The Book of Basketball (66 page)

42. JASON KIDD

Resume: 15 years, 12 quality, 9 All-Stars … MVP runner-up (’02) … top 5 (’99, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’04), top 10 (’03) … All-Defense (9x, four 1st) … 4-year peak: 16–7–10 … leader: assists (5x), minutes (1x) … best player on 2 runner-ups (’02–’03 Nets), 20–8–9 (40 G) … top 4 assists (12x) … traded 3x (once in prime) … career: assists (3rd), steals (8th)
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My buddy J-Bug fittingly summed up J-Kidd’s destiny three years into his career. We were attending a Suns-Celtics game and Kidd bricked three that never had a chance even as it was leaving his hand. After the shot clunked off the rim and nearly took Antoine Walker’s head off, a second passed and the Bug decided, “Every time I watch Jason Kidd play, initially it’s like seeing a girl walk into a bar who’s just drop-dead gorgeous, but then when he throws up one of those bricks, it’s like the gorgeous girl taking off her jacket and you see she has tiny mosquito bites for tits.”

Hey, I didn’t say it. But that was one of Bug’s better moments, right up there with the time he convinced someone at Sully’s Pub that he was a Formula One driver. Maybe Kidd was a smoking-hot girl in nearly every respect—fantastic defender, great rebounder for his size, impeccably smart on fast breaks, completely unselfish, someone who lived to make everyone else better—but if shooting ability were a bra size, he would have been wearing a 32A for his entire career. Any woman can drop five grand on saline implants and suddenly have a killer jump shot, so to speak. But a Hall of Fame point guard who can’t make a 20-footer? There isn’t plastic surgery to fix a bad jumper or a Wonderbra to hide it. For his career (through 2008), Kidd shot just 40 percent from the field,
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which would have been fine in the fifties if he were battling Cousy and McGuire every night. Of the post-1976 guards who played at least 600 games (through ’08), Kidd has the fourth-lowest shooting percentage. His playoff percentages are even bleaker: of the post-1976 guards who played 80-plus postseason games, Kidd currently ranks sixth from the bottom (39.5 percent, ahead of bricklayers Lindsay Hunter, Greg Anthony, Nate McMillan, Howard Eisley and Bruce Bowen),
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and just ahead of Drexler with the second-lowest three-point percentage of anyone who attempted at least two per game (30 percent). Much as Greg Maddux notched 355 wins without a heater, every other aspect of Kidd’s game had to be perfect to compensate for its one shortcoming. And for eight or nine years, that was pretty much the case.

Until he joined Dirk Nowitzki in Dallas, he had always been the best player on his team—not his fault, but still, if your best guy is a 40 percent shooter, you’re not winning a title. And as much as teammates loved playing with him, Kidd was somewhat of a handful behind the scenes, quietly wearing out his welcome with three different teams—Dallas, Phoenix and New Jersey,
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all of whom were anxious to dump him—feuding with Jimmy Jackson and Jamal Mashburn in Dallas, curiously bleaching his hair white-blond for the ’00 Playoffs, battling domestic violence charges in 2001, pushing Byron Scott out as Nets coach in 2004, plodding through an ugly (and public) divorce in 2007 and pushing for a 2008 trade (and getting it) in the messiest way possible. We never mention Kidd in any discussion of head cases of the last twenty years, even though all evidence points to him having a moody, enigmatic, unpredictable personality.

Did we confuse Kidd’s unselfishness with him being a good guy? Probably a little. Much of Kidd’s “struggles” were semiexplainable except for that bleached afro, which remains unexplainable and gets funnier over time. (It looked like Wesley Snipes’ hair in
Demolition Man
crossed with Jules’ afro in
Pulp Fiction
, minus the muttonchops.) The Dallas situation imploded for three reasons: three young stars were given too much money too soon; two feuded over singer Toni Braxton (who can rank splitting up the mid-nineties Mavs right up there with her six Grammy awards);
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and new Mavs coach Jim Cleamons decided to adopt Chicago’s “triangle” even though he had the most gifted open-court point guard since Magic Johnson. (I remember almost crying the first time I went to a game and saw Kidd completely shackled in that triangle. It was like paying for a Sharon Stone movie back then where she didn’t get naked.)
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The Phoenix situation deteriorated because of the aforementioned incident with his wife. The Jersey situation fell apart because Kidd couldn’t stand playing with
Vince anymore, and really, can you blame him? Speaking of Vince, Kidd’s unfortunate luck with teammates was remarkable. Mashburn and Jackson were top-six lottery picks who didn’t pan out until after they were traded. Kidd played with a variety of name guys in Phoenix—Antonio McDyess, Danny Manning, Penny Hardaway, Rex Chapman, Kevin Johnson, Robert Horry, Cedric Ceballos, Clifford Robinson, Shawn Marion, Tom Gugliotta—but caught each at the wrong point of his career. Even during a successful run in Jersey, he turned chicken shit into chicken salad in his first two years, carrying a team with Keith Van Horn, Kerry Kittles, Kenyon Martin, Todd McCulloch, Lucious Harris and rookie Richard Jefferson to the Finals, then bringing the same group back a year later with an aging Dikembe Mutombo replacing Van Horn/McCulloch.

Which brings us to the strongest case for Kidd in the top forty-five of the Pyramid. Look at the teammates in the previous paragraph, then look at these records: 32–23, 56–26, 27–23, 53–29, 51–31, 52–30, 49–33, 47–35. The first five belong to Phoenix from ’97 to ’01; the last three belong to Jersey from ’02 to ’04. For those eight seasons, Kidd finished 137 games over .500, made five first-team All-NBA’s (and one second-team All-NBA) and made the Finals twice playing with
one
All-Star during that entire stretch (K-Mart in ’04). We always hear that KG never had a great supporting cast in Minnesota, but Christ, what about Jason Kidd? He also stands out for making every All-Star Game 20–25 percent more watch-able;
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for averaging an Oscar-like 20–9–8 and melting the Celtics in the ’02 Eastern Finals; for his Magic-like talent for grabbing a rebound, turning on the jets, going coast to coast, and getting to the rim; for subjecting us to forty thousand camera shots of his wife and young son during the ’02 and ’03 playoffs;
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for perfecting the “jump in front of someone and take a charge on a fast break layup” move that led to them putting a circle under the basket; and for having the “J-Kidd” moniker that (along with
“C-Webb”) was responsible for the ensuing sports acronym craze that spiraled out of control and eventually led to Linda Cohn calling Pudge Rodriguez “I-Rod.” Looking back, I enjoyed the J-Kidd era as much as I enjoyed the Michelle Pfeiffer era—yeah, maybe they had small boobs, but they made up for it in other ways.

41. WES UNSELD

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’78 Finals MVP … ’69 MVP … ’69 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’69) … leader: rebounds (1x), FG% (1x) … 4-year peak: 15–17–3 … 3rd-best playoff rebounder (14.9 RPG) … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’78 Bullets) and 3 runner-ups (’71, ’74, ’79) … ’71 Playoffs: 13–19–4 (18 G)

Big Wes submitted the weirdest resume of anyone in the top seventy-five. His peers got carried away and voted him MVP as a rookie, then he didn’t make the All-Star team the following season (or another All-NBA team ever). He wrecked his knee during the ’74 season and dropped off the offensive map, averaging just 8 points per game for his last eight seasons. He was indisputably the worst shot blocker of any great center, someone who couldn’t have jumped over a picture of that Sunday’s
Washington Post.
He gained enough weight during the latter half of his career that his screens worked partly because defenders spent two full seconds making their way around this mammoth man.
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It’s hard to imagine him being nearly as successful today. A six-foot-six center who couldn’t score, run the floor, or protect the rim? How would that work? Even when Wes and the ’78 Bullets won their sole title, they stumbled into the trophy only because Bill Walton’s broken foot opened the door for every pseudo-contender in the playoffs.
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Then you delve into Wesley’s resume a little deeper. He injured his left knee during his second season and blew it out for good in Season 6, still averaging a 14–17–4 during his first five years. He played on four different Bullets teams that made the Finals in a nine-year span—a really good ’71 team that lost Gus Johnson before the Finals, a heavily favored ’75 team that the Warriors swept, and the experienced ’78 and ’79 teams that split with the Sonics—even though they didn’t have a traditional superstar (unless you want to count Hayes, and I don’t). Everyone remembers him as
the
enforcer of that era along with Willis Reed and Bob Lanier, the one guy you didn’t want to cross in any way, as well as the best team locker room guy other than Paul Silas. He cared not about statistics but about making everyone else better and his team’s success reflects that: not just four Finals appearances, but Washington finishing 176 games over .500 and making the playoffs for every one of Unseld’s first eleven years. His outlet passes were the single biggest strength of his game, only we didn’t have a way of measuring their impact—if he threw a crisp fifty-foot outlet pass to Monroe, leading to a two-on-one break and a layup for Kevin Loughery, only Loughery and Monroe were accounted for statistically, right?
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That brings up a larger point: our collective failure to come up with meaningful, easy-to-understand statistics to measure NBA players. I first complained about this on my old website a few years before the statistical revolution in baseball inevitably trickled over to the NBA and NFL. Back in 2001, I openly pined for the following stats:

Clutch FG and FT percentage.
We have this now in various forms;
82games.com
even tweaked it into “clutch” (last 5 minutes, three-point lead or less) and “super-clutch” (last 2 minutes, three-point lead or less). Manu Ginobili’s ’08 stats were absolutely mind-blowing: 61.9% FG super-clutch and 57.4% FG clutch. Why didn’t we have this when Karl Malone was in his prime? Damn it all.

Plus/minus.
A hockey staple that the basketball community ignored until
82games.com
launched it for the 2002–3 season, eventually leading to
Eddy Curry setting the unofficial record for worst plus-minus for anyone who played at least 1,500 minutes in a season. During the ’07–’08 season, Eddy played 1,529 minutes and finished with a plus/minus of-10.1. In other words, Eddy made the team ten points worse just by stepping onto the court. Amazing.
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Nitty-gritties.
I created this one to cover any time someone (a) takes a charge, (b) comes up with a loose ball in a crowd of two or more people, (c) saves a loose ball heading out of bounds by whipping it off an opposing player, or (d) tips a rebound to a teammate. Shane Battier would have led this decade in nitty-gritties, James Posey would have finished second and Tim Thomas would have been last.

Wide-open FG percentage.
Tracks every wide-open jumper launched by a player from 15 feet and beyond. Not only do we have this stat now, but NBA teams separate shots into zones and rely on this information to help them target specific role players (usually point guards who sink a surprising number of open 18-footers from the top of the key or swingmen who drain threes from the corner with startling accuracy). One of the reasons I loved Cleveland’s 2008 trade for Mo Williams was because he had finished second in open FG percentage (51 percent) the previous season.

Dunks.
Another underground stat that went mainstream over the past few years, although I’d break it down even further into subcategories like “Rebound Dunks,” “Dunks on Somebody’s Head,” “Alley-Oop Dunks,” “Dunks That Got the Home Crowd So Fired Up That the Opponents Needed a Time-out,” and “Dunks That Caused Every Black Player or Fan
in the Building to Stand Up in Disbelief and Make the Face Where It Looks Like They Smelled a Life-Altering Fart.”

Ref bitching.
Every time a player complains to a referee, that’s one RB. I was joking about this one at the time; back then I wrote, “We’re creating this just so Antoine Walker would finally get to hold his own record.” Now I’m wondering if this stat wouldn’t be wildly fun to monitor. Kobe would lead the league every season. There’s no question.

Unforced turnovers.
In tennis, this covers every time a player messes up without any provocation. In basketball, that would cover every time someone screws up an easy fast break with a bad decision; commits a dribbling or palming violation; gets whistled for an offensive charge or a three-second violation; blows an uncontested layup or dunk; accidentally throws the ball out of bounds, commits an offensive goaltending, lane violation, or flagrant foul; or loses track of the shot clock and fails to get a shot off before the 24 seconds expires. That’s a wide range of inexcusable fuck-ups we’re covering there. You’re telling me that wouldn’t be valuable?

Defensive stops.
When a defender single-handedly prevents his opponent from scoring on an isolation play, a low-post play or a perimeter drive, that’s a stop. Cause a turnover or an unforced turnover in the process, that’s a superstop. By the way, I threw this idea at Houston’s Daryl Morey and his response was, “Why do you think we have Chuck Hayes?”
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Russells.
Any blocked shot that immediately triggers a fast-break layup or dunk. We always hear about how many times Russell blocked a shot, kept it in play and launched a fast break. Why couldn’t we measure that? And conversely, wouldn’t this measure all the times Dwight Howard stupidly swats the ball out of bounds (and maybe convince him to stop doing it)?
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