The Book of Basketball (24 page)

Look at the firing numbers over the past decade: eight to ten coaches get fired every year, none lasts more than three or four years, and there might be three or four quality coaches in any given season. Doc Rivers lost 18 straight games and won a title within a sixteen-month span. Hubie finished
with a record of 424–495 and somehow became known as a memorably good coach in the process. Paul Westphal led the Suns to the ’93 Finals; within eight years, nobody would hire him. KC Jones made the Finals four of five years in Boston, took two years off, then lasted 118 games in Seattle. We have amassed overwhelming evidence that coaches are exceedingly dispensable—they’re only as good as their talent, with a limited number of exceptions. Occasionally they might stumble into the right situation, but ultimately, players win titles and coaches lose them. I am going to keep pining for the return of the player-coach if it’s the last thing I do. What’s the difference? So it doesn’t work and he gets fired? How is that different from what happens now? Maybe Red Auerbach knew what he was doing with a seven-play playbook, no assistants and a rolled-up program.
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One more thing: if you thought coaches were getting wacky, you should have seen the new slew of owners. Donald Sterling spent $13 million on the Clippers, watched the first home game from midcourt with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, then jumped in coach Paul Silas’ arms and kissed him when they won; within a few months, he’d failed to make deferred payments to players, refused to pay operating expenses and owed over half a million to the NBA’s pension fund and various creditors. Cleveland’s Ted Stepien overpaid for free agents Scott Wedman and James Edwards, lost $5.1 million during the ’82 season and traded away so many number one picks that the Association awarded the franchise compensatory picks when Stepien sold the team. (They also passed the Stepien Rule—teams weren’t allowed to trade first-rounders in consecutive years. How many guys can say they owned an NBA team and had a rule named after them?) Philly’s Harold Katz nearly caused an owner revolt when he offered Moses a then-record six-year, $13 million deal and gave Houston a number one pick and Caldwell Jones so they wouldn’t match.
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This
launched a twenty-five-year pattern of franchises stupidly overpaying for players, then warning the players’ union it had to do something to keep the costs down. How could so many rich people be so dumb?

1982–83: THE CONNECTION

This was the year when everyone realized, “Hey, maybe we should do stuff to win the fans over!” That led to the following innovations and brainstorms:

1. Feeling frisky after inking a new four-year deal for $93 million, CBS unveiled an abnormally catchy intro that included computerized graphics of a basketball court, Brent Musburger’s orgasmic narration, recaps of previous games and a signature hum-along song that everyone from my generation immediately loved:
   “Dah-da-da-da do-do-do dooo do-do-do-doooo … (do-do-do-do) … dah-da-da … duhhh duhhhh duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh … DAH-DA-DOOO!”
   

2. The NBA created its NBA Entertainment division, which immediately launched an “NBA Action … It’s FANNNNNN-tastic!” commercial campaign that can only be described as a watershed.
   Wait, so you’re telling me it’s
   fun
   to attend an NBA game?
   Don Sperling and his NBAE crew kept the first effort relatively simple: just happy eighties music with various shots of cheerleaders, cheering fans and even someone holding an I LOVE IT sign, along with action shots of Kareem reaching for a jump ball, Bird’s reverse layup, Magic clapping and Doc’s tomahawk jam. The ads peaked within a few years and gave us three classics: the one with “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters that featured Isiah stomping his feet and doing a circle, Bernard winking on the bench and a smoking-hot Laker Girl blowing a kiss at the camera; the parade of buzzer-beaters that included Jeff Malone’s aforementioned three (the greatest for all of eternity unless someone makes one with their dick); and an Oscar-winning sixty-second classic that used Hall and Oates’ “One on One” and featured a number of pretty passes, Jerome Whitehead stuffing a Tom Chambers dunk and James Worthy’s gorgeous 360-degree layup in slow motion during the sax solo.
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   I can’t emphasize this strongly enough: those ads had a galvanizing effect on kids like myself in the eighties—they made the NBA seem cool, made us look forward to the next one, and made it seem like
   something was
   happening with this league.
   

   (A note that’s too important to be a footnote: “I’m So Excited” also appeared in an unforgettable
   Miami Vice
   two-parter called “Return of Calderon,” during the nightclub brawl in which Crockett and Tubbs thought they found the Argentinean assassin. The song played in
   Vacation
   during the gas station scene when Clark Griswold flirted with Christie Brinkley, as well as during a crucial scene in
   Beverly Hills Cop II.
   And it anchored the
   Saved by the Bell
   episode when Jessie became addicted to caffeine pills, leading to her famously ridiculous “I’m so excited … I’m so excited … I’m so … scared” meltdown. There’s a ton of hyperbole in this book, but the following statement does not qualify: No eighties song overachieved from a pop culture standpoint more than “I’m So Excited.” See? That was important.)
   

3. 3. Marvin Gaye’s All-Star Game anthem doubled as the best moment in All-Star history, hands down; nothing else came close. Coolest singer alive at the time. The celebrity capital of the world (L.A.). Stars like Bird, Isiah, Magic, Kareem, Dr. J, Moses, Jack Sikma and Sikma’s blondafroperm looking on. High expectations going in. And even though everyone had always sung the song in the most traditional way possible, Marvin sauntered out with dark, oversized “I might be coked up, I might not” sunglasses, gave the anthem his own little spin and absolutely
   crushed
   it. By the last fourth of the song, the entire Forum was clapping and swaying like it was the Apollo Theater. That performance will never be topped. Right year, right sport, right city. You could not have gotten that 150 seconds in any other sport, you have to admit.
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1983–84: WE’RE HERE

For better and worse, the NBA of the twenty-first century was shaped in what has to be considered the single greatest season in the history of professional sports, or at least one of the top five hundred. A closer look at each milestone:

The salary cap.
In March ’83, the league avoided a possible labor stoppage with a new CBA that guaranteed players 53 percent of the gross revenues in exchange for a cap that went into effect the following season ($3.6 million, climbing every year after), making players and owners revenue-sharing partners for better or worse.
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Why did the owners want it? Because it put a lid on escalating salaries and gave them (relatively) fixed costs. Why did the players want it? Because it forced every team to spend money; that season, Philly and New York were spending five times as much as the Pacers. As the years went along, the cap became more and more elaborate and confusing, a luxury tax component was added and Larry Coon became an Internet hero for writing a forty-thousand-word FAQ that explained every conceivable cap/tax rule and loophole.
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Coupled with overexpansion (still a few years away), the days of contenders going nine-deep with quality players and two franchise guys was almost over. We just didn’t know it yet.

The drug policy.
The new CBA agreement moved the league into “three strikes and you’re out” mode. The first offense was a suspension with pay
and rehab (paid by the league) as long as the player voluntarily came forward. Same for the second offense, although teams were given the option of waiving the player and replacing him on their cap. The third strike was a lifetime ban (reviewable every two years) regardless of whether the player came forward voluntarily or not.
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Richardson and Lucas were the odds-on favorites to be banned first, with Sugar winning the snort race (he got kicked out in 1986).
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The important thing to remember: not only was the NBA committed to cleaning things up, fans felt like the league had committed itself to cleaning things up. The days of bleary-eyed superstars drifting through games was almost over. At least until they switched to pot in the nineties.

The David Stern era.
Fitting that he took over on February 1, 1984, one month into what would become the league’s most important year. We don’t need to waste words blowing Stern here. Just know that he’s either the first-or second-best sports commissioner ever (depending on how you feel about Pete Rozelle); he was overqualified for the job (and still is); he had a dramatic impact not just on the league itself but also on the NBA’s marketing/entertainment/legal/corporate staffs (having Larry O’Brien as a boss and then Stern was like jumping from single-A to the majors); he became the face of the Association almost immediately (and remember, it had never had one before); by December ’89, the league had inked four-year deals with NBC and Turner for a combined $875 million; and Stern succeeded to the degree that he was earning more money than only a handful of players by the end of the decade. If that’s not enough, he increased the entertainment level of every draft from 1984 to 2009 by approximately 24.7 percent. Maybe Stern didn’t make the league take off, but he was flying the plane masterfully when it happened.

All-Star Weekend.
When an NBA marketing adviser named Rick Welts lobbied O’Brien to turn the All-Star Game into an entire weekend, the commissioner’s response was predictably grumpy and shortsighted. As Welts recalled three years later in the
New York Times
, “I wouldn’t say it got a ringing endorsement. Larry said that, number one, it couldn’t cost the league a nickel. We said we’d see what we could do.” (Note: if someone ever writes O’Brien’s autobiography, and really, the odds are 200 to 1, it would definitely
not
have a title like
Thinking Ahead
or
The Visionary.)
Welts and his marketing team quickly sold sponsorships for the Dunk Contest and Old-Timers Game, scheduled those events for Saturday in Denver and convinced TBS to televise it. And then something weird happened: fans became legitimately excited about the Dunk Contest, especially when Doc agreed to appear and re-create the magic from his revered ’76 performance (also in Denver).
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The Old-Timers Game was surprisingly fun and loaded with legends (Hondo, Pearl, Pistol Pete, Barry, Unseld, Cowens, Heinsohn, even Johnny “Red” Kerr), with Pistol exploding for 18 points in 18 minutes and East coach Red Auerbach fuming after a game-turning call in the final minute.
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Even better, Heinsohn never coughed up a lung despite Vegas posting even odds for “Tommy Heinsohn will cough up a lung during the game.”

The Dunk Contest contestants were Larry Nance, Edgar Jones, Dominique (the odds-on favorite), Ralph Sampson (as always, they had to have one “Why the supertall guy?” contestant), Clyde Drexler, Orlando Woolridge, Michael Cooper and two doctors (Dunkenstein and J). Wilkins, Nance and the Docs advanced to Round 2 (both Erving and ’Nique dunked two balls at once); Nance prevailed in the Finals because Erving blew his first dunk. Watching it twenty-five years later on tape, it’s shocking how rudimentary the dunks were—only Doc’s last dunk from
the foul line (his entire foot was over) qualified as memorable, and Nance’s Plastic Man performance (a variety of long-armed dunks with his hand way over the rim) seems pretty mundane. But at the time? Riveting! If you watch the YouTube clips, the pivotal moment happens right before the finals, when Doc crouches on the sidelines and diagrams potential dunks with his two young sons and teammate Andrew Toney (replete with different phantom dunk gestures); this was one of those rare “Wow, maybe these black guys aren’t all on drugs; they actually seem like normal people” moments that the NBA needed so desperately in order to connect with secretly-still-a-little-racist America. Within two years, they added a Three-Point Contest (dramatically won by Larry Bird) and we were off and running.

One other note: the actual All-Star Game was fantastic. Doc had 34 points; Isiah won the MVP with 22 points and 15 assists; Magic had 22 assists in 37 minutes; the East won by a 154–145 score that doubled as the highest combined point total ever to that point;
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and the supercompetitive game featured an inordinate amount of quality players (including twelve Pyramid guys and five of the top twenty-five, a stat that will make sense in about 107 pages) actually giving a crap. Until the ’87 Classic, this was the best All-Star game ever played. Again, only good came out of the ’84 All-Star Weekend. Even Rick Barry’s latest rug was a huge hit.

The birth of tanking.
With Hakeem and Jordan looming as draft prizes, both the Rockets (blew 14 of their last 17, including 9 of their last 10) and Bulls (lost 19 of their last 23, including 14 of their last 15) said, “Screw it, we’ll bastardize the sport,” and pulled some fishy crap: resting key guys, giving lousy guys big minutes and everything else. Things peaked in Game 81 when a washed-up Elvin Hayes played
every minute
of Houston’s overtime loss to the Spurs. Since none of the other crappy teams owned their picks, only Chicago and Houston controlled their destinies (hence the tanking). The worst teams in each conference flipped a coin for number one back then, so the 29-win Rockets “won” the toss and picked first; the
26-win Pacers “lost” and picked second (Portland by proxy); and the 27-win Bulls settled for third (winning the ultimate prize).
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The unseemly saga spurred the creation of a draft lottery the following season. And even that didn’t totally solve the tanking problem; Team Stern has changed the lottery system five times in twenty-four years, and we’re probably headed for a sixth soon. My solution: every lottery team gets the same odds. What’s wrong with keeping shitty teams shitty and improving mediocre ones? Why is this bad? You can’t have great teams unless you have lousy ones. If that makes me an NBA Republican, so be it.