by Simmons Bill
shot going, so he’d switch gears and start banging bodies down low (eventually pulling down 18
boards and getting to the line 12 times)? That was Pettit. In 64 playoff games in his prime (’57 to
’63), he averaged 28 points, 16 rebounds and a whopping 11.7 free throw attempts. 60 He also exhibited remarkable durability, playing 746 of a possible 754 games (including Playoffs) without the help of chartered planes, arthroscopic surgeons, stretching routines and strength/conditioning coaches. And you can’t play the “Pettit only thrived because the black guys weren’t around yet”
card because nine of Pettit’s eleven seasons coincided with Russell, seven with Elgin, six with Wilt, and five with Oscar and West, even capturing the ’62 All-Star MVP by scoring 25 points and notching a game-high 27 rebounds. Check out these numbers from ’59 to ’64.
Beyond that, Pettit and Wilt were the only two alpha dogs to topple Russell’s Celtics. Pettit avoided a Game 7 in Boston with a then-record 50 points, including 18 of St. Louis’s last 21, as well as a jumper and a clinching tip in the final 20 seconds to seal the 1958 title. So what if Russell was limping around in a cast and only played 20 minutes? That’s still one of the better performances in Finals history.61 Pettit hasn’t endured historically partly because no tape exists of that game, and partly because he didn’t have that one “thing” that kept him relevant along the lines of Oscar averaging a triple double, Russell winning eleven titles in thirteen years or even West becoming the NBA’s logo. He just missed the television era, didn’t play in a big market and lacked an identifiably transcendent skill like Bird’s passing or Baylor’s hang time. If you want to dig deeper, his southern roots (as well as the damaging Cleo Hill incident) probably linger for many of the great black players from that era, none of whom seem that interested in singing his praises these days. (Russell battled Pettit in four separate NBA Finals and only mentioned him once in Second Wind, with a little dig about how Pettit traveled every time he made an offensive move and the refs never called.) But you know what really killed Pettit historically? His hair. He made Locke on Lost look like Michael Landon. You can’t penalize him for that. You also can’t penalize him for Russell’s injury in the ’58 Finals; only one year earlier, Boston needed a triple-OT Game 7 in the Finals to defeat the Hawks. If he played today, Pettit would shave his head, grow a Fu Manchu, get a prominent tattoo, wax his body, and look like a fucking bad-ass. Back then, it was perfectly fine for the league’s best power forward to look like he should be teaching eleventh-grade shop. You can’t judge.
16. JULIUS ERVING
Resume: 16 years, 14 quality, 16 All-Stars (5 ABA) … ’74, ’75, ’76 ABA MVP ’74, ’76
Playoffs MVP … ’81 NBA MVP … ’80 runner-up … Top 5 NBA (’78, ’80–’83), Top 10 NBA (’77, ’84), Top 5 ABA (’73–’76), Top 10 ABA (’72) … two All-Star MVP’s … ABA leader: scoring (3x) … 3-year NBA peak: 25–7–4 … best player on 2 ABA champs (’74, ’76 Nets) and 3 runner-ups (’77, ’80, ’82 Sixers), 3rd-best player on NBA champ (’83 Sixers) … ’76
Playoffs: 35–13–5 (13 G) … ’80 Playoffs: 25–8–4 (18 G) … career ABA: 28.7 PPG (1st), 12.1
RPG (3rd) … career: points (5th), steals (13th) … 30K-10K Club
The case against Doc being ranked this high: Couldn’t shoot a 15-footer … surprisingly subpar defender … too passive offensively … too nice a guy, not enough of a killer … more style than substance … unwittingly overrated by the national media because he was so gracious and well-spoken … put up his peak numbers in a ramshackle league where nobody played defense, then never approached those numbers after the merger … lost five straight playoff series in his NBA prime in which he barely outplayed Bob Gross (1977), got outplayed by Bob Dandridge (’78), played Larry Kenon to a draw (’79), played Jamaal Wilkes to a draw (’80) and got severely outplayed by Larry Bird (’81) … struggled enough with sore knees in the late seventies that SI ran a March ’79 feature called “Hey, What’s Up with the Doc?” 62… never won an NBA ring until Moses saved him.
The case for Doc being ranked this high: One of the most groundbreaking, important and influential players ever … one of the most exciting players ever … ushered in the Wait a Second, This Dunking Thing Is Really Fun! Era, which eventually turned basketball into a billion-dollar business … single-handedly carried the failing ABA for three extra years … excelled at finishing fast breaks like nobody except for Barkley and maybe LeBron … filled a crucial void in the seventies as “the only beloved black basketball player during a time when fans were turning against basketball because it was considered to be ‘too black’”… probably the captain of the Articulate and Classy All-Time NBA team … along with Cousy, Russell, Wilt, Bird, Magic, Elgin, Mikan and Jordan, one of the nine most important NBA players ever … did I mention that he carried The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh?
(Quick tangent: Fish was the goofier bastard cousin of Fast Break. Doc played Moses Guthrie, the star of the Pittsburgh Pisces, who have their season turned around by a young waterboy and a wacky astrologist. Highlight no. 1: Doc’s acting made Keanu Reeves look like Philip Seymour Hoffman. Highlight no. 2: Doc awkwardly takes a date to a playground at night, then does dunks for her with bad seventies music playing. Somehow this brings them closer together. Highlight no. 3: The basketball scenes are so poorly edited that in one scene, one of Doc’s teammates (Driftwood) takes a jumper, then they cut to him standing under the basket as it goes in. Highlight no. 4: They play Kareem’s Lakers in the climactic scene and everyone has a glazed “Instead of paying us in cash, can’t they pay us in coke?” look. Highlight no. 5: Kareem disappears for the entire fourth quarter for reasons that remain unclear. It’s never mentioned or addressed. Phenomenal. I love this movie.)
Back to the “nine most important players ever” point: What happens to professional basketball without Julius Winfield Erving? Elgin and Russell turned a horizontal game into a vertical one, but Doc grabbed the torch, explored the limits of gravity and individual expression, ignited the playgrounds, delighted fans, inspired the likes of Thompson and Jordan and stamped his creative imprint on everything we’re watching today. He’s like Cousy in this respect; Cousy showed that you could entertain NBA fans while you tried to win and so did Doc. They just did it in different ways. Cousy modernized professional basketball; Doc colorized it, repossessed it, turned it into a black man’s game. If he’d never showed up, would it have happened anyway? Yeah, probably. But it’s like Apple with home computers, Bill James with baseball statistics, Lorne Michaels with sketch comedy … maybe the seeds for the revolution were in place, but somebody had to have the foresight to water those seeds and see what would happen. For basketball, that person ended up being Doc.
His glory years happened in the ABA, with little record of what happened because those teams could barely get fans to show up (much less land a local TV contract). Doc’s eye-popping statistics overshadow the meat of the story: few professional athletes were ever described in such glowing, you-had-to-be-there-to-understand terms. It’s like hearing William Goldman try to describe watching Brando in his prime on Broadway and ultimately failing, but in the process of failing, he was so passionate about it that the point was still made. Everyone in the ABA revered Doc. There was an implicit understanding that he was the league’s meal ticket, the one player who could never be undercut, clotheslined, elbowed, or injured.63 His open-court dunks had such a galvanizing effect on crowds—not just home crowds, but away crowds—that Hubie Brown created a “no dunks for Doc” rule for Kentucky home games because any exciting Doc dunk turned the crowd against the Colonels. (Now that’s a magical player—when you can sway opposing crowds to your side, you know you’ve accomplished something.) His foul line slam in the ’76 Slam Dunk Contest remains one of the single most thrilling basketball moments that ever happened. It almost caused a fucking riot. And if you’re wondering about Doc’s ceiling as a basketball player, his five-game stretch in the ’76 Finals ranks
among the greatest ever submitted at any level: 45–12, 48–14, 31–10, 34–15, 31–19 with none other than Bobby Jones defending him.
So why didn’t he reach similar heights in the NBA? Because the league was so much more talented and tumultuous—that postmerger stretch from ’77 to ’79 was a mess of transactions, drugs and contrasting styles.64 Because coaching and defensive plans became more elaborate, with every quality team making Doc shoot 20-footers and fouling him on any potential dunk. Because Doc played the NBA’s most stacked position (small forward) and dealt with a steady stream of Walter Davis, Bernard King, Dantley, Dandridge, Havlicek, Barry, Wilkes, Kenon, Bobby Jones, Bird, Dominique (note: this list keeps going and going) every night for the next decade. Because his knees were slightly shot from riding coach and playing on bad floors for five grueling ABA years. Because more and more players started doing the same superathletic things. It’s not like he was a bust or anything—he led the Sixers to four Finals and a title, averaged a 30–7–5 in the ’77 Finals, averaged a 26–7–5 in the ’80 Finals, won the ’81 MVP (debunked in the MVP chapter, but still), made five first-team All-NBA’s, remained the league’s biggest draw and submitted four iconic plays (the “ Rock-a-baby” dunk over Michael Cooper in 1983, the tomahawk dunk over Walton in the ’77 Finals, a vicious slam over Kareem in the ’77 All-Star Game, and the swooping behind-the-basket finger roll over Kareem in the ’80 Finals). Just the NBA portion of his career easily propels him into the Hall of Fame. For all-time purposes, the length of Doc’s career also sets him apart: sixteen seasons, all good/excellent/superior to varying degrees with remarkable durability, 65 and even when he faded a little near the end, he never disgraced himself like so many others.
How do we translate Doc to modern times when his old-school style couldn’t totally succeed now?
He couldn’t post anyone up unless it was a guard. He couldn’t consistently drain 18-foot jumpers, much less threes. During the ’81 playoffs, Boston’s Bill Fitch threw bigger forwards on him (usually McHale or Maxwell), had them play five feet off, then angled him toward the shot blockers in the middle (keeping him away from the baseline). For the most part, it worked. That was Doc’s fatal flaw: he couldn’t totally make teams pay for playing off him. (When Jordan entered the league, Doc’s good friend Peter Vecsey was touting MJ’s praises to an unimpressed Erving and finally yelped, “Julius, you don’t understand, he’s you with a jump shot!”) As the years pass, I’m sure people will pick Doc’s resume apart with everything mentioned in the first paragraph, his star will fade, and that will be that. All I can tell you is this: I was there. I was young, but I was there. And Julius Erving remains one of the most gripping, terrifying, and unforgettable players I have ever seen in person. If he was filling the lane on a break, your blood raced. If he was charging toward a center and cocking the ball above his head, your heart pounded. Over everything else, I will remember his hands—his gigantic, freak-show, Freddy Krueger fingers—and how he palmed basketballs like soft-balls. One signature Doc play never got enough acclaim: the Sixers would clear out for him on the left side, with Doc’s defender playing five feet off and forcing him to the middle as always, only every once in a while, Doc would take the bait, dribble into the paint like he was setting up a baby hook or something … and then, before you could blink, he’d explode toward the rim, grow Plastic Man arms and spin the ball (again, which he was holding like a softball) off the backboard and in with some absurd angle. He did it easily and beautifully, like a sudden gust of 110 mph wind, like nothing you have ever seen. His opponents would shake their heads in disbelief. The fans would make one of those incredulous moans, followed by five seconds of “Did you just see that?” murmurs. And Doc would jog back up the court like nothing ever happened, classy as always, just another two points for him.
I will never forget watching Julius Erving play basketball. Ever.
15. KOBE BRYANT
Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP (’09) … Top 5 (’02, ’03, ’04, ’06,
’07, ’08, ’09), Top 10 (’00, ’01), Top 15 (’99, ’05) … MVP: ’08 … Simmons MVP: ’06 …
All-Star MVP (’02, ’07, ’09) … All-Defense (8x, six 1st) … scoring leader (2x) … 2nd-most points, one game (81) … best player on 1 champ (’09 Lakers) 2nd-best player on 3 champs (’00, ’01, ’02), best player on runner-up (’04) … 2-year peak: 33–6–5 … ’01 Playoffs: 29–7–6, 47% FG (16 G) … ’08 + ’09 Playoffs: 30–6–6, 47% FG (44 G) … 20K Point Club …
career: 25–5–5
Question: What movie best captured the secret of basketball?
You answered Hoosiers without blinking. Don’t lie. I know you did. And sure, that movie taught us about teamwork, fundamentals and the human spirit, as well as underrated lessons like “Don’t tell the ref that the drunk guy who just wandered onto the court is one of your assistants”; “Women are fickle and evil, especially when they haven’t boinked anyone in a while and they live with their mom”; “The basket is ten feet high even in a giant stadium”; “Whites will always beat blacks in basketball because they care more and they are smarter” (just kidding; that joke was for Spike Lee, who thought Hoosiers was secretly racist and might be right); “If the coach kicks someone off the team and then allows him back a few weeks later, this guy can just randomly show up in the movie again and it never has to be addressed”; and “If the best player on your team has scored 85 percent of your points in a championship game, and you have the ball with a chance to win, don’t get fancy—clear the floor and run a freaking play for him.” But Hoosiers was the wrong answer. Sorry.
The right answer? That’s right … Teen Wolf.
Most people mistakenly think it’s a werewolf comedy. Nope. It’s a thinking man’s basketball movie. You missed the signs because you were too busy wondering how Michael J. Fox66 nearly notched a triple double in the climactic game even though he was five-foot-four and dribbled with his head down … why Mick was allowed to stand under the basket to psych Fox out for the last two free throws … why they never ran more plays for Fat Boy when his hook shot was sublime …
why the Wolf’s high school wasn’t deluged with reporters and camera crews from around the country … why Coach Finstock never gets more credit in the Greatest Sports Movie Characters Ever discussion 67… even where “Win in the End” ranks against “You’re the Best” and “No Easy Way Out” in the pantheon of Greatest Cheesy eighties Sports Movie Montages. I don’t blame you for getting sidetracked; you just missed the movie’s enduring lesson.
After Fox first transforms into the wolf—the most amazing sports movie game to attend, narrowly edging the Allies/Nazi game from Victory, and only because you can’t top a sparsely attended high school hoops contest in which a player turns into a monster and starts dunking on everyone—once the shock wears off and the Wolf starts kicking ass, his teammates turn into props. At one point later in the season, a teammate is dribbling up the court and the Wolf swipes the ball from him, zigzags through traffic and gets a layup. The success goes right to his head. He starts banging the hottest chick in school. His buddy Stiles starts marketing “Wolf” T-shirts. He’s the big wolf on campus. But even with the team winning and making a late run at the playoffs, his teammates can’t help resenting the Wolf and wishing they played for someone else. He’s getting all the credit. He’s taking all the shots. They have no stake in the team’s performance anymore. So they stop working as hard and openly grumble about Fox/Wolf. With his personal life falling apart as well, he makes a stunning decision to play the regional championship game as himself. You know the rest. The team meshes together and everyone plays a key role (especially number 45, who turns into Bill Russell); Fox explodes for an 18–8 with three steals 68 and sinks the winning free throws (after recovering from a flagrant foul on a give-and-go that took eight seconds to complete even with four seconds left on the clock); the fans happily pour onto the court as Fox plants a smooch on his homely friend Boof; and we learn that
you can still derive individual glory from winning. The end.
What does this have to do with Kobe? He spent his career vacillating between a Fox and a Wolf. The Fox persona happened fairly consistently during his first three seasons, jumped a level during the Y2K season (when he effectively clinched the 2000 Finals with a clutch Game 4) and crested with his unparalled all-around performance in the ’01 Playoffs (really, a masterpiece). He battled an identity crisis during the third title season—half man, half wolf—and morphed into the Wolf over the next two years, lowlighted by a sexual assault charge, the deterioration of his relationship with Shaq and L.A.’s massive collapse in the ’04 Finals. (Note: Wolf mode offended me as a hoops fan even as I was picking him for the ’06 MVP. Would you have wanted to play with him during this stretch? There’s no way you said yes. None.) He didn’t suppress Wolf mode for four solid years, finally embracing his inner Fox one month before the Gasol trade (December ’07). And that’s where we’ve been ever since. Looking back, Kobe never seemed totally comfortable in his own skin—dating back to his ill-fated decision to shave his tiny head MJ-style in the late nineties, or his unintentionally hilarious rap duet with Tyra Banks during All-Star Weekend in 2000—with the Fox/Wolf internal struggle symbolizing everything. He spent the past four years systematically rehabbing his image as a player and public figure, starting with a number change (from 8 to 24), then a self-provided nickname (“Mamba”), then an identity change (he’s evolved into a devoted family man and fantastic teammate with a wonderful sense of humor, or so we’re told), then a