The Book of Basketball (62 page)

So why didn’t Wilkins get selected for the NBA’s 50 at 50? He never played in a Conference Finals, which hurt his cause unless you remember that his prime coincided with three Eastern juggernauts (the mid-eighties Celtics, late-eighties Pistons and early-nineties Bulls). He battled the stigma of being a “me first” guy throughout his career, someone who cared about getting his numbers, dunking on a few guys and that’s it.
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Doc Rivers once joked that you could stand in the huddle with Wilkins during the final 30 seconds of a one-point playoff game and ask him, “’Nique, how many points do you have?” and Wilkins would respond without missing a beat, “Thirty-seven, and I’d have 39 if they called that foul back in the second quarter.” Doesn’t sound like someone with a firm grasp of The Secret. And he never displayed the all-around brilliance of many contemporaries, always making for a better foil than anything. It’s fitting that his career highlights happened in the Dunk Contest and an eventual Game 7 loss (the famous duel with Bird). And he was a self-absorbed scorer who rarely moved without the ball and always seemed to be holding his right hand up in the “I’m open!” stance. I hated playing with those guys. But to claim that Wilkins wasn’t one of the best fifty NBA players ever in 1996 … that’s just absurd.

54. PAUL PIERCE

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … Finals MVP (’08) … top 10 (’09), top 15 (’02, ’03, ’08) … 3-year peak: 26–7–4 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 26–9–5 (26 G) … ’08 Playoffs: 20–5–5 (26 G) … leader: FTs (1x) … career: 23–6–4

The resume for Pierce: Out-dueled LeBron in Game 7 of the 2008 Cavs-Celts series, then outplayed Kobe in the Finals (major points there) … repeatedly raised his level of play in big games (dating back to the ’02 Playoffs) … finished the Double Zeros as the best small forward not named LeBron … exhibited remarkable durability over the past ten years, missing an extended stretch of games only once (during the ’07 season, when the Celtics shelved him while tanking for Oden or Durant) … a memorably tough competitor who didn’t miss a single 2000 preseason game after getting nearly stabbed to death two weeks earlier.
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Maybe I’m a little too close to it—after all, I probably watched 80 percent of his games, attended most of the home games for his first four years and spent an inordinate amount of time wondering about dopey things like, “Shit, why do I have a terrible feeling he was smoking dope with Ricky Davis until 5:45 a.m. this morning?” But after watching Pierce evolve from “guy with franchise potential” to “guy who led a championship team,” I realized his career was a microcosm of the modern NBA fan experience. After some early stumbles during the discouraging Pitino era,
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Pierce emerged as a potential stud, signed a six-year extension for $71 million, then led the Celtics to the 2002 Eastern Finals and submitted a heroic performance in Game 3 (a comeback win from 25 down) before Boston ultimately fell short. After that happened, he probably thought,
“All right, I’m here. I made it. I knew this would happen. I’m one of the greats!” Then he started acting like a complete ass.
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He played on the ’02 World Championships team that disgraced itself, then returned with a petulant attitude (the scowling, chest-pounding, whining, and ref-baiting were insufferable), acting like a prima donna behind the scenes and partying way too much for anyone’s liking. And this just kept going on and going on, without anyone truly calling him on it—you know, because this was the post-Y2K NBA and guys could act like jerks with few or no repercussions—until everything crested in the ’05 playoffs when Pierce committed a boneheaded foul that got him ejected and nearly blew the Indiana series.

Boston fans found themselves in an all-too-frequent position for NBA diehards in the past two decades: we were tired of Pierce’s act, thought he needed a fresh start somewhere else and wondered if he was a lost cause, but we knew our team couldn’t possibly get equal value for him. So what do you do? Do you just keep crossing your fingers and hoping that a talented star who’s already made more money than he’ll ever need will suddenly realize, “You know, I’m wasting my potential, maybe I should straighten myself out”? Or do you admit he’s a falling stock and cash out? There’s no right answer. Teams that owned Baron Davis, Charles Barkley, T-Mac, Allen and C-Webber cashed out and eventually regretted it. Teams that owned Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury, Derrick Coleman, Larry Johnson and Kemp cashed out and never regretted it. And then there’s Boston and Indiana, who found themselves in similar predicaments with underachieving franchise guys—Pierce and Jermaine O’Neal—only both teams crossed their fingers and rode it out over trading them for 60–70 cents on the dollar, a decision that worked out spectacularly for Boston and unbearably for Indiana. You never know with this stuff. You really don’t.

The thing is, the Celtics
wanted
to cash out. That summer, they agreed to a tentative trade with Portland for Nick Van Exel’s expiring contract and the number three pick (planning to take Chris Paul)
³⁰
before Pierce
caught wind of it and squashed the deal by playing the “I’ll make everyone in Portland miserable” card. Maybe that was the turning point. Maybe he matured in his late twenties like so many of us do.
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Maybe enough time had passed since the stabbing and he’d stopped being bitter. Maybe he caught an old Celtics game from the Bird era on ESPN Classic, noticed the Garden swaying and thought to himself, “It used to mean something to be a Celtic; I can do something about this.” Maybe he’d been partying too much and calmed down.
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Whatever happened, he became everything we ever wanted in the 2005–6 season, carrying a young Celtics team, outplaying opposing stars, lifting them in crunch time and doing everything with a smile. Remember when Angelina Jolie broke up with Billy Bob Thornton, stopped wearing a vial of his blood around her neck, stopped dressing like a goth harlot, started adopting third-world babies and fighting AIDS, turned Brad Pitt into Mike Brady and basically became Mother Teresa, and the transformation from “bad” to “good” was so seamless that there was something creepy about it? That was Pierce.
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By December, with rumors flying of a blockbuster trade to launch our umpteenth rebuilding effort, I started getting emails from season-ticket holders telling me, “I don’t care that we’re blowing close games, it’s been worth the money just to watch Pierce every night, we better not trade him.”

What usually happens when an NBA star finds himself stuck in a hopeless situation? He pouts and starts looking for his own stats. He wonders aloud if their team is truly “committed to winning.” His misses twelve games with a five-game hamstring injury. After a tough loss, he saunters off the court with an expression that says,
Hey, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t ask to play with these shitheads.
Eventually, he pushes to play somewhere
else, only because he wants to be paid like a franchise player without the responsibility of actually carrying a franchise. But that was the beautiful thing about Pierce during those two depressing seasons before the Allen/Garnett trades: He
wanted
to be a Celtic. He
wanted
to be there when things turned around. He believed the Celtics were
his
team, for better or worse, that it was his personal responsibility to lead them. Everyone will remember his ’08 season, but Pierce’s greatest season had already happened, the year he accepted the responsibility of a franchise player and killed himself every night. The groundwork for everything that happened afterward was laid then and there. Where did it come from? I couldn’t tell you. But it’s the reason a team like Denver ends up keeping ’Melo for two extra years, because you never want a great player “getting it” as soon as he’s playing for someone else.

By the 2008 Playoffs, Pierce was right where we wanted him to be. Defensively, he pushed himself to heights unseen by giving LeBron everything he could handle in the second round, demolishing Tayshaun Prince in the Eastern Finals, and famously taking over Kobe duty during the 24-point comeback in Game 4. Offensively, he evolved into a game manager of sorts, picking his spots, keeping teammates involved and showing a knack for taking over at the right times. Spiritually, he became the heart of the team, the only one who seemed utterly convinced that they would win the championship. With ten minutes to go in Game 6 and Boston locked into the title, the Lakers called time out and Pierce turned to face the crowd behind the Celtics’ bench, watching fans dance to the arena sound system music and nodding happily. You could see him soaking in the moment. He wasn’t even doing it for the cameras; it was one of those times when you could study someone from a distance and read every single thing he was thinking. He was thinking about the past ten years, and all the bad things that had happened, and all the times he’d given up hope, and now he was reminding himself to enjoy the moment. You could see it. All of it.

I wrote a postgame passage that could have been written about twenty coulda-gone-either-way stars had the best-case scenario of their careers been realized:

We watched that guy grow up. We watched him become a man. We believed in him, we gave up on him, and we believed in him again. I don’t mean to sound like the old man in
Pretty Woman
,
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but part of me wanted to walk onto the court Tuesday night and just tell Pierce, “It’s hard for me to say this without sounding condescending, but I’m proud of you.” We spend so much time complaining about sports and being disappointed that our favorite players never end up being who we wanted them to be, but in Pierce’s case, he became
everything
we wanted him to be. When he held up the Finals MVP trophy after the game and screamed to the crowd in delight, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier for a Boston athlete. How many guys stick with a crummy franchise for 10 solid years, then get a chance to lead that same team to a championship? Does that
ever
happen in sports anymore?

53. DWYANE WADE

Resume: 6 years, 5 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’06 Finals MVP … top 10 (05, ’06, ’09), top 15 (’07) … 3-year peak: 26–5–7 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 25–5–6 (54 G) … ’06 Finals: 37–8–4 … ’09: 30–8–5, 2.2 steals, 49% FG (first scoring leader to finish top 16 in assists, steals, and blocks)

After a few injuries and some well-earned “Let’s hope he isn’t the next Penny Hardaway/Grant Hill” worries,
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Wade reclaimed top-five status in the 2008 Olympics and kept the momentum going with an extraordinary ’09 season, finishing third in the MVP voting and slapping up the best all-around statistical year from a two-guard since Jordan. I can’t remember
an under-twenty-eight guard with a better blend of skills: he scores and creates for others; he’s an excellent defender; he never mails in games or quarters; he rises to the occasion when it matters; and most important, he straddles the line between “making everyone else better” and “it’s time for me to take over” as well as anyone. The Bulls didn’t enjoy playing with Jordan until 1991. The Lakers didn’t enjoy playing with Kobe until 2008. Wade’s teammates have always enjoyed playing with him. That quality sets him apart, as do the uncanny parallels between Wade’s career and Jack Bauer’s: not just their fearlessness and respective abilities to carry their own shows, but their career peaks and valleys from 2002–3 (Wade’s breakout at Marquette and Jack’s first two seasons of
24)
to 2006 (the year they both peaked) to 2007–8 (when things fell apart and their shows nearly got canceled) to 2009 (redemption as franchise guys for both).
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And then there’s this: in Miami’s four Finals victories in 2006, Wade averaged 39.3 points and 8.3 rebounds, made 58 of 73 FTs and earned the following praise from me: “Sometime during the past four weeks, Wade matured into the single best player in the league, someone who instinctively balanced the line between deferring to teammates and taking over games (kinda like what we always
wanted
Kobe to be, only it never happened).” Put in simpler terms, it’s the single best Jordan impersonation ever done. In a 2008 feature about the fifty greatest Finals performances since 1977, John Hollinger ranked Wade’s thrashing of Dallas first
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—partly because he finished with the highest PER rating, partly because Wade’s numbers were achieved during a slower-paced series, and partly because Hollinger may have made a bet with someone who dared him to write the single nuttiest column in
ESPN.com
history—and had the gall to write, “While it seems strange to have somebody besides Jordan in the top spot, the truth is Jordan never dominated a Finals to this extent. At the time, many called Wade’s performance Jordanesque. It turns out they might have been selling him short.”
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Here’s what scares me: as the years pass and fans rely on statistics for memories, fans might believe that Wade’s 2006 Finals performance surpassed anything Jordan did. So let’s put a stop to that. Before I kill someone. Forget about the obvious advantages in Wade’s era (no hand checking, no hard fouls); that series goes down as the biggest travesty in the history of NBA officiating. It was a damned disgrace. It turned people off on the league. After Game 5 played out like a WWE match, I probably received two thousand emails in twelve hours from frustrated fans, many of whom were ready to give up on the league because they felt like the results were preordained. The reality? The NBA was fighting through a fundamental crisis with its style of play that went beyond the whole issue of changing the hand check rules and speeding up play to get more scoring. Some teams were embracing the new rules, attacking the basket, pushing the ball and thinking outside the box; others were sticking to what had worked from 1994 to 2005, slowing down the pace, pushing themselves on defense, and revolving their offense around one guy. Miami and Dallas represented the old-school and new-school ways of thinking, respectively; after Game 5 of the Finals, I even wrote, “I’m starting to feel like the future of the NBA is at stake.” Nothing against Miami, but nobody wanted to watch a predictable offensive team anymore. We didn’t want to watch one guy create every shot in crunch time while everyone else stood around. We didn’t want to watch a team limit possessions and walk up the floor. We didn’t want officials deciding games based on their interpretations of the “superstar barrelling into the paint and trying to draw contact” conundrum.