Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  playoff games. Both the Globe and Herald connected the dots that summer, reporting that between Games 2 and 3 of the Philly series, Bird got into a fight at a Boston bar called Chelsea’s and punched out a bartender named Mike Harlow (eventually settling out of court with him). So much for the ’85 title. Mike Harlow came thissssssssss close to getting his own what-if in this chapter. 28. I mistakenly attempted the “fourth person singular tense,” as perfected by Will Leitch during his reign as Deadspin editor. We don’t know why he wrote that way, but we always found it interesting.

  29. The smoking gun: Kobe was represented by Rob Pelinka, who orchestrated Carlos Boozer’s sleazy move from Cleveland to Utah.

  30. Devil’s advocate view: maybe Kobe just realized, “What the hell am I doing? It’s the Clippers!

  Am I crazy?”

  31. During the ’80 season, idiot Cavs owner Ted Stepien traded Butch Lee and his ’82 number one for an ’80 number one (destined to suck since the Lakers were a top-four team) and Don Ford, a run-of-the-mill swingman who looked like a cross between Craig Ehlo and Ted McGinley. With the exception of Mike Bratz, there has never been a worse player traded for a franchise-altering number one.

  32. Worthy averaged a 16–6 and shot 57 percent as a UNC senior; Wilkins averaged a 21–8 and shot 53 percent as a University of Georgia junior. ’Nique got knocked out of the Final Four; Worthy shined in the title game with a 28–17.

  33. Worthy could have played with Bizarro Worthy (Tom Chambers) on the ’83 Clips. I will explain.

  34. Yes, I wrote this at the time. Repeatedly. For anyone reading this book from 2030 on, the guy Atlanta took instead was a forward named Marvin Williams who couldn’t start for UNC the previous year. I thought this was a bad sign.

  35. In consecutive drafts, Hawks GM Billy Knight took Marvin Williams over Paul and Shelden Williams over Brandon Roy. There’s a 17 percent chance he just sold you this book at an Atlanta Borders or Barnes & Noble. Tall, late ’40s, black, seemed sad … was that him?

  36. I would have said “next decade” but supposedly Roy’s knee ligaments are made out of this book. By the way, there’s a 98.5 percent chance that “What if Portland had taken Durant over Oden?” will crack The Second Book of Basketball in 2016.

  37. Remember when the Texans took Mario Williams over Reggie Bush and everyone gave them copious amounts of shit? It was the best thing that ever happened to Williams; he killed himself to prove everyone wrong. NBA examples along the same lines: Paul, Karl Malone, MJ, Paul Pierce, Rashard Lewis and Caron Butler. Most underrated example: Tom Brady. 38. Even weirder: the Knicks bought Bob McAdoo from Buffalo 20 games into the season and gave him the same money they would have given to Doc. Huh? Wilt flirted with a Knicks comeback that same summer—potentially, the Knicks could have trotted out Wilt, Haywood, Doc, Frazier and Monroe.

  39. This also ranks among the great what-ifs if you were a dealer living in Manhattan in the early

  ’80s. No Micheal Ray in New York?

  40. This was like Marbury for Kidd, only with the Russian roulette aspect of “each guy has battled serious coke/alcohol problems and will either make or break our franchise.” And yes, the Warriors were broken. They dumped him to Jersey for Sleepy Floyd four months later. 41. Hold on, this gets better. Your 2005 NBA Executive of the Year? That’s right, Mr. Bryan Colangelo! I love the NBA.

  42. I’m not totally absolving Johnson here. So they dicked him around a little. When you’re playing with Steve Nash, do you know what that means? You’re playing with Steve Nash! Why give that up unless you have to?

  43. They downgraded from Deng or Iguodala to Rondo to Fernandez to nothing … which means they traded a number seven pick in a loaded draft for $4.9 million, less than they paid Banks to sit on their bench in ’07. Well done!

  44. My buddy JackO and I have been joking about that workout for years. Unless Penny was making half-court shots while stepping on broken glass and swinging his genitals like a lasso, there’s no effing way that one workout should have swayed the Magic from a Webber/Shaq combo. None.

  45. I hate the Magic, Jazz, the Heat and everyone else for the whole “It feels funny using ‘they’

  when you write about a team whose name doesn’t end in an s” conundrum. 46. Poor Carter ended up signing a two-year, $1.5 million deal with San Antonio, with Duffy’s agency repaying Carter the lost wages from the Miami deal. One of my top-12 can’t-be-proven NBA conspiracy theories ever: Miami paid Duffy to “forget” to send that letter. 47. When the Lakers re-signed Kobe that summer, a secret handshake promise to trade Shaq ASAP

  was part of the deal. I know this for a fact. Let’s just say I had a few drinks with the right person once.

  48. I took this section from a February ’08 column. Within ninety minutes of it being posted, an enterprising reader made a homemade version of the ad and posted it on YouTube. I’ve never been prouder.

  49. Browne Sanders was the fellow Knicks employee who sued Isiah for sexual harassment and won. Isiah could have settled out of court but couldn’t even pull that deal off. 50. During the Browne Sanders lawsuit, it was revealed that Stephon Marbury had boinked a female MSG intern named Kathleen Decker outside a strip club in his SUV. The Daily News showed a picture of the SUV on its front page with the headline, “Truck party!” Basically, the name for my 2007–8 fantasy hoops team fell out of the sky. Also, Decker’s father won the 2007

  Most Horrified Dad ESPY.

  51. “Wait a second, there’s a Jack Twyman section?” you ask. You’re fuckin’-A right there’s a Jack Twyman section!

  52. You have to love a draft that had two of the top 20 what-ifs playing off the same scenario. I hope you fledgling GMs learned something in this chapter: don’t trade number one picks five years down the road for guys like Don Ford and Otis Thorpe. By the way, the guy who made those trades and helped kill professional basketball in Vancouver—Stu Jackson—was improbably hired by Stern and given a perplexing amount of power this decade. I had two different connected NBA friends inadvertently make the same joke: if Stern is Michael Corleone, Stu is definitely Fredo. In Fredo’s defense, I don’t think even he could have ruined basketball in Vancouver that quickly. Either way, I hope Stu turns down every one of Stern’s invitations to go fishing. 53. In retrospect, we should have known that a guy named Ralph wasn’t going to be one of the best centers ever. Had he embraced the Muslim faith and changed his name to Kabaar Abdul-Sampson or Raheem Sampson, he’d have been unstoppable. Look at the names of the best players ever: they’re all great names that you’d give a sports movie character. Michael Jordan. Bill Russell. Magic Johnson. Jerry West. Larry Bird. Moses Malone. You’d never name the lead of a sports movie Ralph Sampson or Darko Milicic.

  54. Two of Sampson’s three defining moments involved Boston anyway: his scary fall in March

  ’86 (it happened in the Garden, so it makes you wonder if ghosts were involved), and the punch he threw at six-foot-one Jerry Sichting in Game 5 of the ’86 Finals, leading to Boston’s fans rattling his confidence in Game 6 (and the debut of the Ralph Sampson “I hope I get out of here alive”

  face).

  55. This was the second-best buzzer-beater other than Jerry West’s half-court shot in the 1970

  Finals. How many series end on a twisting, 180-degree fling shot that happens in under a second?

  And they diagrammed it in a huddle to boot!

  56. Houston won Games 2, 3 and 4 by 10, 8, and 10, with Hakeem scoring 75 in Games 3 and 4. Pat Riley later lamented, “We tried everything. We put four bodies on him. We helped from different angles. He’s just a great player.” The Rockets badly outrebounded L.A. in their four wins. As SI’s Jack MacCallum wrote afterward, “The Rockets headed into [the Finals] secure in the knowledge that they had gone over, around and through the Lakers. And everybody else knew it, too.”

  57. Lloyd was devastating in transition and startlingly efficient: from ’84 to ’86, he averaged a 16–4–4 on 53% shooting. He’s also the starti
ng two-guard on the “Now that I’m watching this game 20 years later on ESPN Classic, I can totally see him failing a drug test—he’s got crazy eyes!” All-Stars.

  58. Sampson went up for a dunk, got blocked, got twisted awkwardly and crashed to the ground so violently that the Garden made an ohhhhhhh sound and went deathly quiet. He landed right on his head and back, almost like he fell out of a bunk bed while sleeping. They carried him off on a stretcher a foot too short, so his mammoth legs dangled off it. Here’s how bad the injury looked when it happened: I actually remember where I was when I watched it live (my mom’s bedroom—she had a great TV). You know it’s a watershed moment when you can remember where you watched it.

  59. Personally, I think the Lakers should retire the number of Houston’s coke dealer, as well as the Celtic who fouled Sampson in that ’86 game in Boston.

  60. It’s really too bad that ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack wasn’t around then—he would have been more visible than Mel Kiper Jr. during the month of the NFL Draft. 61. Charlie Scott and Mel Daniels bailed on the league during the ’73 season and got away with it. So it did happen. The ABA only had the legal resources to pick their spots and block bigger stars like Rick Barry.

  62. You have to love the way the NBA operated in the mid-’70s. The Jazz said, “Um, hey, we’ve been thinking about it—we’d love a mulligan on that Moses decision,” and Commissioner O’Brien’s office said, “No problem—here’s your number one back!” Given how haphazardly things were run back then, it makes you wonder if they called O’Brien, he was on the other line, his secretary asked what the call was about, the Jazz told her, she said “Hold on” and passed the message on to O’Brien, and he waved her off by saying “Fine, fine, just tell them yes” before getting back to his phone call with Ben Bradlee or Walter Mondale. 63. Yes, the Jazz probably wouldn’t have earned the number one overall pick three years later had they just kept Moses, since he won the MVP 3 years later. That “Moses and Magic” line just looked imposing on paper, you have to admit.

  64. This part kills me. How did they decide on $232,000? Somebody needs to write a book detailing every fucked-up thing that happened in the NBA in 1976. It could be 1,200 pages. 65. The Buffalo pick ended up being number three overall in ’78: Portland sent it to Indiana along with Johnny Davis for the number one overall pick, taking Mychal Thompson as Walton insurance. Maybe Thompson wasn’t a Pantheon center, but he was good enough to get his own goofy Nike poster: just Thompson wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a parrot while sitting by a tropical pool. The implication being … I don’t know.

  66. On January 25, 1977, one week after SI wrote a “Look at how Moses has ignited the Rockets”

  feature, Tates Locke (the guy who quickly buried Moses in Buffalo) was fired as the Braves’ head coach. This was not a coincidence. For the Lost fans out there, three-plus decades of bad luck for the Braves/Clippers started right after they fired Jack and replaced him with Locke. 67. New Jersey traded the pick a fourth time, leading to the Micheal Ray era in New York. Sadly, I am out of cocaine jokes. I’m tapped.

  68. Nowadays, we have a Catastrophe Rule: an emergency expansion draft in which every team can only protect four or five guys. Then that team gets the top pick of the next draft (plus its own pick). It’s a good thing this isn’t widely known because an irate Knicks fan would have tampered with the team’s charter during the Isiah era.

  69. And one sappy Disney movie in the late ’90s with Samuel L. Jackson playing Elgin and Matthew McConaughey playing Hot Rod Hundley in a film called Cornfield of Dreams or Final Flight.

  70. I bought this book for $6 online; the highlight was reading it, gleaning all the information I needed, then starting a bonfire with it in my backyard. In the words of Marv Albert, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is on fire!”

  71. Looking back, it’s the biggest NBA turnover ever other than Isiah’s pass that the Legend picked off (1987) and Mail Fraud getting stripped right before Jordan’s last shot (1998). It’s too bad the ABA didn’t have George McGinnis hold the check; he would have turned it right over. 72. Remember, Bias was supposed to take the torch from Russell, Havlicek and Bird. That’s how good he was. Also, there was a cap in place by ’86 and owners like Ted Stepien weren’t stupidly giving away number one picks anymore. It was significantly tougher to improve. Fuck. 73. I know I mentioned this twice but it continues to kill me. Remember, Bird routinely got bored during games, spent entire halves shooting left-handed and once played an ’86 game where he and Walton tried to figure how many different ways they could run a play where Bird threw it in to Walton, then cut toward the basket and caught a return pass from Walton. You’re telling me he wouldn’t have said, “I want to see if I can get Len 15 alley-oops tonight”? I am shaking my head. 74. My hypothetical top ten: Bird, Magic, Sampson, Isiah, Bernard, Moses, ’Nique, Moncrief, McHale, Buck Williams.

  75. I found this information online—I refused to buy Living the Dream because it sounded so awful. A strong statement from someone who bought Give ’Em the Hook by Tommy Heinsohn. 76. Philly’s offer never became public. One year later, Harold Katz tried to swap Doc for Terry Cummings before Doc called him out and the entire city of Philadelphia turned on Katz. Although that’s not saying much. Philly would turn on me just for making fun of them in this footnote. Crap, there goes another book signing.

  77. They had just been burned by two questionable high draft picks: Ronnie Lester (bad knees) and Quintin Dailey (bad soul). They wanted a sure thing.

  78. The two best players in prolonged tryouts that included every relevant name from the ’84 and

  ’85 drafts? Jordan and Barkley. Chuck ended up getting cut after Knight told him to lose weight and Barkley went the other way. Other cuts: Malone, Stockton, Joe Dumars, and Terry Porter. Guys who made it: Jeff Turner, Joe Kleine, Steve Alford and Jon Koncak. I think Chris Wallace and David Duke were advisers to Knight that summer.

  79. Or they could have overwhelmed Houston for Sampson: the number two, Drexler and Fat Lever.

  80. You know what’s interesting? Houston just passed up the greatest player ever and I still feel like they made the right pick. You always go with a sure-thing center over a sure-thing guard. Always.

  81. Stern always said the entire franchise’s name during this draft except this one time: He skipped the “Trail Blazers” part, like he was trying to get off the stage as fast as possible. You can’t blame him.

  82. During the same summer The Sure Thing with John Cusack was released. Coincidence? I say no!

  83. Did Bowie’s staggeringly unstaggering college stats remind you of anyone else? I’m thinking an OSU center, number one pick, looked 20 years older than his age, also played for Portland …

  84. Worth mentioning: Sam was extremely polished and handled himself well. I feel bad for the guy. I mean, it’s not his fault they drafted him over Jordan, right? And he was a quality center when he was healthy. Which was only 54 percent of his career, but still. 85. If you ever get a chance to watch this clip, check out the look on the guy who’s on the phone for Chicago—he’s so delighted, it looks like he’s getting blown under the table. We’ll never know for sure.

  86. Jason Robards won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Bradlee in one of my favorite performances ever. He owns every scene of a movie with Redford and Hoffman in it. Within seven years, he was playing the lead in Max Dugan Returns. I don’t get Hollywood.

  FIVE

  MOST VALUABLE CHAPTER

  SAY WHAT YOU want about the NBA, but fifteen of its running features and subplots distinguish it from every other professional sport (in a good way): 1. A wildly entertaining rookie draft that helped calibrate my Unintentional Comedy Scale. Things settled down over the last few years when agents and PR people realized things like, “Maybe we shouldn’t send him to the draft dressed like a pimp” and

  “Maybe it’s not a good idea to give David Stern a full body, genitals-on-genitals hug after you get picked,” but it’s still one of my favorite TV nights of
the year, if only because Jay Bilas has a ton of length and a ridiculous wingspan.

  2. A dress code for injured players that, after an adjustment period, ultimately led to fashionably dressed scrubs hopping onto the court after time-outs to dole out chest bumps and high fives. We witnessed a blossoming of the Overexcited Thirteenth Man in the ’08 Playoffs; if Walter Herrmann was the Jackie Robinson of this movement, then Brian Scalabrine was Larry Doby and Scot Pollard was Don Newcombe. Where else can you see a $2,000 leather jacket get stained with sweat by a chest bump?

  3. Courtside seats that serve a double purpose: First, they’re hard to get without connections or unless you have six figures sitting around for season tickets. If you’re sitting in them, your success in life has been validated in some strange way, even if everyone sitting in every non-courtside seat probably thinks you’re an asshole. (It’s the same phenomenon as sitting in first class and watching everyone else size you up in disgust as they’re headed to coach, multiplied by fifty.) And second, it’s the best possible seat in any sport. You’re right on top of the court, you hear every order, swear, joke, insult or trash-talk moment, and if you’re lucky enough to be sitting right next to one of the benches, you can hear them discussing strategy in the huddle.1 There isn’t another sports fan experience like it. I’d even argue that the twelve seats between the two benches—six on each side of the midcourt line, or as they’re commonly known, the Nicholson Seats—are the single greatest set of seats for any professional sport. 4. Cheerleaders dressing like hookers and acting like strippers. Can’t forget them. 5. Foreign players entering the NBA with heavy accents, then picking up a hip-hop twang over the course of a few seasons from being around black people all the time. I call this

  “Detlef Syndrome” because Schrempf was the ultimate example; by the halfway point of his career, he sounded like the German guys in Beerfest crossed with the Wu-Tang Clan. It’s just a shame that Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t train at an all-black gym in the seventies; we really could have seen something special. 2