by Shea Serrano
That’s a sample size of 25 different duos. I’m sure that’s plenty.
EIGHT ROUNDS OF ELIMINATION
1. Is the duo Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer? If yes, then they’re out.
Dang. Okay. So I guess that means we’re losing Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer here. Tough break for them.
2. Did they win a bunch of games?
There are three ways to tally things here. We can look at (a) regular season wins, (b) playoff wins, or (c) regular season wins and playoff wins combined. I’m not all the way certain that regular season wins should matter a bunch because the regular season is just the regular season, but I also don’t want to disregard them totally because those wins, if massive, are definitely a version of important. Maybe the best way to handle it is to just look at playoff appearance percentages. What I mean is let’s look at the number of seasons a duo was together versus the number of times their team made the playoffs. Any duo whose team made the playoffs less than, say, 75 percent of the time they were together, then we can eliminate them.
With that hurdle in place, it means we’re losing Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash here. They were together for six seasons and made the playoffs four times, good for 66.7 percent of the time. It also means we’re losing Tim Hardaway and Chris Mullin (my dark horse pick).14 Everyone else on the list was at or above the 75 percent threshold.15
REMAINING DUOS: John Stockton and Karl Malone, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Steve Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire, Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade, Magic Johnson and James Worthy, Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway, Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady, Tim Duncan and David Robinson, Charles Barkley and Kevin Johnson, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving, Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer, Julius Erving and Moses Malone.
3. Did they win a bunch of playoff series together?
I suppose that depends on what we’re quantifying as “a bunch” here. Requiring our duos to have won at least 10 playoff series together feels like too big of an ask, given that only 5 of our remaining 23 duos even played together at all for 10 or more seasons.16 That said, requiring too few series wins here would defeat the purpose of this category, given that, excepting Yao and T-Mac, they all won at least three of them, even Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, if you can even believe that. I say we split the difference and set the requirement for moving past this round of cuts as, “Any duo advancing past this round has to have won at least seven playoff series.” That means we’re losing Yao and T-Mac (0), Chris and Blake (3), Dr. J and Moses Malone (6; this one hurts), Shaq and Dwyane Wade (6), Charles Barkley and Kevin Johnson (5), Shaq and Penny (5), and Nash and Stoudemire (5).
REMAINING DUOS: John Stockton and Karl Malone, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, Magic Johnson and James Worthy, Tim Duncan and David Robinson, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving, Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer.
4. How interesting was the duo’s compatibility, both on the court and philosophically?
This is probably my favorite subsection of all the subsections of this conversation, because this is really what’s at the center of what makes duos so much fun and so entertaining. All the very best, most fulfilling duos have some sort of identity attached to their union; they have very set, very easy-to-identify roles and labels and jobs and faults. And more than that: All of those things from one person snap together perfectly when measured up against the ones possessed by the person they’re teamed up with.
Stockton and Malone are the easiest and most complete pairing17 (one was short, one was tall, one was white, one was black, one was unflappable, one was shaky at the worst times, one wanted nothing more on offense than to pass, one wanted nothing more on offense than to shoot, both were iron-tough, etc.), but all the elite duos had a similar pathos, which is to say that they were fundamentally aligned (even when they looked opposite of one another outwardly).
We’re making some tough cuts in this category. We just talked about how Stockton and Malone were seamless, so for sure they’re safe. And we know we can’t cut Shaq and Kobe, given that they were Feuding Gods, and Feuding Gods is always a great angle. And we also know we can’t cut Jordan and Pippen, given that Jordan was the perfect overlord and Scottie was the perfect second gun. We also can’t cut LeBron and Dwyane Wade (new king + old king), or Magic and Kareem (unburdened love of life savant + ornery savant), or Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp (a true buddy cop movie), or Isiah and Laimbeer (little evil and big evil). I think those are the only ones who make it past this round, though, which is a hard thing for me to type.
We’re losing: Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant (they could never quite get all their pieces sorted); Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol (a successful duo, obviously, but not anywhere near as thrilling as Kobe and Shaq); Magic Johnson and James Worthy (just not as cool together as Magic and Kareem, is all); Tim Duncan and David Robinson (my heart is broken); LeBron James and Kyrie Irving (this is a hard cut to make); Larry Bird and Kevin McHale (those Celtics teams always felt a little too much like teams for Larry and Kevin to really have a chance here); Hakeem and Clyde (Hakeem probably would’ve had a better shot if we’d just paired him up with himself, if we’re being honest with one another); Steph and Klay (let’s you and me have this conversation again in 2021 because Steph and Klay are going to be in a different spot if they stick together through then).
REMAINING DUOS: John Stockton and Karl Malone, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer.
5. How’d their partnership end?
The final seven.
• Shaq and Kobe: They had a swordfight atop an active volcano. Kobe eventually sliced open Shaq’s chest and shoved him in it. Shaq was reborn in Miami a year later.
• Stockton and Malone: Stockton ended up retiring in 2003. Malone hung on for one more tumultuous season, chasing a ring with Kobe and Shaq and the Lakers in 2004. He didn’t get it.
• Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer: Laimbeer retired early in the 1994 season and Isiah's body betrayed him shortly thereafter.
• Payton and Kemp: Kemp turned into the real-life version of Vince Vaughn’s Delivery Man. Payton, like Malone, attempted chasing a ring down after his and Kemp’s partnership ended. (He was even on that same 2004 Lakers team as Malone, Kobe, and Shaq.) He caught up to his in Miami in 2006 on a team led by Shaq and Dwyane Wade.
• Jordan and Pippen: Jordan retired in 1998 (for the second of three times). Pippen left on a solo journey of self-examination.
• Magic and Kareem: Kareem retired in 1989. Two years later, Magic was forced to retire after finding out he’d contracted HIV.
• LeBron and Wade: LeBron left for home in Cleveland. Wade left for home in Chicago.
This one seems like a tricky round of cuts because minus Shaq and Kobe’s ending, easily the best and most gigantic of all the endings, all the rest land within a pretty close proximity of one another. It’s actually an easy cut, though. There are two duos we're losing. We're losing Isiah and Laimbeer, mostly because that ending felt very lackluster when it happened, and also we're losing LeBron and Dwyane. They get cut because they're the only one duo of the remaining non-Shaq-and-Kobe duos where one of the members still had bigger, more substantial days ahead of him.
REMAINING DUOS: John Stockton and Karl Malone, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdu
l-Jabbar, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.
6. Was each member of the duo in his prime during their time together?
This is a simple fill-in-the-blank category.
• Stockton and Malone: Duh. They played their whole goddamn lives together. (A fun thing: Stockton and Malone won a total of 906 regular season games together. Only three other guys in the whole history of the NBA ever won more.)18
• Shaq and Kobe: Nope. Shaq was the fully realized version of Shaq, but we were still four or five years from the fully realized version of Kobe.
• Payton and Kemp: Yes. (Here’s a thing to think about: Jordan retired in 1998, officially ending that era of basketball. If we look at the final half-dozen years of that period, which is when Payton and Kemp were dynamos, the Sonics won 357 games, second only to the Bulls [362]. That’s an average of almost 60 wins a season for six straight seasons. That’s what Payton and Kemp did. It’s incredible. And yet history barely remembers them.)
• Jordan and Pippen: Yes.
• Magic and Kareem: They overlapped primes, but certainly not as perfectly as the others.
We lose Shaq and Kobe and Magic and Kareem here.
REMAINING DUOS: John Stockton and Karl Malone, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.
7. Was the duo fun to watch?
When I was in middle school—this was something like seventh grade, maybe eighth—I spent the night at a friend’s house. That evening, right around dinnertime, his mom hollered back toward his room that dinner was ready. We quit whatever it was we were doing (probably playing video games, but possibly ignoring each other while we looked at separate issues of Playboy) and walked to the kitchen. When I got to the table, I could barely believe what I saw. His mom, who, to the best of my knowledge to that point, was not an insane person, had set our dinner out for us, and guess what it was? Hand to God, it was a single piece of ham between two pieces of white bread. That’s it. That’s all. There was no mustard, no mayonnaise, no lettuce, no tomatoes, no nothing. There weren’t even any chips on the plate, or fruit on the plate, or anything else on the table. The only thing there was bread, ham, bread, plate, top to bottom, in that exact order.
Now, to be sure, we ate it, of course. And it was fine, of course. And we felt full afterward, of course. It was sustenance, of course. We could’ve survived a week or month or year or entire lifetime on just that bread, ham, bread, plate, over and over again, forever, of course. But why would we want to, and why would anyone ever want to, when there are more enjoyable foods out there, you know what I’m saying?
We’re losing Stockton and Malone here.
REMAINING DUOS: Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.
8. Tiebreaker.
We’re at a tie here.
Both of our final two duos won games (though MJ and Pippen won far more). Both duos were wonderfully compatible (if we’re picking sides, though, I prefer my duos to be one big guy and one small guy, so Payton and Kemp get the nod here). Both duos had narrative endings that were okay-but-not-super. Both duos featured two guys in their prime. And both duos were exceptionally fun to watch play together.
So, I say again: We’re at a tie here.
I don’t want to end things on a tie, though, because ties are for cowards. And I also don’t want to end things by just looking at championships won, because too many basketball conversations end that way, and it’s rarely ever fun. And so that means we need a different tiebreaker micro-category to tilt things one way or the other. I’m going with nicknames.
For an exceptional duo (which both of these are) to be a perfect duo (which only one of these are), both of the guys in it need to have their own very great, very neat, very dope, very wonderful nicknames. It might seem like a tiny thing, or a dumb thing, or a sidebar thing, but it’s not. It’s vital when you’re rubbing your fingers across the texture of perfection; you have to feel that part; it has to be there.
And so, with that final benchmark in place, I say with certainty that the most perfect duo in NBA history was Gary Payton, otherwise known as The Glove, and Shawn Kemp, otherwise known as The Reign Man.
THE WINNING DUO: Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.
1. Kobe Bryant and Derek Fisher won more playoff series together (32) but less titles (5). Also, Derek Fisher wasn’t an All-Star.
2. In March of 2017, I received an email from a guy I’d never met before named Taylor. He said he was in town for the night because he was visiting his best friend, Josh, because Josh’s dad was in the hospital. He asked if I had some time to hang out, maybe get dinner. I said sure, and so we three went to dinner that night. While there, we actually brainstormed these duo requirements together. It was great and helpful. The most interesting part of the evening, though, was when we talked about Josh’s father, whom he referred to as Beast. The two best Beast stories: (1) One time, while working on a roof, he got into a fight with a man. The man lost his balance during the scuffle and tumbled over the edge of the roof, but Beast, a superhero, caught him by his arm at the last possible moment and prevented him from plummeting down to the ground. Beast didn’t catch him just to catch him, though. He caught him because he wasn’t done fighting him. He held the man by the wrist with one hand and, as the man dangled helplessly in the air, continued to punch him in the face with the other. (2) One time in high school, Beast, a track runner, ran a four-minute mile during a track meet. Somehow, he still finished last in the race, he said. // I don’t know how true either of those stories are, but I’m choosing to believe both of them. I’m very pro-Beast.
3. These two actually got in a confrontation with one another during a Timberwolves practice in 2000.
4. One was definitely in his prime, one was approaching it.
5. Two younger guys.
6. One older guy, one younger guy.
7. One older guy, one younger-ish guy.
8. Both guys are older. (It’s very crazy to think about how Shaq has played with Penny, Kobe, Dwyane Wade, LeBron, Steve Nash, and Paul Pierce.)
9. The only duos eligible were ones from after the merger. Apologies to Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, Bill Russell and Bob Cousy, Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas, Wilt Chamberlain and Hal Greer, George Mikan and Jim Pollard (the original Shaq and Kobe, except super not), John Havlicek and Dave Cowens, John Havlicek and Bill Russell, Sam Jones and Bill Russell (honestly, you could just stick any name you want with Bill Russell’s), Bob Pettit and Slater Martin (I’m sad that we’ll never have another big-time NBA player named Bob again), and Willis Reed and Walt Frazier.
10. As of me writing this sentence.
11. Tim Duncan and Tony Parker as a duo actually won 733 regular season games, good for second-place all time among duos, but I just couldn’t, in my right mind, separate them from Manu Ginobili. Mostly, I avoided mentioning any of the serious Big Three groups in this chapter. I just didn’t want to break them up. The only serious ones I broke up were Bird, Parish, and McHale and also LeBron, Wade, and Chris Bosh. Bird and McHale together as a duo is just too fun of a thing not to talk about, same as LeBron and Wade. All my love and best wishes to Robert Parish and Chris Bosh, though.
12. As of me writing this sentence.
13. As of me writing this sentence.
14. They were together for six seasons and made the playoffs three times.
15. Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant were at exactly 75 percent. (Six postseason appearances in eight years together.)
16. Stockton and Malone (18), Jordan and Pippen (10), Magic and Kareem (10), Bird and McHale (12), Isiah and Laimbeer (13).
17. While working on this book, I had a person whose name I refuse to say argue that Steve Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire were a better duo than John Stockton and Karl Malone. And while I acknowledge that they were masters of the uptempo game, I mean, come on. When you line them up against Stockton and Malone, they were like when you’d ask for an iPhone for Christmas and your mom would buy you an ePhone she saw at the grocery
store that “looked like the one you wanted.”
18. Kareem won 1074, Robert Parish won 1014, and Tim Duncan won 1001.
IF YOU COULD DUNK ON ANY ONE PERSON, WHO WOULD IT BE?
A scenario: If you could dunk on any figure in time, past or present, basketball-related or otherwise, who would you pick? Someone famous? Someone giant? A renowned physicist? A person from your work you secretly hate? Would you dunk on James Naismith? That would be a delicious slice of irony. Would you dunk on the Pope? Anne Hathaway? Usher?
We should put at least a few rules in place here for who you can and can’t pick for your Dream Dunk:
• YOU GET ONE DUNK. That’s it. It’s guaranteed to go in and it’s guaranteed to be monstrous—something like Baron Davis booming on Andrei Kirilenko in Game 3 of the 2007 Western Conference Semifinals—but it’s just the one. So don’t waste it.1
• TIME TRAVEL IS PARTIALLY ALLOWED. We’re treating this like a Timecop situation. Do you remember Timecop? It was a movie about a tiny government agency that policed time travel. One of the main parts of the time travel in that movie was, okay, you can travel through time, sure, but you can only go backward. You can’t go forward in time because the future hasn’t happened yet. We’re doing that here, too. So if you want to pick a person from any moment in time prior to you reading this sentence at this exact moment, that’s cool. Go for it. But nobody from the future is eligible.
• JESUS CHRIST IS OUT. It’d for sure be a lot of fun to bang one home against The Redeemer. I mean, if for nothing else than just because there’d be so many incredible things you could say to him as you were dunking on him or immediately after you dunked on him. (“Resurrect yourself from this!” “And on the eighth day God created the windmill dunk!” “You just got baptized!” “Let he without sin get yammed on!”) Ultimately, though, it’s just too easy of an answer. So he’s out. You can’t pick him. (FYI, my number-one Dream Dunk if we were able to pick both the dunker and the dunkee: 1988 Dominique Wilkins dunking on 32 CE Jesus Christ. The Human Highlight Film vs. The Captain of Salvation. That’s first-class billing.)