Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  1. The most underrated superstar of the past thirty-five years

  2. The single biggest NBA tragedy other than Lenny Bias

  Two strong statements, right? Since you bought my book, I feel obligated to back them up. During the first two postmerger seasons (’77 and ’78), Thompson averaged a 27–5–4, shot 52 percent and made consecutive first-team All-NBA’s during one of the richest talent stretches in league history.62 How old was Thompson when he finished third in the MVP voting and nearly brought the Nuggets to the 1978 Finals ? Twenty-three. Check out his numbers from ages twenty-two to twenty-four compared to other famous two-guards for that same age span:

  63

  So MJ, Kobe, Iverson,64 T-Mac, and Wade made the leap from twenty-three to twenty-four, but Thompson took a step backward. Why? Two words: nose candy. I can’t explain why twenty-four becomes such a pivotal age for athletic shooting guards, 65 but that’s the year things apparently fall

  into place from a physical and mental standpoint, and drugs robbed Thompson of reaching his true potential. Since he couldn’t have possibly peaked at age twenty-three—that would defy everything that’s ever happened historically—if you include his hypothetical leap year at age twenty-four, here are Thompson’s first five seasons with drug-free projections:

  Based on those numbers, we’re talking about a “top-three shooting guards ever” ceiling, which makes it so painful that the wheels came off. Imagine if Jordan had started doing loads of blow after the ’87 season, blew out his knee during a Mars Blackmon shoot and was effectively washed up at twenty-eight? That’s basically what happened to Thompson. I’m using the word “basically”

  because it’s unclear if Thompson had the same fiery competitive streak as Jordan; it’s also unclear if he was victimized by the cocaine era and/or too weak to handle fame and success. So let’s figure that out once and for all.

  1973. Thompson popularizes the alley-oop and leads the Wolfpack to an undefeated record; they’re ineligible to play in the NCAA Tournament. 66

  1974. The Wolfpack outlast Maryland in triple OT to earn the ACC’s only NCAA bid (one of the most famous college games ever); shock Bill Walton’s UCLA in the semis, with Thompson hitting the game-winner in double overtime (another of the most famous college games ever); and thrash Marquette for the title, with Thompson winning the ’74 tourney MVP. That’s one of the greatest seasons ever by a college player, right up there with Princeton’s Bill Bradley (1965), Houston’s Elvin Hayes (1969), Kansas’ Danny Manning (1988) and Holy Cross’ Steve “Air Hermo” Herman (1990). 67

  1975. Wins every conceivable Player of the Year award but can’t carry the depleted Wolfpack past North Carolina for the lone ACC bid. Great story from this season: In one of the dumbest ideas in the history of mankind, dunking was outlawed in many college conferences thanks to the idiotic Lew Alcindor Rule. In Thompson’s last home game, he broke the rule with a thunderous second-half dunk, leading to the obligatory technical as well as near euphoria in the stands. By all accounts, this was one of the most randomly exciting moments in sports history. By the way, how much did Kareem suck? He even inadvertently caused a no-dunking ban.

  1976. Wins ABA Rookie of the Year, gives Doc a worthy challenge in the watershed Dunk Contest, carries Denver to the Finals and makes Denver’s franchise enough of an asset that they get picked over Kentucky as one of the four merger teams.

  1977. With everyone expecting Doc to take the postmerger NBA by storm, Thompson makes a bigger splash, beating Doc statistically and leading Denver to a league-high 50 wins before falling to Portland (the eventual champs) in the first round.

  1978. After 48 wins and Thompson missing his first scoring title by a fraction of a point, Denver becomes the first ABA team to win a playoff series before falling to Seattle in the Conference Finals. That summer, Thompson signs the biggest contract in the history of professional sports: five years, $4 million. A shitload of money in 1978.

  (Hold on …)

  (Cue up the ominous Behind the Music music …)

  And that’s when everything turned.

  You can guess how the next few years turned out. I failed to find anything from 1973 to 1978 that made me think Thompson was anything other than Jordan before Jordan (a winner with a flair for the moment). He also understood something that Kobe and Jordan didn’t know right away: namely, that his team would win more if he sacrificed some of his numbers to make everyone better. In NBA TV’s Thompson documentary, Skywalker, Issel made the following testimonial:

  “All of his teammates loved him because he helped you win games, and he was the type of player that made everyone on the court better, not a player who subtracted from everyone else on the team to get his stats.” 68 The biggest difference between Thompson and Jordan: Thompson’s vice (drugs) was infinitely worse for basketball than Jordan’s vice (gambling). Had Thompson skipped coke and gambled away millions on golf every summer, we’d be looking at a top-twenty guy historically, someone who would have altered the Western landscape and broken through with shoe commercials, mainstream marketing and everything else. Do Magic’s Lakers win five titles with Jordan before Jordan thriving in Denver and Walton’s feet holding up in Portland? I’m going out on a limb and saying no. What a shame. And that’s why Thompson’s abrupt career ended up being the NBA’s biggest tragedy except for Lenny Bias.

  69. DENNIS RODMAN 69

  Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 2 All-Stars … top 15 (’92, ’95) … leader: rebounds (7 straight times), FG% (1x) … All-Defense (8x, six 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’90, ’91) …

  4-year peak: 7–18–2 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 8–14 (32 G) … played for 5 champs, started for three (’96, ’97, ’98 Bulls) … career: 13.2 RPG (13th)

  Statistically, he’s one of the three greatest rebounders ever (along with Russell and Chamberlain) because he grabbed such a significant percentage of his team’s boards.70 As the years pass, nobody will remember that those numbers in San Antonio and Detroit spiked partly because Rodman never strayed from the basket and cared more about rebounding than anything else, even if that meant not helping a teammate who had just been beaten off the dribble. I’d rather have the Rodman from ’87 to ’91 (when he was such a destructive rebounder/defender off the bench) and

  ’96 to ’98 (when he cared about defense again and played Karl Malone so effectively in back-to-back Finals). Still, nobody will remember his considerable talents since Rodman’s legacy centers around abject insanity, colored hairdos, piercings and tattoos, an affair with Madonna, his Bad as I Wanna Be book, the time he kicked a cameraman, the indefensible way he screwed up the

  ’95 Spurs in the Conference Finals 71 and the fact that he’s probably going to be found dead in a seedy Vegas hotel room within the next five years. Could the ’96 Bulls have won 72 games with Robert Horry instead of Rodman? No way. And doesn’t he deserve credit for fitting in so seamlessly with two pathologically competitive, historically unique teams (Isiah’s bad-boy Pistons and MJ’s postbaseball Bulls)? That’s why I have Rodman ranked fifteen spots higher than Horry. Four other notes augment Rodman’s case beyond five rings and jaw-dropping rebounding numbers.

  1. He played for ten conference finalists in three cities, ten 50-win teams, and five 60-win teams, and he missed the Playoffs once in his career (a 40-win Pistons team in ’93). From his rookie season in Detroit through his final Bulls season in ’98, Rodman’s teams finished 574–298 in the regular season and 118–54 in the playoffs. Wow.

  2. He guarded Larry Bird better than anyone. Nobody else came close. Other than Kevin McHale, nobody could defend so many different types of players effectively: Magic, Bird, Malone, Kemp, Barkley, Worthy, Jordan …

  3. When the ’89 Pistons won their first title, Rodman averaged 24 minutes and 10.0

  rebounds in 17 playoff games and doubled as the best defensive player in the league. On those two Pistons title teams, he was their third most indispensable guy behind Dumars and Isiah.

  4. Durin
g his last good season on the ’98 Bulls—at age thirty-six, when he was partying incessantly, to the point that MJ and Jackson had an intervention with him—Rodman played 80 regular-season games (15.0 RPG), then another 20 playoff games (11.8

  RPG), logging nearly 3,600 minutes in all. The man was a physical freak. We’ll see another fifty Horace Grants before we see another Dennis Rodman. And thank God. I think one was enough.

  68. PETE MARAVICH

  Resume: 10 years, 7 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’76, ’77), top 10 (’73, ’78) … 3-year peak: 28–5–6 … leader: scoring (1x) … never won a Playoffs in his prime

  Any late-night-cable junkie has stumbled across a Steve Prefontaine movie and felt excited (because it’s the one with Billy Crudup) or bummed out (because it’s the one with Jared Leto). If I see Crudup or Jack Bauer’s dad, I’m in. If I see the cockeyed blonde from Melrose Place or Leto wearing one of those awful wigs, I’m out. Either way, I always ask myself the same question:

  “Why did Hollywood feel the need to release competing biopics about a long-distance runner who finished fourth in the 1972 Olympics?” One would have been plenty, right? When competing Maravich biographies hit the bookstores in 2007, that seemed similarly strange because Pistol had died nineteen years before, never won anything other than some scoring titles and never played in the Final Four or past the second round of the NBA playoffs. We always hear that Bird and Magic saved the NBA from the depressing seventies. Doesn’t that mean they saved it from players like Maravich?

  Then you remember that two documentaries and a movie were made about him; that fans tell Pistol stories and trade Pistol tapes to this day; that he seduced a whole new generation of fans on YouTube; that he may have been the greatest H-O-R-S-E player ever; that he destroyed an aging Frazier for 68 points in 1977 (and would have broken 70 if they hadn’t whistled him for two cheap fouls in the final two minutes);72 that he blew out his knee in ’78 and was never the same; and that, out of all the pre-1980 stars, it was Pistol whose career would have been transformed most by a three-point line. That thing was made for him. Hell, he was shooting threes before they were threes. 73 Not only would the line have boosted his offensive stats, but opponents would have been forced to defend him 25 feet from the basket (inadvertently opening the floor for him). In every conceivable way, Pistol Pete was ahead of his time. Seeing him in person was like seeing twelve Globetrotters rolled into one: no pass was too farfetched, no shot too far away. He’d glide across the court—all rubbery limbs, ball attached to his hand like a yo-yo, blank expression on his face—and you never knew what would happen next, just that the scoreboard never mattered as much as the show. Kids from that era remember his appearances on CBS’s halftime H-O-R-S-E

  contests more fondly than any of his games. Even his basketball cards were cool, like the one from 1975, when he sported an extended goatee and looked like a count.

  You can imagine my delight when Auerbach plucked an end-of-the-line Pistol off waivers during Bird’s rookie season. We picked up the Pistol for nothing? I hadn’t seen him in a while, though. Woefully gaunt and out of shape, limping on a bum knee and wearing a godawful perm that made him look like Arnold Horshack, Pistol struggled mightily to blend in with his first good NBA team. The Garden crowd adopted him anyway. Every time he jumped off the bench to enter a game, we roared. Every time he sank a jumper, we went bonkers. When he shared the court with Bird, Cowens, and Archibald—four of my top seventy—there was always a sense that something special could happen. 74 But like an abused dog from the pound, there was too much damage and too many bad habits picked up over the years. After Bill Fitch buried him in the ’80 playoffs, Pistol retired the following fall and just missed playing for the ’81 champs. I remember being particularly crushed by the whole thing, like I’d been given an expensive TV for free and it broke down after two months. I never knew that there was substantial evidence that he was a drunk and a loon, one of the first athletes pushed too far by an overbearing father, 75 someone who believed in UFOs and couldn’t find peace until he retired and found Christianity in 1982. When he dropped dead at age forty, it was, fittingly, while playing a casual game of pickup hoops.

  Even those who loved watching him have trouble putting his career in context. At dinner in Boston two years ago, my father was perplexed about the existence of two Maravich books until we spent the next few minutes remembering him and inadvertently making their case. Dad recalled that there was usually one nationally televised college game a week in the 1960s and “you tuned in every weekend praying LSU was on.” When my wife asked which current player reminded us of Maravich, Dad’s answer was simply, “There will never be another Maravich.” We tried but couldn’t express the experience of watching someone play on a completely different plane from everyone else. He made impossible shots look easy. He saw passing angles his teammates couldn’t even imagine. He was the most entertaining player alive, and the most tortured one as well. You marveled at Pete Maravich, but you worried about him, too.

  Stick Pistol in the modern era and he’d become the most polarizing figure in sports, someone who combined T.O.’s insanity, A-Rod’s devotion to statistics and Nash’s flair for delighting the crowds. Skip Bayless would blow a blood vessel on Cold Pizza (now called ESPN First Take) screaming about Pistol’s ball hogging. The SportsCenter guys would create cute catchphrases for his no-looks. Bloggers would chronicle his bizarre comments and ghastly hairdos. Fantasy owners would revere him as if he were LaDainian Tomlinson or Johan Santana. Nike would launch a line of Pistol shoes. He’d be the subject of countless homemade YouTube videos and have a trophy case filled with ESPYs. Yup, it’s safe to say the Pistol was ahead of his time in every respect. And when Hollywood makes a big-budget movie about him someday, I hope they stop at one.

  67. EARL MONROE

  Resume: 13 years, 7 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’68 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’69) … 3-year peak: 24–4–5 … 2nd-best player on 1 runner-up (’71 Bullets), started for 1 champ (’73

  Knicks) and 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks)

  You could make a case for bumping Pearl down to a spot in the mid-eighties. He only made one All-NBA team and four All-Star teams. He got torched by Goodrich in the ’72 Finals and averaged just a 16–3–3 over 16 games in the Playoffs for the ’73 Knicks (his only ring). His knees and hips started going on him within his first few NBA years, transforming him from a gifted all-around player to a scorer and that’s it. But can you blame Pearl that his career started late? After graduating from high school in South Philly and failing to get scholarship offers from any major colleges, Monroe worked as a shipping clerk for a year before making a “comeback” at Winston-Salem College, a tiny black college in North Carolina, spending the next four years ravaging his knees but delighting fans in nontelevised college games and soon-to-be-legendary summer playground games in Philly and New York. Much like Maravich, the Pearl wasted two potential All-Star years in college because NBA teams were only allowed to draft four-year seniors. By the time he joined the Bullets, the Pearl was twenty-three years old and carrying God knows how much asphalt mileage on his knees. 76

  Doesn’t matter. We’re invoking the Walton Corollary here: even if a guy peaked for just two or three years as a truly great player, that’s more appealing than someone who never peaked at all. You know someone was great when he had two playground nicknames (Black Jesus and Magic) and a mainstream nickname (Earl the Pearl); moved Woody Allen to write a famous magazine profile about hanging out with him; invented a specific signature move (the spin move); 77 became immortalized in He Got Game even though the movie was released twenty-five years after his prime; and owned such an unconventional offensive game based on spins and herky-jerky hesitation moves that nobody has replicated it since. 78 Ask any over-forty-five NBA junkie about Pearl and they practically have a John-Madden-raving-about-Brett-Favre-level orgasm about him, as well as the famous Pearl/Clyde duels that forced the Knicks to say, “Screw it, we can’t stop this guy, let
’s trade for him.” So maybe his career wasn’t much different statistically from those of Hudson, Jo Jo, Jeff Malone, Rolando Blackmon, Calvin Murphy or Randy Smith. But none of those guys had their improvisational skills compared to a jazz musician’s—the most frequent analogy used to describe Pearl’s style—or inspired stories like the one David Halberstam captured in Breaks through the eyes of Maurice Lucas.

  One day Earl Monroe, then at the peak of his fame as the star of the Baltimore Bullets (and before Julius Erving had replaced him, a special kind of hero to black fans and players since he could do what no one else could do), showed up. The word had been out for several days that Monroe would play and the crowd was much bigger than usual. When Monroe missed the start of play the disappointment among the other players and the crowd was tangible. Then, ten minutes into the game, a huge beautiful car, half the length of the street, had shown up—it was a Rolls, Luke had known instinctively—and out had come Earl Monroe. He was wearing the most ragged shorts imaginable, terrible ratty sneakers and an absolutely beautiful Panama hat. That, Luke knew immediately, was true style, the hat and the shorts and the Rolls. The crowd had begun to shout Magic, Magic, Magic (his playground nickname, different than his white media nickname which, given the nature of sportswriters who like things to rhyme, was the Pearl). Monroe had put on a show that day, dancing, whirling, faking, spinning, orchestrating his moves as he wished, never any move repeated twice, as if to repeat was somehow a betrayal of his people. Luke had watched him, taking his eyes off Monroe only long enough to watch the crowd watching him. The Black Jesus, he had thought, that’s what he is—the Black Jesus.