6. My vote for the most underrated NBA game: double OT, Game 7. It ended with Boston scoring with 1 second left, followed by St. Louis player-coach Alex Hannum calling time out to set up a play from underneath his own basket, where he’d whip a full-court football pass off the other backboard, then it would ricochet to Pettit at the foul line and he’d quickly shoot. What happened?
Hannum threw the ball 90 feet, it bounced off the backboard right to Pettit and he missed the game-tying shot. This actually happened. Can’t we put Gus Johnson in a time machine and have him announce this one?
7. The Hawks won their four games by six points total. I’m guessing a healthy Russell would have made a difference in two of those.
8. Another great ’50s sports name: Guy Rodgers. I actually tried to convince my wife to name our son Guy, but she couldn’t get past making cutesy talk with a baby named Guy. I thought it would be cool because we could have said things like “Look at the little Guy” or “He’s been a good Guy.”
Regardless, we need more Guys. Some other classic NBA names from the ’50s that would work for dogs at the very least: Woody, Archie, Bo, McCoy, Harry, Clyde, Forest, Nat, Arnie and Elmer.
9. Coaches Wilt threw under the bus: Neil Johnston, Dolph Schayes, Alex Hannum, Frank McGuire, Butch van Breda Kolff.
10. Weirdest fact from this season: Russell won MVP but didn’t make first-team All-NBA. 11. One of Boston’s greatest achievements of the Russell era: never losing to a team that featured West and Baylor in their prime (two of the best seven players of the NBA’s first thirty-five years). Everyone just casually overlooks this one.
12. In The Last Loud Roar, Bob Cousy writes that Cincy gave Boston everything they could handle; he headed into the ’63 Finals expecting the Lakers would beat them. The X-factor was Tommy, who quit smoking a few weeks before the playoffs, dropped 14 pounds, and destroyed Rudy LaRusso in the Finals. You have to love it when NBA Finals were decided by things like
“somebody quit smoking.”
13. Hidden fact from the Russell era: KC Jones was abominable offensively. Playing 30 to 32
minutes a game post-Cousy, KC averaged 7.8 points and 5.3 assists, shot 39 percent from the field, and didn’t have to be guarded from 15 feet. How can a defensive specialist make the Hall of Fame by playing 9 years, starting for 4, and never making an All-Star team? Was he better than Al Attles? Was he even half as good as Dennis Johnson? Of the post-shot-clockers who’ve made the Hall of Fame, he’s the single strangest selection, just ahead of Calvin Murphy. 14. At one point they were 10–34. Would a healthy MJ have ever played for a 10–34 team? What about a healthy Bird or a healthy Magic?
15. Underrated aspect of the Russell era: Five aging vets signed with Boston hoping for a free ring (Naulls, Carl Braun, Wayne Embry, Clyde Lovellette and Woody Sauldsberry). Nowadays, these guys would just sign with Phoenix or Miami because of the weather. 16. Russell’s inadequacies as a player-coach emerged as a dominant theme that season: he’d forget to rest guys or bring them back in and basically sucked. The next year, Russell delegated to teammates and named Havlicek and Jones as his de facto assistants, turning it into a professional intramural team where players subbed themselves and suggested plays during time-outs. This worked for two straight titles. Naturally, no NBA team since 1979 has tried it. 17. Wilt was traded twice in his prime: once for Paul Neumann, Connie Dierking, Lee Shaffer, and cash, once for Archie Clark, Darrall Imhoff, Jerry Chambers, and cash. Wilt defenders stammer whenever this gets mentioned.
18. Walton averaged 5.5 assists per game in the ’77 Playoffs. Russell averaged five assists or more in seven different playoffs, including 6.3 a game in the ’65 Playoffs (when it was much tougher to get credited for an assist). For his career, Russell averaged more playoff assists (4.7) than any center who ever played more than 30 playoff games.
19. For anyone reading this after 2030: Stephen A. Smith was an ESPN personality whose gimmick answered the question “What it would be like if somebody argued about sports with their CAPS LOCK on?”
20. Bob Cousy wasn’t as staggered. Here’s what he wrote in 1964’s The Last Loud Roar:
“Basketball is a team game. When it becomes a one-man operation, as it did after Chamberlain came to Philadelphia, it just doesn’t work. You cannot expect nine other guys to submerge themselves and their abilities to one man. It particularly doesn’t work when the man everybody else is feeding isn’t helping the others whenever and wherever he can … the argument can be made that Chamberlain only suffers from a poor supporting cast. If you have a man who makes better than 50 percent of his shots, the argument goes, why shouldn’t you concentrate on getting the ball to him whenever possible? Carrying that to its logical conclusion, I would have to ask why you should ever let any other player on the team shoot at all. No, statistics mean nothing in basketball.”
Amen, Cooz! I love when a Hall of Famer proves my point.
21. And if you’re looking for a degree of difficulty, Russell coached himself for the last two titles. Why doesn’t that ever get factored in? Imagine MJ winning those final two titles in Utah as a player-coach.
22. In Terry Pluto’s Tall Tales, Heinsohn claims that Russell’s defense was worth 60 to 70 points per game. Take that one with a grain of salt because he’s the same guy who compared Leon Powe to Moses Malone. It was only a matter of time before Tommy was interviewed for a book called Tall Tales.
23. This was before the three-point line, basketball camps, and picture-perfect jump shots, when teams took a ton of shots and threw up a ton of bricks. Of the great guards who peaked in the ’50s, Cousy was a 37.5% shooter; Sharman, 42.6%; Slater Martin, 36%; Bob Davies, 37%; Guy Rodgers, 38%; Richie Guerin, 42% and Dick McGuire, 39%. Only when Sam Jones, Jerry West, and Hal Greer emerged did the prototypical two-guard take shape; long-range shooting specialists didn’t start making a mark until the mid-’70s. So someone who protected the basket had an even greater effect back then.
24. It’s exceedingly possible that Russell was good for 8 to 15 blocks per game in the playoffs. Just researching this chapter, there were three different playoff games in the ’60s when an author or narrator casually mentioned in their summary that Russell had 12 blocks. 25. Sam Jones made an art form of this, adding little insults with each shot like “Too late” or
“Sorry, Wilt” every time he sank a jumper. One time Wilt flipped out and chased him around the Garden, so Sam grabbed a photographer’s stool to fend him off. If this happened in 2009, I’m almost positive it would lead Around the Horn.
26. Hondo’s take on Russ: “There was never a player who could control a game defensively like him. You could see the shooters just cringing every time they got within his range. Sometimes he would start out very strong, in order to discourage his man completely. Other times he would allow a man to score some early baskets, then later on, when the guy wanted to attempt the same move in a crucial situation, he would find that Russell would prevent him from doing it…. The end of the game was really Russell’s time. In a close game, he was incredibly alive.”
27. This is an entertaining book that includes stories about Wilt getting blown by stewardesses on airplanes and stuff. Here’s one case where Wilt really didn’t get enough credit for something. Wilt should have won a Pulitzer, or at least a National Book Award.
28. Later in life, Wilt executed this unselfish mind-set to perfection on the set of Conan the Destroyer, which went on to become the most unintentionally funny action movie of the ’80s other than Gymkata. Even as an actor, Wilt was breaking records. 29. In A Few Good Men, this would be the trial scene when Cruise grabs the rule book from Kevin Bacon and asks Noah Wyle to find the part about going to the mess hall for dinner. In other words, I just scored major points with my case by digging up these Wilt quotes. Even better, I got to read the story about Wilt getting blown by the stewardess again.
30. From Bill Libby’s enjoyable 1977 biography of Wilt (Goliath): “A couple of times he went to a teammate with a hot hand
and told him he was going to give him the ball exclusively because the other guys were wasting his passes and he wouldn’t win the assists title this way.” What a team player, that Wilt. In that book, Libby mentions that, for all the hullabaloo about Wilt being such a ladies’ man, “a surprising number of players and reporters say they’ve never seen Wilt with a woman.” Come on, Wilt couldn’t have been gay! He was a lifelong bachelor, he loved clothes and he loved cats! Where is this coming from?
31. Although, again, Conan the Destroyer was a great freaking movie. 32. That’s the same Willie Naulls who landed on the Celts one year later and won two straight titles with Russell. Hmmmmmm.
33. Wilt played for 9 coaches in 14 years. I love that stat.
34. Even Wilt admitted this in his book, writing, “The stories created quite a furor, and I’m not sure the 76ers ever got back in stride during the playoffs.” Although, in classic Wilt fashion, he blamed the magazine for not waiting to run the piece.
35. One thing Wilt can’t be blamed for: during a 1965 game in Boston, 76ers owner Ike Richman died of a heart attack while sitting at the press table next to Philly’s bench. If you had to pick a superstar whose owner might drop dead during a big game, you’d have to pick Wilt, right?
Strangest part of the story: they carried Richman out and the game kept going. How heartless was that? Nowadays, I’d like to think we’d postpone a game even if one of the Maloofs dropped dead. Although nobody would be able to tell for about a quarter.
36. The best part of this story? I found out about it from Wilt’s autobiography. He didn’t even seem that bitter, explaining, “I guess guys like Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were afraid I’d come to L.A. and take some of their glory away.” Yeah, Wilt, I’m sure that was it. 37. With five seconds left, Wilt cut Boston’s lead to one. Russell’s ensuing inbounds pass hit one of the wires that held the basket up, a fluke play that doubled as an automatic turnover and nearly cost Boston the season. Wilt loved to bring this up afterward, pointing out again and again that Russell was as capable of choking as anyone. This is like Lindsay Lohan hearing that Dakota Fanning sipped champagne at a wedding one night, then screaming, “See, see, I’m not the only messed-up one!”
38. One of the hidden subplots of Game 7: Hondo said later that he jumped the inbounds pass for Hal Greer partly because he was waiting for it; he knew Wilt wasn’t getting the ball because Wilt never wanted to get fouled in big moments (so there was no way they were running the play for him).
39. It’s a photo of Barry standing in an airport and holding a bag and a basketball. He’s not even really looking at the camera. He looks put out, like he’s posing for a picture for an Asian tourist who didn’t know who he was and just wanted a picture of a tall white guy. It’s spectacular. 40. When Reed limped off early in Game 5, Wilt somehow got shut down by a woefully undersized Dave DeBusschere and New York’s pressure defense during their rousing 16-point comeback. Wilt finished with 22 points but took only three shots in the second half. Three shots?
The fact that he threw up a 45–27 in Game 6 only made it worse.
41. Bradley’s book double as a psychological profile of Wilt’s loserdom. No joke. 42. Thanks to Elliott Kalb’s informative book Who’s Better, Who’s Best in Basketball for the stats you’re about to read. If you’re an NBA fan, buy this book. It’s great. Even if I disagreed with almost all of it and he painfully overrated Shaq.
43. Which raises a question: why the heck didn’t they keep track of blocks back then? How hard would that have been? This is the first of 79 times I will complain about this. 44. Butch benched Wilt for the last five minutes of Game 7 of the ’69 Finals knowing that if the Lakers lost the game, he’d get fired. And he did. That’s how strongly he disliked Wilt. 45. I couldn’t fight off Grumpy Old Editor from chiming in any longer. His take on Lucas: “Lucas should talk—he never met a stat he didn’t squeeze until it was dead.”
46. According to SI’s Frank Deford, Russell once told Wilt, “I’m probably the only person on the planet who knows how good you really are.” I’m almost positive that Mario Lopez never said this to Mark-Paul Gosselaar.
47. That sentence easily could have been Vince Carter’s high school yearbook quote.
THREE
HOW THE HELL DID WE GET HERE?
WHILE TRYING TO absorb six-plus decades of NBA history, one question keeps popping up: How do we put everything in perspective? If Wilt averaged 50 points a game for an entire season, what does that really mean? Would he average 40 a game now? Thirty? Twenty? Could the ’72
Lakers win 33 games total if they were playing in 2009? Were the ’96 Bulls the greatest team of all time or just the most successful? I can’t answer these questions without putting some sort of elaborate context in place. When I tell you that Oscar Robertson’s season-long triple double wasn’t as impressive as it seemed, you’d have to take my word unless you saw every relevant rule change, innovation, talent glut/dearth, statistical whim, big-picture mistake and trouble patch laid out from 1946 to 1984. Why stop there? Because that’s when the NBA, for better and worse, became the league it is now. Stylistically, creatively, fundamentally and talent-wise, you could transport any good player or team from 1984 to 2009 and they would be fine (and in some cases better than fine).
Think of the NBA like America’s comedy scene and everything will fall into place. Ever watch tape of Milton Berle, Bob Hope or Sid Caesar performing on their top-rated shows in the 1950s?
Lots of mugging, lots of easy jokes, some cross-dressing, more mugging, tons of self-flagellation, even more mugging. It’s bewildering that they were considered geniuses at the time. But they were. Nobody was bigger. (Kinda like George Mikan and Dolph Schayes, right?) When Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Bob Newhart and the Smothers Brothers pushed comedy in a different direction in the sixties—astute observations, hyperintelligent premises—they were considered geniuses of the highest order. (Kinda like Oscar, Elgin, Wilt and Russell, right?) But you know what? If you YouTubed any of those guys in their primes, you wouldn’t laugh that much. Only during the Ford presidency did comedy start to look like it does now: Richard Pryor’s acerbic take on the African American experience, George Carlin’s pointed riffs, Saturday Night Lives ballsy redefinition of televised sketch comedy, Steve Martin’s intentionally absurd stand-up act, even young observational comics like Jay Leno and David Letterman who had been influenced by Carlin and Bruce. (Kinda like Julius Erving, Bob McAdoo and Tiny Archibald redefining the limits of speed and athleticism with the NBA.) The 1977–1982 stretch saw iconic movies capture similar strides, like Caddyshack, Animal House, Stripes and The Blues Brothers, all funny movies fueled by drugs, recklessness, and individualism. (Kinda like the NBA when it was being led by the likes of Pete Maravich, George Gervin, David Thompson and Micheal Ray Richardson.) Then the eighties rolled around and comedy settled into the era of over-the-top humor, sarcastic irony, and “Did you ever notice … ?” jokes that, for better and worse, still make us laugh now. Letterman’s groundbreaking NBC show. Howard Stern’s equally groundbreaking radio show. Eddie Murphy’s SNL impressions and standup acts. A little cable show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.1 Stand-ups like Jerry Seinfeld and Sam Kinison. Consistently funny movies like Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, Night Shift, Fletch and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. All of that stuff holds up even today.
By the mid-eighties, the comedy world had figured it out and reached the place it needed to be. But it didn’t just happen. The civil rights struggle, three assassinations (JFK, RFK and MLK), and a growing discontent about Vietnam altered the comedy scene in the sixties; people became more serious, less trusting, more prone to discuss serious issues and argue about them. That’s how we ended up with Woody and Lenny. The seventies were marred by a polarizing war and the Watergate scandal, pushing disillusioned Americans into cynical, outspoken and carefree directions (drugs, free sex, etc.), a spirit that quickly manifested itself in comedy. The comedians of the late seventies and early eighties learn
ed from everyone who had pushed the envelope—what worked, and more importantly, what didn’t work—and developed a more somber, reflective, sophisticated attitude stemming from how the previous generation’s pain shaped their perspective. A perspective that, for better and worse, hasn’t really changed since. And now we’re here. Were Bird and Magic better in ’84 than LeBron and Wade are right now? It’s a nice debate. Was Eddie Murphy funnier in ’84 than Chris Rock is right now? It’s a nice debate. But if you’re asking me whether a Get Smart episode from 1967 is funnier than a South Park episode in 2009, no. It’s not a debate.
So it’s all about context. The ebbs and flows of the years (and with the NBA, the seasons) affect our memories and how we evaluate them. If we’re figuring out the best players and teams of all time—don’t worry, we’re getting there—we need to examine every season from 1946 (year one) through 1984 (year thirty-nine) and the crucial developments that helped us get here. Consider it a brief and only intermittently biased history of how the NBA became the NBA.2
1946–1954: GROWING PAINS
Heading into the summer of ’54, everyone thought the NBA was going down in flames. And they believed it for five reasons.
Reason no. 1. Without rules to prevent intentional fouling, stalling, and roughhouse play, league scoring dropped to an appalling 79.5 points per game. Every game played out like a Heat-Knicks playoff slugfest in the mid-nineties, only with clumsy white players planting themselves near the basket, catching lob passes, getting clubbed in the back and shooting free throws over and over again. If you were protecting a lead, your point guard dribbled around and waited to get fouled. If you were intentionally fouling someone, you popped him to send a statement. Players fought like hockey thugs, fans frequently threw things on the court and nobody could figure out how to stop what was happening. You can’t really overstate the fan-unfriendliness (I just created that word) of the stalling/fouling tactics. There was the time Fort Wayne famously beat the Lakers, 19–18. There was the five-OT playoff game between Rochester and Indy in which the winner of each overtime tap held the ball for the rest of the period to attempt a winning shot, leading to a bizarre situation in which Rochester’s home fans booed and booed and ultimately started leaving in droves even with the game still going. The ’53 Playoffs averaged an unbelievable eighty free throws per game. The anti-electrifying ’54 Finals featured scores of 79–68, 62–60, 81–67, 80–69, 84–73, 65–63 and 87–80. You get the idea.