The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

NINE
THE PYRAMID: LEVEL 3



36. GEORGE MIKAN

Resume: 9 years, 7 quality, 4 All-Stars … Top 5 (’50, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’54) … leader: scoring (3x), rebounds (2x) … best player for 7 straight champs (including NBL and BAA) … 3-year peak: 28–14–3, 42% FG … playoffs: 23–14 (60 g’s)
Give yourself a high five because you just reached the dumbest moment of the book. I mean, where would you rank the best player of the pre-shot-clock era? Calling someone the greatest pre-shot-clock force is like calling One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird the greatest computer sports game of the early eighties.1 In other words, you’re not saying much. The six-foot-ten Mikan peaked with a tiny three-second lane, no shot clock, no seven-footers, no goaltending rules and barely any black players … and it’s not like he was throwing up Wilt-like numbers. Look how he compared to his peers during his last four quality years (1951–54).2


So Mikan led everyone in scoring and rebounding (but not in a staggering way) while attempting the most shots (by far) in a sport tailored to his specific attributes and talents (size and toughness). Make no mistake: Big George was not dynamic to watch. Here’s how Leonard Koppett described him: “The Lakers would bring the ball up slowly, waiting for the lumbering Mikan to get into position in the pivot. Then they would concentrate on getting the ball in to Big George, whose huge left elbow would open a swath as he turned into the basket…. Mikan was simply too big in bulk to be blocked out. He couldn’t jump very high, but he didn’t have to. He couldn’t run, but he didn’t have to.” No wonder the league nearly went under. The sport started moving against Mikan before the 1951–52 season, when they expanded the three-second lane to 12 feet so Big George couldn’t plant himself next to the basket anymore. In the three seasons preceding that rule change (’49 to ’51), he averaged 28 points on 42 percent shooting. For the next three years (’52 to ’54), he averaged 21 points on 39 percent shooting. Given how Mikan struggled to adjust to the three-second rule and the post-shot-clock era, you can only imagine how his career would have suffered when they changed the goaltending rules and allowed more black players. Every piece of evidence points to Mikan having better timing than anything: he entered and departed the league at the quintessential times. Unfortunately, we can’t stick him lower than Level 3 because I can’t risk offending my nursing home demographic.
Two fun things about George: First, he’s the only player in NBA history to successfully carry off the “thick glasses and dorky kneepads” combination. Every Mikan picture or clip makes him look like the starting center for Lambda Lambda Lambda’s intramural hoops team.3 Second, he may have been the toughest player of that era, breaking ten different bones and taking 160 stitches during his nine-year career. He helped Minny win the 1950 title playing with a broken wrist. During the 1951 playoffs, he played with a fractured leg when Minny fell to Rochester in the Western Finals. As Mikan told Newsday years later, “The doctors taped a plate on it for the playoffs. I played all right, scored in the 20s. I couldn’t run, sort of hopped down the court.” He was like the Bizarro Vince Carter. Of course, he just inadvertently proved the point of the previous few paragraphs—that Mikan excelled during an era when centers could score 20 a game in the playoffs while hopping around with a plate taped to their broken leg.
35. KEVIN MCHALE

Resume: 13 years, 10 quality, 7 All-Stars … Top 5 (’87) … All-Defense (6x, three 1st) … season leader: FG% (2x) … 2nd-best player on one champ (’86 Celts) and 2 runner-ups (’85, ’87); 6th man for 2 other champs (’81, ’84) … 2-year peak: 24–9–3, 60% FG … 3-year Playoffs peak: 24–9, 59% FG … 3rd-best playoff FG ever, 100+ games (56.6%) … career: 55% FG (12th), 80% FT
The starting power forward on the Players I Miss Most from the Old Days team. Watch an old Celtics game on ESPN Classic and think of Tim Duncan while you study McHale: long arms, quick feet, tortuous low-post moves, an unblockable sky hook, underrated passing, an uncanny ability to block shots and keep the ball in play. It’s all there. Duncan runs the floor better; McHale had a wider arsenal of low-post moves. Other than that, they’re basically the same. Duncan is a little faster and a little more athletic; McHale was better at handling double-teams (and sometimes even triple-teams). Of course, we’ll see ten Duncans before we see another McHale. John Salley once described the experience of guarding McHale down low as “being in the man’s chamber.” Nobody could score more ways down low; not even Hakeem. McHale feasted on defenders with the following three moves: the jump hook (he could do it with either hand, although he never missed the righty one and could shoot it from a variety of angles), the turnaround fall-away (he could do it from both sides and from either direction; completely unblockable), and the step-back jumper from 12–15 feet (which always went in, forcing defenders to play up on him).4
Since he could convert those three shots at any point of any game, and the defender knew this, that set up the following alternative moves: up-and-under no. 1 (faked a turnaround, drew the guy in the air, pivoted, and did an ugly scoop shot), up-and-under no. 2 (faked a jump hook, drew the guy in the air, ducked under him, and did an ugly scoop shot),5 the hesitation turnaround (showed the turnaround, waited for the defender to jump, drew the contact, then did a modified turnaround anyway), the double jump hook (showed the jump hook, drew the guy in the air, turned into him, drew contact and finished the jump hook), the running jump hook (started off on the left side, faked the jumper, drew the guy in the air, put the ball on the ground and unleashed an ugly running jump hook), and the drop-step (started off on the left side with the defender overplaying for the righty hook, then did a quick drop-step toward the baseline and laid the ball in). Then there were the combination moves, which nobody has been able to execute except Hakeem (who mastered the first one): combo no. 1 (faked the turnaround, pivoted, faked the righty jump hook, twisted the guy around and did the up-and-under), combo no. 2 (faked the righty jump hook, faked the full turnaround, twisted the guy around and did the modifed turnaround), and combo no. 3 (faked the righty jump hook, faked the up-and-under, caused the guy to freeze, then shot the step-back jumper).6
For those of you scoring at home, that’s twelve different low-post moves. Twelve! McHale had more combinations on his menu than Panda Express. If you were wondering how any forward could top 60 percent shooting for two straight years in his prime … well, that’s how. Did you know certain high school and college coaches show McHale tapes to their big men? And don’t forget, during the first half of the eighties (before Ewing entered the league), McHale was the top defensive player, someone who protected the rim and defended any low-post scorer or perimeter player: Toney, Julius, Hakeem, Worthy, Moses, Kareem, you name him. He was THE stopper in the NBA. Some other fun facts about my favorite underrated Celtic:
Fact No. 1. McHale played the entire ’86–’87 postseason on a broken left foot. It wasn’t sprained or bruised—the thing was broken. That didn’t stop McHale from posting the following numbers in 21 playoff games: 21–9, 58% FG, 39.4 minutes. He risked his career—literally—to help the Celtics try to repeat as champions. Remember him limping up and down the court like a wounded animal? Remember Rick Mahorn purposely stepping on the broken foot during the Detroit series? Remember how he dragged the foot around for a whopping 53 minutes in a double-OT win in Game 4 of the Milwaukee series that year? He never thought about saying “Get me my ring, boys,” sucked it up and kept playing … and was never the same. Ever. Which reminds me …
Fact No. 2. When McHale injured his foot near the end of that season, he had been playing the best basketball of his life (26–10–3, 2.2 blocks, 60.4% FG, 84% FT). Even Bird admits that McHale could have taken the 1987 MVP. So how good would McHale have been without suffering that foot injury? If Len Bias hadn’t passed away, McHale could have rested until the Conference Finals. Instead, he played in pain and broke the same foot in the first round. And if Bias had been around, maybe McHale wouldn’t have averaged nearly 40 minutes a game in the first place.7 All we know is that he never had the same lateral movement or the same spring in his feet again. (What’s interesting is that McHale has no regrets; if he had to do it over again, he would.)8 But the foot problems invariably led to ankle problems in both feet; McHale badly sprained his left ankle in Seattle during the ’90–’91 season, an injury that effectively ended his career two years later. I swear, if McHale hadn’t injured that damned foot, he would have thrived into his early forties on that Panda Express menu.
Fact No. 3. McHale was the funniest Celtic of all time. (For further evidence, trek down to your local library and get a copy of Jack McCallum’s Unfinished Business, or better yet, just buy it online. Come on, you already splurged for this book. Go crazy!) One of the true tragedies in sports history was that McHale decided to run the Timberwolves into the ground instead of heading right into sports broadcasting, where he would have become the John Madden of basketball.9 Remember, this was the guy who actually stole scenes from Woody on an episode of Cheers.
Fact No. 4. His uneasy alliance with Larry Legend remains the most intriguing subplot of the Bird era. People always assumed they were friends—you know, the whole “two big goofy-looking white guys” factor—but they rarely mingled and McHale was the only teammate Bird always avoided praising, partly because of their friendly rivalry, partly because Larry resented the fact that basketball didn’t consume McHale like it consumed him.10 He praised Parish and DJ constantly but never seemed to have a compliment for McHale that wasn’t at least a little backhanded. Even after their careers were over, Bird bemoaned the fact that McHale never drove himself to become the best player in the league, saying that his teammate could have become an MVP had he “really wanted it.” Larry almost seemed disappointed that McHale never pushed himself harder because, in turn, Bird would have had to push himself an extra notch to keep his place as the alpha dog on the team. Still, nobody should ever question McHale’s desire after the ’87 playoffs. Not even the Basketball Jesus. To his credit, McHale always took the high road with Bird—dutiful teammate, perfect second banana, never daring to challenge him publicly, always willing to fade into the background. One of my favorite McHale quotes came after the legendary Dominique/Larry duel, when McHale said, “Sometimes after Larry plays a game like this it makes me think ahead … I’ll be retired in Minnesota and Larry will be retired in Indiana, and we probably won’t see each other much. But a lot of nights I’ll just lie there and remember games like this, and what it was like to play with him.” Somebody turn the heat on, because I just got the chills.
Fact No. 5. Nobody had a weirder body; it was almost like someone gave him Freddy Krueger’s arms and put them on backward. Bill Fitch said McHale had “an incomplete body … he’s waiting for the rest of the parts to come by mail.” McCallum described McHale’s body as “Frankenstein-esque … deep bags under the eyes, unusually long arms, shoulders that appear to be coming off the hinges.” Of his awkward running style, poet Donald Hall wrote that McHale “lopes down the floor like an Irish setter, his hair flopping like ears.” Danny Ainge once quipped that McHale on a fast break looked like a “baby deer on ice.” But until Hakeem came along, no big man had quicker feet; nobody was better at the “miss a short jumper and jump up again quickly to tap the ball in” play (McHale hopped like a kangaroo). And McHale’s turnaround could be touched only by Hakeem’s turnaround in the Turnaround Pantheon (and that’s the toughest shot in basketball, bar none). So McHale was a great athlete. He just didn’t look like one.
    Make no mistake, he had some great moments: coming up with some huge blocks against Philly in Game 7 of the ’81 playoffs; pouring in 56 points against Detroit; eating Ralph Sampson alive in the ’86 Finals; playing on the broken foot during that double-OT game in Milwaukee; his forgotten 33-point performance in the Bird-Dominique game; even his retro farewell in Game 2 of the Charlotte series in ’93, when he had the Garden rocking one last time with a 33-point flashback performance. Over any single game, one image is embedded in my brain: every crucial road victory from the Bird era ended the same way, with the Celtics prancing happily out of the arena and McHale crammed in the middle of it all, holding both arms in the air with his fists clenched. Name the game, you’ll see it: Game 4 in Houston (’86), Game 4 in Los Angeles (’84, ’85), Game 6 in Philly (’81, ’82), Game 4 in Milwaukee (’87), Game 6 in Atlanta (’88) … it doesn’t matter. He did it every time. In a funny way, it became McHale’s legacy along with the post-up moves. He may have looked ridiculous as hell—giant arms craning up in the air, armpit hair flying everywhere, a goofy smile on his face—but McHale’s sweaty armpits doubled as our disgusting victory cigar. He was amazing to watch, unstoppable at times, laugh-out-loud funny, inventive, ahead of his time, the ideal teammate … and the one NBA legend who felt obligated to rub his armpits in the collective faces of 18,000 fans after an especially rewarding victory. I miss those days, and I miss those armpits.
34. GEORGE GERVIN

Resume: 14 years, 11 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’78 and ’79 MVP runner-up … Top 5 (’78, ’79, ’80, ’81, ’82), Top 10 ABA (’75, ’76), Top 10 NBA (’77, ’83) … leader: scoring (4x) … record: points in one quarter (33) …-5th-leading Playoffs scorer (27.0 PPG, 59 G) … 3-year peak: 30–5–3, 54% FG, 85% FT … career: 25–3–3, 50% FG, 84% FT … ’75 playoffs: 34–14 (6 G) … ’79 playoffs: 29–6–3, 54% FG (14 G) … 3 straight scoring titles (1 of 6 players ever)
33. SAM JONES

Resume: 12 years, 8 quality, 5 All-Stars … Top 10 (’65, ’66, ’67) … 3-year peak: 24–5–3 … 5-year Playoffs peak: 25–3–5, 47% FG … played for 10 champs (’59–’66, ’68–’ 69 Celts), 2nd-best player (3x), 3rd-best player (3x) … 3rd-best player on one runner-up (’67 Celts) … career: 46% FG, 80% FT
The Ice/Sam debate doubles as the enduring point of this book. When measuring the impact of a player’s career, it’s easy to get swayed by individual triggers (scoring/rebounding stats, All-Star appearances, All-NBA nods) and situational triggers (either a lack of playoff success or an inordinate amount of playoff success), as well as things that have nothing to do with anything (like a cool nickname or distinctive shot). Upon first glance, you’d assume Ice was a better player than Sam and that’s that. So let’s break it down Dr. Jack–style:
Originality. Sam provided the DNA model for nearly every great shooting guard from the past forty years, a six-foot-four athlete with long arms, an explosive first step, a killer bank shot and no discernible holes in his game. Ice was a six-foot-eight string bean who weighed about an Olsen Twin and a half at his peak, looked like a dead ringer for a black John Holmes11 and could have been knocked over by one of Billy Paultz’s farts. We’ll never see anyone like him again. I am sure of this. Slight Edge: Ice.
Calling Card. Sam owned the most accurate bank shot of his era, making them from 22-degree angles, 64-degree angles … it didn’t matter. Meanwhile, Ice owned the most accurate bank shot of his era and it wasn’t even his signature shot: He could routinely sink his world-famous finger roll from as far as 12–15 feet, like he was trying to win a stuffed animal at a carnival. I can’t pick between these two shots because I love them both to the point that I’m writing this with a boner right now. What’s tragic is that we probably won’t see either shot again—at least to that degree of success and frequency—because of the basketball camp mentality that infected today’s game. Everyone shoots the same and plays the same, like they’re coming off an assembly line or something. That’s why we rarely see finger rolls or bankers anymore, and hell will probably freeze over before we see another old-school hook shot. Slight Edge: Ice.
Nickname. Gervin had one of the best NBA nicknames ever, “the Iceman”;12 Sam never had a nickname, fitting because he received less attention and fanfare than anyone in the top forty. We’re deducting points here only because Val Kilmer went by “Iceman” in Top Gun and had such disturbing homoerotic tension with Maverick. Edge: Ice.
Best What-if. Sam played behind the great Bill Sharman for four full seasons in an eight-team league—with no hope of stealing Sharman’s job because of the black/white thing—until he finally landed crunch-time minutes in the ’61 playoffs (25.8 MPG, 13.1 PPG) and the starting spot after a banged-up Sharman retired that summer.13 Throw in four years of college and two years of military service and Sam didn’t start until he was twenty-eight, making the rest of his career even more astounding. (Note: Jones and Russell were the first greats to maintain a high level of play into their mid-thirties.) Then again, “What if Sam hadn’t lost much of his twenties?” can’t compare with Gervin getting drafted by the ’72 Virginia Squires and teamed up with a young Julius Erving for one year before the cash-poor Squires sold Doc to the Nets. What if Ice and Doc had played their whole careers together? Can you imagine a late seventies NBA team trying to match up with them? Would that have been the coolest team for the rest of eternity? And who thought it would be a good idea to stick a professional basketball team in Virginia? Edge: Ice.
Scoring Ability. Ice was the number two all-time shooting guard from an “I’m getting my 30–35 tonight in the flow of the game and you’re not stopping me” efficiency standpoint, nestled comfortably between MJ (number one)14 and Kobe (number 3). Sam’s scoring had an on/off switch; Ice just scored and scored and rarely had those “Uh-oh, look out, he’s starting to catch fire!” streaks, peaking in 1978–80 with these Money-ball numbers: 30 points per game, 54 percent shooting, 85 percent free throw shooting. During the ’78 season, he had a game in Chicago where he scored 37 points on 17-for-18 shooting. As one Spurs teammate joked in 1982, “The only way to stop Ice is to hold practice.” Sam wasn’t in that class, but he was remarkably steady in big games (we’re getting to that); it should also be mentioned that Sam had 25-foot range and would have been helped by a three-point line, whereas the three-point line didn’t help Ice at all. Poor Sam came along twenty years too soon in every respect. Edge: Ice.
Head Case Potential. Gervin endured constant criticism for his priorities (did he care more about scoring titles or winning titles?); his defense (outstandingly crappy); his squawking about being underpaid (constant); his dedication (he skipped practice so frequently that SI casually mentioned in 1982, “Gervin is habitually late for workouts and sometimes doesn’t show up at all,” like they were talking about an asthma condition or something); his effort issues (when the Spurs gave him a six-year, $3.9 million extension before the ’81 season, they included a $14,000 bonus for every win between 36 and 56 games);15 and his personal life, which was endlessly rumored about.16 Here’s how Ice summed up his relative lack of popularity in 1978: “Whereas I never went fly like some of the boys.17 I’m conservative. I got the short hair, the pencil ’stache, the simple clothes. Plus I’m 6’8”, 183—no, make that 185—and when you look at me all you see is bone. Otherwise in Detroit I’m known as Twig according to my physique. I just do my thing and stay consistent. I figure the people be recognizing the Iceman pretty soon now. Whereas I be up there in a minute.”18 It would have been fun following him and covering him, but you might not have enjoyed coaching him or playing with him. As for Sam, he was a head case only in one respect: He never liked the pressure of being “the guy” and preferred to be a complementary star. According to Russell’s Second Wind, Sam carried the team enough times that Russ finally asked him why it didn’t happen more often; Sam responded, “No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want the responsibility of having to play like that every night.” Russell respected that choice, pointing out how so many players wanted to be paid like stars without actually carrying the star’s load every night, so Sam’s acceptance of his own limitations was admirable in a way, even as it frustrated the hell out of Russell that Sam was satisfied with being an afterthought some nights. Then again, Sam turned into Jimmy Chitwood with games on the line. Here’s how Russell described it:
I never could guess what Sam was going to do or say, with one major exception: I knew exactly how he would react in our huddle during the final seconds of a crucial game. I’m talking about a situation where we’d be one point behind, with five seconds to go in a game that meant not just first place or pride but a whole season, when everything was on the line…. Red would be looking around at faces, trying to decide which play to call. It’s a moment when even the better players in the NBA will start coughing, tying their shoelaces and looking the other way. At such moments I knew what Sam would do as well as I know my own name. “Give me the ball,” he’d say. “I’ll make it.”19 And all of us would look at him, and we’d know by looking that he meant what he said. Not only that, but you knew that he’d make it.
Defensive Prowess. The old joke about Sam: the best part of his defense was Russell. But he wasn’t better or worse than most of the guys back then—great athlete, well conditioned, long arms, knew where to go and what to do—while Ice was the worst defensive player of anyone in the top thirty-five. Part of this wasn’t Ice’s fault: the Spurs didn’t care about defense, only that he outscored whomever was guarding him. Which he usually did. Still, defense wins championships … and when your franchise guy is a futile defensive player, that doesn’t bode well for your title hopes. The Spurs made a conscious decision, “We’re revolving everything around Ice’s offense, running and gunning, scoring a ton of points and hoping our snazzy black uniforms catch on with inner-city gangs,” which was probably the right move. With Ice leading the way from 1974 to 1983 (ABA + NBA), the Spurs won 45, 51, 50, 44, 52, 48, 41, 52, 48 and 53 games—not a bad run by any means. But it didn’t translate to success in the Playoffs. They lost ten of eighteen playoff series and made the Conference Finals three times (’79, ’82 and ’83). Ice averaged a 27–7–3 over that stretch, but these were the relevant numbers: 31–41 (overall playoff record), 0–4 (Game 7’s), zero (Finals appearances).
Gervin’s best chance happened in ’79, the second year of a peculiar two-spring vacuum with no dominant NBA team, when the Spurs jumped out to a three-games-to-one lead in the Eastern Finals over the aging Bullets. Ice scored 71 points combined in Games 3 and 4 at home, telling SI afterward, “The Bullets know they can’t stop Ice. Ice knows he’s got them on the run.”20 But the Bullets staved off elimination in Game 5 and shockingly stole Game 6 in Texas, with Ice scoring just 20 points and getting hounded by Grevey and Bobby Dandridge all game.21
When Washington went bigger in the second half, Kirkpatrick explained later, “What this personnel switch did was force [San Antonio coach Doug] Moe to decide where to hide Gervin’s lazy, idling defense. On the tricky scorer, Dandridge, or on the power rebounder, [Greg] Ballard?” Does that sound like someone you’d want to go to war with? Moe picked Ballard, who finished with a 19–12 and combined with Bobby D for 17 of the last 19 Bullets points. Ice went scoreless in the first quarter of Game 7, headed into halftime with eight, then exploded for 34 in the second half … but the Spurs blew a six-point lead in the final three minutes, gave up the winning jumper to Dandridge and became the third team ever to blow a 3–1 lead in a playoff series. Ice completely disappeared in the final three minutes: no points, one brick off the backboard.
Looking back, that was the seminal moment of Ice’s career: his biggest test, his chance to make the Finals and put himself on the map, and his team made history failing. He’d never get that close again. Can we blame his supporting cast? To some degree, yes. During that 1974–83 stretch, his best teammates were Silas (a stud until he blew out his knee in the ’76 Playoffs), Larry Kenon (a starter on the seventies Head Case All-Stars22 and All-Time All-Afro teams);23 Artis Gilmore (on his last legs), Johnny Moore and Mike Mitchell. Not exactly a murderer’s row. Like Jason Kidd, Gervin turned chicken shit into chicken salad to some degree. (By the way, San Antonio’s front office wasn’t helping matters: from 1977 to 1982, San Antonio traded away three first-rounders and took Frankie Sanders, Reggie Johnson and Wiley Peck with the other three.) On the other hand, none of the five most memorable all-offense/no-defense superstars of the past four decades—Gervin, McAdoo, Maravich, Vince and Dominique—ever became the best guy for a Finals team. This can’t be a coincidence. It just can’t. Edge: Sam.
Winnability. We hinted around this word in the Parish/Worthy sections, so screw it: I’m just creating it. Couldn’t you argue that “winnability” is a specific trait? In other words, does a player’s overall package of skills and intangibles (personality, efficiency, sense of the moment, leadership, teamwork, lack of glaring weaknesses) inadvertently lend itself to a winning situation? It’s hard to imagine Gervin playing for a championship team unless it happened later in his career—a little like McAdoo with the ’82 Lakers, with a contender bringing him off the bench as instant offense24—or as the second-best player on a team with a franchise big guy like Hakeem, Kareem or Duncan. And even then, I’m not totally sure it would work. Would the ’95 Rockets have cruised to the title if you switched ’82 Gervin with ’95 Drexler? Could they have covered up for his defense? Probably not.25 On the flip side, you’d have to admit that Sam Jones winning ten rings in twelve seasons ranks absurdly high on the Winnability Scale. He could play either guard spot, didn’t care about stats and made monster plays when it mattered. I’m not sure what’s left. Sam Jones definitely knew The Secret. Big Edge: Sam.
Clutchness. We just covered Gervin’s clutchness issues. (Lack of clutch-ness? Anti-clutchness? A-Rodability? A-Rodianism?) Even when Ice battled Pete Maravich in CBS’s legendary H-O-R-S-E tournament, he blew the clinching shot and Pistol finished him off with two of his patented moves: the sitting-in-the-floor layup and jumping-from-out-of-bounds reverse layup. Meanwhile, Sam’s teams finished 9–0 in Game 7’s and 13–2 in elimination games, with Sam scoring a combined 37 off the bench in Game 7’s against Syracuse and St. Louis, then averaging 30.1 points in eight other Game 7’s or deciding Game 5’s as a starter. You know what’s amazing? Sam had so many playoff heroics that I couldn’t even scrape together a complete list. Here are the ones we know for sure: ’62 Philly, Game 7 (27 points, game-winning jumper with two seconds left) … ’62 Lakers, do-or-die Game 6 (35 points in L.A.) … ’62 Lakers, Game 7 (27 points, 5 in OT) … ’63 Cincy, Game 7 (outscored Oscar, 47–43)26… ’65 Philly, Game 7 (37 points in the “Havlicek steals the ball!” game) … ’66 Cincy, Game 5 (34 points in deciding game) … ’66 Lakers, Game 7 (22 points) … ’68 Sixers, Game 7 (22 points) … ’69 Lakers, must-win Game 4 (down by one, Sam hits the game-winning jumper at the buzzer) … ’69 Lakers, Game 7 (24 points in L.A.).27 Sam and Jerry West were known as the Association’s first two clutch scorers for a reason. Big Edge: Sam.
Defining quote. I’d narrow it down to these two:
Sam on scoring 2,000 points (1965): “That doesn’t mean a thing. Every guy on this team has the ability to score 2,000 points if that’s what he’s asked to do. There’s a lot of unselfishness by others in those 2,000 points I scored.”
Gervin on his legacy (1980): “I’m perfectly happy being known as George Gervin, scoring machine, because in this game the person who puts the ball in the hole is the person that usually gets ahead.”
    Which guy would you have wanted as a teammate? Which guy would you have wanted in your NBA foxhole with you? Which guy would you trust with your life on the line in a big game? Which guy was predisposed to thriving with great teammates? Please. Edge: Sam.
We’ll give the last word to Russell (from Second Wind):
Whenever the pressure was greatest, Sam was eager for the ball. To me, that’s one sign of a champion. Even with all the talent, the mental sharpness, the fun, the confidence and your focus honed down to winning, there’ll be a level of competition where it all evens out. Then the pressure builds, and for a champion it is a test of heart…. Heart in champions has to do with the depth of your motivation, and how well your mind and body react to pressure. It’s concentration—that is, being able to do what you do best under maximum pain and stress.28 Sam Jones has a champion’s heart. On the court he always had something in reserve. You could think he’d been squeezed out of his last drop of strength and cunning, but if you looked closely, you’d see him coming with something else he’d tucked away out of sight. Though sometimes he’d do things that made me want to break him in two, his presence gave me great comfort in key games. In Los Angeles, Jerry West was called “Mr. Clutch,” and he was, but in the seventh game of a championship series, I’ll take Sam over any player who’s ever walked on a court.
Now I ask you: Would you rather go to war with George Gervin or Sam Jones?
(I thought so.)
32. WALT FRAZIER

Resume: 13 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … Top 5 (’70, ’72, ’74, ’75), Top 10 (’71, ’73) … All-Defense (7 1st teams) … Playoffs: 20–6–7 (93 G) … 6-year peak: 22–7–7 … best or 2nd-best player on 2 champs (’70, and ’73 Knicks) and one runner-up (’72)
If you’re measuring guys by extremes and italicizing “the” to hammer the point home, Frazier’s resume includes three extremes: one of the best big-game guards ever; one of the best defensive guards ever; and one of the single greatest performances ever (Game 7 of the ’70 Finals, when he notched 36 points, 19 assists, 7 rebounds and 5 steals and outclutched the actual Mr. Clutch). Beyond his pickpocketing skills (terrifying), rebounding (underrated), playmaking (top-notch) and demeanor (always in control), what stood out was Frazier’s Oscar-like ability to get the precise shots he wanted in tight games. You know how McHale had a killer low-post game? Clyde had a killer high-post game.29 He started 25 feet from the basket, backed his defender down, shaked and baked a few times, settled on his preferred spot near the top of the key, then turned slightly and launched that moonshot jumper right in the guy’s face … swish.30 That’s what made him so memorable on the road—not just how he always rose to the occasion, but the demoralizing effect those jumpers had on crowds. They knew the jumper was coming (“oh, shit”), they knew it (“shit”), they knew it (“send a double”), they knew it (“shit”) … and then it went in (dead silence).
Quick tangent: I am too young to remember watching Clyde live, but in my basketball-watching lifetime, only seven guys were crowd-killers: Jordan, Bird, Kobe, Bernard, Isiah, Andrew Toney, and strangely enough, Vinnie Johnson. When those guys got going, you could see the future unfold before it started manifesting itself. We knew it was in the works, our guys knew it, our coaches knew it, everyone knew it … and then the points came in bunches and sucked all forms of life out of the building. It was like frolicking in the ocean, seeing a giant wave coming from fifteen seconds away, then remaining in place and getting crushed by it. Jordan and Bird were the all-time crowd-killers; they loved playing on the road, loved shutting everyone up and considered it the best possible challenge. When Fernando Medina took the famous photo of Jordan’s final shot of the ’98 Finals, that was the definitive crowd-killing moment: an entire section of Utah fans sitting behind the basket, screaming in horror and bracing for the inevitable even as the ball drifted toward the basket. My favorite crowd-killing moment happened after Bird had been fouled in the last few seconds with the Celtics trailing by one, only he wasn’t satisfied with the noise level of the pathetic Clippers crowd, so he stepped away from the line and waved his arms. That’s right, the Legend was imploring the crowd to pump up the volume. I mean, who does that? Do I even need to tell you that he swished the free throws? Probably not.
Frazier was the most infamous crowd-killer of his generation and, taking it in a slightly different direction, the master of the impact play—whether it was stripping someone at midcourt when the Knicks needed a hoop, dramatically setting up and draining a high-post jumper or whatever. You always hear about guys like Gervin or English who finished with a “quiet” 39; Clyde routinely finished with a loud 25 and four deafening steals. His relationship with the MSG faithful ranked among the most unique in sports; they appreciated him to the fullest, understood exactly what he brought to the table and connected to him spiritually in an atypical way. When the Knicks struggled after Reed and DeBusschere retired, those same fans took out their frustrations by turning on Frazier as if he were to blame. Eventually they gave him away as compensation for signing free agent Jim Cleamons in 1977, an ignominious end to a particularly dignified career. Clyde was a lightning rod in every respect: he carried himself with particular style during a fairly bland era, became an iconic Manhattan personality because of his muttonchop sideburns, mink coats, Rolls-Royces, swank apartments, stamp-of-approval party appearances and enviable bachelor life,31 and on top of that, he stood out for the way he connected with those MSG crowds. So maybe it made sense that his career ended in such a messy, ugly fashion; if you connect with a crowd positively when things are going well, maybe you connect negatively when everything is falling apart. Fans are fickle and that’s just the way it is.
Two lingering questions about Frazier. First, his career ended so abruptly that it’s hard to make sense of it. He played nine good years and then was cooked without a drug problem or major injury to blame. Bizarre. And second, he peaked during the best possible era for his specific gifts—no three-point line, no slash-and-kick, no complex defensive strategies, mostly physical guards imposing their will and playing that high-post game. Not until the merger did NBA teams start differentiating between point guards and shooting guards. Before that? You were just a guard. Nobody cared who brought the ball up. Was it a coincidence that Frazier lost his fastball immediately after the merger, when the sport became faster and speedy point guards such as John Lucas, Norm Nixon, Gus Williams, Kevin Porter and Johnny Davis became all the rage?32 Hard to say. Had Frazier come along ten years later, maybe he would have been a hybrid guard like Dennis Johnson … and maybe he wouldn’t have been as effective. Again, we don’t know.33 But we do know that an inordinate number of fans from Frazier’s generation—including a few that influenced me over the years—have Clyde ranked among the greatest ever. For instance, I always found it interesting that my father, a lifelong basketball fan and thirty-five-year NBA season ticket holder who remembers everyone from Cousy to LeBron, ranks Jordan and Frazier as his all-time back-court. So maybe I’m not old enough to remember seeing Frazier kill a crowd, but I grew up with my father telling me, “Frazier killed us. He was an assassin. You didn’t want any part of him in a big game—he was always the best guy on the court. I’ve never been happier to see anyone retire.” And that’s good enough for me.
31. DAVE COWENS

Resume: 11 years, 8 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’73 MVP … ’75 MVP runner-up … ’71 Rookie of the Year … Top 10 (’73, ’75, ’76) … All-Defense (2x) … Playoffs: 14.4 RPG (5th all-time) … 4-year peak: 20–16–4, 46% FG … 4-year Playoffs peak: 21–16–4 (50 g’s) … best or 2nd-best player on 2 champs (’74, ’76 Celts), 21–15–4 (36 g’s) … starter for 68-win team (’73)
When Dad bought our second season ticket in 1977, our new section hugged one side of the player’s tunnel and the wives’ section hugged the other side.34 Hondo’s wife (or, as Brent Musburger called her, “John Havlicek’s lovely wife, Beth”) and kids sat in the parallel row to our right during that first season. I remember checking out Hondo’s daughter from ten feet away and thinking, “Someday I’ll marry her and I can spend Christmas with the Hondos!” Then Hondo retired and the wives’ section was in constant flux, a little like how the cast of Law and Order changes every year. When Scott Wedman joined the team in 1982, we also picked up his beautiful spouse, Kim, who easily could have passed for the hottest daughter on Eight Is Enough. After we traded for Bill Walton, his wife and kids crammed into that three-seat row next to the railing—like seeing five people stack into the backseat of a Volkswagen or something—only every kid had Walton’s gigantic head crammed onto a tiny body.35 You get the idea. The wives/girlfriends/families invariably filled in the blanks with each player and strengthened opinions you already had about them. Danny Ainge’s wife couldn’t have been more cute and wholesome. Bird’s wife was unsurprisingly normal and down to earth (like the Patty Scialfa of the NBA). Reggie Lewis’s wife was brash and loud; she clearly wore the pants in the family. Dino Radja married a leggy European who carried herself like Brigitte Nielsen in Rocky IV; you could picture them chainsmoking after games while Dino complained about Todd Day. Sherman Douglas’ wife showed up in saggy jogging pants and ate like a Shetland pony for three hours. Dee Brown had one of those “Shit, I didn’t realize I was going to be famous when I married her” wives as a rookie, won the Dunk Contest and soon traded up for the best-looking wife of that decade.
Nobody stood out more than Robert Parish’s not-so-better half, a Gina Gershon look-alike who carried on like a profane bunshee, to the degree that she’d scream at officials as everyone else wondered, “Hey, do you think the Chief is just afraid to break up with her because he doesn’t want to wake up with his house on fire?” An aspiring singer who sang the national anthem before a few Celtics games,36 Mrs. Chief detested referee Jake O’Donnell so much that she vaulted over two other girlfriends at halftime of one game, leaned over the railing, showered him with obscenities and actually had to be held back like a hockey player. For a second, we thought she might break free, hurtle off the railing and deliver a flying elbow like Macho Man Savage … and if it happened, none of us would have been even remotely surprised. She missed her true calling by about fifteen years: reality TV. Too bad.37
What does this have to do with Dave Cowens? Near the end of his career we noticed a new lady started sitting in the wives’ section: She looked a little like Linda Blair, only with frizzy reddish brown hair and a sane smile. She couldn’t have been more pleasant to everyone who approached her. You could have easily imagined her baking cookies every afternoon. We couldn’t figure out which player she was dating for the first few games, finally putting two and two together when Cowens was heading out to the court after halftime and stopped to talk to her for a few seconds with a big shit-eating smile on his face. I remember thinking the same thing as everyone else: “Good God, Dave Cowens has a girlfriend!” How was this possible? The guy had a competitiveness disorder, playing every game in fifth gear, berating officials like they were busboys, bellowing out instructions to teammates, diving for loose balls, crashing over three guys for rebounds, battling bigger centers game after game and getting into fights at least once a month. Whenever Cowens fouled out, he stood in disbelief with his hands stuck on his hips, staring the offending official down and hoping the guy might change his mind. Don’t you realize what you just did? This means I can’t play anymore! Don’t you realize what you just f*cking did? The Newlin/flopping story doubled as the ultimate Cowens moment: after eight years of dealing with lousy referees and opponents who didn’t respect the sport, he finally snapped and took the law in his own hands. Even after all these years, he remains my father’s favorite Celtic—the guy who never took a night off, the guy who cared just a little bit more than everyone else.38
And now he had a girlfriend? I was totally confused by this revelation. Does this mean they hold hands and go on dates? Do they sleep in the same bed together? I kept picturing her forgetting to buy milk and Cowens flipping out the same way he freaked after an especially terrible call. That’s what separated Cowens from everyone else: he played with such unbridled ferocity that little kids couldn’t even conceive of him having a girlfriend. Imagine Jason from Friday the 13th heading home from a weekend of killing camp counselors, showering, changing into clean clothes, then taking his lady to Outback Steakhouse. That was Cowens with a girlfriend. I remember being even more dumbfounded when they got married. There’s a Mrs. Dave Cowens? Of course, marriage ended up domesticating him like Adrian Balboa softened Rocky. Within two years of getting betrothed, a calmer Cowens had walked away from a huge paycheck on a potential championship team (the ’81 Celtics, who did win the title), blaming ravaged ankles, tired knees and a fire that was no longer burning inside him. And there wasn’t a Clubber Lang out there to insult his wife, kill Red Auerbach and lure him back into uniform. Too bad.
We’ll remember him for everything I already covered in the prologue, as well his ’73 MVP award (dubious, but whatever), two titles, a clutch 28–14 in Game 7 of the ’74 Finals and the quirkiest career of anyone in the Pyramid. He enrolled in mechanics school, covered the ’76 Olympics as a newspaper reporter, rode the subway to home games, bought a 30-acre Christmas tree farm in Kentucky and moonlighted as a taxi driver in downtown Boston.39 He capped off a night of celebrating the ’74 championship by sleeping on a park bench in Boston Common. When the Celtics lowballed Paul Silas and dealt him to Denver after the ’76 title season, then replaced him with anti-Celtics Curtis Rowe and Sidney Wicks, a distraught Cowens took an unpaid leave of absence for 32 games and accepted a PR job at Suffolk Downs racetrack to experience a traditional nine-to-five job. When Bob Ryan skewered him for the Newlin bullrush, Cowens wrote a rebuttal in the Boston Globe and railed against the evils of flopping. He became the league’s last player-coach during the ’79 season. He even refused to hang on as a much-needed bench player after the Parish/McHale trade, walking away from a giant paycheck and writing a goodbye column in the Boston Herald explaining his motives. By contrast, his postplaying career has been unfathomably mundane—a few coaching gigs, that’s about it—and part of me wishes he’d flamed out in dramatic style, crashing a motorcycle into a polar bear in Alaska at 130 miles an hour or something. It’s just tough for the Newlin story to have the same lasting impact when you see Cowens unassumingly holding a clipboard as a Pistons assistant and looking like he just finished your taxes. Oh, well.
One last Cowens thought: Unlike most stars from the sixties and seventies, Cowens would be just as effective today because of his durability and athleticism.40 For the “Wine Cellar” chapter that’s coming up, I gave him strong consideration for a bench spot because of his versatility and intensity—seriously, can you think of a better guy to change the pace of a game off the bench than ’74 Dave Cowens doing his “bull in a china shop” routine?—ultimately leaving him off because of his up-and-down shooting (career: 44 percent), impeccable timing (he never faced Wilt or Shaq in their primes, both of whom would have bulldozed him) and never-ending struggles with foul trouble. You can’t watch a memorable Celtics game from the seventies without an announcer saying, “That’s the sixth on Cowens!” or “One more and he’s gone!” He couldn’t help himself. The man cared just a little too much. Here’s how he explained his leave of absence to SI in 1976: “I just lost my enthusiasm for the game. That’s all I can say. This wasn’t something sudden for me, I’d been thinking about it for three months. I even thought seriously about quitting before the season started, but I figured, aw, I’d try it and see how it was. And then I just didn’t have it. Nothing. When somebody drives right by you and you shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Aw, what the hell,’ when you go down and make a basket like a robot, when you win or lose a ballgame and it doesn’t matter either way, when you can’t even get mad at the refs, then something’s wrong. I couldn’t do anything about it. When there’s nothing left, there’s no use making believe there is. I don’t want to spoil the Celtics and I don’t want to take their money if I’m not earning it.”
In other words, Dave Cowens was turning into everyone else in the NBA. And he didn’t like it. Now that’s a guy I want in my NBA Foxhole.
30. WILLIS REED

Resume: 10 years, 7 quality, 7 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’70, ’73 … ’70 MVP … ’65 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’70), Top 10 (’67, ’68, ’69, ’71) … 5-year peak: 21–14–2 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 25–14, 50% FG (28 G) … best or second-best player on 2 champs (’70, ’73 Knicks)
Hey, it’s another undersized lefty center, inspirational leader and world-class hombre who protected his teammates! Both Reed and Cowens won an MVP trophy, a Rookie of the Year trophy and two rings. They played in seven All-Star Games apiece and each took home an All-Star MVP. They played for exactly ten years and couldn’t stay healthy for the last few (although Cowens lasted better than Reed did). Their home crowds connected with them in a “Springsteen playing the Meadowlands” kind of way. They finished with nearly identical career scoring/rebounding numbers (18–14 for Cowens, 19–13 for Reed). And neither of them became a good coach for the same reason: namely, that an overcompetitive legend couldn’t possibly coach modern NBA players without going on a three-state killing spree.
So why not honor them with a Dr. Jack breakdown? Because Reed was better defensively and had a higher ceiling offensively, that’s why.41 Willis played 28 playoff games against Unseld (twice), Russell, Kareem and Wilt and averaged a 25–14 with 50 percent shooting as the Knicks prevailed in four of their five playoff series in ’69 and ’70, a more impressive stretch than anything Cowens ever offered.42 Willis peaked with a terrific ’70 Knicks team that surpassed any Boston edition from that decade. Cowens had a defining “tough guy” story (the Newlin incident), but Reed’s “tough guy” story was more impressive (the ’67 Lakers massacre where he decked three Lakers and sent their bench scurrying). Cowens’ greatest game (Game 7, ’74 Finals) can’t hold a candle to Reed’s greatest game (Game 7, ’70 Finals), and Cowens’ defining moment (skidding across the floor after pickpocketing Oscar) can’t come close to matching Reed’s defining moment (“And here comes Willis!”). Considering Willis wasted two years playing forward to accommodate the likes of Walt Bellamy, the distance between Cowens and Reed should have been bigger than it was.43 And you can’t gloss over Reed’s reputation as the premier enforcer of a much rougher era.
His remarkable Game 7 comeback shouldn’t matter for Pyramid purposes, but it’s hard not to give Willis credit for single-handedly swaying the ’70 Finals and providing one of the most famous sports moments of the twentieth century. Of all the NBA players who gritted through a debilitating injury, Willis stood out because he was literally dragging his right leg underneath him, like when your foot falls asleep and you can’t put any weight on it for a few seconds, only that was his right leg for a solid hour. That’s what made it so remarkable when he drained the first two jumpers and nearly broke Madison Square Garden’s roof. We can all agree Willis’ injury seemed worse than any other injury. Was it as gruesome as it looked? We know that Reed tore his right quadricep muscle, specifically a part called the rector femoris, which controls movement between hip and thigh. According to my favorite injury expert, Baseball Prospectus writer Will Carroll, you can feel that muscle by standing up, pushing your fingers into the center of your right thigh right inside the hip, then raising your right knee like you’re shooting a layup.
(Come on, just stand up and do it. I don’t ask for much.)
(Come on, just freaking do it! You’re pissing me off.)
(Thank you.)
Okay, once you raised that right knee, did you feel that specific part of the muscle tightening? That’s what Willis ripped in Game 5 of the ’70 Finals. All control had been severed between his hip and right leg, and as Carroll points out, “Willis’ right leg was a lot bigger than ours.” As for quantifying the level of pain, Carroll believes that it hinges on the impossible-to-determine combination of painkiller injections,44 adrenaline (running high for a Game 7, especially after the crowd went ballistic) and Willis’ pain threshold (obviously high). Was Willis draining two un-contested shots on a dead leg more impressive than Kirk Gibson limping off the bench, timing baseball’s top reliever and pushing off a ravaged knee for his Roy Hobbs-like game-winning home run in the ’88 World Series? Was Reed’s Game 7 cameo more courageous than Larry Bird spending the night in traction with a wrecked back, showing up for Game 5 of the Pacers-Celtics series the next morning, playing with a cumbersome back brace, banging his head in the first half and breaking a bone near his eye, then returning midway through the third quarter and beating Indiana with a vintage Larry Legend performance? There’s no way to know, no Pain Scale that measures it.
But here’s what we do know: of all the legendary playing-in-pain performances, Willis Reed had the only one that swung the deciding game of an entire season. Top that, Dave Cowens.
29. ALLEN IVERSON

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 9 All-Stars … ’01 MVP … ’97 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’99, ’01, ’05), Top 10 (’00, ’02, ’03), Top-15 (’06) … 3-year peak: 31–4–7 … best player on runner-up (’01 Sixers), 33–5–6 (22 G) … leader: scoring (4x), steals (3x), TO’s (2x), minutes (1x) … 30-plus PPG (5x) … Playoffs: 30–6–4, 40% FG (67 g’s) … 20K Point Club
As the years and decades pass, both Iverson and no. 21 on the Pyramid will be picked apart by an army of statisticians looking for various ways to undermine their careers. And that’s fine. Just know that Iverson passed the Season Ticket Test every year this decade (starting with his ’01 MVP season): when season tickets arrive in the mail, the recipient invariably checks the schedule, marks certain can’t-miss games and writes those dates down on a calendar. The importance of those games is measured by rivalries, superstars, incoming rookies and the “I need to see that guy” factor. That’s it. From 1997 to 2007, Iverson always made my list. Always. So I don’t give a crap about Iverson’s win shares, his ranking among top-fifty scorers with the lowest shooting percentage or whatever.45 Every post-Y2K ticket to an Iverson game guaranteed a professional, first-class performance (no different from reservations at a particularly good restaurant or hotel), and for whatever reason, he was always more breathtaking in person. He’s listed at six feet but couldn’t be taller than five-foot-ten, so every time he attacked the basket, it was like watching an undersized running back ram into the line of scrimmage for five yards a pop (think Emmitt Smith). He took implausible angles on his drives (angles that couldn’t be seen as they unfolded, even if you’d been watching him for ten years) and drained an obscene number of layups and floaters in traffic. He had a knack for going 9-for-24 but somehow making the two biggest shots of the game. And he played with an eff-you intensity that only KG and Kobe matched (although MJ remains the king of this category). For years and years, the most intimidating player in the league wasn’t taller than Rebecca Romijn. I always thought it was interesting that Iverson averaged 28 minutes of playing time in his eight All-Star Games and played crunch time in every close one; even his temporary coaches didn’t want to risk pissing him off.
Iverson’s career personifies how the media can negatively sway everyone’s perception of a particular athlete. There was a generational twinge to the anti-Iverson sentiment, fueled by media folks in their forties, fifties and sixties who couldn’t understand him and didn’t seem interested in trying. Nearly all of them played up his infamous aversion to practice (overrated over the years) and atypical appearance (the cornrows/tattoos combination) over describing the incredible thrill of watching him play in person. They weren’t interested in figuring out how an alleged coach-killer who allegedly monopolized the ball, allegedly hated to practice and allegedly couldn’t sublimate his game to make his teammates better doubled as one of the most revered players by his peers.46 They glossed over the fact that he was saddled with an incompetent front office, a subpar supporting cast and a revolving door of coaches in Philly.47 They didn’t care that he was one of the most influential African American athletes ever, a trendsetter who shoved the NBA into the hip-hop era (whether the league was ready or not) and resonated with blacks in a way that even Jordan couldn’t duplicate. They weren’t so interested in one of the most fascinating, complex athletes of my lifetime: a legendary partier and devoted family man; a loyal teammate who shot too much; a featherweight who carried himself like a heavyweight; an intimidating competitor who was always the smallest guy on the court; an ex-con with a shady entourage who also ranked among the most intuitive, self-aware, articulate superstars in any sport. If I could pick any modern athlete to spend a week with in his prime for a magazine feature, I would pick Allen Iverson. In a heartbeat.
And yeah, his field goal percentage wasn’t that good and he took too many shots. Whatever. Fifty years from now, I hope people realize that Iverson had better balance than everyone else, that he was faster and more coordinated than everyone else, that he took a superhuman pounding and kept getting up, that he was one of the all-time athletic superfreaks. We already know that he was the best high school football player in Virginia history, but he also would have been a world-class soccer player, boxer or center fielder, someone who could have picked his sport in track and competed for an Olympic spot, and while we’re here, I can’t fathom how much ground he could have covered on a tennis court. (Tangent that’s too important for a footnote: Every time the World Cup rolls around, I always find myself thinking about which NBA players could have excelled at soccer. Iverson would have been the best soccer player ever. I think this is indisputable, actually. Deron Williams would have been a great stopper. Josh Smith could have been unstoppable soaring above the pack to head corner kicks. And can you imagine a better goalie than LeBron? It would be like having a six-foot-nine human octopus in the net. How could anyone score on him? Couldn’t we teach Bron the rudimentary aspects of playing goal, then throw him in a couple of Cleveland’s MLS games? Like you would turn the channel if this happened?) Iverson wrecked his body on and off the court and somehow kept his fastball, which shouldn’t be counted as an achievement but remains amazing nonetheless.48 And he deserves loads of credit for dragging a mediocre Sixers team to the ’01 Finals when so many other scoring machines had failed before him. Unlike Gervin, McAdoo and Dominique, Iverson played with a swagger that pushed a decent team to a whole other level. He believed they could win, he killed himself to that end, and everyone else eventually followed. Watching Game 7 of the Bullets-Spurs series from ’79 and Game 7 of the Bucks-Sixers from ’01, the biggest difference between Gervin and Iverson—two spectacular offensive players—was the way they carried themselves. Gervin never gave the sense that the game was life or death to him, whereas Iverson went into foxhole mode, with his ferocity lifting his teammates and energizing the crowd.49
That ferocity separated Iverson from everyone else after Jordan retired; for most of his twenties, he was the Association’s single most menacing player. He had a darker edge that belonged to nobody else, a switch that instantly transformed him into a character from The Wire. I remember attending a Boston-Philly game when Iverson was whistled for a technical, yelped in disbelief, then followed the referee toward the scorer’s table before finally screaming “F*ck you!” at the top of his lungs. The official whirled around and pulled his whistle toward his mouth for a second technical. They were maybe 25 feet away from me, so I could see everything up close. And I swear on my daughter’s life, the following moment happened: As the ref started to blow the whistle, Iverson’s eyes widened and he moved angrily toward him, almost like someone getting written up for a parking ticket who decides it would be easier just to punch out the meter maid. For a split second, there was real violence in the air. The rattled official lowered his whistle and never called the second technical. By sheer force of personality, Iverson kept himself in the game.
Look, I’m not condoning what happened. It was a frightening moment. I specifically remember thinking, “I am frightened.” But I haven’t seen a basketball player bully a referee like that before or since; it was like playing an intramural hoops game against the football team and watching the biggest offensive lineman intimidate a 130-pound freshman ref. And that goes back to the seeing-him-in-person thing. At his peak, Iverson played with a compelling, hostile, bloodthirsty energy that nobody else had. He was relentless in every sense of the word, a warrior, an alpha dog, a tornado. He was so quick and coordinated that it genuinely defies description. He was enough of a lunatic that officials occasionally cowered in his presence. And none of this makes total sense unless you watched him live. Could you win a title if Iverson was your best player and you didn’t have a franchise big man? Of course not. Could you win a title with Iverson as the second-best player and crunch-time scorer? Yeah, possibly. Would you pay to see him in his prime? In the words of Mr. Big, absah-f*ckin’-lutely.50 I will remember him.
28. DAVID ROBINSON

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 10 All-Stars … ’95 MVP … runner-up: ’94, ’96 … ’90 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’91, ’92, ’95, ’96), Top 10 (’94, ’98), Top 15 (’90, ’93, ’00, ’01) … All-Defense (8x) … Defensive Player of the Year (’92) … leader: scoring (1x), rebounds (1x), blocks (1x) … 3-year peak: 28–11–3 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 24–11–3 (25 G) … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’99 Spurs), starter for 1 champ (’03 Spurs) … scored 71 points (one game) … one quadruple double (34–10–10–10) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 20K-10K Club
I mentioned seeing every relevant NBA player from 1976 to 1995 strolling through the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel and how only four stood out. Not including Ken Bannister or Popeye Jones, of course.
One was Manute. Already covered him.
The second was Bird. Nearly everyone in our section had watched the Legend walking by us dozens and dozens of times, but that didn’t stop us from staring at him the next time. This was the single most famous person who kept popping up in any of our lives. You worked, you slept, you ate, you went to the bathroom, you studied, you dated, you worked out, you did whatever normal people do … and then you went to the Boston Garden for a basketball game, and suddenly one of the greatest players ever was ambling by you again. When does that stop becoming surreal?51
The third one was Jordan. He reached a high enough level of fame by the mid-nineties that every entrance was accompanied by a barrage of flashbulbs, shrieks of “Michael!” and fans screaming hysterically for no real reason, like we were attending an all-girls private school and the Jonas Brothers had just walked in. What fascinated me was the way Jordan carried himself—keep moving, keep looking down, keep a small smile on your face—never breaking character even as strange palms bounced off his shoulders, even if someone was screaming “Myyyyyyy-kalllllllllllll!!!!!!!” from three feet away and blowing out his eardrum. He just kept plowing forward with a tiny grin. When he reached the floor and started preparing for the game, knowing the whole time that everyone was taking pictures, staring and waiting for him to pick his nose and scratch his nuts or something … I mean, there was just something dignified about the way he existed. Famous people are famous for a reason.
The fourth one? David Robinson. During his rookie year in 1990, I buzzed down from college to catch his first game at the Garden. That seemed like a worthy trip at the time; everyone had been waiting for him to join the NBA for two years and the “Russell 2.0” tag didn’t seem farfetched yet. Everyone attending this game already knew what he looked like. So when Robinson emerged from that tunnel, nothing should have happened other than everyone thinking, “Cool, there he is.” Instead, we made this sound: “Whoa.” Is that a sound or a murmur? I don’t know. But it was breathtaking to watch him glide by for the first time, like standing a few feet away from a prize thoroughbred or a brand-new Ferrari Testarossa. To this day, I have never seen anyone that close who looked more like a basketball player than David Robinson: The man was taller and more regal than we expected, but so absurdly chiseled that he looked like a touched-up model in a Soloflex ad. He walked proudly with his chest puffed out, his head held high, and a friendly smile on his face. He was strikingly handsome and even the most devout heterosexual males would have admitted it. Really, he was just a specimen. That’s the best way I can describe it. He was a freaking specimen. My dad said later that it was the only time he’d ever heard the “Whoa” sound in all his years sitting in that tunnel. We all made it. None of us could believe what we were seeing. Some guys are just destined to play basketball for a living.52
At that specific point in time, I would have wagered anything that Robinson would become one of the ten greatest players ever. Never happened. He failed to dominate the NBA despite having every conceivable tool you’d want for a center: Russell’s defensive instincts, Wilt’s strength and agility, Gilmore’s height, Parish’s ability to run the floor, Hakeem’s footwork and hand-eye coordination … and if that weren’t enough, the guy was left-handed. If we ever start cloning basketball players someday, Jordan, LeBron and Robinson will be one-two-three in some order.53 On paper, you couldn’t ask for a better center. In The Golden Boys, Cameron Stauth reveals that a twenty-five-year-old Robinson was the committee’s number four choice for the team—behind Bird/Magic/Jordan and ahead of everyone else—and there were always rumors that Chicago held internal discussions about offering Jordan straight up for Robinson before the ’92 and ’93 seasons. That’s how good everyone thought Robinson would be. The guy had everything.54
Well, almost everything. The same qualities that made him a special person also limited his basketball ceiling. Robinson might have been his generation’s most intelligent player, the guy scoring 1310 on his SATs, playing the piano, and dabbling in naval science in his spare time.55 Do book smarts matter on a basketball court? Not really. If anything, those extra brain cells wounded Robinson. Every early Robinson story centered around him “overthinking” things and needing to let “the game come to him.” He routinely sucked in crunch time, maybe because he was thinking about big-picture things like “I need to come through or else my legacy will be questioned someday.” A peaceful Christian who tried to find good in everyone, he lacked the requisite leadership skills—much less MJ’s “keep this up and I’m bringing you into the locker room, locking the door and beating the living crap out of you” quality, for that matter—to handle Dennis Rodman as Rodman spiraled out of control and undermined San Antonio’s ’95 playoff run. He never developed the same cutthroat attitude that defined Hakeem in his prime. It just wasn’t in him. When Jordan went on his “baseball sabbatical” and left a gaping opening for Robinson to become The Guy, Hakeem bulldozed him out of the way and won consecutive titles. Everything crested in the ’95 Playoffs—Robinson’s MVP season, by the way—when Hakeem delivered such a one-sided ass-whupping in the ’95 Western Finals that it eventually found a home on YouTube in a clip appropriately titled “Olaujwon Dominates Robinson.” Hakeem slapped up a 35–13–5 with 4 blocks per game, made the game-winning assist in Game 1, outscored Robinson 81–41 in the deciding two games and abused him with one particularly evil “Dream Shake” in Game 2 that became the defining moment of the series. So much for the Hakeem-Robinson debate.56
When Robinson finally became a champion in ’99, it happened only because Tim Duncan assumed alpha dog duties and allowed Robinson to settle into his destiny as a complementary guy … although, of course, that title doesn’t count because the ’99 season never happened. Even if his personality prevented him from reaching his full potential as a player (and by the way, no. 28 in the Pyramid isn’t too shabby), those same generous, thoughtful, unselfish qualities made him the greatest person out of anyone from his generation of stars. You know when you read about some people and feel embarrassed because you never touched people’s lives in the same way? That’s how Robinson made people feel; he’s the guy who once spent $9 million of his own money to build a school in San Antonio. My favorite Robinson memory was the way he reacted during the Steve Kerr Game, when Kerr shook off the cobwebs and caught fire in Game 6 of the ’03 Mavs-Spurs series. Since Kerr was popular with teammates and his barrage of threes was completely unexpected (he was their twelfth man that year), San Antonio’s bench was reacting like a fifteenth-seed pulling off a March Madness upset. Right in the middle of everything was Robinson. He couldn’t have been more overjoyed. You can actually see him jumping up and down like a little kid at one point. I guarantee he remembers that game as one of the highlights of his career. And in the big scheme of things, you know what? That counts for something. Nobody in the Pyramid was a better teammate or person than David Robinson. On the other hand, that’s not a great sign for Robinson’s legacy: my favorite Robinson moment was him cheering a teammate from the Spurs bench.
He only played fourteen seasons and struggled with back/knee issues for the last two—with nobody fully recognizing how much he had slipped because he looked exactly the same57—before rallying in the 2003 Finals to help the Spurs clinch a second title. His career was hindered slightly by a late start (thanks to four college years and a two-year navy stint), too many coaches (five in his first six years), and a crummy supporting cast (before Duncan, his only teammate to make an All-Star team was Sean Elliott). He wasn’t a twenty-four-year-old rookie because he bounced around Juco schools, spent time in prison, or repeated his senior year of high school three times; the guy served our country and fulfilled his responsibilities, so he deserves historical extra credit there. If there’s a what-if with Robinson other than losing two years with the navy stint, it’s that the Spurs botched the number three pick in ’89 by drafting Elliott ahead of Glen Rice, an indefensible decision58 that became worse as the years passed and Rice evolved into a crunch-time killer and murderous three-point shooter for Charlotte and Miami. Had Rice been taking the big Spurs shots in the mid-nineties, the Spurs would have snuck into the Finals during Robinson’s prime and he might have cracked Level 4. Instead I’ll remember him for one sound: “Whoa.”59
27. BILL WALTON

Resume: 10 years, 4 quality, 2 All-Stars … ’77 Finals MVP … ’78 MVP, ’77 runner-up … Top 5 (’78), Top 10 (’77) … All-Defense (2x) … leader: rebounds (1x), blocks (1x) … best player on 1 champ (’77 Blazers), 6th man on 1 champ (’86 Celts) … ’77 playoffs: 18.2 PPG, 15.5 RPG, 5.5 APG, 3.4 BPG
Imagine you became GM of your favorite team and were given the power to pull any NBA center from a time machine, then stick that player on your team—only his career would unfold exactly like it did when he played. Under these rules, would you rather have fourteen quality years of Robinson or two and a half transcendent years from Walton (one and a half as a starter, one as a sixth man)? I take Walton, and here’s why: for that one transcendent year when we catch lightning in a bottle with him, I am guaranteed a title as long as I flank him with a good rebounder, a decent shooter and quick guards. How many players guaranteed you an NBA title? Jordan, Bird, Magic, Russell, Kareem, Hakeem, Duncan, Shaq, Moses, Wilt (if his head was on straight), Mikan (as long as it was the early fifties) … really, that’s the whole list. Walton cracked that group for one magical year, prevailing with the worst supporting cast of any post-merger champion: Mo Lucas, Lionel Hollins, Bobby Gross, Johnny Davis, Dave Twardzik, Lloyd Neal and that’s about it. For eleven months from March 29, 1977 to March 1, 1978, including the ’77 playoffs, Portland finished 70–15 during an especially competitive era.60 And everything—everything—ran through Walton. Maybe some centers were better in specific areas, but none was the best passer, rebounder, shot blocker, outlet passer, defensive anchor, crunch-time scorer, emotional leader and undisputed “guy we revolve our offense around” for their team at the same time. If you made a checklist of what you want from a center, he’s the only player who gets check marks in every category.61 And if you tinkered with his game to make it “better,” really, what would you do? Maybe give him Kareem’s sky hook or a few McHale low-post moves? We’re picking nits at that point, right?
The big redhead deserves credit for peaking on the ultimate stage: the ’77 Finals, when he averaged a 19–19–5 with 4 blocks and slapped up an ungodly 20–23–8 with seven blocks in the deciding game, then ripped off his jersey and celebrated shirtless with the delirious Portland fans. It’s on the short list of most dominating individual performances that actually meant something, right up there with Russell’s Game 7 of the ’62 Finals, Wilt’s Game 5 against Boston in ’67, Pettit’s Game 6 of the ’57 Finals, Jordan’s Game 6 of the ’98 Finals, Frazier’s Game 7 of the ’70 Finals, Kareem’s Game 5 of the ’80 Finals, Magic’s Game 6 of the ’80 Finals, Duncan’s Game 6 of the ’03 Finals, Hakeem’s Game 5 in the ’95 Spurs series and Bird’s Game 6 of the ’86 Finals. Fortunately, NBA TV and ESPN Classic run an inordinate number of ’77 Blazers games; it’s one thing to read about Walton, and it’s another thing to marvel at his Unseld-like outlets, Bird-like passing and deadly bank shots, as well as the way he constantly lifted his teammates and made them better. He controlled the basket on both ends. That’s the best way to describe it. We haven’t seen anything like it since.62
Quick tangent: during that star-crossed ’78 season when Walton’s body broke down right as the Blazers were decimating everyone, they played in Boston right before my Christmas break. I had just turned eight. For me to remember a random Celtics game from December ’77 means that it left a significant imprint on me. And here’s what I remember: Portland showed up in Boston and absolutely kicked the small intestines out of us. It’s not like we were good anymore; that was the year Hondo retired, Heinsohn got fired and everything fell apart. They caught us at the perfect time. With that said, the Blazers reached a level that I hadn’t seen in person before. They turned the game into a layup line for four quarters. Every time we missed, Walton grabbed the rebound and started another fast break. There was no conceivable way to beat them. We missed, they scored. We missed, they scored. They were a machine. I remember leaving the Garden with my father and feeling like we had both been beaten up or something. By the time I turned twenty-five, I remembered the score being 151–72; actually, the final score was 113–81. But you get the point. Other than the ’86 Celtics and ’96 Bulls, that’s the best team I’ve ever seen in person. And all because of Walton.
You can’t overstate how damaging those lost Walton years were for anyone who truly cared about basketball. From a comedy standpoint, it would be like Eddie Murphy releasing 48 Hours and Trading Places, disappearing for the next eight years, coming back and releasing Beverly Hills Cop, then disappearing for good. From a musical standpoint, it was like Cobain killing himself right as Nirvana was recording the follow-up to Nevermind. Of course, the perfect pop culture comparison would be Tupac Shakur—funny because you can’t find a blacker guy than ’Pac or a whiter guy than Walton—because their careers started out stormy (Walton’s injuries and political activism, ’Pac’s jail time and brash lyrics) and had an ominous, this-could-end-at-any-time feel (thanks to Walton’s feet and ’Pac’s death wish), only they returned at full strength and blew everyone away for a solid year (Walton’s 70–15 stretch, Tupac’s All Eyez on Me album)63 before getting pulled away for good (Walton because of his feet, ’Pac because he was murdered). Then they lingered for the next decade or so, with Walton’s comebacks repeatedly getting cut short64 and Death Row Records repeatedly releasing lost songs and re-dubs that weren’t as good as the stuff ’Pac made when he was alive. The big difference was that Walton found redemption on the ’86 Celtics; Tupac won’t find redemption unless he returns from the dead. (And don’t rule it out.) I do wonder if Walton and Tupac were helped historically by their brief apexes; we romanticize them years later and wonder what could have been, only Tupac loved the thug life too much and Walton’s misshapen feet were never meant to handle the NBA. They each had a fatal flaw and that was that.
But you know what? They were original prototypes. One of a kind. Give me Walton for two and a half years over fourteen years of Robinson, and give me four years of ’Pac over a full career of any other rapper. My favorite Tupac song is “Picture Me Rollin’,” an uplifting effort right after his release from prison, when he’s cruising around in his 500 Benz, relishing his freedom and telling everyone who kept him down over the years (I’m translating into honky-speak), “Now that I’m out on the streets and being me again, I sincerely hope you take a few moments to think about me happily driving around in my expensive car as a free man. By the way, go f*ck yourself.” That’s really the whole point of the song. At one point he taunts, “Can you see me now? Heheheh. Move to the side a little bit so you can get a clear picture. Can you see it? Hahah. Picture me rollin.’” Fantastic. And it’s one of his catchier tunes, the kind of song that makes you want to ride around in a convertible and pretend you’re black. (Wait, you don’t do that? Um … me neither.) Anyway, the song ends with Tupac taunting everyone from Clinton Correctional Facility, his old stomping grounds:
Any time y’all wanna see me again
Rewind this track right here,
Close your eyes and picture me rollin’.
I feel that way about Walton and the Blazers. They didn’t roll for long, but they rolled. And I don’t even need to rewind the tapes to picture it.65
26. RICK BARRY

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’75 Finals MVP … BS MVP (75) … Top 5 NBA (’66, ’67, ’74, ’75, ’76), Top 5 ABA (’69, ’70, ’71, ’72), Top 10 (’73) … ’67 All-Star MVP (38 points) … season leader: points (1x), FT% (9x), steals (1x) … best player on champ (’75 Warriors) and runner-up (’67 Warriors) … ’67 playoffs: 35–8–4 (15 G); ’75 Playoffs: 28–6–6, 44% FG, 92% FT (17 G) … 3-Year ABA Playoffs peak: 34–8–4, 49% FG (31 G) … 3-year NBA Playoffs peak: 27–7–6, 45% FG, 91% FT (40 G) … career: 24.8 PPG (13th), 89.3 FT (3rd), 5.1 APG … 25K Point Club
We already nailed an inordinate number of Barryisms throughout the book: his various hairstyles, his controversial leap to the ABA, his announcing foibles, his autobiography with the worst cover ever, the year they robbed him of the MVP and the reasons why. Say what you want about the guy, but he was definitely interesting. Especially if you were his hair stylist. We’ll remember him as the most notorious a*shole in NBA history, a perfectionist who held inferior teammates in disdain, had an almost pathological need to rub everyone the wrong way, and earned a reputation (fair or unfair) for not being able to click with black teammates. Remember when Jeff Beebe flips out during the near-plane crash in Almost Famous, berates Russell Hammond and finally screams, “You act like you’re above us! You always have!” as their bassist chimes in, “Finally the truth.” That was Rick Barry. He acted like he was above everyone else. Five former teammates or coworkers threw him under the bus in the same 1983 SI feature: Robert Parish (“He had a bad attitude. He was always looking down at you.”), Phil Smith (“He was the same on TV. He was so critical of everyone. Like he was Mr. Perfect.”), Mike Dunleavy (“He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him to the U.N. he’d end up starting World War III”),66 Billy Paultz (“Around the league they thought of him as the most arrogant guy ever. I couldn’t believe it. Half the players disliked Rick. The other half hated him.”), and then-Warriors executive VP Ken Macker (“You’ll never find a bunch of players sitting around talking about the good old days with Rick. His teammates and his opponents generally and thoroughly detested him.”). Poor Barry was the Daniel LaRusso of the NBA—there was just something about him that rubbed people the wrong way.
The quintessential Barry story: when he threw away Game 7 of the ’76 Western Finals because his teammates never defended him in the Ricky Sobers fight.67 Barry probably watched the highlights at halftime and confirmed his own suspicions that his teammates sold him out; the second half started and Barry simply stopped shooting. During the last few minutes, coach Al Attles probably threatened him because Barry suddenly became Barry again; even with a late surge, the defending champs ended up falling at home to an inferior team. You won’t find a more indefensible playoff defeat in a deciding game. When I was working for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, we used Barry for a comedy bit and I couldn’t resist asking him what happened in that series. He quickly replied, “We should have won Game 7. We were rallying and I had a pick-and-roll with Clifford Ray, but he couldn’t catch the damned pass.” Then he shook his head in disgust and let out one of those “I wish Cliff were here right now so I could shoot him a nasty look” groans. Twenty-seven years later, Rick Barry—Hall of Famer, NBA champ, one of the eight best forwards of all time—couldn’t let that play go. It was weird. Sure enough, I watched the tape a few weeks later: the Warriors were roaring back, Ray set a pick and rolled to the basket, and Barry delivered the ball right off Ray’s hands and out of bounds. The cameras caught Barry frozen in disbelief. It’s the defining Barry moment in the defining “Rick Barry was a prick” game.
Poor Barry was his own worst enemy. He fled from a perfect situation in 1967—the top scorer on a Finals team that had a young Hall of Fame center (Nate Thurmond) and a quality second scoring option (Jeff Mullins)—and jumped to the ABA’s Oakland Oaks. Why? Because his father-in-law (Bruce Hale) had been named their coach, even though the move meant sitting out an entire season and playing in an inferior league that could have gone belly up at any time. Has there ever been a dumber career move by an NBA superstar that didn’t involve the words “Birmingham Barons”? You can’t even say Barry did it for the money; G-State matched Oakland’s offer and he still left. How could he forget to put in his contract, “If the team moves or Bruce Hale gets fired, I can opt out immediately”? He sat out a year and injured his knee the following season. Then he watched in horror as the Oaks moved to Washington (Barry couldn’t extricate himself from his ABA contract) and Virginia (Barry finally forced a trade by insulting Virginians in a 1970 SI feature, saying that he didn’t want his son “to come home from school saying, ‘Hi y’all, Daad’”) before dragging the Nets to the ’72 ABA Finals and returning to Golden State the next season. So the best forward of that generation wasted five full years of his prime in a second-rate league because he wanted to play for his father-in-law? Two years later, Barry nearly dumped the Warriors again to become CBS’ lead color guy, changing his mind at the last minute.68 After the ’77 season, he pissed on Warriors fans a third time by signing with the Rockets as a free agent (killing his relationship with Golden State owner Franklin Mieuli forever). Just like Roger Clemens at the end, Barry retired belonging to nobody: no farewell tour, no retirement ceremony, nothing.
How could we possibly rank him this high? Barry was the second-best passing forward ever, a beautiful creator who made everyone better as long as they didn’t cross him. He could score with anyone when he was younger, averaging 35.6 points in his second NBA season (trailing only Wilt, Baylor and Jordan as the highest average ever) and 34.7 points in the ’67 Playoffs.69 He was one of those born-before-his-time shooters who thrived with a three-point line, draining 40 of 97 threes (41.2 percent) in 31 ABA playoff games. He wasn’t a great defensive player but crafty enough that he led the league in steals once (2.8 per game). He’s one of the best free throw shooters of all time, probably the greatest end-of-the-game cooler ever.70 He slapped together one of the single best seasons in basketball history in 1975, doing every single thing that needed to be done and pulling off one of the bigger Finals upsets ever. And he actually would have been fun to play basketball with … as long as you didn’t disappoint him or make a dumb mistake. Had they had formed a Dream Team for the ’76 Olympics, Barry would have become the team’s alpha dog and everything would have revolved around his passing and creating. That counts for something in the big scheme of things.71
We’ll remember him as an inordinately talented player and inordinately screwed-up person, and over everything else, that’s why it didn’t seem right to make him a Level 4 guy. Other than the ’75 Finals, his defining moment happened two years after WatermelonGate, when a freelancer named Tony Kornheiser profiled Barry for one of the most memorable features in SI’s history, “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness.” Kornheiser tried to figure out how such a great player could be forgotten so quickly, cleverly arguing that Barry’s biggest problem was “face discrimination” and comparing him to the annoying, know-it-all actor that Dustin Hoffman played in Tootsie who rubbed everyone the wrong way. The piece starts like this:
Rick Barry has a problem. He would like people to regard him with love and affection, as they do Jerry West and John Havlicek. They do not.
“The way I looked alienated a lot of people,” Barry says. “I’ve seen films of myself and seen the faces I made. I looked terrible.” He closes his eyes to the memory and shakes his head. “I acted like a jerk. Did a lot of stupid things. Opened my big mouth and said a lot of things that upset and hurt people. I was an easy person to hate. And I can understand that. I tell kids, “There’s nothing wrong with playing the way Rick Barry played, but don’t act the way Rick Barry acted.” I tell my own kids, “Do as I say, not as I did.”
What bothers him isn’t that he’s not beloved.
“It bothers me,” Barry says, “that I’m not even liked.”
And he wasn’t. But I can’t drop him below no. 26. He brought too much to the table. If Barry’s career was relived as a twelve-person dinner party with Barry hosting, then the following things would definitely happen: Dinner would start late because one of Barry’s chefs quit that afternoon; everyone would comment on the table looking absolutely fantastic; two guests would storm out during the appetizers after Barry makes an inappropriate joke about one of their kids; another couple would leave before dessert because Barry keeps arguing politics with the husband and won’t shut up; there would be multiple awkward interactions with Barry second-guessing one of the waiters (highlighted by one accidentally inappropriate racial joke); and the rest of the guests would ultimately decide to ignore his bullshit and savor the wonderful wine, first-rate filet mignon and an unbelievable round of soufflés and ports. Sure, they would bitch about him the entire way home … but a great meal is a great meal.
25. JOHN STOCKTON

Resume: 19 years, 10 quality, 10 All-Stars … Top 5 (’94, ’95), Top 10 (’88, ’89, ’90, ’92, ’93, ’96), Top 15 (’91, ’97, ’99) … Playoffs record: most assists (24) … 5-year peak: 16–3–14 … leader: assists (9x), steals (2x) … ’88 playoffs: 19–4–15 (11 G) … 2nd-best player on 2 runner-ups (’97, ’98 Jazz) … Playoffs: 13–10.4, 80% FT (182 G) … missed 22 games total, played 82 games in 17 of 19 seasons … career: assists (1st), games (3rd)
For Jazz fans, watching Stockton was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades. Yeah, you were having regular sex (or in this case, winning games), but you weren’t exactly bragging to your friends or anything. He was very, very, very, very good but never great, personified by all those second-team and third-team All-NBA appearances and the fact that he never cracked the top six of the MVP voting. He bored everyone to death with those predictable high screens with Malone, the blank expression on his face72 and a sweeping lack of flair. He made the Dream Team only because Isiah had burned so many bridges that Stockton was a much safer choice.73 I always thought he was more fun not to like. He didn’t have a nickname and modeled his haircut after the LEGO Man. He deserves partial responsibility for Utah’s appallingly methodical style of play in the nineties. He pulled enough dirty stunts over the years to make Bruce Bowen blush, routinely tripping opponents as they curled off screens, setting moving picks by sticking his knee out at the last second, “mistakenly” punching in the nuts anyone who blind-picked him … and yet nobody ever called him out on this shit because he looked like he could have replaced Brenda and Brandon’s dad on 90210.74
You can’t pick a point when Stockton’s career peaked because it never happened. From 1988 to 1995, he averaged between 14.7 and 17.2 points and 12.3 and 14.5 assists during the “assists are suddenly easier to get” era. His shooting numbers were outstanding (51.5 percent career FG, 38.4 percent career threes, 82.6 percent FT); he shot 53 percent or better seven times and reached 57.4 percent in 1988. Curiously, those numbers dipped in the playoffs (47.3 percent in 182 postseason games); from ’92 to ’96, Stockton shot just 44 percent and missed 107 of 153 threes (30 percent). After submitting a monster performance in the ’88 Playoffs (20–4–15, including a 24-assist game against L.A.), Stockton wasn’t exactly Big Shot John for the rest of his postseason prime. The ’89 Jazz got swept by seventh-seed G-State (starting Winston Garland at point guard, no less). Kevin Johnson and the ’90 Suns stole a deciding Game 5 in Utah. The Blazers eliminated them in the ’91 and ’92 Playoffs, with Stockton going 6-for-25 in the last two ’92 losses and getting outplayed by Terry Porter (a 26–8 for the series). The ’93 Jazz blew a 2–1 lead and lost to Seattle in the first round, with Stockton shooting 4-for-14 in a potential Game 4 clincher at home. The ’94 Jazz lost in the Western Finals to Houston; Stockton missed 38 of 65 shots and averaged just 9.4 assists in the series. The ’95 Jazz blew a deciding Game 5 at home to Houston, with Stockton contributing just 5 assists and 12 points on 4-for-14 shooting. And when the ’96 Jazz lost Game 7 of the Western Finals to Seattle, the point guard matchup brought back memories of Olajuwon-Robinson the previous year: 20.8 points, 6.4 assists and 56 percent shooting for GP; 10.1 points, 7.6 assists and 39 percent shooting for Stockton.
By the time Payton had finished whipping him like a dominatrix, Stockton was thirty-four and heading toward the twilight of his career. Then fate intervened. Magic and Isiah were gone. KJ and Price were fading away. Penny was a blown-out knee waiting to happen. Tim Hardaway tore an ACL and became much easier to defend. Kidd and Marbury weren’t ready. Kenny Anderson and Damon Stoudamire would never be ready. Rod Strickland and Nick Van Exel were crazy. Mark Jackson and Mookie Blaylock weren’t in his class. Really, who was left?75 And the pace of NBA games had slowed so much that fast breaks were obsolete and every team milked possessions for 18–20 seconds at a time, a godsend of a development for a point guard in his mid-thirties. By dumb luck and sheer attrition, Stockton remained the league’s second-best point guard. When the ’97 Jazz won 64 games and made the Finals, Stockton enjoyed his best playoff numbers in five years (16–4–0, 52 percent FG) against Darrick Martin (first round), Van Exel (second round), Matt Maloney (Western Finals), and Steve Kerr (Finals). When they returned to the Finals in ’98, Stockton made a bunch of memorable crunch-time plays against Maloney (first round), Avery Johnson (second round), Van Exel (Western Finals), and Kerr (Finals).76 So much for the glory days of battling Magic, GP and KJ.
I would argue that Stockton enjoyed the luckiest career of any top-forty guy. He lasted long enough that we forget his Playoffs resume from ’89 to ’96 and remember only his big moments in ’97 and ’98 … you know, when he was lighting up Maloney.77 We marvel at his gaudy assist numbers, forgetting that they came during an era when the criteria for assists inexplicably softened. And we gloss over his good fortune of playing with one of the best coaches ever (Jerry Sloan) and best power forwards ever (Malone, who complemented him perfectly in every respect). Look, I was there. He wasn’t better than Isiah, Magic, Payton or even Hardaway and KJ at their peaks. He couldn’t guard anyone for the last half of his career. He didn’t have an extra playoff gear like so many other greats. Had he arrived at a different time, landed on the wrong team or blown out a knee, Stockton just as easily could have been Mark Price. So why the high ranking? Because he wore me down. Even after turning forty, he kept playing at a fairly high level and putting on a “how to run a basketball team” clinic. There was a crunch-time moment in the 2002 Playoffs with Utah trailing by six and desperately needing a hoop to silence a raucous Sacramento crowd. As Stockton was tearing down the court, I was sitting there thinking, “Pull-up three, he’s going for the pull-up three,” only because I’d seen it so many times. Mike Bibby didn’t know him as well. Thinking Stockton intended to take it coast-to-coast, Bibby started backpedaling at the three-point line … and as soon as Bibby’s momentum started to lean backward, Stockton pulled up and launched one of his trademark “my momentum is taking me forward, but somehow I stopped my body long enough to launch this baby” threes right in Bibby’s mug.
Swish.
Three-point game.
Mike Bibby’s head shaking in disgust.
And I remember thinking, “That’s why I’m gonna miss John Stockton.” Even after seventeen years and counting, you knew him inside and out, knew every one of his moves, knew what he was doing before he even did it and he was still pulling that crap off. Unbelievable. Watching Stockton in his waning years reminded me of a family member or longtime friend who gets you with the same two moves every time, like my uncle Bob, who lived off the same pull-up jumper going to his right for about forty-five years. There’s something to be said for that. Isiah was better at his peak, but would you rather have an A-plus point guard for ten quality years or an A-minus for seventeen years pulling off the same exact shit in 2003 that he pulled in 1987? Interesting debate. I’d still take Isiah, but I had to think about it. As late as 1996? I wouldn’t have thought about it. Stockton wasn’t flashy like Magic or as naturally gifted as Nash. He stood out only because of his short shorts78 and a vague resemblance to David Duchovny. Only Utah fans and basketball nerds truly appreciated him; Stockton’s final few months barely registered a thump against Jordan’s third and final farewell in 2003. Too bad. He should have gotten more credit for being the most fundamentally sound point guard ever, for playing the position selflessly and thoughtfully for an extraordinary length of time. Most points play at a high level for nine to twelve years; Stockton did it for eighteen and didn’t miss a single game in seventeen of them. Only Nash was better at running high screens. Only Magic was better at going coast-to-coast in big moments. And nobody owned the “we’re up by one, we’re on the road, the crowd’s going bonkers, there’s a minute left, the other team just got a fast break dunk, they have all the momentum, and that’s why I’m bringing it down and dropping a 25-footer on them” sequence quite like Stockton did. He was one of a kind. Boring as hell … but one of a kind.
(One last thought: here’s where you have to love the Level 3/Level 4 debate. Stockton was the defining Level 3 guy for me, but you could easily make the case that his longevity and assist numbers sneak him up a level. See, the Pyramid works! It works, dammit!)
1. I spent roughly 10,000 hours playing Doc vs. Larry in 1984. If I’d had NBA Live 2009 at the time, Doc vs. Larry wouldn’t have come out of the box. You could say the same about Mikan in 1951. If Dwight Howard had been playing back then, Mikan wouldn’t have come out of the box.
2. They didn’t even keep rebounding stats until ’51. What the hell was going on back then? It’s amazing they even kept track of points.
3. I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out what current celebrity Mikan looked like. The answer? A giant, bespectacled Jason Biggs. I’m glad I’m here.
4. McHale told Jack McCallum in 1990, “The footwork is important, but my success begins with the premise that I can shoot the ball. That’s where so many big guys get off track right away. Everything is predicated on my defensive guy thinking, ‘If McHale shoots the ball, he’s going to make it.’ … The one thing I know right away is when I’m going to take a jump shot. When the entry pass is in the air, and I feel my guy with just one hand on me, playing off me, there’s no way I am not going to shoot. And there’s no way he’s going to block it.”
5. I incorporated this move into my own game. Unstoppable. House and I played like a thousand hours of one-on-one and two-on-two in college and he always fell for it. I also had the double jump hook as well.
6. During an ESPN shoot, I got Paul Pierce to fall for this move at the EA headquarters in Vancouver. He claims he wasn’t trying, but there’s video and everything. I sank combo no. 3 right in the mug of a guy who’d win Finals MVP ten months later. Come on, how many people can say that?
7. Didn’t help that KC Jones coached every game like it was Game 7 of the Finals. I was rereading 48 Minutes (the book about a specific ’87 Cavs-Celtics game by Terry Pluto and Bob Ryan) and laughed when I came to the box score at the end: KC played McHale and Bird 51 and 49 minutes respectively in an OT game against a bad team in January. This shit happened all the time. No wonder those guys broke down.
8. Think of this when you see him limping around on the sideline as Minnesota’s coach.
9. You know, before Madden lost his fastball and grew twelve-inch-long eyebrow hairs and started to look like a mortician was doing his makeup.
10. McHale never imagined going pro until his senior year. Here’s what he told McCallum: “I was at a party with some football players and somebody brought in the Sporting News that had me rated as the top forward and second-best center in basketball. ‘Hey, you’re going to be a top-five pick,’ someone told me, and I said, ‘Really?’ … I played in all those postseason All-Star games basically for the travel. I had no thoughts of improving myself in the draft or getting more money or anything like that. I remember I picked up the paper and read that Darrell Griffith wasn’t going to play in the All-Star game in Hawaii because he didn’t want to take the chance at getting hurt. And I thought, ‘What’s with this guy? Miss a free trip to Hawaii?’ I went over there, drank pi?a coladas and beer, and won the MVP.” How could you not like this guy?
11. I forgot to include Ice and Holmes in my pantheon of Cross-Racial Lookalikes: they even had the same facial hair and body types. The Ice/Holmes parallels are eerie: they both started in 1972, had primes from ’77 to ’83, set a few records, had cool nicknames (“Ice” and “Johnny Wadd”), battled whispers about personal problems, flamed out remarkably fast and were gone by 1986. You could even make a parallel between Ice’s depressing final season on Chicago and Holmes playing a gay sultan. And yes, I know this is the third Holmes-related footnote in the book. Just know that the over/under was 4.5.
12. Virginia teammate Fatty Taylor gave Gervin his nickname during Ice’s rookie year, marveling at how Ice could score all game without sweating. In Ice’s defense, he only weighed 135 pounds and probably didn’t have any water in his body.
13. Sam’s per-36-minute numbers in ’59, ’60 and ’61? 20–9–3, 45% FG. For ’62 and ’63? 22–7–4, 47% FG.
14. They played together on the ’86 Bulls when Ice was three levels beyond washed up.
15. The NBA Players Association would flip if this happened now. Every Spur was given the same bonus, although the $$$ changed depending on the player. According to SI, the Spurs won on opening night and a teammate yelled, “One down, eighty-one to go!” Gervin corrected him: “No, one down, thirty-five to go.”
16. I’m not sure why anyone speculated about Gervin: he weighed less than any Charlie’s Angel, coasted through certain games, referred to himself in the third person, made way too much money, skipped practices all the time with no explanation, was washed up at thirty-three even though he never suffered a major injury and answered to the nickname “Ice.” I don’t see any red flags.
17. This quote inexplicably started with “Whereas,” like Ice was answering a question even though he wasn’t. Since he said “Whereas” two other times, I think that was just his vocal tic. Whereas, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.
18. This came from Curry Kirkpatrick’s S.I. feature about Ice. Curry’s talents obscured a meanspirited tendency to make certain NBA players sound like Buckwheat. Like how he included this Bob McAdoo quote in the first paragraph of a ’76 Mac profile: “It be hard not to get buckets in this league. If I be doin’ any less, people think I be doggin’ it.”
19. Did Jimmy Chitwood steal this line from Sam Jones, or did Sam steal it from Jimmy, because Hickory High’s championship hypothetically happened before Jones played for the Celtics? My head hurts.
20. Ice paved the way for Rickey Henderson and every other star from future generations who constantly referred to himself in the third person. Bill Simmons loves Ice for this.
21. Grevey explained later, “If Gervin doesn’t get the ball for a while, he goes into a lull. He stops running and working for it. I was in his chest.” That was the rap on Ice—if you beat him up, knocked him around and hounded him, eventually he’d stop trying as hard.
22. Kenon sulked after S.A. fans voted Gervin Most Popular Spur in ’77, telling reporters, “This town has Gervinitis. They don’t recognize me enough. I’m the best player in the game.” There’s a reason he wasn’t in Chapter 1.
23. Starters: Gilmore, Kenon, Doc, Darnell Hillman, Moochie Norris. Sixth man: Ben Wallace. Yes, I had to play Doc at 2 to get everyone in. Sue me.
24. With Ice on his last legs and the Spurs in a free fall, it’s a shame no ’84 contender traded for him. Imagine the ’84 Finals with Ice instead of Mike McGee. Even would have been a fair trade: McGee averaged 17 MPG and 10 PPG and shot 56% for the ’84 and ’85 Lakers.
25. During the first season when his contract included win bonuses, Ice dropped 42 on G-State and said afterward, “Yeah, I told you I’d get 40. Only points don’t make me no money. Only W’s. Nothing but W’s. From now on when I get my 40’s I’m gonna make sure that we win, too.”
26. God forbid there was tape of this one. Oscar and Sam guarding each other in a door-die playoff game and combining for 90 points?
27. I could only find one “Sam choked” game: Game 4 of the ’63 Finals, with Sam in-bounding the ball in a tie game and three seconds remaining, Jerry West picked off his pass for a buzzer-beating, game-winning layup. Auerbach complained about the timekeeper afterward, but I saw the clip and it seemed legit. That’s the only buzzer-beating steal/layup in Finals history as far as I can tell.
28. Just like Karl Malone, only the exact opposite.
29. I always loved Clyde for carrying off another first name as his nickname. When does that ever happen? For instance, if I was Bill “Rufus” Simmons, that would be weird. But Walt “Clyde” Frazier sounded perfect. Maybe it’s a black/white thing. All right, it’s definitely a black/white thing.
30. In Game 7 of the NYK-Boston series in ’73, when New York became the first team to win a Game 7 in Boston, Frazier kills Jo Jo White down the stretch with 19-footers. Couldn’t be stopped. It’s demoralizing to watch even thirty-five years later.
31. I’d love to know who banged more high-caliber ladies from 1969 to 1975, Frazier or Joe Namath. Had they kept score, it’s a better battle than Federer and Nadal in the ’08 Wimbledon Finals. I’d make Namath a slight favorite.
32. Tiny Archibald was the one ahead-of-his-time point guard playing in that 1970–1975 stretch, and that’s when he peaked statistically and had the famous lead-the-league-in-points/assists season. Makes you wonder what would have happened had there been more Tinys.
33. Frazier’s attempt to shatter the Unintentional Comedy Scale as a Knicks announcer for the past two-plus decades did not factor into this ranking.
34. This was back when the players actually had wives. By the mid-nineties, this became the “girlfriends, hos, bimbos and the-bitch-claims-she’s-pregnant-but-the-paternity-test-hasn’t-come-back-yet” section.
35. It seemed inconceivable then that any Walton kid would make the NBA. When Luke broke out at Arizona, I remember asking my dad, “Wasn’t that the little Walton kid who looked like Rocky Dennis?” Now he’s something of a ladies’ man: I even had a reader compare him to Jennifer Love Hewitt in that guys love JLH (and it makes girls furious) and girls love Luke (and it makes guys furious).
36. When that happened, Dad and I debated whether a kookier person had ever sung that song in front of more than 15,000 people, ultimately deciding no.
37. Once they mercifully separated and Mrs. Chief accused Chief of hitting her during an allegedly wild brawl, we read her allegations at my father’s house—my dad, my stepmother and me—and agreed within seconds that either (a) the Chief was innocent, or (b) if he laid his hands on her in an inappropriate way, it was only because he feared for his own life. We all wanted to testify at the divorce trial in his defense. And my stepmother is a raging feminist and successful doctor who went to Smith College. That’s how crazy Mrs. Chief was.
38. Grumpy Old Editor: “Mine too, and I hate the Celtics.” He’s a delight.
39. Imagine being drunk in your mid-twenties, stumbling out of a bar, hailing a taxi and getting picked up by Cowens. That’s reason no. 736 why I wish I had been single in Boston in 1976 instead of 1996. Other reasons include blondes with Farrah Fawcett haircuts, polyester suits, discos, guilt-free use of cocaine, sex without consequences or fear of AIDS, season tickets to the Celtics for $6 per game and, of course, the lack of bras.
40. I could totally see Cowens playing center on some of Nash’s Suns teams, or anchoring the ’07 Warriors team that ended up beating Dallas. Really, he could have fit in with any NBA team except New Jersey, where he absolutely would have run Vince over with his taxicab within about five weeks.
41. See, I told you this book would be free of Boston biases! And you were worried after I put Sam ahead of the Iceman. Just wait until we get to the top five.
42. From March 24, 1970, through Game 4 of the ’70 Finals, Wilt played seven games vs. Unseld, five vs. Kareem, and four vs. Wilt and averaged 29.6 points and 17.5 rebounds a game.
43. The Knicks relived this f*ckup 20 years later, playing Ewing and Bill Cartwright together for three frustrating years. You know a franchise is historically inept when they start repeating old mistakes like Dubya did with Iraq. By the way, they gave up three quality role players for Bellamy, including “Jumping” Johnny Green, a four-time All-Star who would have been a YouTube hero 40 years later.
44. According to a New York Times article by Jane Leavy in 1979, Willis was injected with 250 milligrams of an anesthetic called carbocaine. If I told you that a famous person used something called carbocaine in 1970, would you have guessed Willis Reed or Keith Richards?
45. The case against Iverson: he’s a ball hog (averaged 23-plus shots in 7 straight seasons); he’s a horrible three-point shooter (31% career, three straight sub-30% years from ’02 to ’04); he turned the ball over too much (3.8 career per game, four seasons of 4.4 or higher); and he was a 2-guard in a point guard’s body (so you had to match him with a tall point guard to keep Iverson from defending bigger 2-guards). The only defensible gripe was his three-point shooting—nobody who sucks that much from deep should attempt nearly 3,300 threes in 12 seasons.
46. Right before Philly dealt Iverson to Denver in 2006, the ex-players on NBA Coast to Coast (Greg Anthony, Tim Legler and Jon Barry) traded Iverson war stories like they were talking about a Mayan warrior.
47. Iverson only played with two All-Stars in Philly: Theo Ratliff and a becoming-decrepit Dikembe Mutombo. His prime was saddled with overpaid role players (Eric Snow, Aaron McKie, Kyle Korver, Kenny Thomas, Marc Jackson, Brian Skinner, Greg Buckner, Tyrone Hill, George Lynch, Corliss Williamson), overpaid underachievers (Derrick Coleman, Keith Van Horn, Sam Dalembert, Joe Smith), overpaid and washed-up veterans (Todd MacCulloch, Toni Kukoc, Chris Webber, Glenn Robinson, Matt Geiger, Billy Owens) and underachieving lottery picks (Jerry Stackhouse, Tim Thomas, Larry Hughes).
48. You could fill an entire chapter with secondhand Iverson stories of the “I heard he slept with ten women in one night” and “I heard he was out drinking all night, then played a day game in Boston and scored 49” variety. By all accounts, the guy doesn’t sleep. He’s a vampire. Might explain why his career came to a screeching halt in 2009.
49. When his teammates couldn’t match that ferocity, that’s when things fell apart. Just ask Keith Van Horn, who might still be in therapy from playing with the Answer. There were times when Iverson looked so pissed off at KVH for letting him down, the possibility of a postgame shower rape was in play.
50. That’s right, I quoted from Sex and the City. To this day, I will defend Season One for being funny, well written and original. I cannot defend the next few years, obviously. But Season One was solid. You can add this footnote to my “Gay List” (of tidbits that would make one of my friends say, “He’s definitely not gay, but …”), along with the fact that I enjoyed the first season of Friends, I loved Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” video, I own every Smiths and Cure album as well as And the Band Played On on DVD; two of my favorite shows ever were 90210 and Melrose Place and I went to a Coldplay concert and would go again.
51. One pretty lady in my section swooned every time Bird walked by and studied him to the point that she noticed there was a barely perceptible quarter-sized stain on the left front leg of his shorts. It drove her crazy. “Would it be out of line if I offered to wash his shorts?” she asked once. These are the questions that get asked when you’re sitting that close to NBA players.
52. Please add this entire paragraph to my Gay List. Thank you. By the way, Young Wilt was supposedly the king of the “Whoa!” category.
53. Paul Mokeski would be last.
54. The Robinson hype machine peaked in 1991 when Pat Riley said, “David is the spitting image of Russell, only David is a better athlete” and Cotton Fitzsimmons argued that he’d already surpassed Bird, MJ, and Magic, saying, “They’re all MVPs—this guy is more. He’s the greatest impact player the league has seen since Kareem.”
55. I took my SATs around the same time and scored a 1330. That’s one of my enduring highlights from high school—narrowly beating David Robinson on the SATs. Yeah, 1330 to 1310! I f*cked that guy up!
56. Best moment of the series: Robinson getting presented with the MVP before Game 2, then a pissed-off Hakeem destroying him in San Antonio with a Hall of Fame eff-you performance. By Game 5, Robinson was a shell of himself. Here’s how Leigh Montville described it in SI: “Robinson was tentative, off-balance, hitting only six of 17 shots for 19 points, grabbing but 10 boards, missing important foul shots. Lost. David Robinson was lost. ‘I’ve never felt this way before,’ he said afterward. ‘For the first time in my life, I felt I let my teammates down.’”
57. Robinson belonged to the Tony LaRussa All-Stars, maybe my favorite example other than Coach K or LaRussa himself. By the way, Robinson averaged a 6–6 in the Mavs/Lakers series (12 games) before rallying a little in the Finals (11–7).
58. Elliott averaged a 22–7 and shot 43% from three as a senior at Arizona; Rice averaged a 26–6, shot 52% from three and led Michigan to the ’89 title. At no point in his life was Elliott a better small forward than Rice. Also, Rice averaged 20-plus points in six different NBA seasons and peaked in ’97 for Charlotte: 27 points a game and a surreal 47% from three (taking 440 of them).
59. That’s not totally true. I’ll also remember him for being the Michael Spinks to Hakeem’s Mike Tyson.
60. Of those 15 losses, three were by double digits and five were by three points or less.
61. And that includes size. Walton was listed at six-foot-eleven but he was easily seven-foot-two or seven-foot-three. When he played in Boston, he was at least 2 inches taller than Parish and McHale. He never wanted to be thought of as a seven-footer.
62. My favorite Walton trait other than the exquisite passing: he always kept the ball over his head after every rebound on either end and was always in position to make a play. Walton tapes should be shown to fledgling high school centers for the rest of eternity.
63. That double album included “Life Goes On,” “All About the U,” “Picture Me Rollin?,” “California Love,” “I Ain’t Mad at Chu” and “How Do U Want It” … and the B-side of the “How Do U Want It” single was “Hit ’Em Up,” the one where he declared war on Biggie Smalls. I keep waiting for Shaq to remake “Hit ’Em Up” about Kobe, although technically, “Tell Me How My Ass Tastes” could have qualified.
64. It’s hard to say who had more feet problems: Walton or James Caan’s Misery character after Annie Wilkes hobbled him.
65. My apologies to Walton for not coming up with the perfect Grateful Dead song here.
66. After watching Dunleavy destroy the Clippers and make no friends in the process, this quote kills me. Dunleavy wouldn’t start World War III—he’d just keep you in the war for twenty-five years as casualties mounted and he blamed everyone else.
67. Which they didn’t. If anything, they were either silently cheering Sobers or figuring out how to jump in, pretend to break it up and “accidentally” sock Barry a couple of times. Again, Barry spends the next minute postfight repeatedly touching his wig to make sure it didn’t get messed up. I wish Sobers had pulled it off and waved it to the crowd like they do in wrestling.
68. Barry’s ego was so huge that he nearly chose TV over the NBA in his prime. It’s amazing the guy didn’t release a sex tape. Did I mention he wore a wig for the entire ’76 season? I mentioned that, right?
69. Devil’s advocate point: He averaged a ton of shots that year—29 during the season and 33+ in the playoffs. In Game 3 of the Finals, he scored 55 on 48 shots. As for Game 4, here’s how Frank Deford described it: “[Barry] handled the ball 59 times. Twice he lost it, three times he was fouled before shooting, 43 times he shot and only 11 times did he pass off. On occasion, it looked as if his teammates were trying to steer the ball away from him, and in the fifth game Coach Bill Sharman risked censure by sitting Barry down for a long period.” The lesson, as always: don’t trust stats.
70. And he shot them underhanded! Did we ever figure out why underhanded free throws faded away when Barry was nailing 90 percent of them? Oh, wait, I know—because it made the players look like pansies. I forgot.
71. Here’s who I think they pick for the 1976 Dream Team: Barry, Kareem, Doc, Hondo, and Tiny (starters); Cowens, Thompson, Maravich, Walton, Westphal, McAdoo, college’s John Lucas (bench). Westphal makes it over Jo Jo with the “crap, we need more white guys” rule. Here’s 1980: Kareem, Bird, Doc, Gervin, Magic (starters); Moses, Gus Williams, DJ, Westphal, Sikma, Bobby Jones, college’s Kevin McHale (bench). Jones beats out Marques Johnson with the “crap, we need more white guys” rule. (Please don’t think I agree with this rule—that was just the thinking back then.) Here’s 1984: Kareem, Bird, Doc, Magic, Moncrief (starters); Moses, King, Isiah, McHale, Jim Paxson, and college’s MJ and Ewing (bench). I’m furious about Paxson making it over Andrew Toney because of the white/black thing even though it’s my own hypothetical. Put Toney on there, and mother of schnikes! What a team! Here’s 1988: Ewing, Bird, Barkley, Magic, MJ (starters); Isiah, Drexler, K. Malone, Stockton, Mullin, and college’s David Robinson and Danny Manning. With ’Nique and Worthy in disbelief that both were bumped for Stockton. Anyway, I like ’84 the most if that Toney/Paxson switch is made. Loaded team, everyone would have gotten along, Bird and Magic leading the way, King and Bird in crunch time, Isiah, MJ, Moses, Toney, and McHale off the bench, Young Ewing wreaking havoc defensively … holy mother of God.
72. Stockton’s face looked like that of a recovering alcoholic who stopped drinking and couldn’t remember how to be fun anymore. Like you’d be trapped making small talk with him at a Christmas party for 20 minutes and thinking about intentionally choking on a crab cake just to get away.
73. A bitter Thomas torched Stockton for 44 points the next season. In their next encounter, Malone sought revenge and nailed Thomas with a vicious elbow, opening up a 40-stitch cut over his eye. Too bad for Isiah that this didn’t happen in the playoffs—Malone would have missed the elbow.
74. Can’t you see Stockton whirling around in the opening credits like James Eckhouse did, with that “That’s right, I’m Mr. Effing Walsh” grin on his face? Come on, really? You can’t see it?
75. Call it the Great Point Guard Drought of 1997. Fortunately, Chauncey Billups, Steve Nash, Mike Bibby, Andre Miller and others showed up in the next three drafts.
76. The most memorable Stockton play: his series-winning three in the ’97 Western Finals that was highlighted by Karl Malone’s couldn’t-have-been-more-illegal moving pick/bear hug on Barkley, as well as Stockton deliriously jumping up and down in one of those “Wait, that guy isn’t a robot?” moments.
77. Stockton drove Maloney out of the league. He just owned him. There’s a 45 percent chance Maloney is working as Stockton’s full-time dog walker right now.
78. Kudos to Stockton for making a valiant attempt to keep the whole Tight Shorts thing going in the mid-’90s despite mounting opposition.