The Book of Basketball (78 page)

But you know what? They were original prototypes. One of a kind. Give me Walton for two and a half years over fourteen years of Robinson, and give me four years of ’Pac over a full career of any other rapper. My favorite Tupac song is “Picture Me Rollin’,” an uplifting effort right after his release from prison, when he’s cruising around in his 500 Benz, relishing his freedom and telling everyone who kept him down over the years (I’m translating into honky-speak), “Now that I’m out on the streets and being me again, I sincerely hope you take a few moments to think about me happily driving around in my expensive car as a free man. By the way, go fuck yourself.” That’s really the whole point of the song. At one point he taunts, “Can you see me now? Heheheh. Move to the side a little bit so you can get a
clear
picture. Can you see it? Hahah. Picture me rollin.’” Fantastic. And it’s one of his catchier tunes, the kind of song that makes you want to ride around in a convertible and pretend you’re black. (Wait, you don’t do that? Um … me neither.) Anyway, the song ends with Tupac taunting everyone from Clinton Correctional Facility, his old stomping grounds:

Any time y’all wanna see me again
Rewind this track right here,
Close your eyes and picture me rollin’.

I feel that way about Walton and the Blazers. They didn’t roll for long, but they
rolled.
And I don’t even need to rewind the tapes to picture it.
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26. RICK BARRY

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’75 Finals MVP … BS MVP (75) … Top 5 NBA (’66, ’67, ’74, ’75, ’76), Top 5 ABA (’69, ’70, ’71, ’72), Top 10 (’73) … ’67 All-Star MVP (38 points) … season leader: points (1x), FT% (9x), steals (1x) … best player on champ (’75 Warriors) and runner-up (’67 Warriors) … ’67 playoffs: 35–8–4 (15 G); ’75 Playoffs: 28–6–6, 44% FG, 92% FT (17 G) … 3-Year ABA Playoffs peak: 34–8–4, 49% FG (31 G) … 3-year NBA Playoffs peak: 27–7–6, 45% FG, 91% FT (40 G) … career: 24.8 PPG (13th), 89.3 FT (3rd), 5.1 APG … 25K Point Club

We already nailed an inordinate number of Barryisms throughout the book: his various hairstyles, his controversial leap to the ABA, his announcing foibles, his autobiography with the worst cover ever, the year they robbed him of the MVP and the reasons why. Say what you want about the guy, but he was definitely interesting. Especially if you were his hair stylist. We’ll remember him as the most notorious asshole in NBA history, a perfectionist who held inferior teammates in disdain, had an almost pathological need to rub everyone the wrong way, and earned a reputation (fair or unfair) for not being able to click with black teammates. Remember when Jeff Beebe flips out during the near-plane crash in
Almost Famous
, berates Russell Hammond and finally screams, “You act like you’re above us! You always have!” as their bassist chimes in, “Finally the truth.” That was Rick Barry. He acted like he was above everyone else. Five former teammates or coworkers threw him under the bus in the same 1983
SI
feature: Robert Parish (“He had a bad attitude. He was always looking down at you.”), Phil Smith (“He was the same on TV. He was so critical of everyone. Like he was Mr. Perfect.”), Mike Dunleavy (“He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him to the U.N. he’d end up starting World War
III”),
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Billy Paultz (“Around the league they thought of him as the most arrogant guy ever. I couldn’t believe it. Half the players disliked Rick. The other half hated him.”), and then-Warriors executive VP Ken Macker (“You’ll never find a bunch of players sitting around talking about the good old days with Rick. His teammates and his opponents generally and thoroughly detested him.”). Poor Barry was the Daniel LaRusso of the NBA—there was just something about him that rubbed people the wrong way.

The quintessential Barry story: when he threw away Game 7 of the ’76 Western Finals because his teammates never defended him in the Ricky Sobers fight.
⁶⁷
Barry probably watched the highlights at halftime and confirmed his own suspicions that his teammates sold him out; the second half started and Barry simply stopped shooting. During the last few minutes, coach Al Attles probably threatened him because Barry suddenly became Barry again; even with a late surge, the defending champs ended up falling at home to an inferior team. You won’t find a more indefensible playoff defeat in a deciding game. When I was working for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, we used Barry for a comedy bit and I couldn’t resist asking him what happened in that series. He quickly replied, “We should have won Game 7. We were rallying and I had a pick-and-roll with Clifford Ray, but he couldn’t catch the damned pass.” Then he shook his head in disgust and let out one of those “I wish Cliff were here right now so I could shoot him a nasty look” groans. Twenty-seven years later, Rick Barry—Hall of Famer, NBA champ, one of the eight best forwards of all time—couldn’t let that play go. It was weird. Sure enough, I watched the tape a few weeks later: the Warriors were roaring back, Ray set a pick and rolled to the basket, and Barry delivered the ball right off Ray’s hands and out of bounds. The cameras caught Barry frozen in disbelief. It’s the defining Barry moment in the defining “Rick Barry was a prick” game.

Poor Barry was his own worst enemy. He fled from a perfect situation in 1967—the top scorer on a Finals team that had a young Hall of Fame center (Nate Thurmond) and a quality second scoring option (Jeff Mullins)—and jumped to the ABA’s Oakland Oaks. Why? Because his father-in-law (Bruce Hale) had been named their coach, even though the move meant sitting out an entire season and playing in an inferior league that could have gone belly up at any time. Has there ever been a dumber career move by an NBA superstar that didn’t involve the words “Birmingham Barons”? You can’t even say Barry did it for the money; G-State matched Oakland’s offer and he still left. How could he forget to put in his contract, “If the team moves or Bruce Hale gets fired, I can opt out immediately”? He sat out a year and injured his knee the following season. Then he watched in horror as the Oaks moved to Washington (Barry couldn’t extricate himself from his ABA contract) and Virginia (Barry finally forced a trade by insulting Virginians in a 1970
SI
feature, saying that he didn’t want his son “to come home from school saying, ‘Hi y’all, Daad’”) before dragging the Nets to the ’72 ABA Finals and returning to Golden State the next season. So the best forward of that generation wasted
five full years of his prime
in a second-rate league because he wanted to play for his father-in-law? Two years later, Barry nearly dumped the Warriors again to become CBS’ lead color guy, changing his mind at the last minute.
⁶⁸
After the ’77 season, he pissed on Warriors fans a third time by signing with the Rockets as a free agent (killing his relationship with Golden State owner Franklin Mieuli forever). Just like Roger Clemens at the end, Barry retired belonging to nobody: no farewell tour, no retirement ceremony, nothing.

How could we possibly rank him this high? Barry was the second-best passing forward ever, a beautiful creator who made everyone better as long as they didn’t cross him. He could score with anyone when he was younger, averaging 35.6 points in his second NBA season (trailing only Wilt, Baylor and Jordan as the highest average ever) and 34.7 points in the
’67 Playoffs.
⁶⁹
He was one of those born-before-his-time shooters who thrived with a three-point line, draining 40 of 97 threes (41.2 percent) in 31 ABA playoff games. He wasn’t a great defensive player but crafty enough that he led the league in steals once (2.8 per game). He’s one of the best free throw shooters of all time, probably the greatest end-of-the-game cooler ever.
⁷⁰
He slapped together one of the single best seasons in basketball history in 1975, doing every single thing that needed to be done and pulling off one of the bigger Finals upsets ever. And he actually would have been fun to play basketball with … as long as you didn’t disappoint him or make a dumb mistake. Had they had formed a Dream Team for the ’76 Olympics, Barry would have become the team’s alpha dog and everything would have revolved around his passing and creating. That counts for something in the big scheme of things.
⁷¹

We’ll remember him as an inordinately talented player and inordinately screwed-up person, and over everything else, that’s why it didn’t
seem right to make him a Level 4 guy. Other than the ’75 Finals, his defining moment happened two years after WatermelonGate, when a freelancer named Tony Kornheiser profiled Barry for one of the most memorable features in
SI
’s history, “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness.” Kornheiser tried to figure out how such a great player could be forgotten so quickly, cleverly arguing that Barry’s biggest problem was “face discrimination” and comparing him to the annoying, know-it-all actor that Dustin Hoffman played in
Tootsie
who rubbed everyone the wrong way. The piece starts like this:

Rick Barry has a problem. He would like people to regard him with love and affection, as they do Jerry West and John Havlicek. They do not.

“The way I looked alienated a lot of people,” Barry says. “I’ve seen films of myself and seen the faces I made. I looked terrible.” He closes his eyes to the memory and shakes his head. “I acted like a jerk. Did a lot of stupid things. Opened my big mouth and said a lot of things that upset and hurt people. I was an easy person to hate. And I can understand that. I tell kids, “There’s nothing wrong with playing the way Rick Barry played, but don’t act the way Rick Barry acted.” I tell my own kids, “Do as I say, not as I did.”

What bothers him isn’t that he’s not beloved.

“It bothers me,” Barry says, “that I’m not even liked.”

And he wasn’t. But I can’t drop him below no. 26. He brought too much to the table. If Barry’s career was relived as a twelve-person dinner party with Barry hosting, then the following things would definitely happen: Dinner would start late because one of Barry’s chefs quit that afternoon; everyone would comment on the table looking absolutely fantastic; two guests would storm out during the appetizers after Barry makes an inappropriate joke about one of their kids; another couple would leave before dessert because Barry keeps arguing politics with the husband and won’t shut up; there would be multiple awkward interactions with Barry second-guessing one of the waiters (highlighted by one accidentally inappropriate racial joke); and the rest of the guests would ultimately decide to ignore his bullshit and savor the wonderful wine, first-rate filet mignon
and an unbelievable round of soufflés and ports. Sure, they would bitch about him the entire way home … but a great meal is a great meal.

25. JOHN STOCKTON

Resume: 19 years, 10 quality, 10 All-Stars … Top 5 (’94, ’95), Top 10 (’88, ’89, ’90, ’92, ’93, ’96), Top 15 (’91, ’97, ’99) … Playoffs record: most assists (24) … 5-year peak: 16–3–14 … leader: assists (9x), steals (2x) … ’88 playoffs: 19–4–15 (11 G) … 2nd-best player on 2 runner-ups (’97, ’98 Jazz) … Playoffs: 13–10.4, 80% FT (182 G) … missed 22 games total, played 82 games in 17 of 19 seasons … career: assists (1st), games (3rd)

For Jazz fans, watching Stockton was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades. Yeah, you were having regular sex (or in this case, winning games), but you weren’t exactly bragging to your friends or anything. He was very, very, very, very good but never great, personified by all those second-team and third-team All-NBA appearances and the fact that he never cracked the top six of the MVP voting. He bored everyone to death with those predictable high screens with Malone, the blank expression on his face
⁷²
and a sweeping lack of flair. He made the Dream Team only because Isiah had burned so many bridges that Stockton was a much safer choice.
⁷³
I always thought he was more fun
not
to like. He didn’t have a nickname and modeled his haircut after the LEGO Man. He deserves partial responsibility for Utah’s appallingly methodical style of play in the nineties. He pulled enough dirty stunts over the years to make Bruce Bowen blush, routinely tripping opponents as they curled off screens, setting moving picks by sticking his knee out at the last second,
“mistakenly” punching in the nuts anyone who blind-picked him … and yet nobody ever called him out on this shit because he looked like he could have replaced Brenda and Brandon’s dad on
90210.
⁷⁴

You can’t pick a point when Stockton’s career peaked because it never happened. From 1988 to 1995, he averaged between 14.7 and 17.2 points and 12.3 and 14.5 assists during the “assists are suddenly easier to get” era. His shooting numbers were outstanding (51.5 percent career FG, 38.4 percent career threes, 82.6 percent FT); he shot 53 percent or better seven times and reached 57.4 percent in 1988. Curiously, those numbers dipped in the playoffs (47.3 percent in 182 postseason games); from ’92 to ’96, Stockton shot just 44 percent and missed 107 of 153 threes (30 percent). After submitting a monster performance in the ’88 Playoffs (20–4–15, including a 24-assist game against L.A.), Stockton wasn’t exactly Big Shot John for the rest of his postseason prime. The ’89 Jazz got swept by seventh-seed G-State (starting Winston Garland at point guard, no less). Kevin Johnson and the ’90 Suns stole a deciding Game 5 in Utah. The Blazers eliminated them in the ’91 and ’92 Playoffs, with Stockton going 6-for-25 in the last two ’92 losses and getting outplayed by Terry Porter (a 26–8 for the series). The ’93 Jazz blew a 2–1 lead and lost to Seattle in the first round, with Stockton shooting 4-for-14 in a potential Game 4 clincher at home. The ’94 Jazz lost in the Western Finals to Houston; Stockton missed 38 of 65 shots and averaged just 9.4 assists in the series. The ’95 Jazz blew a deciding Game 5 at home to Houston, with Stockton contributing just 5 assists and 12 points on 4-for-14 shooting. And when the ’96 Jazz lost Game 7 of the Western Finals to Seattle, the point guard matchup brought back memories of Olajuwon-Robinson the previous year: 20.8 points, 6.4 assists and 56 percent shooting for GP; 10.1 points,
7.6
assists and 39 percent shooting for Stockton.