Basketball (And Other Things)

by Shea Serrano

  2008

  All-Star / All-NBA Second Team / All-Defensive Second Team / NBA Champion

  Kobe’s first trip back to the Finals following Shaq getting ousted. (Also worth mentioning that Pau Gasol arrives, which is important. He ends up being exactly what Kobe wants in a big man: basically someone who will get the fuck out of the way when people start talking about the Lakers.) Kobe charts the third highest Win Shares of his career and also the third highest VORP of his career (though Chris Paul and LeBron James beat him in both categories). If you were ever to argue that Kobe Bryant was the best player in the league, this is the season to do so, which is at least a bit ironic because his Lakers got crushed by the Celtics in Game 6 of the Finals to lose the series.23 (The series swung toward the Celtics after the Lakers coughed up a 24-point lead in Game 4, letting the Celtics take what proved to be an insurmountable 3–1 lead.)

  2009

  All-Star (and ASG MVP) / Finals MVP / All-NBA First Team / All-Defensive First Team / NBA Champion

  There are two reasons you can’t call Kobe the best player in the league in 2009, the first post-Shaq championship of Kobe’s career: (1) Pau Gasol beats out Kobe in Win Shares, VORP, and BPM for the season;24 and (2) LeBron James goes fucking atomic.25 He’s the best player in the league.

  One reason that maybe you can call Kobe the best: (1) He beat Dwight Howard in the NBA Finals, and I am 100 percent in favor of calling anyone anything they want me to call them if they beat Dwight Howard. It doesn’t even have to be the Finals. If you beat Dwight Howard in a regular season game or even a preseason game, then fuck it, you’re the best player in the league.

  So no, Kobe wasn’t the best player the league in 2009, but by virtue of the Beat Dwight Howard Rule he was, you know what I’m saying?

  2010

  All-Star / Finals MVP / All-NBA First Team / All-Defensive First Team / NBA Champion

  This was my personal favorite version of Kobe. It was the first time I watched him and felt like he wasn’t doing (a) his best Michael Jordan impersonation or (b) his best villain impersonation.26 He was just existing and playing basketball. Still, sentiment aside, he finished outside of the Top 5 in just about every major statistical category, advanced or otherwise. LeBron’s the best during the regular season, Kobe is MAYBE the best during the playoffs.

  Is Kobe Bryant a dork?

  Yes.

  How many years during his career was Kobe Bryant the best player in the league?

  Zero. Possibly one. Potentially two.

  1. Jordan had a similar impact on fans of opposing teams, I’m told. I never felt it, though, because I always found myself rooting for him.

  2. Possibly not a big shot.

  3. Possibly early.

  4. Possibly an ordinary game.

  5. Gunslingers are cool.

  6. To be thorough, it was against the 2006 Raptors, which is like scoring 25 against a proper NBA team.

  7. Black Mamba. I would pay any amount of money to see two things: (1) Derek Fisher’s face the first time Kobe asked him to call him Black Mamba from now on, and (2) Kobe writing lyrics in a notebook during those couple of weeks when he thought he was gonna be a rapper.

  8. In 2013, Kobe tweeted out that a friend (who he didn’t name) gave him the nickname Vino, referring to his ability to get better with age. Kobe ended up missing 139 games over the final three seasons of his career after that. That does not sound like that great of a wine.

  9. In a profile of Bryant in Rolling Stone, Anthony Bannister, a high school friend of Kobe’s, said that Kobe would call him at 3 A.M. and they would write rhymes together. “You’d think it was Nas,” Bannister said of Kobe’s lyricism. I don’t know Anthony Bannister, but I know that he’s a liar. (In that same story, Kobe Bryant said he wanted to buy a tiger because he was friends with Mike Tyson and Tyson had three of them.)

  10. Of course, the flip side of this is that Chris Childs immediately becomes one of the five coolest players in the league that year after the Kobe fight.

  11. Interesting sidebar: The most points Kobe scored in any game during his rookie season was 24, which is what he ended up changing his number to in the off-season between the 2006 season and the 2007 season.

  12. He played 35 total games, missing 47 on account of injuries.

  13. If we’re rounding, it’s 29-6-5 in the season, 29-7-6 in the playoffs.

  14. Iverson won the MVP that year. If we arrange him, Shaq, and Kobe for that season into rankings based on their VORP or their BPM or their Win Shares or their PER, the results are always the same: Shaq finishes ahead of both of them.

  15. He leads the league in Win Shares, Playoff Win Shares, Playoff VORP, Playoff BPM, Playoff Net Rating; he’s third in regular season PER, second in playoff PER; he’s the league MVP and the Finals MVP; and the Spurs win their second championship. Plus, just for fun, he threw up 37–16 on the Lakers in Game 6 of their Western Conference Semifinals series, closing it out in LA.

  16. I was in a casino in Louisiana when the news of his rape charge came out. I was in a different casino in Louisiana the night he scored 81 on the Raptors. I don’t know what that means. I don’t think it means anything. Also: Casinos in Louisiana are ugly.

  17. If you want to add LeBron here, who was in just his second season but averaged 27-7-7 on the season and also led a closet full of brooms and mop buckets to 42 wins, then go ahead.

  18. Probably not Nash, though.

  19. John Hollinger of ESPN.com, writing about Wade’s 2006 Finals: “Overall, Wade’s 33.8 PER is easily the best of any Finals performer since the merger. While it seems strange to have somebody besides Michael Jordan in the top spot, the truth is Jordan never dominated a Finals to this extent.”

  20. This is correct but also incorrect: George McCloud wore 24 during Kobe’s rookie year, but he actually wasn’t acquired until mid-season, so Kobe could have chosen 24. The season before Kobe’s rookie year, it was worn by Fred Roberts, who was waived in July of 1996, the month after Kobe was acquired and several months before Kobe’s rookie season began.

  21. I made this up, but there’s at least a 15 percent chance this is true. He watched Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and decided he wanted to tell everyone to call him Black Mamba. There’s no way you can convince me that it’s impossible that he watched 24 and then decided he wanted that to be his number.

  22. I also made this one up. It’s also probably true, too.

  23. Possibly interesting: Kobe’s Lakers suffered four losses by 28 or more points in elimination games. That said, Kobe played in 17 elimination games as a starter and was 9–8 in them. (Jordan was 6–7 in his 13 elimination games.)

  24. Possibly interesting: Kobe never led a championship team in Win Shares for the season.

  25. LeBron’s VORP that season remains the best ever among all seasons and all players who are not Michael Jordan.

  26. His whole 2006 season was like some Daniel Day-Lewis method actor shit.

  WHAT ATTRIBUTES MAKE FOR THE BEST BASKETBALL VILLAIN?

  (AND ALSO: WHO’S A FIRST-BALLOT SELECTION FOR THE BASKETBALL VILLAIN HALL OF FAME?)

  I was playing Mortal Kombat II not that long ago, and the way the game is set up (and the way most fighting games are set up) is you pick a fighter, then you fight your way through a bunch of other fighters until you get to the boss. In the early editions of the MK series,1 the fighters you had to face were arranged in a literal tower, bottom to top, in order of ascending difficulty. So the first person you fought was at the bottom of the tower and he or she was always super easy to beat, and then after you’d beat that person, you’d move up a level and fight the next person, who was slightly harder to handle. It looked like this (imagine the equal signs are fighter faces):

  [=] (last person: hardest fight)

  [=]

  [=]

  [=]

  [=]

  [=]

  [=]

  [=] (first person: easiest fight)

  There were either more or less peopl
e in the tower depending on the game, but you get it. That’s how it worked.

  Now, and I’m slightly embarrassed by this, but I have to tell you a thing: This kind of doesn’t have anything to do with this chapter. I mean, in a sense, yes, it does, but in a different sense it doesn’t.

  The chapter is about basketball villains, which are great, and also the Tower of Villains, which is a thing I just made up right now. It’s similar to what you had to face in those Mortal Kombat games, in that it’s a tower, but it’s also not similar to what you had to face in those Mortal Kombat games, in that we’re not talking about fighting them here. Mostly, all we’re doing is (1) identifying the attributes a good basketball villain has and (2) identifying some players who belong in the Basketball Villain Hall of Fame.

  That’s just the way these things go sometimes.

  WHAT ATTRIBUTES MAKE FOR THE BEST BASKETBALL VILLAIN?

  There are 13 of them. When determining the excellence or non-excellence of a basketball villain, you have to ask yourself:

  1. Is he very smart? Big, strong, dumb villains are rarely ever as big-picture dangerous as smart, poised, composed villains. It’s why Godzilla was never as scary as Anton Chigurh. So, are you talking about (a) someone who is just going to clobber you upside the head for no reason other than to clobber you upside the head, like what Brad Miller did to Shaquille O’Neal in 2002 when Shaq tried to post him up in the lane? Or are you talking about (b) someone who has concocted a master plan to unravel your team’s whole everything, and the first step in that master plan is to clobber you upside the head, like what Kevin McHale did to Kurt Rambis in the 1984 Finals?

  2. Does he revel in the idea of his own villainy? This one is important. For a guy to be a truly elite basketball villain, he has to want to be a basketball villain. He has to want to slit the sports-throats of his opponents and, in the case of a few, also the sports-throats of the fans of his opponent. It’s what separates someone like Dwight Howard, who appears to hate the idea of people not liking him, from someone like Shaq, who appeared to thrive on it.

  3. Is he willing to taunt people? For this category, we’re talking about instances like when Reggie Miller hit a game-winning shot against the Bulls in Chicago during a game in 1994 and then bowed to the crowd as his team celebrated around him. (Bowing in an opposing stadium is such a dope move.) (Of course, it’d have been even doper if the shot had actually won the game for the Pacers. What happened was it put the Pacers up two with 0.8 second left. On the next play, Toni Kuko hit a three at the buzzer to win the game for the Bulls. The next time the teams played, a game the Bulls won in Indiana, Scottie Pippen bowed to the crowd after the final buzzer. Scottie Pippen remains wildly underrated.)

  4. Is he a contributing player? For a basketball villain to have any real heft or weight to his villainy, he has to be action-involved. He has to be in the game doing things.

  5. Is he a contributing player on a good team? Draymond Green makes for such a great basketball villain because he’s an important player on an important team. If a lesser player on a lesser team did all of the same things Draymond has done, we wouldn’t look at that player as a villain. He’d just be a dick.

  6. How far outside of the rules is he willing to step during warfare? Will he trip someone when he thinks no one is looking like what Bruce Bowen did to Chauncey Billups in Game 7 of the 2005 NBA Finals? Will he clothesline someone when he knows everyone is looking like what Raja Bell did to Kobe Bryant in the 2006 playoffs?2 And so on.

  7. Is there a team that he just really looks to love giving the business to? Larry and the Lakers, Magic and the Celtics, Jordan and the Pistons, Latrell Sprewell and the Knicks, Shaq and the Kings, Allen Iverson and the Cavs, John Wall and the Celtics, etc.

  8. If yes to the above question, then does he have a good reason for it? Did he get traded away after tension between him and those in charge grew too big to ignore? Was he overlooked on draft night? Did it start out as a hatred for one of the players on the other team and then it just eventually spread to everyone else on the team?

  9. Is there a player that he just really looks to love giving the business to?

  10. If yes to the above question, then does he have a good reason for it? A lot of times when we see this one it’s because one guy played the same position as the guy he hated and so people were always comparing the two and he hated it. Another reason is both guys belonged in the Top Ten Players in the League This Year grouping for more than a couple seasons together so they just developed a dislike for one another. Another reason is the two players were on the same team and their relationship soured and then one got traded away. Another reason is personal stuff that isn’t at all basketball related, like the time [redacted] [redacted] a player’s [redacted], or the time [redacted] [redacted] a player’s [redacted], or the time [redacted] [redacted] a player’s [redacted].

  11. Does he possess a discernible amount of mystery in his bones? Complicated basketball villains are ideal. What’s his motivation? What’s his purpose? Why does he exist?

  12. Does he have a “look”? Can you identify him just by his shadow, or maybe just by his arms, or maybe just by his smile, or maybe just by the way he walks? I have a guy in my head right now that I’m thinking of that I hate from high school and if you took him and literally everyone else in the world and had them walk behind a sheet with a light shining toward them so that all I could see was the outline of the way they walked, I could absolutely pick that fucker out of the seven billion other people.

  13. Was he ever slain? Bill Laimbeer is the greatest basketball villain of all time, and a big part of the reason is because there’s an arc to his existence. He has an identifiable beginning to his reign (when the Bad Boys–era Pistons became dominant) and also an identifiable end to his reign (after Jordan and the Bulls knocked the weapons out of their hands in the 1991 playoffs). Villains who are impossible to beat are fine. But villains who are mortal are way better.

  The more of these attributes a person possesses, the greater the basketball villain he is. That’s how you figure out who belongs where in the Tower of Villains. A player who only possesses one or two of them can be a villain, sure, but just barely. He’d belong at the bottom of the tower. Someone who possesses all of them, however—well, now you’re talking about a first-class villain. A top-level villain. An iconic basketball villain, of which there are only four, maybe five.

  THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT BASKETBALL VILLAINY, AND ONE QUESTION ABOUT THE TOWER OF VILLAINS

  1. If a player is a villain, does he always remain a villain? Is that just who he is for his entire career? Or can he move in and out of villainy?

  Villainy is not a state of permanence. There’s always redemption to be had. The most straight-line example of this is LeBron James deciding to leave Cleveland via an hour-long televised announcement in 2010, immediately becoming a villain, staying a villain for the four years he was in Miami, and then wiping away his villain status after he returned to Cleveland for the 2015 season. He and the Cavs eventually lost in the Finals that year, but he offered so much of himself during that run that it became impossible to view him as a villain anymore.

  2. What about for players who weren’t in that sort of circumstance? How do they redeem themselves?

  Well, it’s just a matter of balance, really, and I mean that literally. Think on it like it’s one of those scales with weights on both sides. On the left side, you’ve got all of the villainous and dastardly things a player did. If, following his heel turn, he’s able to amass enough good things to stack up on the right side so as to counterbalance the bad things, then that’s how he redeems himself.

  A fun way to approach villain redemption—and I mean villainy in general, not just basketball villainy—is to say, “Okay. If [NAME] were on a cruise ship and the cruise ship all of a sudden sunk, how many people would he [or she] have to save before I considered them to be a good person now?” If we stick with LeBron, then he probably would’ve had to save a good eigh
t, nine people’s lives on that boat before Clevelanders would’ve been like, “Maybe he ain’t that bad after all.” Meanwhile, someone like Rick Barry, a historic mega-prick, he’d have to save everyone on the cruise, then he’d have to swim to the bottom of the ocean, retrieve the ship, fix it, then load everyone back on it so they could resume their vacations. That’s what he’d have to do to redeem himself.

  3. That’s fun. Can we do that for more basketball villains? How many people would ______ have to save from a sinking ship before we consider him to be good? No.

  4. How do you know who belongs where in the Tower of Villains?

  Easy. It’s an attributes-based thing. There are five levels in the Tower of Villains. The bottom level (Level 1) is made up of the weakest villains. The top level (Level 5) is made up of the strongest villains. And the middle section increases as you’d expect it to.

  People who end up in Level 1 are those who possess one to three of the basketball villain attributes. (Unofficially, this is the Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin level.) People who end up in Level 2 possess four to seven. (This is the Colin Farrell as Bullseye in Daredevil level.) People in Level 3 possess eight or nine. (This is the Chong Li in Bloodsport level.) People in Level 4 possess ten or eleven. (This is the Jaws level.) And people in Level 5 possess twelve or thirteen. (This is the Hannibal Lecter level.)

  THE BASKETBALL VILLAIN HALL OF FAME FIRST-BALLOT PICKS, ARRANGED BY VILLAINY

  1. Bill Laimbeer,3 1981–1994 (Level 5): The alpha villain. My favorite thing about him is that he was punched by so many people. He was punched by Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, Robert Parish, Alonzo Mourning, Bob Lanier, Larry Bird. Even Isiah Thomas punched him. That’s basically the starting lineup of an All-Star team. There was even a time when Benny the Bull, the mascot for the Bulls, beat up a life-size Bill Laimbeer doll during a stoppage in game action.