The Book of Basketball (7 page)

With that said, I would have rather been playing blackjack and drinking vodka lemonades then figuring out how to cajole a pissed-off NBA legend. When a somber Gus finally waved me over, I was relieved to get it over with. (By the way, there should be no scenario that includes the words “Gus Johnson” and “somber.” I feel like I failed America regardless of how this turned out.) Gus threw an arm around me and said something like, “Look, I straightened everything out, he’s willing to talk to you, just understand, he’s a sensitive guy, he takes this shit personally.”
⁹
Understood. I followed him to a section of chairs near the topless pool, where Isiah was sipping a water and wearing a white Panama hat to shield himself from the blazing sun. As we approached, Gus slapped me on the back and gestured to a female friend who quickly fled the premises, like we were Mafia heads sitting down in the back of an Italian restaurant and Gus was shedding every waiter and busboy.
Get out of here. You don’t want to be here for this
. Meanwhile, Isiah rose from the chair with a big smile on his face—he’d make a helluva politician—saying simply, “Hi, I’m Isiah.”
¹⁰

We shook hands and sat down. I explained the purpose of my column, how I write from the fan’s perspective and play up certain gimmicks—I like the Boston teams and dislike anyone who battles them, I pretend to be smarter than every GM, I think Christmas should be changed to Larry Bird’s birthday—which made Isiah a natural foil for me. He understood that. He thought we were both entertainers, for lack of a better word. We were both there to make basketball more fun to follow. He didn’t appreciate two things I had written: that he destroyed the CBA (which he claimed wasn’t true) and how I lumped him with other inept GMs in a
widely read parody column called “The Atrocious GM Summit.”
¹¹
That led to us discussing each move and why he made them. He admitted two mistakes—the Jalen Rose trade (his fault) and the Steve Francis trade (not his fault because Larry Brown insisted on it, or so he claimed) and defended everything else. Strangely, inconceivably, each explanation made sense. For instance, he explained the recent Randolph trade by telling me (I’m paraphrasing), “Everyone’s trying to get smaller and faster. I want to go the other way. I want to get
bigger
. I want to
pound
people down low.” I found myself nodding like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé in
SNL’s
“Sinatra Group” sketch.
Great idea, Chairman! I love it! You’re a genius!
Only later, after we parted ways and I thought about it more, did it dawn on me how doomed his strategy was—not the “getting bigger” part as much as the “getting bigger with two head-case fat asses who can’t defend anyone or protect the rim and are prohibitively expensive” part. You get bigger with McHale and Parish or Sampson and Olajuwon. You don’t get bigger with Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph.
¹²

But that’s not why I’m telling you this story. After settling on an uneasy truce about his job performance, we started remembering those unforgettable Celtics-Pistons clashes from the eighties: how their mutual hatred was palpable, how that competitiveness has slowly eroded from the league because of rule changes, money, AAU camps and everything else. Today’s rivals hug each other after games and pull the “I love you, boy!” routine. They act like former summer camp chums who became successful CEOs, then ran into each other at Nobu for the first time in years.
Great to see you! I’ll talk to you soon—let’s have lunch!
When Isiah’s Pistons played Bird’s Celtics, the words “great to see you” were not on the agenda. They wanted to destroy each other. They did. There was an edge to those battles that the current ones don’t have. I
missed that edge and so did Isiah. We both felt passionate about it, passionate enough that—gasp—we were legitimately enjoying the conversation.
¹³

I was getting comfortable with him. Comfortable enough that I had to ask about The Secret.

And here’s where I won Isiah over—not just that I asked about The Secret, but that I remembered it in the first place. Detroit won the 1989 title after collapsing in consecutive springs against the ’87 Celtics and ’88 Lakers, two of the toughest exits in playoff history because of the nature of those defeats: a pair of “why did that have to happen?” moments in the Boston series (Bird’s famous steal in Game 5, then Vinnie Johnson and Adrian Dantley banging heads in Game 7), followed by another in the ’88 Finals (Isiah’s ankle sprain in Game 6). The ’89 Pistons regrouped for 62 wins and swept the Lakers for their first championship, vindicating a controversial in-season trade that shipped Dantley and a draft pick to Dallas for Mark Aguirre. That season lives on in Cameron Stauth’s superb book
The Franchise
, which details how GM Jack McCloskey built those particular Pistons teams. The crucial section happens during the ’89 Finals, with Isiah holding court with reporters and improbably offering up “the secret” of winning basketball. Here’s an edited-for-space version of what he tells them. The part that matters most is in boldface.

It’s not about physical skills. Goes far beyond that. When I first came here, McCloskey took a lot of heat for drafting a small guy. But he knew that the only way our team would rise to the top would be by mental skills, not size or talent. He knew the only way we could acquire those skills was by watching the Celtics and Lakers, because those were the teams winning year in and year out. I also looked at Seattle, who won one year, and Houston, who got to the Finals one year. They both self-destructed the next year. So how come? I read Pat Riley’s book
Show Time
and he talks about “the disease of more.”
¹⁴
A team wins it one year and the next year every player wants more minutes, more money, more shots. And it kills them. Our team has been up at the Championship level four years now. We could have easily self-destructed. So I read what Riley was saying, and I learned. I didn’t want what happened to Seattle and Houston to happen to us. But it’s hard not to be selfish. The art of winning is complicated by statistics, which for us becomes money. Well, you gotta fight that, find a way around it. And I think we have. If we win this, we’ll be the first team in history to win it without a single player averaging 20 points. First team. Ever. We got 12 guys who are totally committed to winning. Every night we found a different person to win it for us. Talked to Larry Bird about this once. Couple years back, at the All-Star Game. We were sitting signing basketballs and I’m talking to him about Red Auerbach and the Boston franchise and just picking his brain. I don’t know if he knew I was picking his brain, but I think he knew. Because I asked one question and he just looked at me. Smiled. Didn’t answer.

Whoa.

A few pages later, with the Pistons on the cusp of sweeping the Lakers, Isiah rants about Detroit’s perceived lack of respect from the outside world:

Look at our team statistically. We’re one of the worst teams in the league. So now you have to find a new formula to judge basketball. There were a lot of times I had my doubts about this approach, because all of you kept telling me it could never be done this way. Statistically, it made me look horrible. But I kept looking at the won-loss record and how we kept improving and I kept saying to myself, Isiah, you’re doin’ the right thing, so be stubborn, and one day people will find a different way to judge a player. They won’t just pick up the newspaper and say, oh, this guy was 9 for 12 with 8 rebounds so he was the best player in the game. Lots of times, on our team, you can’t tell who the best player in the game was ’Cause everybody did something good. That’s what makes us so good. The other team has to worry about stopping eight or nine people instead of two or three. It’s the only way to win. The only way to win. That’s the way the game was invented. But there’s more to that. You also got to create an environment that won’t accept losing.

Forget for a second that, in two paragraphs of quotes, Isiah just described everything you would ever need to know about winning an NBA championship. I always wanted to know what The Secret was. If you noticed,
he never fucking said it
. Even more frustrating, nobody ever asked him again.
¹⁵
And I had been wondering about it since I was in college. Now we were sitting by a topless pool in Vegas and he seemed to be enjoying my company, so screw it. When was this scenario ever happening again? I set up the question and asked him about The Secret.

Isiah smiled. I could tell he was impressed. He took a dramatic pause. You could say he even milked the moment.

“The secret of basketball,” he told me, “is that it’s
not
about basketball.”

The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball
.

That makes no sense, right? How can that possibly make sense?

For the next few minutes, Isiah explained it to me. After coming soooooooooo close for two straight postseasons, the chemistry for the ’89 team was off for reasons that had nothing to do with talent. Chuck Daly needed to give Dennis Rodman more playing time, only the Teacher (Dantley’s nickname, in an ironic twist) wasn’t willing to accommodate him. And that was a problem. Rodman could play any style and defend every type of player; he gave the Pistons a uniquely special flexibility, much like Havlicek’s ability to play guard or forward drove Russell’s last few Celtics teams. There was also a precedent in place from when John Salley and Joe Dumars came into their own in previous seasons; Isiah and Vinnie Johnson gave up minutes for Dumars, and Rick Mahorn gave up minutes for Salley. But when Rodman started stealing crunch-time minutes from Dantley, the Teacher started sulking and even complained to a
local writer. You couldn’t call it a betrayal, but Dantley had undermined an altruistic dynamic—constructed carefully over the past four seasons, almost like a stack of Jenga blocks—that hinged on players forfeiting numbers for the overall good of the team. The Pistons couldn’t risk having Dantley knock that Jenga stack down. They quickly swapped him for the enigmatic Aguirre, an unconventional low-post scorer who caused similar mismatch problems but wouldn’t start trouble because Isiah (a childhood chum from Chicago) would never allow it. Maybe Dantley was a better player than Aguirre, but Aguirre was a better fit for the 1989 Pistons. If they didn’t make that deal, they wouldn’t have won the championship. It was a people trade, not a basketball trade.
¹⁶

And that’s what Isiah learned while following those Lakers and Celtics teams around:
it wasn’t about basketball
.

Those teams were loaded with talented players, yes, but that’s not the only reason they won. They won because they liked each other, knew their roles, ignored statistics, and valued winning over everything else. They won because their best players sacrificed to make everyone else happy. They won as long as everyone remained on the same page. By that same token, they lost if any of those three factors weren’t in place. The ’75 Warriors self-combusted a year later because of Barry’s grating personality and two young stars (Wilkes and Gus Williams) needing better numbers to boost their free agent stock. The ’77 Blazers fell apart because of Bill Walton’s feet, but also because Lionel Hollins and Maurice Lucas brooded about being underpaid. The ’79 Sonics fell apart when their talented backcourt (Dennis Johnson and Gus Williams) became embroiled in a petty battle over salaries and crunch-time shots. The ’81 Lakers were bounced because Magic Johnson’s teammates believed he was getting too much attention, most notably fellow point guard Norm Nixon, who resented having to share the basketball with him. The ’83 Celtics got swept by Milwaukee for a peculiar reason: they had
too many
good players and everyone wanted to play. The ’86 Lakers lost to Houston because Kareem wasn’t an alpha dog anymore, only Magic wasn’t confident enough to
supplant him yet. The ’87 Rockets imploded because of drug suspensions and contract bitterness. Year after year, at least one contender fell short for reasons that had little or nothing to do with basketball. And year after year, the championship team prevailed because it got along and everyone committed themselves to their roles. That’s what Detroit needed to do, and that’s why Dantley had to go.
¹⁷

“So that’s the secret,” Isiah said. “It’s not about basketball.”

The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball
.

These are the things you learn in Vegas.

When I was talking to Isiah that day, his affection for those Pistons teams stood out almost as vividly as the pair of exposed nipples eight feet away. This didn’t surprise me. I remembered his appearance on
NBA’s Greatest Games
,
¹⁸
when he watched Game 6 of the ’88 Finals with ESPN’s Dan Patrick. The ’88 Lakers couldn’t handle point guards who created shots off the dribble, as we witnessed during Sleepy Floyd’s legendary thirty-three points in one quarter in the first round.
¹⁹
If someone like Sleepy gave them fits, you can only imagine how they struggled against Isiah Lord Thomas III when he needed one more victory for his first title. Smelling blood in the third quarter at the Forum, he dropped fourteen straight points with a ridiculous array of shots, doing his best impression of Robby Benson at the end of
One on One…
right until he stepped on Michael Cooper’s foot and crumbled to a heap. Poor Isiah kept trying to stand, only his leg wouldn’t support him and he kept falling to the ground. At the time, it was like watching those uncomfortable few seconds after a racehorse suffers a leg injury, when it can’t stop moving but
can’t support itself, either. Anyone who ever played basketball knows how an ankle sprain feels at the moment of impact: like Leatherface churning his chain saw against the bottom of your leg. You don’t come back from a badly sprained ankle. Hell, you can’t even walk off the court most times. Isiah didn’t stand for ninety seconds before getting helped to his bench. You could practically see Detroit’s title hopes vanishing into thin air.