The Book of Basketball (113 page)

Quality of competition.
The league was tougher in ’86 than ’96 (fewer teams, deeper teams, lower salaries), so considering the ’86 Celts finished only five wins behind the ’96 Bulls (87–13 vs. 82–18), can those five extra wins be atttributed to playing in a watered-down league with someone who was
clearly
the best player (and pathologically competitive to boot)? Absolutely. Although the ’86 Celts would have thrived in a high-caliber season; they finished 18–2 against 49-win teams (30–5 including playoffs) but slacked against easier competition, with twelve of their fifteen regular season losses coming against sub-.500 teams.
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Going against a steady stream of
’96
creampuffs, a bored Bird would have spent weeks at a time seeing how many 30-footers he could make or shooting only with his left hand.

Extended stretch of dominance.
The C’s didn’t get rolling until January because of Bird’s sore back. As soon as he rounded into shape, they ripped off a 39–5 stretch that included an 11–0 mark against the Lakers, Sixers, Bucks, Hawks and Rockets (with at least one road win over each). I’d say that qualifies as a hot streak.

Playoff run.
Surprisingly good considering the talent that season. Jordan went bonkers in the first round (49 in Game 1, 63 in Game 2), but the
Celtics still swept the series. They blew a second-round sweep against the frisky Hawks (50 wins, superathletic, led by the runner-up MVP pick), then exacted revenge with one of the all-time closeout ass-whuppings in Game 5. They swept a 57-win Bucks team in the Eastern Finals and convincingly handled a mildly terrifying Rockets team in the Finals. You left that Playoffs run thinking, “Wow, those guys couldn’t have played any better.” That’s what we want, right?

Homecourt advantage.
Forget about the record-setting 50–1 mark (including Playoffs) for a second. Did you know the Celtics nearly went undefeated at home for twelve straight months? After losing to Portland on December 6, 1985, they won
55 straight home
games (including Playoffs and the first seven of the next season) before Washington beat them on December 2, 1986. Of those 55 straight wins, only 3 were decided by four or fewer points; 40 of the 55 were by double digits, 11 by more than 20, and five by more than 30. In the ’86 playoffs, only Jordan’s 63-point game robbed the Celtics of winning all 10 home games by double digits. When I say nobody was touching these guys at home, I mean,
nobody was
touching these guys at home. You have a better chance of seeing another multi-permed NBA coaching staff than seeing another NBA team win 55 straight home games in the luxury box era.
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No way. It will never happen.

Unintentional comedy.
The Celts set the standard in three dopey categories: Best Whitewash Ever (Walton, Bird, McHale, Ainge and Wedman, with Sichting, Kite and Carlisle off the bench); Strangest-Looking Championship Team Ever, and Consistently Clumsiest High Fives Ever. Everything culminated in an unforgettable high five/pseudo-hug/half-embrace between Walton and McHale near the end of Game 6 of the ’86 Finals. Just an explosion of abnomally long appendages, giant teeth, bad hairdos, hairy armpits and über-Caucasian awkwardness; it’s amazing they didn’t clunk heads and knock each other unconscious.

Defensive/rebounding prowess.
Top of the line in both categories. You were not pounding the ’86 Celtics down low or on the boards. Period. Not even the Hakeem/Ralph or Chuck/Moses combos could do it.

Signature Playoffs performances.
They played three ESPN Classic games—Game 2 vs. Chicago (Jordan’s 63), Game 4 vs. Milwaukee (Bird’s four threes in the final 4:03 clinched a sweep) and Game 4 at Houston (legitimately exciting)—and three Sistine Chapel games, a list that includes Game 6 of the ’86 Finals (the clincher), Game 1 vs. Milwaukee (128–96) and especially Game 5 vs. Atlanta, which remains the greatest evisceration in modern Playoffs history: a 36–6 third quarter punctuated by a 24–0 run and the longest standing ovation in NBA history. The
Globe’s
Bob Ryan called it a “scintillating display of interior defense, transition basketball and Globetrotter-like passing which transformed the game into something bordering on legitimate humiliation, but which never degenerated into farce … say this for the Hawks: At no point during that surrealistic third period did they lose dignity. They tried hard at both ends. They simply could not avoid being an accident of basketball history.” And that, my friends, is a Sistine Chapel performance.

Rewatching it on tape, what stands out beyond the crowd (delirious), the passing (exquisite) and the defense (frenetic) was the cumulative effect it had on Atlanta. Mike Fratello called three time-outs trying to stop the bleeding; by the end of the quarter, the Hawks wobbled back to their bench like five guys escaping a violent bar fight. (McHale would say later, “I don’t think you’ll ever see another quarter of basketball like that again. I mean, the look on the faces of those Atlanta guys leaving the floor after the game, it was like they had just been in a war. It was shell-shock. I think they couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was as close to perfection as you are ever going to see.”) And it’s not like this was a bad Hawks team; they matched up fairly well because Boston had trouble defending Wilkins and Spud Webb.
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Didn’t matter. They got blown out of the building. Ainge
told Peter May later, “I call it the Way Basketball Was Supposed to Be Played. That was maybe the most impressive quarter ever played. Atlanta just had no sniff.” The tape confirms this. Truly great teams can smell blood and raise it a level; you can see it happening, the fans recognize it, the announcers recognize it, the guys on the bench recognize it, and even the guys playing recognize it. At one point, DJ just starts happily hopping up and down after yet another layup, like even
he
can’t believe what’s happening. Great moment, transcendant quarter, unforgettable team.

Biggest flaw.
The Sichting/Thirdkill spots could have been better. KC Jones inflicted minimal damage other than killing Sam Vincent’s confidence. But we’re just picking nits. In the fictional round-robin, my biggest concern would be their lack of three-point attempts. Nobody was launching them in the mid-eighties; wouldn’t modern defensive teams double McHale and Bird a little more quickly? Then again, Bird and Ainge
became
killer three-point shooters and Wedman certainly had the range, so in a fictional tournament, they could have adjusted. Right? My head hurts.

Dirk Diggler factor.
In other words, could they adapt to every conceivable style? The answer is yes. They even had one wrinkle that mortified opponents: a supersized lineup with a front line of Parish, McHale and Walton, then Bird playing guard on offense (which could happen because McHale the Freak could defend almost any two-guard). Every time they played those four guys together at once, you moved to the edge of your seat. On the flip side, they could also handle smallball with Bird-DJ-Ainge-Wedman-McHale, or even Sichting in Wedman’s place and DJ playing small forward. You could not throw an opponent at them from any point in history that they wouldn’t have handled. Kinda like Dirk Diggler.
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Alpha dog.
From January to June, Bird peaked as a basketball player. Even said so himself, commenting after Game 6 of the Finals, “That was the only game I thought I was totally prepared for. As far as focus was concerned,
none better. Never. I should have quit right there.” You think a thirty-three-year-old MJ said that at any point in 1996?

Title defense.
The ’87 Playoffs may have set the standard for “to get rid of us, you’re going to have to chop our head off like we’re Jason in
Friday the 13th
because that’s the only way we’re dying” title defenses. See the prologue for the gory details.

Chemistry and swagger.
Top of the line. No team loved busting balls more than these guys. They killed Walton for his speech impediment, made fun of McHale’s goofy body, rode Ainge like a little brother, teased Wedman about his vegetarian diet … there wasn’t a single bad apple, or someone who didn’t have an exact understanding of his role in the team’s hierarchy. Pushing everything over the top were McHale and Ainge (two of the funniest guys who ever played), Bird (the best trash-talker ever) and Walton (whose overexuberance defined the season).
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If anything, they had too much swagger and needed to be challenged at times. Their defining moment: Game 4 of the Milwaukee series, when Bird disdainfully nailed his fourth three in four minutes at the buzzer (the first-ever eff-you three) and jogged off the court like he had just banged everyone’s girlfriend in the stands. In the video of that season, Walton runs into the locker room screaming, “Lar-ree Bird! Lar-reeeeee Bird!” We’ve seen other teams win on that level, but I can’t remember any of them getting more of a kick from it.

Trump card.
I can’t go with passing because Magic’s Lakers were just as memorable in that department. So let’s go with this: Remember how boxers like Julio Cesar Chavez, Roberto Duran or Bernard Hopkins would
close the ring on opponents over the course of a few rounds, and by the eighth round, suddenly the other guy looked like he was fighting in a phone booth and couldn’t move around at all? That’s what the Celtics did offensively. They pounded it down low, kept rotating Bird/McHale/Parish/Walton on the low post, kept swinging the ball, kept attacking mismatches, kept getting wide-open 20-footers—only they kept inching closer and closer, and by the second half, suddenly those 20-footers were 15-footers. (Like watching a hockey team pull its goalie and crowd the net with forwards, but in this case the net was the basket. In other words, they crowded the rim.) What’s interesting is that had this specific team come along just a few years later, Ainge and Bird would have been gleefully bombing wide-open threes, the spacing would have been better and that boxer/hockey dynamic wouldn’t have happened. Would this have made them even more efficient offensively? Probably. But this was memorable. We will never see it again. It’s too easy to just jack up threes now.

Biggest luxury.
Every time Walton loped off the bench for the first time, the crowd stood and cheered—partly because we liked him, partly because it meant he and Bird would do their “night at the Improv” routine. They experimented that whole season with various no-looks, pick-and-rolls and every other “only we are on this plane and see these angles” offensive play; even on tape two decades later, it’s like seeing rare video of Biggie freestyling with Eminem. Their favorite play? Bird dumped the ball in to Walton, then ran by him toward the basket like he was clearing out, only Walton would quickly flip the ball over his head to Bird for an easy layup. When teams caught on, they changed the play a little—now Bird used Walton (holding the ball) to pick his guy, so everything hinged post-pass on whether he ran by Walton’s right side or left side (and each time, both defenders had to guess). Nobody could stop it.
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When teams floated a third defender over to stop them, his guy (usually McHale) just cut to the basket for an easy layup from Walton. And that’s how it went. Walton only averaged an 8–7 in 18 minutes a game, but that’s reason no. 759 why
statistics don’t tell the story. Seeing two basketball savants combining their once-in-a-generation passing skills was the pickle for the greatest cheeseburger of a team ever assembled.

Killer instinct.
They led by thirty-plus at some point in the fourth quarter or three of four playoff clinchers. The fourth? The one where Bird ripped Milwaukee’s heart out with all those threes. And if that’s not enough, they defeated their main threat in the West (the Lakers) both times by double digits and their main threats in the East (Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philly) twenty-two of twenty-five times. Well, then.

Iconic relevance (then).
Yes.

Iconic relevance (now).
Not as much. Yet another reason why we needed a book like this.
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1.
“Anythang is possaaaaaaabulllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!”

2.
The answers, which I won’t bother to defend because I shouldn’t have to waste more than the minimum words: Emmitt; Gretzky; Ali; Montana; yes; no; no; yes; LeBron and Serena Williams.

3.
Only one potential scenario could defy this statement, and it involves five ifs:
if
LeBron signs with Portland in 2010;
if
Greg Oden stays healthy and becomes a stud center;
if
Portland considers using its resources to buy late first-rounders and stash young foreign players;
if
they get lucky with one of those moves; and
if
Brandon Roy’s knees cooperate. Vegas odds: 75 to 1.

4.
You probably remember the first time you had sex. Like, all the details. Do you remember everything about the sixth time? What about the eighth? Or the eleventh? Been there, done that, right? But that first time … I mean, even twenty-five years later, I still remember everything about that magical night at the Neverland Ranch.

5.
The ’65 Celtics didn’t have a true point guard other than an aging KC Jones, who was a worse shot than Dick Cheney. In crunch time, Sam and Hondo handled the ball for them. Could you win the 2009 title with Kobe and Pierce as your ball handlers? Seems a little far-fetched, right?