by Shea Serrano
Paul Pierce was stabbed 11 times and also had a bottle smashed over his head during an altercation in September of 2000 and still came back and started all 82 games that following season. He fucking lived through the purge in real life then averaged 25 points per game in the days afterward. He’s my guy. That’s whose group I’m joining.
1. That being said, I liked it. And I liked the sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, which allowed itself to lean into its weirdness, even more. (The Purge: Election Year was fine.)
2. Inasmuch as it can be “real” and “actual” and “literal” given that it’s a hypothetical question with a fictional movie as its underpinning.
3. Bill Russell obviously would’ve gotten you safely through the night. Jerry West, on the other hand, would’ve gotten you through the night safely one out of every eight tries.
4. This is only a portion of the story. It’s the main parts, though.
5. Patrick Ewing and John Starks and Greg Anthony aren’t in this group.
6. The only six players in the history of the league to have done it are Kyle Korver, Steve Kerr, Tim Legler, Jon Sundvold, Jason Kapono, and Detlef Schrempf. Steve Kerr’s the only player to have ever done it multiple times. He did it three times. Steve Kerr is a killer. My favorite Steve Kerr story I half-remember is him talking about when he got to the point in his career where he was spending most of his time on the bench, he’d do a shooting drill where he’d just sit down for, like, 30 minutes, then run out there and shoot one shot and then sit back down for another 30 minutes before doing it again.
7. His defense team said he was petting the horse, not punching it, which seems like a thing that is definitely not true.
8. He had a spotty career in and out of the league, but there’s a great story in Jayson Williams’s book Loose Balls about how he got into an altercation with Armen Gilliam during a practice. Shack ended up cussing at Gilliam, who was very religious, and so it offended him a bunch. Gilliam challenged Shack to a fight later. Shack showed up with a fucking machete.
9. Jerry got in a fight with Kirk Snyder following a game in 2005 (he waited for him in the tunnel and then pummeled Snyder when he saw him), and it rattled Snyder so soundly that Snyder thanked him for beating him up when they came across each other the following season.
10. As of the 2017 season.
11. In 2009, Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton both brought guns into the Washington Wizards locker room following a gambling dispute on the team plane. It was a gigantic story that ended up unraveling the team. Caron Butler talks about it in his book Tuff Juice. He says he’s fairly confident Arenas was joking. Crittenton, on the other hand, was serious. (He ended up being sentenced to 23 years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in 2011.) Go with Crittenton, not Arenas.
12. This story is how I know that I belong in Group 3.
13. I’m just really trying to figure out a way to get Patrick Ewing in this category.
14. The only Smush Parker story worth telling is the one about Kobe Bryant, whom Smush played with for the 2006 and 2007 seasons, telling him that he didn’t have enough accolades to talk to Bryant during practice. I wonder what the exact number of accolades one needs to talk to Kobe Bryant, or even what kinds of accolades are required.
15. There’s a tiny thing in Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball where he cites an article that ran in the LA Times in August of 1980 where the then-GM of the Atlanta Hawks, Stan Kasten, guessed that 75 percent of the players in the league were casual drug users.
16. So fucking clutch.
17. Here’s a fun stat: Peja Stojakovic shot 41.6 percent from three in 2002. Do you know what he shot in Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals? He shot 0 percent. He went 0 for 6, including a wide-open air ball three that would’ve put the Kings up 2 with 12 seconds to go. Doug Christie also shot a wide-open three at the end of overtime that would’ve given the Kings a one-point lead. It didn’t even hit the rim. I’m still hurt about this. The Kings ain’t even my team and this loss still bothers me.
18. Clyde’s inclusion here is conditional. If the purge takes place during any of the years Michael Jordan wasn’t retired, then he belongs in Group 3. If it takes place when Jordan was retired, then you can move him up to Group 2.
19. As of the 2017 season.
20. I can’t remember a role player who took not winning a championship as hard as McDyess did. There was a story about how after the Pistons had lost to the Spurs in a game during the 2005 Finals he didn’t even get dressed back in his regular clothes, he just walked right the fuck to his car in his uniform and left.
21. Tinsley was on that Pacers team involved in the Malice at the Palace brawl. There was a short clip of him swinging one of those dustpans that ushers use around at people. He was on some Jackie Chan Anything Can Be A Weapon shit.
22. Shoutout the 2004 Pistons.
23. Earl Boykins was 5'5". He weighed 140 pounds and benched 315. Figure that shit out.
WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT NBA CHAMPIONSHIP?
PART 1
In 2015, a book I wrote called The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed was published. The subtitle, while clunky, does a good job of summarizing the premise: Each of the chapters is about whatever rap song it was that happened to be the most important of a given year. For example, the first chapter is about the most important song from 1979,1 the second chapter is about the most important song from 1980,2 the third chapter is about the most important song from 1981,3 and it just goes on like that all the way through to 2014.4
I mention it here because when I started telling people that the next book I was writing was going to be this basketball book, a person I know and kind of like but not all-the-way like made a joke close to “Is it going to be about the most important NBA championship of each year?” Now, of course that’s semi-funny because there’s only one NBA championship per year, but what if we toggled the settings a bit? What if, rather than make it a Per Year thing, we just make it a By Importance thing? That, I think, becomes an interesting discussion. So here’s the new version: What’s the most important NBA championship? Meaning: Which NBA championship had the greatest, biggest, most substantial impact on the NBA?
To answer that, what we need to do is set up the borders of the conversation. To measure the weight of the importance of a particular NBA championship, we have to look at four things:
1. WHAT, IF ANY, EFFECT DID THE CHAMPIONSHIP HAVE ON THE LEAGUE? This is an easy category to identify, but also an essential one. The clearest way to look at it: The 1984 Finals featured the first pro championship matchup between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (more on this one later). It was obviously bigger and more important for the league than, say, when the Washington Bullets, a 44-win team, beat the SuperSonics, a 47-win team, to win the championship in 1978.5
2. WHAT, IF ANY, EFFECT DID THE CHAMPIONSHIP HAVE ON A PARTICULAR PLAYER’S LEGACY? An easy example: Bill Walton is a member of the basketball Hall of Fame and was also picked by the NBA as one of the league’s 50 best players in history in 1996. Those things happened largely because of his performance in the 1977 Finals, where he averaged 18.5 points, 19 rebounds, 5.2 assists, 3.7 blocks, and was named the Finals MVP. The two years before that, he was mostly injured, and in just about all the years after that, he was injured, too.6 It’s very likely that without that one Finals, we don’t remember him near as fondly as we do today.
3. WAS THERE A PARTICULARLY ICONIC GAME DURING THE FINALS? A good rule for this one is “Does one of the games in the Finals for whatever year it is you’re talking about have a name?” If yes, then it was iconic, and thus made that Finals more important than a Finals that didn’t have a game with a name. (Think: The Flu Game, The Isiah Thomas Sprained Ankle Game, The Junior, Junior Skyhook Game, The Willis Reed Game, etc.)
4. WAS THERE A PARTICULARLY ICONIC MOMENT DURING THE FINALS? Same as above: “Did a moment in one of the games in the Finals
for whatever year it is you’re talking about get a name?” If yes, then it was iconic, and thus made that Finals more important than a Finals that didn’t have a moment like that. (Think: Iverson’s Step Over, Dr. J’s Behind-the-Backboard Layup, MJ’s Shrug, LeBron’s Chasedown Block, etc.)
We just take all of the championships, run them through a grading rubric based on those four questions above, and there you go: That’s how you figure out what the most important NBA championship was.
One thing to keep in mind, and this is maybe inflammatory or controversial (probably not, though), but I’m automatically going to eliminate any of the championships from before 1980 from contention. Originally, I’d intended to sort through all the championships from the NBA-ABA merger (1976) to now, but that seems like just empty space since none of the championships from 1977 to 19797 finished anywhere near the top of this What’s the Most Important NBA Championship? conversation. Also, 1980, which is when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson entered the NBA, was essentially the beginning of the NBA as we know it today. So that’ll be the starting point: We’re only considering championships from 1980 to today.
TIER V: ARRANGE THESE FINALS INTO JUST ABOUT ANY ORDER YOU’D LIKE.
It won’t change much.
There are 37 championships that need to be arranged by importance. This last tier is the one where, I mean, okay, if we’re being all the way honest, the order here isn’t really all that important. These championships definitely belong in this section, but basically you can arrange them into just about any order you’d like and it’s not going to affect too, too many things. It always works like that with any sort of list that’s longer than, say, 20 spaces. You get to number 34 and it’s just like, “Really, how much different is this one than 33 or 35?”—you know what I’m saying? If I ask you for your four favorite memories as a kid, you’re probably going to have a very firm list of meaningful moments for me. If I ask you for your 37 favorite memories as a kid, by the time you get to 33 you’re going to be like, “Um . . . I watched an episode of Family Matters that was pretty good when I was 12,” or whatever. That’s just the way it goes.
That said, this is the actual correct order these championships belong in:
37. The 2004 Championship (Pistons beat Lakers, 4–1): This was the year that the Lakers supersized themselves (Shaq, Kobe, Gary Payton, Karl Malone), only to have their legs cut off in the Finals by a team that had no real, discernible superstar.8 Chauncey Billups was the first guard since Isiah Thomas to win Finals MVP. The main notable things that happened after this championship were things that were likely going to happen regardless of the outcome—it was the last series Shaq and Kobe ever played together; it was the end of Phil Jackson’s first stint as a Lakers coach; the league introduced new rules during the off-season meant to eliminate hand-checking on defense, which eventually opened up the game—so I can’t really credit it for causing the changes.
36. The 1999 Championship (Spurs beat Knicks, 4–1): Rough season. Two big, bad things happened: (1) The lockout gobbled up more than a third of the games, and so no one was really expecting to even have any season at all that year, which equaled up to some not that great basketball.9 (2) Jordan retired after the 1998 championship, and no Jordan meant the league lacked the top-tier megastar it had had during all its best seasons. Two good things happened, though, one of which was substantial and the other of which was cool: (1) Tim Duncan, the fifth greatest basketball player of all time, won the first of his five titles. I imagine it’s a bunch like what that guy in The Beach was talking about when he was telling Leonardo DiCaprio the difference between a young shark and a mama great white shark who’s killed before. Duncan became a mama great white shark after 1999, is what I’m saying. (2) The Knicks became the first-ever eighth seed to make it to the Finals.10
35. The 2005 Championship (Spurs beat Pistons, 4–3): A couple of neat asides happened—first Finals Game 7 since 1994; first time since 1987 the previous two champions met in the Finals; first time since 1960 the two previous champions played in a Finals Game 7—but those are all mostly just fun party favors. The main important thing that happened was this championship tied Duncan with Shaq for three titles and three Finals MVPs apiece.11
34. The 2012 Championship (Heat beat Thunder, 4–1): This was LeBron’s first title, yes,12 but really the most important thing that happened here is that the Thunder, who had a nucleus then of a 23-year-old Russell Westbrook, a 23-year-old Kevin Durant, a 22-year old James Harden, and a 22-year-old Serge Ibaka, lost out on winning a championship. They never made another trip back to the Finals, and by the summer of 2016, all but Russell Westbrook were playing for different teams.
33. The 2007 Championship (Spurs beat Cavaliers, 4–0): Tim Duncan’s fourth title. Tony Parker becomes the first-ever international player who didn’t play in the NCAA to win Finals MVP, which you could probably argue is pretty meaningful if you squint a little bit. This was also the first Finals appearance for LeBron James, though the Spurs dispatched him and his Cavs fairly easily. (This was of no fault of LeBron’s. The Spurs basically guarded him with all five guys at once all game, every game. Besides, LeBron had already etched his name into the side of the Playoff Legends mountain in the previous series, when he put up 29 of the Cavs’ final 30 points in a Game 5 double-overtime win on the road against Detroit.13) The maybe most notable thing that happened was after the Spurs swept the Cavs, when cameras caught Tim Duncan telling LeBron James, “This is gonna be your league in a little while, but, uh, I appreciate you giving us this year,” proving that Tim Duncan was a real human and not a statue that’d been brought to life by some sort of spell like in a movie, as many had assumed up to that point.
32. The 1994 Championship (Rockets beat Knicks, 4–3): This was a good one. We got (1) Hakeem vs. Ewing, marquee centers in the league who had played against each other in the 1984 NCAA championship and then went back-to-back as number-one picks in the NBA Draft after that; (2) the John Starks Game 7 disaster (2–18 from the field, including going 0–11 from three-point range, his final three somehow falling literally several feet short of the rim); and (3) every single one of the seven games was decided by single digits.14 It was also (4) the first title for Hakeem, an all-timer; and (5) the first time a team from the Western Conference who wasn’t the Lakers won the title since the 1979 Sonics. Of course, the everlasting knock on it would be that it came during the nearly two-year window of Jordan’s first retirement,15 which is or isn’t valid, depending on your opinion of the Houston Rockets.
TIER IV: THE IN-BETWEENERS
Championships that fall into this category are the ones that are fun to remember and are certainly more impactful than those in Tier V, but don’t quite have the reverb that the ones in Tier III have. Still, from here going forward, unlike Tier V, there’s no wiggle room for the placement of a particular championship. It belongs where it sits.
31. The 1987 Championship (Lakers beat Celtics, 4–2): It’s the Lakers and the Celtics for the third time in four years, which is just fantastic because rivalries are fantastic, so that’s one big thing. Another big thing is that Magic Johnson becomes the first player ever to win three Finals MVP trophies. A third big thing is that it’s the last year Larry Bird appears in an NBA Finals, and so we have to pay respect to that history. And then a last big thing is that it gives Magic a 4–3 lead over Bird in championships, which means a lot in the Magic vs. Bird argument.16
30. The 1995 Championship (Rockets beat Magic, 4–0): An NBA Finals I have come to appreciate and respect and even revere, in part because of the excellence of Hakeem Olajuwon,17 but mostly because this particular Rockets team was like every lovable NBA team from the 1990s, except they were able to win a championship and that’s great because it feels a lot like it validates those teams. Think on it like this: The Rockets only won 47 games in the 1995 season. They were the sixth seed in the playoffs. They beat Karl Malone and the third-seeded Jazz in the first round, Charles Barkley and the second-seeded Suns in t
he second round, David Robinson and the first-seeded Spurs in the third round, then Shaquille O’Neal and the Eastern Conference champion Magic in the Finals. And they did all of that despite their second-best player being a slightly-past-his-prime Clyde Drexler. Imagine a Charlotte Hornets team from the early-to-mid ’90s doing that. Imagine an Indiana Pacers team from the mid-to-late ’90s doing that. Imagine the ’01 Sixers doing that. That was this Rockets team. So there was that. Plus, you’ve got: (1) the Rockets repeating off their 1994 championship, helping to quiet some of the But If Jordan Was Here . . . talk; (2) the first Finals appearance for Shaq; and (3) a cargo ship’s worth of What Ifs (see Chapter 20).
29. The 1989 Championship (Pistons beat Lakers, 4–0): (I’m going to ignore that Byron Scott, an essential starter for the Lakers, missed the entire series because he pulled a hamstring during a practice before Game 1. And I’m also going to ignore that Magic Johnson, the most essential Laker, missed the end of Game 2, all but the first five or so minutes of Game 3, and then all of Game 4, also with a hamstring injury.) This was the first of two titles in a row for the Pistons, which means that, as a championship, it was the solidification of the Bad Boys model of basketball practices.18 That’s important, and even more so than it just being a thing that was attached to the Pistons, it also vibrated outward. What I mean is: The Lakers’s coach that year was Pat Riley. He wouldn’t coach another team to the Finals until 1994. His team that year? The New York Knicks, who took what the Bad Boys Pistons did and then cranked the dial all the way up.19
28. The 2010 Championship (Lakers beat Celtics, 4–3): A couple of neat things here: (1) This was a revenge championship for the Lakers, as they’d lost to the Celtics in 2008, and revenge championships are always fun. (2) This was Kobe’s last title, and the one that put him permanently ahead of Shaq in the championship count (5–4) and temporarily ahead of Duncan, with whom he dueled for the Best Player of That Generation title. (3) This was Kobe’s second Finals MVP in a row, and that meant that he’d become the first to do that since Shaq did it during their original title run together at the beginning of the decade, and also the first guard to do it since Jordan did it during his second three-peat. (4) From a broader, non-Kobe view, this was the championship that brought the Lakers to within one title of the Celtics (Celtics have 17, Lakers have 16). (5) And it also has packed into it a fun What If to toss around: The Celtics were up 3–2 in the series when Kendrick Perkins, a defensive anchor for the Cs, tore his PCL and MCL at the beginning of Game 6. He missed the rest of that game (Celtics lost by 22) and all of Game 7 (Celtics lost by 4). Do the Celtics win that series if Perk doesn’t go down?20 And if they do, how does that affect Kobe’s legacy?