was keeping the three alive?

  1985. Threes climb to 6.2 per game; the league’s average climbs to 28.2 percent; fifteen players attempt 100-plus threes; four players break the 40 percent mark; and the three gains “cool” status when Bird adds it to his arsenal (making 42.7 percent and draining two memorable ones in his 60-point game).

  1986. Our long-awaited breakthrough includes:

  1. The first three-point contest at All-Star Weekend, which Bird wins handily after guaranteeing victory beforehand.96

  2. The Legend getting inspired by his title and adopting the three as a weapon, ripping off a ten-game stretch later that month in which he made 25 of 34 threes. By season’s end, he led the league in attempts (194) and makes (82) but finished fourth in percentage (42.3

  percent). Beyond that, the Legend becomes the first to use threes as a psychological weapon, draining four in the fourth quarter of Boston’s sweep over Milwaukee in the Conference Finals, then making the ludicrous “dribble out of the paint, dribble around three guys, find a spot in front of Houston’s bench, and launch an Eff You Three” that nearly caused the Garden’s roof to cave in during the clinching game of the ’86 Finals. 3. Three-point specialists were emerging like Craig Hodges (45%), Trent Tucker (44%), Kyle Macy (41%), Michael Cooper (39%) and Dale Ellis (36%), guys who spread the floor and opened things up down low.

  4. Three legitimately memorable threes: Doc banking a buzzer-beater to beat the Celtics on national TV; Dudley Bradley winning a playoff game over Philly with an improbable buzzer-beater; and Jeff Malone making the crazy “chase down the loose ball and falling out of bounds” three that they showed in “The NBA … It’s FANNNNNtas-tic!” commercial for a solid year.97

  1987. Bingo! Threes climb to nearly 10 per game, the league’s percentage climbs over 30 percent, eight players attempt 200-plus threes and twenty attempt at least 1,215 threes. And if Bird made that three to win Game 4 of the ’87 Finals, we would have had ourselves the most famous three ever. Anyway, that’s how the three became the threeeeeeeeeeeeeel It was an eight-year process.

  One other trend opened up offenses: a point guard boon. Of the twenty-two NBA teams in 1981, half employed true PGs: Magic Johnson/Norm Nixon, Tiny Archibald, Mo Cheeks, Gus Williams,98 Kevin Porter, Rickey Green, Johnny Davis, Eddie Johnson, Micheal Ray Richardson, John Lucas and Phil Ford. With Isiah Thomas and Johnny Moore joining the mix the following season, that’s an inordinately high number of true points, isn’t it? No wonder scoring and field goal percentages kept going up. The ’78 teams averaged 108.5 points and 46.9 percent shooting; by ’84, those numbers had risen to 110.1 and 49.1 percent (and those numbers would have been higher if everyone wasn’t jacking up bad threes). The days of the ’77 Lakers nearly making the Finals without a single ball handler were over, and if you ever see any of those Philly-Boston games from 1981, watch Tiny and Cheeks put on an absolute clinic—just two guys who knew how to run fast breaks, handle the ball, bang home 15-footers and penetrate whenever they needed to penetrate. What a pleasure.

  1980–81: NOSE CANDY

  Cocaine use went from recreational to potentially league-altering in 1980. Why do I know this?

  Because the f
ollowing things happened:

  During a practice before the 1980 Finals, the Lakers were stretching on the floor when a coked-out Spencer Haywood simply passed out. He was excused for the rest of the postseason. Quickly. The Broken Mirror strikes again! It’s amazing he wasn’t on the floor for the Kermit-Rudy punch.

  Utah’s Terry Furlow was killed in a car accident just one week after the ’80 Finals ended. Furlow was driving and his blood had traces of cocaine and Valium. Hmmmmmm.99

  In August 1980, spurred on by Richard Pryor setting himself on fire in a freebasing accident, the L.A. Times released an investigative feature about drug abuse within the celebrity culture and reported that cocaine and freebasing had become a borderline epidemic in the NBA, with then-Atlanta GM Stan Kasten estimating the number of players dabbling in drugs at 75 percent. Seventy-five percent!

  When SI wrote about David Thompson being his “old soaring self” in November of 1980, the piece included repeated references to cocaine rumors the previous season, with Thompson not really denying them by telling an acquaintance, “I’m not doing anything worse than what everybody else in the NBA is doing.” 100

  Should we have been surprised? Look at what was happening in the late seventies and early eighties: Widespread coke use had taken off within the music/movie/television industries, prep schools, discos, nightclubs and every professional sports league, 101 but everyone remembers the NBA struggling most because we could see the effects (bleary eyes, skinny bodies, inconsistent and lethargic play). There isn’t a more naked sport than basketball. Nobody can deny that from 1977 to 1983, certain stars struggled as they should have been peaking; certain young stars openly battled personal issues; and certain veteran stars acted erratically, missed scores of practices, burned the candle at both ends and/or had their careers end abruptly. We learned the identity of some of them thanks to drug rehab stints and public admissions—Thompson, Walter Davis, John Drew, Richardson, John Lucas, Barnes, Bernard King, Eddie Johnson—and we’ll always wonder about some of the others (including one of the era’s biggest stars, someone who became infamous in NBA circles for his surreal ability to thrive even after he had used cocaine). Regardless, there were an inordinate number of “What the hell happened to him?” and “Why did his career inexplicably end?” guys for such a brief time frame; after Furlow’s death and the L.A. Times report, it’s hard to figure how two more years passed before the powers that be did anything. 102

  Some teams traded troubled players instead of helping them. The Knicks dumped Richardson, the Nets dumped Bernard, the Hawks dumped Drew; it’s like they wanted to get anything of value before those guys snorted themselves out of the league. The ’81 Warriors suspended Lucas for their last eight games while fighting for a playoff spot; then again, he didn’t leave them much choice after no-showing six games and missing three team flights and over a dozen practices. 103

  When Drew finally sought help in 1983, he admitted to the New York Times that he’d been freebasing for three years and snorting cocaine since 1978. You’re telling me his teams didn’t notice? Or that the Lakers didn’t notice Haywood sniffling his way through the ’80 season? (That same piece revealed that Buck Williams, speaking at an awards dinner that year, had estimated the percentage of NBA players using drugs as “maybe 20 or 30 percent,” adding that the figure was much lower than he thought it would be. Much lower? Really?) It turned out to be a fairly wasted era for basketball; maybe it’s good thing everything was tape-delayed.

  What’s the greatest NBA coke-era story that I can print? A 1982 SI feature about troubled Hawks guard Eddie Johnson casually included revelations that Atlanta had placed him in a psychiatric facility against his will, that Eddie had stolen a Porsche from a car dealer, that he’d been arrested for gun possession and cocaine possession in separate incidents, and that he’d jumped out of a second-story apartment building to evade drug dealers who were shooting at him. 104 (I vote for Don Cheadle to play Eddie in the movie.) And you know what? That’s honorable mention. We have to give first prize to the Broken Mirror himself, Spencer Haywood. After Paul Westhead suspended him for the ’80 Finals, Haywood wrote in his 1988 autobiography that he hired a Mafia hit man to kill his coach before changing his mind. I’m almost positive this would have marred the Finals. Also, that revelation led to my favorite quote from the coke era: Haywood remembering in the book, “I left the Forum and drove off in my Rolls that night thinking one thought—that Westhead must die.” I wish this had been my high school yearbook quote.

  (One positive this season: free agent compensation was replaced by right of first refusal, so we didn’t really have free agency, but we kind of did. Example: L.A. signs Mitch Kupchak, the Bullets agree not to match and Washington ends up with Jim Chones, Brad Holland and a 1983

  number one pick for “not refusing.” I like the right of first refusal; it’s really too bad it can’t extend to ex-girlfriends. “Yeah, you can date her, but only if you give me your iPod.”)

  1981–82: THE PERILS OF OVERCOACHING

  After everyone made a fuss about Bill Fitch (NBA title) and Cotton Fitzsimmons (Western Finals) doing terrific jobs in the ’81 Playoffs, the era of overcoaching kicked off when SI’s subsequent NBA preview centered on the success of former college coaches in the NBA. 105 Suddenly coaches were frantically diagramming plays during time-outs, studying tape until the wee hours, hiring multiple assistants and pontificating about the sport like Henry David Thoreau, culminating in Hubie Brown getting hired by the Knicks (I love Hubie, but he’s the ultimate “hey, look at me”

  coach) and paving the way for Rick Pitino’s $50 million deal in Boston and Avery Johnson employing at least 375 assistants for the Mavericks during the 2007–8 season. The new wave of coaches made defenses sophisticated enough by 1981 that the league created an “illegal defense”

  rule to open the paint. Here’s how referee Ed Rush explained it to SI: “We were becoming a jump-shot league, so we went to the coaches and said, ‘You’ve screwed the game up with all your great defenses. Now fix it.’ And they did. The new rule will open up the middle and give the great players room to move. People like Julius Erving and David Thompson who used to beat their own defensive man and then still have to pull up for a jump shot because they were being double-teamed, should have an extra four or five feet to move around in. And that’s all those guys need.”

  Nice! That explanation actually made sense. But as the egos of coaches swelled, so did the egos of players who didn’t feel like getting ordered around. One famous youngster battled injuries during his second season and threw up a series-losing air ball in a stunning Round 1 playoff upset. As the player headed into his third season, the team’s owner handed him the biggest contract in sports history: $25 million for 25 years. When the team struggled coming out of the gate, the player told reporters that he couldn’t play for his coach anymore and demanded to be traded. The coach got canned the following day. Now disgraced and considered a selfish jerk, the young player was booed at home and became the poster boy of the Too Young, Too Rich, and Too Immature NBA. One of his teammates wondered, “If he got mad at a player, would the player be gone the next day?” SI called him a “greedy, petulant and obnoxious 22-year-old” and decided he’s “clearly a great player. Just as clearly, he’s no longer a great guy.”

  The player? That’s right … Earvin “Magic” Johnson. It’s all true.

  Only after the ’81 Playoffs did people start believing that coaches could work wonders. I’ve purposely avoided them in this book for the following reason: there’s no concrete evidence that they make a genuine, consistent difference except for a small handful of gifted leaders (Pat Riley, Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly, Larry Brown, Jerry Sloan) and forward thinkers (Mike D’Antoni, Don Nelson, Jack Ramsey). Plenty of coaches understand The Secret; only a few can pass it along to players; even fewer can keep The Secret thriving with any type of roster. Daly spearheaded those terrific Bad Boy Pistons teams, failed to find the same success with tw
o knuckleheads (Derrick Coleman and Kenny Anderson) in New Jersey, then suffered through the unhappiest of seasons with a petulant Penny Hardaway on the ’97 Magic. Only a handful of coaches would have enjoyed the same success that Daly had with Detroit, just like the same handful would have failed to reach Coleman, Kenny, and Penny. Which brings me back to my point: unless you’re teaming an elite coach with a quality roster, coaches don’t really matter. You have your top guys—usually three or four per year—and everyone else ranges between functional, overrated, replaceable, incompetent, “my God, what a train wreck,” and Vinny Del Negro. Most of them tread water or inflict as much damage as good.

  Look at the firing numbers over the past decade: eight to ten coaches get fired every year, none lasts more than three or four years, and there might be three or four quality coaches in any given season. Doc Rivers lost 18 straight games and won a title within a sixteen-month span. Hubie finished with a record of 424–495 and somehow became known as a memorably good coach in the process. Paul Westphal led the Suns to the ’93 Finals; within eight years, nobody would hire him. KC Jones made the Finals four of five years in Boston, took two years off, then lasted 118 games in Seattle. We have amassed overwhelming evidence that coaches are exceedingly dispensable—they’re only as good as their talent, with a limited number of exceptions. Occasionally they might stumble into the right situation, but ultimately, players win titles and coaches lose them. I am going to keep pining for the return of the player-coach if it’s the last thing I do. What’s the difference? So it doesn’t work and he gets fired? How is that different from what happens now? Maybe Red Auer-bach knew what he was doing with a seven-play playbook, no assistants and a rolled-up program. 106