by Shea Serrano
Winner: Jordan
Tally: 1–1
Sidebar: The Lakers were down one in the final seconds of the Sprained Ankle Game and so Kareem had the ball. He turned to let fly a hook shot over Laimbeer. The shot clanked off the rim but Laimbeer was called for a foul. Replays showed that Laimbeer didn’t touch him.6 Kareem made both free throws,7 the Lakers won by one, then they won the title in Game 7. The next year, the Pistons beat the Lakers to win the title, and then they won it again the year after that. So you could make a pretty good argument that the Pistons were one bad call away from three-peating, which is crazy.
3. WHAT POST-INJURY POSE IS THE MOST ICONIC? This is an important category because the poses are the images that grow into myth. Figuring out who the winner is here is just a matter of looking to see which guy looked the most broken during the moment that people most remember from the game.
For Jordan, it was Pippen basically carrying him back to the bench after the Bulls had taken a three-point lead with just 6.2 seconds left following an especially rigorous few possessions.8 Jordan looked all the way cooked there. He looked like a deflated balloon, or like a bag of sand Pippen was dragging through an airport.9 It was great.10
For Isiah, it was him, his right ankle completely useless by this point, trying to sprint back to the defensive end of the floor after he’d made a layup that capped an 11–1 run that had finally, magically, mystically, unbelievably given the Pistons the lead. It’s a fantastic clip, that one of him trying to run back up court on one leg. There’s lots and lots of motion and very little movement. He looks like a dirt bike in the mud trying to throttle its way out of a rut. It was, same as the Jordan one, also great.
Winner: It has to go to Jordan, right? I love Isiah trying to tumble his body forward to get back into that play during his game. And I love all of the parts that exist within that specific moment. But I can’t get past Jordan looking like death as Scottie held him up. It might’ve maybe been a little exaggerated, and it might’ve maybe even been a little TOO perfect. But I think what it ends up being is: Isiah looked like he was ready to give his life to win that game as he tried to sprint back up the floor. Jordan looked like he’d already given his. Jordan wins here.
Tally: 2–1, Jordan
4. WHAT PERFORMANCE INSPIRED THE BEST IN-GAME CALL FROM ONE OF THE GAME’S ANNOUNCERS? This is a tinier category than the rest, but it still matters. The best thing anyone said during Jordan’s game was when Marv Albert, following Jordan’s near-end-of-game three, marveled, “He looks like he’s a boxer just hanging on along the ropes, but able to hit for a three-point Chicago lead.”11
The best thing anyone said during Isiah’s game happened at the end of his third-quarter run. By that point, it was all the way clear that he had been touched by whomever it is that controls the universe, and so there really wasn’t much left to do except watch him flame-throw the Lakers into the Pacific Ocean. His 24th and 25th points came as the quarter was ending. He caught the ball in the left corner, gave the much taller Michael Cooper a tiny dribble move to create a hair’s worth of space between the two, then threw up a rainbow fade-away that scraped the ceiling in the Forum. The ball swished through the net, and all the color commentator Billy Cunningham could think to do was shout “Again!” and he did it with such fervor, with such joy, with such disbelief, that there’s really no way to put Marv’s (albeit considerably more poetic) call above it.
Winner: Isiah.
Tally: 2–2
5. WHICH PLAYER HAD THE BETTER ACTUAL STAT LINE? Both were gigantic.
Jordan put up 38 points (13/27), 7 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals, 1 block, and 3 turnovers in his game. Isiah put up 43 points (18/32), 3 rebounds, 8 assists, 6 steals, 1 block, and 5 turnovers. Those are goofily close,12 so I guess maybe the most appropriate thing to do would be to look at each player’s Game Score, which is an advanced stat that was created by John Hollinger that gives a designated score for each player based on how well or poorly he played in a given game.
On Hollinger’s Game Score scale, anything up near a 40 is exceptional and anything down near a 10 is pretty average. For the Flu Game, Jordan’s Game Score was 29.4. For the Sprained Ankle Game, Isiah’s Game Score was 34.0. So there’s that.
BUT ALSO, we should probably give Jordan a few extra points because he played the entirety of his game under duress, while Isiah didn’t sprain his ankle until halfway through the third quarter.
BUT ALSO, we should probably give Isiah a few extra points because his third-quarter atomization of the Lakers, during which he scored 25 points, is still an NBA Finals record.
BUT ALSO, we should give Jordan a few extra points because, really, technically, Isiah only scored 11 points in the third quarter after his ankle sprain; meanwhile, Jordan had 17 flu-ridden points in the second quarter of his game.
BUT ALSO, we should give Isiah a few extra points because he was being guarded mostly by Michael Cooper, and Michael Cooper was selected to the NBA All-Defensive First or Second Team every year from 1981 to 1988 and also he won the 1987 Defensive Player of the Year Award; meanwhile, Jordan was mostly being guarded by Bryon Russell, whom Jordan regularly slayed.
So, I mean, I don’t know. It’s close. It’s all very close. It’s all very, very close. There are just so many pieces here. If I squint, though—if I make my eyes as tight and as focused as they can get—it looks a lot like this category has to go to . . .
Winner: Isiah
Overall Winner: Isiah Thomas’s Sprained Ankle Game proves better than Michael Jordan’s Flu Game, 3–2.
1. For all of this chapter, let’s 100 percent believe that Jordan actually did have the flu and not that he was hungover (as a popular conspiracy theory asserts) or that he was food poisoned (as his trainer asserts) or that he wasn’t near as sick as he was said to have been (as Jerry Sloan, coach of the Jazz, asserts).
2. The first two field goals of the game for the Knicks, actually.
3. Another game that fits into this category: Jordan’s Father’s Day Game. It was Game 6 of the 1996 Finals. The Bulls clinched the title. Afterward, Jordan laid on the floor in the locker room alone and cried. It was his first championship since his father’s murder in 1993.
4. Ignoring Rondo’s Dislocated Elbow Game, Dirk’s Flu-like Symptoms Game, MJ’s Father’s Day Game, Kobe’s Flu Game, Dwyane Wade’s Flu Game, and Iverson’s Swallowing Blood Game. (Iverson had gotten hit in the mouth near the end of a close Sixers–Bucks game. He wasn’t able to stop the bleeding during a timeout and so, afraid that the referees might not let him play, he simply closed his mouth and started swallowing blood. Over the next two minutes, Iverson made a layup, stole the ball, and hit five of six foul shots.)
5. These numbers very much fall into the GTFOH range for stat lines.
6. In 2014, Pat Riley acknowledged that there’d not been a foul. Pat Riley waiting 26 years to admit a thing everyone saw as soon as it happened is an extremely Pat Riley thing to do. I respect his dedication to the hustle.
7. In his 1993 book, The Winner Within, Riley said of Jabbar making those two very, very, very pressure-filled free throws: “Later, I asked Kareem what he had been thinking when he made those two shots. He said, ‘I like to get paid.’” I love that.
8. Jordan shot two free throws. He missed the second but got his own rebound. After stalling a bit, the Bulls initiated their offense. It ended with Jordan hitting a three, putting the Bulls up three. The Jazz came down, ran a quick play, got a dunk, then totally panicked. Rather than fouling (there were about 15 seconds left in the game and they were down one), they played regular full-court defense. It resulted in a Chicago dunk. Following his initial three, Jordan just sort of wandered around the court in a daze.
9. I don’t know which airline is letting people carrying bags of sand onto planes. Probably Southwest.
10. I think my favorite thing about it is that Pippen, ever brilliant, absolutely understood the mythology that was going to be built into that moment, which you can
tell because there’s a brief moment where he flashes a big smile as he holds Jordan up.
11. The second-best call of the game happened at the very end of it. The Bulls, who had a one-point lead, were inbounding the ball with 15 seconds left in the game. Luc Longley threw it to Scottie Pippen, and Pippen paused a bit because he was waiting for Karl Malone (who was guarding him) to foul him, because that’s what was supposed to happen in that moment. Malone, though, panicked, and so rather than foul Pippen, he just stood by him for a few seconds. Bill Walton, who was helping call the game, started shouting over everyone, “You gotta foul right now! You gotta foul! Karl Malone! What are you doing?!” I’m sure it’s a call that haunts Jazz fans, but for me, I loved every bit of it and still love every bit of it.
12. Writing for ESPN, Kevin Pelton had Jordan’s Flu Game ranked as the eighth greatest Finals game of all time, and then had Isiah’s Sprained Ankle Game as the seventh greatest.
WHAT WOULD’VE HAPPENED IF SHAQ AND HAKEEM HAD PLAYED THAT ONE-ON-ONE GAME?
Following the 1995 NBA Finals, Shaquille O’Neal, whose Magic lost the series 4–0 to Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets, wrote a typed note to Olajuwon. The note very simply read:
Hakeem—
The series may be a done deal, but it ain’t over between you and me. Sure, you’re pretty good with your team behind you, but I want you one on one.
—Shaq
That was the entire note. I happened across it while I was rummaging around through the old Sports Illustrated archives. There are some quick questions that come along when something like this comes up. To wit:
• Were typewritten notes very popular in 1995? Is that just what was happening back then? People were typing up tiny notes like that and sending them to each other? Because that sounds like the shittiest version of Twitter I have ever heard of.
• Beyond just person-to-person notes, were post-Finals notes a common thing among NBA super-stars? Are they a common thing now? Is it some long-standing tradition that the public at large is just unaware of? Did Bill Russell write one to Wilt after the Celtics beat the Lakers in 1969? Did Jordan write one to Malone after the Bulls beat the Jazz in 1997?1 Did LeBron write one to Steph after the Cavs beat the Warriors in 2016?2
• Did Shaq own his own typewriter? Because that’s fun to think about. It seems more likely that he was just sitting there and shouted out, “Aye, someone bring me a typewriter right now,” and then someone brought him a typewriter. But maybe not. Maybe he was actually a typewriter enthusiast back then. Maybe he has a very literature-romantic side to him that nobody talks about.3 Maybe he sat there at the typewriter while in a bathtub, a cigarette in one hand, his own wit in his other, tapping away at it like Dalton Trumbo.4
• If Shaq did own a typewriter, I wonder if it was a giant typewriter. I seem to remember reading a thing when he was going through a divorce where his monthly expenses were made public and he was spending $24,300 a month on fuel for all of his cars. I bring that up to say it doesn’t seem that unreasonable that he would’ve commissioned someone to build him a giant typewriter to accommodate his giant ham hands.
There are a lot more questions that can be asked, really.5 But there’s only one that I want to get answered in this chapter:
The note (apparently) was the first of all the pieces of what was to be a remarkable event: Three months after the Finals, Shaq and Hakeem were going to play one-on-one live for $1,000,000. It was called The War on the Floor and it was sponsored by Taco Bell, if you can even believe that, which you should, because the ’90s were super fucking weird. The day before the game, though, Hakeem pulled out, saying he’d injured his back lifting weights and couldn’t play.6 The game got canceled, then some possible names came up as replacements,7 then the whole thing was eventually just outright canceled. There was never a follow-up or anything.
But so then the question here is obvious: If Shaq and Hakeem had played that game, who would’ve won?
As foreign as the idea of two basketball superstars playing against each other for money in games of one-on-one may sound today, there was actually precedent for exactly that sort of matchup. The five best examples: (5) In 1990, eight potential members of that year’s NBA Draft class played in a one-on-one tournament called the One-on-One Collegiate Challenge. Bo Kimble beat Gary Payton in the final game, winning himself $100,000.8 (4) In 1972, there was an actual one-on-one tournament sanctioned by the NBA. The winner received $15,000. (3) In 1988, there was a video game that came out called Jordan vs. Bird: One on One, and I know that’s not real life, but that game meant a whole lot to me so that’s why I included it here.9 (2) In 1992, six retired NBA players played in a pay-per-view one-on-one tournament called “Clash of the Legends.” Kareem was there. Dr. J was there. George Gervin, Connie Hawkins, Rick Barry, Tiny Archibald were all there. Kareem ended up beating Dr. J in the final round. The whole thing may, as you’re reading those names, sound like it was a good and fun thing, but mostly it was not.10 Mostly it was just a bunch of old guys shooting hook shots and layups. (1) In 2011, rapper Bow Wow challenged Kobe Bryant to a game of one-on-one for $1,000. (Bow Wow starred in Like Mike so I’m counting him as a “basketball superstar.”) It was a bloodletting. The game ended with Bow Wow, exhausted, lying on the floor of the gym. “I don’t ever wanna go to the NBA,” he said, smiling, but smiling the way you smile when you’re just glad a horrible thing is over. “Everything that [Kobe] does on [the video game NBA] 2K, that shit is real.”
These are guidelines for how the Shaq vs. Hakeem one-on-one game was supposed to be played and governed:
• The game would be organized as such that, rather than play a single game to 15 or 21 or whatever for the $1,000,000, they would play 10 separate 2-minute rounds, each worth $100,000.
• The 2-minute rounds would have a 12-second shot clock per possession.
• For any round that ended in a tie, the money and the victory for that round would just get rolled over to the next round.
• Scoring would be done same as the NBA (two points for baskets made inside the three-point line, three points for baskets made outside of it), with one big exception: Any shots made from 32 feet and beyond would be worth six points.
A few other things about the event that are interesting to know but aren’t explicitly part of the rules or structure:
• The game was going to be shown on pay-per-view. It was going to cost between $19.95 and $29.95 to watch it. That seems like a remarkably low price to me. I mean, these were the two main guys from the two NBA teams that had just met in the Finals. Right now, as I write this book, it’s 2017. So that means if we had the today version of this game, it’d be LeBron vs. Steph.11 I can’t think of an amount of money I wouldn’t pay to watch that.
• There were two undercard matches that were to precede the Shaq and Hakeem game: Lakers guard Nick Van Exel was going to play one-on-one against Nets guard Kenny Anderson, and Joe Smith, then an unsigned rookie but the number-one pick in the draft that year, was going to play one-on-one against Kevin Garnett(!!!), also then an unsigned rookie.12
• The game was going to be played at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.
• The NBA basically just ignored that any of this was happening.
The very natural reflex to looking at the “Who would’ve won if Shaq and Hakeem had played one-on-one in 1995?” question is to very quickly and confidently respond with some version of “Oh, Hakeem obviously would’ve destroyed Shaq, obviously.” It’s understandable, really, what with the game coming shortly after Olajuwon’s Rockets gave O’Neal’s Magic the business. Here’s the thing of it, though: That matchup would’ve been way closer than maybe you’re assuming. Some numbers:
If we just go all-time matchups, Shaq’s teams and Hakeem’s teams played against each other 20 times during the regular season and 8 times in the playoffs during their careers. Shaq’s teams beat Hakeem’s teams 14 of the 20 times during the regular season, and Hakeem’s teams beat Shaq’s teams
5 of the 8 times in the playoffs.13 For the regular season, Shaq14 held statistical advantages in four of the six important categories:
REGULAR SEASON:
SHAQ HAKEEM
PPG: 22.1 vs. 18.4
RPG: 12.4 vs. 9.1
APG: 3.6 vs. 2.9
FG%: 54.4 vs. 44.7
BPG: 1.8 vs. 2.4
SPG: 0.9 vs. 1.4
For the playoffs, Shaq held even bigger statistical advantages, this time in five of the six important categories:
PLAYOFFS:
SHAQ HAKEEM
PPG: 28.8 vs. 23.0
RPG: 11.4 vs. 9.4
APG: 5.1 vs. 3.0
FG%: 55.6 vs. 46.5
BPG: 3.3 vs. 1.4
SPG: 0.5 vs. 1.6
Now, I don’t figure all of this is all that relevant if we’re just trying to figure what would’ve happened had they played their one-on-one game that September in 1995, given that most of their matchups happened well after that, but I just wanted to put their career numbers against each side-by-side because it’s interesting to see.
A more accurate measure of things, at least for this particular exercise, would be to look at what was happening only during the 1995 and 1996 seasons.
For Shaq, 1995 was just his third season in the league. He was a baby monster, barely 23 years old, but he’d already proved himself a dynamo. He won his first NBA scoring title that year (29.3 ppg). He was All-NBA Second Team. He finished second in the MVP voting.15 And his Magic beat Jordan’s Bulls in the playoffs, which, I mean, okay, that was the season where Jordan came back from retirement at the very end of it and so of course he wasn’t his completely normal self, but still, it’s Jordan in the playoffs so we can’t completely ignore it.
For Olajuwon,16 1995 was his eleventh season in the league. He was All-NBA Third Team and he was also All-Defensive Second Team. He turned 32 in January, so he was considerably older than Shaq, but certainly still in his prime. And he’d led his team to a championship in 1994, and so that’s a thing we definitely have to take into account because championship pedigree is always important. Here’s a bigger thing, though: As good as Olajuwon was in the 1994 season and playoffs, he was even better during the 1995 playoff run. Look at this shit: He averaged 35 points per game against Karl Malone and the Utah Jazz in the first round, 29.6 points per game against Charles Barkley and the Phoenix Suns in the Conference Semis, 35.3 points per game against David Robinson and the San Antonio Spurs in the Conference Finals, and 32.8 points per game against Shaq and the Magic in the NBA Finals.17 That’s a nuts string of games, man. Those four players he knocked off won five of the eight MVP awards from 1993 to 2000.18