20. That Game 6 defeat ranks among the most brutal ever. Even with Isiah barely able to move by game’s end, Detroit led by three with 60 seconds to play. Time-out, L.A. Byron Scott hit a jumper in traffic (102–101, 52 secs left). Isiah ran the shot clock down and missed a one-legged fall-away (27 secs left, time-out L.A.). Kareem got bailed out by a dubious call (Laimbeer’s “bump” on a sky hook), then drained two clutch FT’s with 14 secs left. Then Dumars badly missed a runner coming out of the time-out. Ballgame. If healthy, Isiah swings that final minute of Game 6. I am positive. But that’s basketball—you need to be good and lucky.
21. After getting waxed by Boston in the ’85 Playoffs, McCloskey realized he had three keepers (Isiah, Vinnie, and Laimbeer) and nobody else with the right mix of athleticism and toughness to hang with Boston. He selected Dumars with the 17th pick, traded Kelly Tripucka and Kent Benson for Dantley, and turned Dan Roundfield into Mahorn (a physical forward who could protect Laimbeer). In the ’86 draft, he picked Salley 11th and Rodman 32nd, hoping Detroit could wear down Bird with young legs off the bench. That same summer, he stole backup center James Edwards from Phoenix. It’s the most creative 12-month stretch ever submitted by an NBA GM. McCloskey built a future champion around Isiah without making a single top-10 pick or trading anything of real consequence.
22. We created one just for him: nitty-gritties. Someone like Battier transcends stats. I thought it was fascinating that, in the same week that Lewis’ complimentary piece was released, (a) John Hollinger’s “player efficiency rating” on ESPN.com ranked Battier as the 53rd best small forward and 272nd overall out of 322 players, and (b) Houston was shopping Battier. 23. Cast Away is on my Mount Rushmore for Most Rewatchable Cable Movie of the 2000s along with Anchorman, Almost Famous and The Departed. They should make Cast Away 2 as a thriller where Chuck Noland loses his mind and makes hookers wear volley-balls over their heads when he has sex with them, eventually starts killing them, then escapes police by living outdoors and using his survival skills from the first movie. Like a combination of First Blood and Silence of the Lambs. You would have paid to see this in the theater. Don’t lie. 24. For everyone after 2025: Spencer and Heidi were a reality TV couple who disappeared shortly after this book was published when Satan decided, “Even I can’t take it anymore,” and dragged them into the bowels of hell.
25. My editor (known as Grumpy Old Editor from now on) adds, “I was watching an MSG special on Clyde and he mentioned being pissed about Willis winning ’70 Finals MVP because Frazier thought he deserved it, which was certainly true if you based it on the numbers. But then he said that as he thought about it he realized he would have never done what he did in Game 7 if Willis hadn’t inspired him. The Secret, again.”
26. Billups led the ’04 Pistons during a discombobulated season when the rules swung too far in favor of elite defensive teams who made threes and limited possessions. Plus, the Shaq/Kobe era completely imploded that season, with half the team embroiled in “I’m not talking to that mothafucka anymore” fights … and yet they still could have won the title if Karl Malone hadn’t gotten hurt.
27. Every fan of the Suns from 2004 to 2007 just rammed this book against their heads. 28. That same dynamic doubles for any military unit or dorm hall of college freshmen: the human closeness cannot be reconstructed on a larger scale.
29. That section finished like this: “Rarely will you see an athlete who hasn’t put on 10 or 15
pounds over a full career, but even rarer are the ones who don’t put on the same amount of mental fat. That’s the biggest killer of aging champions, because it works on your concentration and your mental toughness, which are the margin of victory; it prevents you from using your mind to compensate for your diminished physical skills.” I like the concept of “mental fat.” Does this mean a thirty-five-year-old Eddy Curry would have real fat and mental fat? What’s that gonna look like?
30. Kudos to Doc Rivers for smartly banning all mobile devices on the trip. Although I think the players were still allowed to order porn in their hotel rooms.
31. Even if you could describe Posey’s man hugs as corny, homoerotic or genuinely uncomfortable (especially if you were sitting in the first few rows), they symbolized the closeness of that team. After the Hornets imported Posey for $25 million that summer, I watched Posey dole out man hugs for Chris Paul and David West; for the first time, I can say that I watched other men hug and felt wistful about it. It was like getting three fantastic dances from a stripper, feeling like you had a connection with her, then seeing her 45 minutes later grinding on the lap of some seedy 300-pound dude. The NBA: where questioning your sexuality happens!
32. This is from The Game, Dryden’s excellent account of his final season with the Montreal Canadiens, a team that played in something called the National Hockey League. 33. I felt the same way as I was frantically trying to finish this book with a deadline hanging over my head. Do you think Russell used cigarettes, booze, coffee, Pilates, and a $2,000 Relax the Back chair to repeatedly come through under stress en route to 11 titles? Or was that just me? It took me so long to finish this book that I actually started smoking again (just two or three per day when I was writing, for the nicotine rush) and quit smoking again, and the two events seemed like they happened 10 years apart.
34. Weird stats from that game: MJ/Pippen shot 15 for 43; Chicago missed 17 of 41 FTs; Rodman did nothing (22 minutes, 6 boards); and Indy shot 48% (Bulls: 38%). So how did the Bulls do it?
They had 22 offensive rebounds, and 26 second-chance points, and they controlled the ball like a hockey team down the stretch—from the 7:13 mark to the 0:31 mark (when they clinched the game), they held the ball for 270 of a possible 402 seconds. And that includes 20–25 seconds of dead time when the clock kept running after they made baskets. Incredible game to rewatch. 35. Weird parallel: The best wrestlers are also held to this standard within their ranks. For instance, Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels are considered to be the best of their respective generations. Why?
Because they sold the shit of their opponents. They could have a great match against anybody, even if it was someone with four moves like Hulk Hogan or Undertaker. Only three sports work this way: basketball, hockey and wrestling. That’s right, I just called pro wrestling a sport. You have a problem with that? Huh?
36. This should be a riveting sell on the talk-show and talk-radio circuit. I think I’m going to lie and pretend that there’s a chapter in here that definitively answers the questions “Did Jordan get suspended for gambling?” “Was the 1985 lottery fixed?” “Was Tim Donaghy acting alone?” “Did Kobe really do it?” and “Was Wilt Chamberlain’s 20,000 figure an elaborate way of covering up the fact that he was gay?” When they ask for more info, I’ll just say, “Look, you’ll have to read the book.” Then I’ll kill the rest of the time talking about how Barry wore a wig during the 1976
Playoffs. There’s no way in hell that Stephen Colbert won’t be riveted by that. 37. Kobe alert! Kobe alert!
38. Just like Isiah, he tried to pass The Secret on after his playing days and failed in Seattle and Sacramento. It’s never been explained why the same legends who embraced The Secret or at least understood it (Russell, MJ, Bird, Magic, Cousy, Baylor and McHale, to name seven) couldn’t apply that same secret to teams they were running. It’s like the opposite of VD—you can’t pass it along.
TWO
RUSSELL, THEN WILT
THE GREATEST DEBATE in NBA history wasn’t really a debate. I think this is strange. For instance, you might believe that the greatest television drama of all time was The Sopranos. I believe it’s The Wire. If we knew each other and this came up after a few drinks one night, I would refuse to talk about anything else until you conceded one of three things:
1. “You’re right, I am an idiot, the greatest television drama of all-time was The Wire.”
2. “I don’t know if you’re right, but I promise to plow through all sixty-five episodes of The Wire as fast as possible and then w
e can continue this debate.”
3. “You’re bothering me. I need to get away from you.”
Those would be the only three acceptable outcomes for me. Still, it’s a subjective opinion—I might believe The Wire can’t be approached, but ultimately I can’t prove it and can only argue my side. That’s it. But if we were arguing about the greatest debate in NBA history—Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain?—I can prove Russell was better. There’s a definitive answer that involves common sense, firsthand accounts, relevant statistics and the valuable opinions of teammates, fellow players, coaches, and educated writers who watched them battle for ten straight seasons. 1
You know what it’s like, actually? Writing about O. J. Simpson’s murder trial. A few days after the Goldman-Brown killings, when the Juice made his aborted attempt to flee to Mexico, an overwhelming majority of Americans assumed he was guilty. His criminal trial started and we learned about a pattern of corruption and racism within the L.A. Police Department. We discovered that much of the blood evidence was mishandled. We watched the overwhelmed prosecution team unforgivably botch its case. But none of it mattered because this guy had to be guilty. After all, his blood dripped all over the crime scene, he didn’t have an alibi during the time of the murders, he had a mysterious cut on his left middle finger that matched the drips of blood from someone who fled the crime scene, he had a history of threatening and beating his wife, there were no other suspects, and it seemed proposterous that so many inept policemen and forensic scientists could collaboratively conspire to frame someone on such short notice. 2
Smartly, if not reprehensibly, the defense team battered the race card home—that was their only chance to get a guilty person acquitted, even if it meant splintering the country and damaging the relationship between blacks and whites in the process—and lucked out because many of the dense jurors couldn’t understood the damaging DNA evidence in the pre -CSI era. To everyone’s disbelief, O. J. Simpson walked. Facing more competent attorneys and a lesser level of proof one year later, the Juice was pulped in a civil trial and ordered to pay the Goldman/Brown families $30
million in punitive damages. Fifteen years later, even though we haven’t convicted anyone for the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman—shit, we haven’t even found a potential suspect—more and more Americans believe Simpson was innocent or not conclusively guilty. Give it another fifteen years and even more will believe he was framed. By the year 2035, nobody under forty will remember the details, just that O.J. walked and that maybe, just maybe, that meant he was innocent. None of this changes the fact that O.J. either killed two people himself or was
“involved” with the dirty deed in some other way. It’s impossible to come up with any other reasonable conclusion. Unless you’re insane.
Same goes for the Russell-Chamberlain debate. Wilt was more talented; Russ gave his teams a better chance to win. Wilt had a greater statistical impact; Russ had a greater impact on his teammates. Wilt peaked in the regular season; Russ peaked in the playoffs. Wilt shrank from the clutch; Russ thrived in the clutch. Wilt lost nearly every big game; Russ won nearly every big game. Wilt averaged 50 points for one season; Russell was voted Most Valuable Player by his peers that same season. Wilt was traded twice in his career; Russ never would have been traded in a million years. Wilt was obsessed with statistics; Russ was obsessed with winning. Wilt cared about what fans, writers, and critics thought; Russ only cared what his teammates thought. Wilt never won a title in high school or college and won only two as a pro; Russ won two in college and eleven in the NBA. Wilt ignored The Secret; Russell embraced it. I shouldn’t have to waste an entire chapter on them for two indisputable reasons: Russell’s teams always beat Chamberlain’s teams, and Wilt was traded twice. Right there, it’s over. And really, it was over when Russell retired in 1969 as the greatest basketball player ever.
But a few years passed, and then a few more, and then a few more. Chamberlain’s numbers started to look more and more implausible. The “debate” heated up again. Now I have to waste a whole chapter debunking the six most common myths of the Chamberlain-Russell debate. So here we go.
MYTH NO. 1:
RUSSELL HAD A BETTER SUPPORTING
CAST THAN WILT
There isn’t a simpler team sport to understand than basketball: if two quality opponents play a seven-game series, the dominant player should prevail as long as the talent level on both sides is relatively equal. We have sixty years of hard-core evidence to back this up. The ’84 Celtics were dead even with the ’84 Lakers, but Bird played better than Magic in the Finals. The ’93 Suns were better than the ’93 Bulls, but Jordan played out of his mind. Moses Malone was the dominant player in the ’81 Finals, but Houston’s collective talent couldn’t handle Boston’s collective talent. This isn’t rocket science. Since the 1976 merger, only one Finals result still doesn’t make sense on paper: when the ’04 Pistons soundly defeated a more talented (but quietly imploding) Lakers team, 3 a wake-up call for a league that had been slowly gravitating toward lower-scoring games, fewer possessions, swarming, physical defenses and a much slower pace. As long as the talent level between two teams is relatively equal, the team with the best player should win. So the supporting-cast card works with Russell and Wilt only if we prove that the talent disparity was not relatively equal. Right off the bat, it’s almost impossible because the NBA didn’t expand to ten teams until 1967, giving everyone a good supporting cast (even the crummy teams). People seem to think Russell played with only Hall of Famers and poor Wilt was stuck carrying a bunch of beer-bellied bums; not only is that erroneous, but it would have been impossible given the numbers. Imagine the current NBA if you removed every foreign player, chopped the number of black players in half, then cut the number of teams from thirty to eight. Would every team end up with three All-Stars and four or five solid role players at worst? Of course. Welcome to the NBA from 1956 to 1966.
(Warning: If I just wrote, “Wilt’s teammates were better than you think and Russell’s teammates weren’t as great as you think,” you wouldn’t believe me, so we’re covering each season in painstaking detail the way Barry Scheck clinically took apart the DNA evidence in the O.J. trial, and if we kill a few thousand trees in the process, so be it. To keep you entertained, I loaded the bottom of the pages with dumb footnotes.)
Here’s how the seasons shook out after Russell entered the league:
1957. Russell joins Boston mid-January after banging out military duty, 4 then the Celts squeak by Philly (featuring Hall of Famers Paul Arizin and Neil Johnston) in the Playoffs and meet St. Louis in the Finals. Boston has two stud guards in their prime (Bill Sharman and ’57 MVP Bob Cousy) and three terrific rookies (Russell, Heinsohn, and Frank Ramsey), while St. Louis has Bob Pettit (two-time MVP), Macauley (Hall of Famer) and Slater Martin 5 (Hall of Famer, second-team All-NBA that season), as well as Charlie Share, Jack Coleman and Jack McMahon (three highly regarded role players). Since Boston won Game 7 in double OT, 6 it’s safe to say these two teams were equally talented.
1958. The Hawks exact revenge thanks to up-and-comer Cliff Hagan (second-team All-NBA, Hall of Famer) and Russell’s badly sprained ankle. 7 Again, even talent on both sides.
1959. Boston starts to pull away: three All-NBA first-teamers (Russell, Cousy, and Sharman), two promising guards (Sam and KC Jones), the best sixth man (Ramsey) and one of the best scoring forwards (Heinsohn). Even then, they needed seven games to get past Syracuse (led by NBA Top 50 members Dolph Schayes and Hal Greer) before easily sweeping Elgin and the Lakers. Through three years and two titles, Russell and the Celtics had the most talent exactly once.
1960. Boston handles Philly in six and needs seven to defeat a Hawks team with four Hall of Famers (including newcomer Lenny Wilkens). Meanwhile, Wilt wins the MVP as a rookie playing with Arizin (ten straight All-Stars), Tom Gola (five straight All-Stars, Hall of Famer), Guy Rodgers 8 (four All-Stars) and Woody Sauldsberry (’58 Rookie of the Year, ’59 All-Star). Boston had mor
e firepower, but not by much. Wilt wasn’t exactly stuck playing with Eric Snow, Drew Gooden, Sasha Pavlovic, Larry Hughes, and Turdo Sandowich like 2007 LeBron.
1961. We’re kicking off a two-year stretch for the most loaded NBA team ever: Boston easily handles Syracuse and St. Louis for title number four. Meanwhile, Philly gets swept by a weaker Nats team in the first round, leading to Wilt throwing his first coach under the bus after the season (a recurring theme). 9
1962. Still loaded to the gills, Boston needs seven games to defeat Wilt’s Sixers and an OT Game 7 in the Finals to defeat Baylor, Jerry West and the Lakers. I’m telling you, everyone had a good team back then. 10
1963. The first sign of trouble: Sharman retires, Cousy and Ramsey are slipping, and rookie John Havlicek isn’t Hondo yet. Boston needs seven games to hold off Cincy (led by Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson, Jack Twyman, and Wayne Embry) and another six to beat the Lakers. 11
Meanwhile, Philly moves to San Fran, finishes 31–49 and misses the playoffs with Wilt, Rodgers, Tom Meschery (an All-Star), Al Attles (KC Jones’ equal as a defensive stopper) and Willie Naulls (four-time All-Star). But hey, if they’d won more games, maybe Wilt wouldn’t have averaged 44.8
points that season. 12
1964. Cousy retires and no Celtic makes first-team All-NBA, but that doesn’t stop Boston from beating a stacked Cincy team (led by Oscar and rookie of the year Jerry Lucas) and easily handling Wilt’s Warriors in the Finals (the same group as the ’63 Sixers, only with future Hall of Famer Nate Thurmond aboard). Boston won without a point guard or power forward this season—other than Russell, they didn’t have a top-twenty rebounder or anyone average more than 5 assists—but we’ll give them a check mark in the “most talent” department for the last time in the Russell era. 13