Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  Imagine if I could have been that succinct with the Pyramid; you would have finished this book two weeks ago. But Bradley missed one crucial part of the Russell Experience: Russell was obsessed with winning. A handful of NBA players were wired with overcompetitive DNA, 91 but Russell and Jordan stand alone in their singular devotion to prevailing over and over again. The single greatest Russell statistic other than eleven rings? Russell’s teams finished 10–0 in deciding Game 5’s or Game 7’s. The single greatest Jordan statistic? The Bulls lost their first three games of the 1990–91 season, but after that, they never lost three in a row again with Jordan wearing a Chicago uniform. 92 Anyone can win two or three titles. Russell and Jordan defended their turf again and again and again, and beyond that, they measured themselves by those defenses. They searched for every possible edge even if they went about it in different ways. Russell embraced his biggest foe, befriended him and allowed him to shine in meaningless moments, even as he was secretly ripping out the guy’s heart without him realizing it. Jordan settled for tearing out hearts and holding them up like the dude from Temple of Doom. He wanted his rivals to know it was happening. That’s what he loved most—not the winning as much as the vanquishing. Russell just loved winning.

  The other difference between them: at no point in Russell’s career did a teammate hiss, “I hate that asshole” or “He cares about himself more than the team.” Russell’s teammates treasured and revered him. They sing his praises to this day. They maintain that you cannot place a statistical value on what he accomplished on a daily basis. Code words like “sacrifice” and “teammate” and

  “unselfish” pop up every time he’s remembered. He’s the only player who realized every component of basketball as a team game—not just playing, but coming together as a group, respecting one another, and embracing common goals—from the first game of his career through the last. In George Plimpton’s “Sportsman of the Year” piece about Russell in 1968, he passed along a fascinating anecdote from Boston trainer Joe DiLauri that explained Russell to a tee:

  The big concern he has is for the Celtics. Nothing else really matters. That’s why he seems so cold often to the press and the fans. They’re not Celtics. After we won the championship last year he kicked everyone who wasn’t a Celtic out of the dressing room—press, photographers, hangers-on, and also this poor guy who was tending a television camera in the locker room who said he had to have permission to leave it untended, pleading to stay, said he was going to lose his job, and it took three or four minutes to get him out. The press was pounding on the door, furious about deadlines and all, and Russell turned around and looked at us and he asked

  [Bailey] Howell to lead the team in prayer. He knew Bailey was a religious man—it was also his first year on a championship team—and he knew Bailey would appreciate it. Russell’s not a religious man himself. Sam Jones said, “You pray?” And Russell said, “Yeah, Sam.”

  You never hear Jordan’s teammates and coaches discuss him that way. Not even now. The most compelling part of his storyline, for years and years, was the collective attempt to channel his competitiveness into the greater good of the team. He needed to “trust” his teammates and “make them better.” We heard this again and again. Then his supporting cast improved and Chicago started winning titles, so we stopped hearing it … even though he was playing the same way he always did.93 Only after his “baseball sabbatical” did Jordan fully embrace the team dynamic, whereas Russell’s sense of team was ingrained. Which brings us to the best part of Russell’s resume, as well as the point that potentially undermines it: his success in tight games. Of Russell’s eleven titles, six hinged on games that could have easily swung against the Celtics. 94 Each went in their favor, with only one involving an opponent missing a season-deciding shot (Frank Selvy in 1962). On the face of it, you might say it was luck, something of an Anton Chigurh coin flip that fell his way every time. But with close-knit, unselfish teams and an alpha dog who lives to make everyone else better, how much of it is really luck? In a tight game of teams between equal talents with the pressure mounting, wouldn’t you wager on the close-knit/unselfish team led by the best defensive player ever? Isn’t that what basketball is all about?

  Now you’re saying, “Wait a second … so why isn’t Russell no. 1?” Because it’s so difficult to project Russell into today’s game. Athletically, he could have survived. No question. But Russell wasn’t taller or thicker than Kevin Durant. How would he have defended Kareem? 95 What about Yao Ming, Rik Smits or Artis Gilmore? What about Shaq in his prime or even young Dwight Howard? And wouldn’t his mediocre shooting become a bigger liability in today’s game? Would Russell be 70 percent as effective now? Eighty percent? Is the number higher or lower? How can we know? Like with Oscar, Pettit, Elgin and Wilt, Russell’s era-specific advantages are hard to ignore. It was easier to block shots when nobody was attacking the rim except for Wilt, just like it was easier to grab rebounds when opposing forwards were six-four and six-three instead of six-eight and six-eleven. Russell also had more value in the sixties: everyone played run-and-gun and every basket only counted for two points, so a rebounder/shot blocker was the biggest commodity you could have. Now it’s a slash-and-kick game driven by perimeter stars; during the

  ’09 season, when only five players averaged more than 10.0 rebounds and 39 players shot better than 40 percent on threes, you’re better off with a LeBron-like scorer who creates quality shots for himself and his teammates. And with gigantic salaries, salary cap rules and luxury tax hindrances, it’s nearly impossible to assemble an unselfish infrastructure of team-first players and keep it in place—this decade, only the Spurs were able to do it for more than four years—which means Russell would battle 1-in-30 odds just that he’d be landing on the perfect team for him. So let’s split the difference and put him on a modern contender—we’ll switch him with Howard and say Russell averages 16.3 rebounds, 12.7 points and a record-breaking 6.2 blocks a game for the 2009

  Magic. Do you feel like we’re guaranteed a title? I don’t feel like we are. We have a good chance

  … but it’s not a lock. (June ’09 addition: Strangely, I wrote this section two months before Orlando snuck into the finals. Foreshadowing? ESP?)

  And that’s what sets the next guy apart. Stick ’92 MJ or ’96 MJ in any era and he immediately becomes the alpha dog. From 1946 to 1965, it would have been unfair and scientists would have tested him in the mistaken belief that he was an alien. From 1965 to 1976, he would have dominated on a higher level than West did … and West only won a title and reached six other Finals. From 1977 to 1983, he would have crushed it. You know everything that happened from 1984 on. Throw in Jordan’s individual and team success, as well as his lack of any conceivable holes—seriously, when we will ever see the league’s best offensive player also make nine All-Defensive teams?—and Bill Russell will have to settle for second place. For once.

  1. MICHAEL JORDAN

  Resume: 16 years, 12 quality, 16 All-Stars … MVP: ’88, ’91, ’92, ’96, ’98 … Simmons MVP:

  ’90, ’93, ’97 … runner-up: ’87, ’89, ’97 … ’85 Rookie of the Year … Finals MVP: ’91, ’92,

  ’93, ’96, ’97, ’98 … Top 5 (’87, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91, ’92, ’93, ’96, ’97, ’98), Top 10 (’85) …

  All-Defense (nine 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’88) … 30+ PPG 8 times, 34+ PPG in 7 different Playoffs … 4-year peak: 34–6–6, 3.0 SPG, 52% FG … career: 30–6–5, 49.7% FG, 83.5% FT … Playoffs: 33.4 PPG (1st), 6.4 RPG, 5.7 APG (179 G) … Finals: 34–6–6 (35 g’s)

  … leader: scoring (10x), steals (3x) … records: most scoring titles (10); consecutive scoring titles (7); most Finals MVPs (6); highest points, Finals (41.0 in ’93); most Playoffs points, career; most points, one Playoffs game (63); most points in one half, Finals game (35) …

  career: points (3rd), steals (2nd) … best player on 6 champs (’91–’93, ’96–’98 Bulls) … 30K

  Point Club
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  In my lifetime, only one superstar was routinely described like Hannibal Lecter. Michael is a killer. Michael will rip your heart out. If you give Michael an opening, he will kill you. Michael smells blood. Michael is going for the jugular. Nobody goes for the kill like Michael Jordan. They’re on life support and Michael is pulling the plug. Michael will eat your liver and cap it off with a glass of Chianti. I made up only the last line; everything else was definitely muttered by an announcer between 1988 and 1998. Our society enabled the competitor that Michael Jordan became: we value athletes who treasure winning, maximize their own potential, stay in superior shape, pump their fists, slap asses and would rather maim themselves then lose a game. Ronnie Lott had part of his pinkie amputated in the offseason in order to keep playing in the NFL. We thought this was awesome. We loved Ronnie Lott for this. Now that’s a guy who cares! Tiger won the 2008 U.S. Open playing with a torn ACL. Now that’s a champion! Pete Rose bowled over Ray Fosse to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star Game, separating Fosse’s shoulder and altering his career. Hey, you don’t block home plate when it’s Pete Rose! We will always love the guys who care just a little more than everyone else, just like we will always hate the ones who don’t. Why? Because we like to think that we’d play that way if we were blessed with those same gifts. Or something.

  That’s why we never judged Michael Jordan for his competitive disorder. If anything, we deified it. The man could do anything and it was okay. From 1984 to 1991, by all accounts—magazines, newspapers, books, you name it—Jordan pulled all the same shit that Kobe did this decade, only in a more indefensible and debilitating way. When Sam Smith finally called him out in his turned-out-to-be-totally-accurate 1992 book, The Jordan Rules, everyone reacted like we would now if Perez Hilton started lobbing online grenades at Obama’s daughters. Jordan couldn’t be an asshole, and even if he was, we didn’t want to know. By the time Kobe rose to prominence, our society had become much more cynical: we gravitated toward tearing people down over building them up, so that’s what we did. Had Jordan come along fifteen years later, the same thing would have happened to him.

  Of course, Kobe’s diva routine happened out of weakness: he couldn’t figure out his own identity and settled on a slightly creepy Jordan impression, pursuing that goal by trying to excel on both ends (did it), win a few rings (did it), score as many points as possible (did it), mimic Jordan’s celebratory fist pump (did it) and lead his own team to the title (didn’t do it). Everything about Kobe’s handling of the inevitable transition from “the Robin to Shaq’s Batman” to “Batman” was clumsy.96 Jordan always knew who he was. He had to win at everything. He studied up on opponents and searched for any signs of weakness, even pumping beat writers and broadcasters for insider information. He soaked teammates in poker on team flights so brutally that coaches warned rookies to stay away. He lost in Ping-Pong to teammate Rod Higgins once, bought a table and became the best Ping-Pong player on the team. He dunked on Utah’s John Stockton once, heard Utah owner Larry Miller scream, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” then dunked on center Mel Turpin and hissed at Miller afterward, “He big enough for you?” He bribed airport baggage guys to put out his suitcase first once, then wagered teammates that his bag would be the first one on the conveyor belt. He stormed out of a Bulls scrimmage once like a little kid because he thought Doug Collins screwed up the score. When a team of college All-Stars outscored the Dream Team in a half-assed scrimmage and made the mistake of puffing their chests out, Jordan started out the next day’s scrimmage by pointing at Allan Houston and simply saying, “I got him”

  … and Houston didn’t touch the ball for two hours. 97

  Jordan measured everything by the result and every teammate by his capacity to care about that result. He tested them constantly and weeded out the ones who folded: Dennis Hopson, Brad Sellers, Will Perdue, Stacey King … it’s a longer list than you think. He punched teammates in practice to reassert his dominance. In the early years, he went too far and his bloodthirsty fire crippled a few of his teams; you never want to affect teammates to the degree that they’re afraid to assert themselves in big games. Craig Hodges told Michael Wilbon about a 1990 incident in which Pippen made the mistake of challenging Jordan in practice, when Michael “proceeded, literally, to score on Scottie at will. It was incredible. I mean, Scottie Pippen even then was one of the best players in the league and Michael just rained points on him. Scottie had to step back and say, ‘Slow up, man.’” For years and years, Jordan couldn’t rein himself in. He cared about winning, but only on his terms—he also wanted to win scoring titles, drop 50 whenever he pleased and treat his teammates like the biggest bully in a prison block—which led Phil Jackson to adopt the triangle offense in a last-ditch effort to prevent Jordan from hogging the ball (and, Jackson hoped, embolden his supporting cast). By the 1991 playoffs, when his teammates had advanced to an acceptable level, Jordan found a workable balance between involving them and taking over big moments. The rest was history. 98

  You know Jordan’s “best ever” credentials: his playoff chops, individual records and all-around honors surpass those of anyone else who ever played. He owns more iconic moments than anyone: the 63-point game at the Garden, the ’87 Slam Dunk Contest, “the shot” against the ’88 Cavs, the

  “Ohhhhhh, a spec -tack- ular move!” layup in the ’91 Finals, those 6 threes in the ’92 Finals (along with the shrug—you can’t forget the shrug), 41 points per game in the 1993 Finals, the 72-win team in ’96, the Flu Game in ’97 and The Last Shot in ’98. He demoralized eight memorable teams in eight years—the Bad Boy Pistons, the Showtime Lakers, Riley’s Knicks, Drexler’s Pistons, Barkley’s Suns, Shaq’s Magic, Malone’s Jazz and Miller’s Pacers—and none was ever quite the same. 99 He accomplished everything with just two Pyramid teammates (Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman) and a bunch of role players and pseudo-scrubs. When he captured that last title in 1998, we all agreed: This is the greatest basketball player we will ever see. That didn’t stop us from looking for the next him. We spent the next eleven years anointing false successors, hyping young stars who weren’t ready and overrating imitators who weren’t really him. We need to stop looking.

  My personal belief: Nobody will surpass Jordan. Ever. And I have four reasons why …

  Reason no. 1: the four peaks Most basketball players peak once and that’s it (a career year, as we call it). An elite few peak a second time: Hakeem in ’90 and ’94, Barkley in ’90 and ’93, West in

  ’66 and ’70, and Shaq in ’95 and ’00, to name four. In rare cases, an athlete peaks three different times: Bird (’84, ’86 and ’87), Magic (’82, ’85, ’87), Kareem (’72, ’76, ’80) and Wilt (’62, ’67,

  ’72) released a 3.0 version that exceeded the 1.0 and 2.0 versions in many respects. Only Jordan peaked four times, and arguably, Jordan 4.0 was better than the other three versions. Here are the models:

  • MJ 1.0 (’89-‧90). His fifth and sixth seasons, normally when a star makes the leap and scratches the ceiling of his talents. Jordan carries a lousy ’89 Bulls team to 47 wins and an Eastern Finals cameo during an extremely competitive year, finishing with the best all-around statistical season since the merger: 32.5 PPG, 8.0 APG, 8.0 RPG 2.9 SPG, 54%

  FG, 85% FT (regular season), 34.8 PPG, 7.0 RPG, 7.6 APG, 2.5 SPG, 51% FG (Playoffs). The following spring, he enjoys the finest Playoffs of his career (43.0 points, 7.4 assists, 6.6 rebounds and 55 percent shooting against Philly) before falling to Detroit in seven. As a pure athlete and scorer, here’s the stretch when Jordan peaked: matchless athletic ability, maximum speed and explosiveness, Larry /Magic-level respect from officials, extreme durability (played 99 of 99 games despite old-school rules that allowed teams like the Pistons to hammer him on drives) and multiple defenders required to stop him. Unleash ’89

  Jordan into the current NBA with no hand checking or hard fouls and it’s all over. He’d score 45 a game. 100

  • MJ 2.0 (spring ’93). He’
s mastered everything at this point. A rigorous workout routine sculpts his body and whips him into superior shape, enabling him to absorb hard fouls, stop tiring at the end of games and abuse smaller defenders on the low post. He’s a savvier all-around player, with a better sense of how (to use his teammates) and when (is the right time to take over a game), even defending his teammates (which he did repeatedly against Riley’s Knicks, personified by the memorable “And one!” layup where he stood over Xavier McDaniel and yelped angrily at him) instead of undermining them publicly and privately. Only one problem: the man suddenly has no peers. He’s the only NBA super-duper star without a relative equal driving him to remain on top. That puts him in a no-win situation. Once the media pressure and public attention becomes too much, he makes one of the most curious decisions in NBA history: he walks away at his apex. 101

  • MJ 3.0 (winter ’96). Jordan shakes off the baseball rust, 102 rebuilds his body for basketball and and plays more physically on both ends—instead of Barry Sanders, he’s Emmitt Smith, picking his spots, plugging away, moving the chains and punishing defenders for four quarters. MJ 3.0 features descriptions like “extremely resourceful” and

  “cerebral on the Bird-Magic level,” and as if that’s not enough, his baseball foibles taught him to embrace his teammates, accept their faults and adapt his own considerable skills to complement theirs. He finally understands The Secret.

  • MJ 4.0 (spring ’98). My favorite version. His hops are pretty much gone, yet he makes up for it with renewed intensity and resiliency. Rarely does Jordan exhibit emotion anymore; even game-winning jumpers are celebrated with a simple fist pump and a relieved smile. Like Ali in the mid-seventies, he relies on guile, experience, memory, and heart and knows every trick (like the Bryon Russell push to win the ’98 Finals). 103 Jordan 4.0 demonstrates a (I hate to use this word, but screw it) surreal ability to take command in optimum moments. You could say he evolved from the greatest basketball player ever to the greatest closer ever, and his collection of performances against superior Pacers and Jazz teams—as he fought the effects of his third straight 100-game season, coaxed as much as he could from a thirty-six-year-old body, carried Scottie Pippen’s slack (derailed by a bad back) in the final two games and still managed to carry the Bulls to a title—remains the most extraordinary athletic achievement of my lifetime. Watch Game 6 of the ’98 Finals some time. He wins it by himself. No help. Just him. He scores 41 of Chicago’s first 83 points, biding his time even as he’s manipulating the proceedings. Down by three with 40 seconds to go, he goes for the kill—explodes for a coast-to-coast layup, strips Karl Malone on the other end and drains the game-winner, all in one sequence—without a single teammate touching the ball, a fitting conclusion to the most brilliant basketball game ever played. I know LeBron James is fantastic right now, but if he’s still winning championships by himself at thirty-six on the fourth version of himself, we can start talking about him and Jordan. And only then.