by Simmons Bill
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 first 37—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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 sc
ored 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.”