The Book of Basketball (92 page)

74.
I wrote that season, “The best part about playing craps with Kobe must be watching him eventually drift over to the ‘Don’t Pass’ line.” And that wasn’t even the best craps joke of my career—a friend of mine dated a girl who couldn’t have orgasms (she had like a mental block), and when he was complaining about it I joked, “I want to play craps with her at Foxwoods just to see if she keeps betting on the ‘Don’t Come’ line.” I am the king of hacky craps jokes.

75.
Kobe’s Lakers blew a 3–1 lead to the ’06 Suns; his teammates sucked so badly in Game 7 that Kobe spitefully took just 2 shots over the next 14 minutes of game action as Phoenix’s lead ballooned to 25. I’d blame him more if he hadn’t been playing with the likes of Kwame Brown and Smush Parker. He also quit during Game 6 of the ’08 Finals as the Celtics ran L.A. off the floor, although it’s unclear if it was sabotage or his spirits were crushed. Kobe stank in the ’08 Finals (for him): 26–5–5, 40.5% FG, 3.8 TOs, not one great game.

76.
After sitting next to L.A.’s bench for Game 5 of the ’08 Finals, Matt Damon emailed me that Kobe used his alpha dog status malevolently: instead of inspiring teammates, he belittled/intimidated them. He believed Kobe would
never
win a title until he changed the way he treated his peers and his coach. Curt Schilling sat courtside for Game 3, blogged about it and came to the same conclusion: “From the first tip until about 4 minutes left in the game I saw and heard this guy bitch at his teammates. Every TO he came to the bench pissed, and a few of them he went to other guys and yelled about something they weren’t doing, or something they did wrong,” later saying, “He’d yell at someone, make a point, or send a message, turn and walk away, and more than once the person on the other end would roll his eyes or give a ‘whatever, dude’ look.” You have to love the 21st century, when baseball players blog about their experiences at NBA games. I don’t know how we got here, but it’s fantastic.

77.
Wilt quickly broke that mark by scoring 73 at the old MSG. They played a triple-OT game against each other in December ’61 where Wilt finished with 78 and Elgin had 63. This absolutely would have led
SportsCenter
in 1961.

78.
Elgin exploded for 61 in Game 5, causing Cousy to say later, “[When] we held Elgin to 61, I remember going up to Satch Sanders and telling him sincerely that he’d done a helluva job defensively. And he had. He made Elgin work for every basket. But that’s how good Elgin was.” Cooz always called him “Elgin” because the word “Baylor” was simply unattainable for him.

79.
In
Wilt, 1962
, Gary M. Pomerantz writes that Don Barksdale was frozen out by teammates on the ’53 Baltimore Bullets (they didn’t pass to him for an entire quarter) and broke into tears on the bench. They finished 16–54 that season and folded a year later. Karma.

80.
I’ve seen some of the early Elgin tapes and can’t emphasize this strongly enough—watching Elgin dismantle his “peers” is like watching the
Back to the Future
scene when Marty McFly cranks his electric guitar solo as everyone else stares at him in disbelief. Imagine a 2009 player dunking routinely from the three-point line. That’s what Elgin looked like compared to everyone else.

81.
In fairness to Elgin, he had bad luck with two potential franchise guys (Danny Manning and Livingston suffered crippling knee injuries), lost Derek Smith and Ron Harper to torn ACLs and never bottomed out in the right draft. His biggest mistakes were trading down from no. 2 in ’95 (McDyess went 2nd, Sheed went 4th, KG went 5th) and botching no. 1 in ’98 (misfiring with Michael Olowokandi over Pierce, Nowitzki, Vince, and others). Okay, maybe he was a bad GM.

82.
He never paid me. Bad coach, bad GM and a welcher to boot. I got him back by sponsoring his
basketball-reference.com
page and thanking him for all the wasted years of my season ticket money. No, really. Best $10 I ever spent.

83.
Add Elgin to the list of people over 35 who had a memory destroyed by YouTube. For me, it was finding out that Jimmy Snuka’s famous steel cage leap at MSG vs. Bob Backlund—which seemed like 25 feet at the time—was actually closer to 10. I still haven’t totally gotten over it.

84.
The Clips replacing Elg with Dunleavy—who had already bombed as Bucks GM—was like a bumbling CEO on Wall Street firing his loyal, longtime chaffeur who covered up 15 different potential crimes and 25 affairs over the years, then replacing him with the CEO’s loser nephew who just got released from jail for his 3rd.

85.
Elgin got revenge by suing the Clips for age/racial discrimination two months later, claiming that he had been unfairly compensated for the previous 20 years. The suit is still pending.

86.
The biracial team was too tough to figure after I couldn’t get hold of Dave Chappelle. Here are the ten-man rotations for the other teams weighted toward post-1976 guys.
Whites:
Walton, Bird, Barry, West, Stockton (starters); Havlicek (6th man), Cowens, McHale, Maravich, Cousy (bench).
Blacks:
Russell, Moses, Doc, Jordan, Magic (starters); LeBron (6th man), Kareem, Oscar, Kobe, Barkley (bench).
Foreigners:
Hakeem, Duncan, Nowitzki, Nash, Petrovic (starters), Ginobili (6th man), Gasol, Rik Smits, Detlef Schrempf, Tony Parker (bench). Obviously the foreigners would get wiped out. The blacks might be
too
loaded; I can’t imagine Kobe-Oscar-Kareem coming off the bench. Plus, Barkley and MJ definitely would be involved in one off-court, casino-related incident during the 7-game series. Check out the Whites again. Barry is the only prick on the team. Their passing skills would have been off the charts. They could run the 2nd team’s offense through McHale and play him at crunch time with Bird and Walton. Defensively, they’d get exploited at PG and they’re undersized, but it’s a flexible team that would enjoy playing together. For a 7-game series, the blacks would be a-400 favorite because of the hypercompetitive Russell-Jordan-Magic trio. But you know what? I’d bet on the whites at +350 if only because of the odds. You don’t know how much this kills Jabaal Abdul-Simmons.

87.
Hondo was Cleveland’s last cut of the ’62 preseason even though he ran a 4.6 40 and caught everything; he couldn’t master blocking and everyone ran the ball back then. He’s your answer for the trivia question “Who’s the only person to play professionally with Bill Russell and Jim Brown?”

88.
SI
never wrote a Havlicek feature until October ’74 (one of those “the old man is still doing it” features). During his overly sentimental farewell tour, an amused Cowens remarked, “John’s never had a definite profile like Russell or Cousy. He’s played all these games without being recognized, and now everybody is apologizing for it.”

89.
Grumpy Old Editor wasn’t as surprised: “As someone who would have given Jabaal a run for his money in the ‘I wanna be black’ contest, and who hated the Celtics almost as a religious requirement, I never doubted how good Havlicek was. Choose-up game? After Jordan, he might be my first choice.”

90.
One of the toughest calls in the book: Hondo for Level 4 or Level 5. I decided on L4 for two reasons. First, every Pantheon guy qualifies for “If you surrounded him with a good team, you were winning a title or coming damned close” status and Hondo wasn’t quite there. Second, he never won MVP (finishing top five just twice) and made just four first-team All-NBA’s (getting squeezed out from ’66 to ’70). Even with the playoff heroics and superhuman minutes, I just couldn’t justify it. So our four cutoff guys were Miller (Level 1), Nowitzki (Level 2), Stockton (Level 3), and Hondo (Level 4). I like it.

ELEVEN
THE PYRAMID: PANTHEON

12. MOSES MALONE

Resume: 19 years, 13 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’83 Finals MVP … MVP: ’79, ’82, ’83 … Top 5 (’79, ’82, ’83, ’85), Top 10 (’80, ’81, ’84, ’87) … 5-year peak: 26–15, 52% FG … leader: rebounds (6x), minutes (1x) … best player on 1 champ (’83 Sixers) and 1 runner-up (’81 Rockets) … ’81 Playoffs: 27–15, 45.5 MPG (21 G) … ’81 Playoffs: 26–16 (13 G) … Playoffs: 22–14 (100 G) … career: points (6th), rebounds (3rd), games (5th), minutes (4th) … 25K-15K Club

I just spent the last two hours trying to figure out the top twelve modern celebrities who extracted the most success (financial and careerwise) from one gimmick. Important note: this doesn’t necessarily mean that they
only
had one gimmick, just that they had one ploy that brought them inordinate success. Call it the Buffer List. Here’s the top twelve:

1. Michael Buffer
   

2. Simon Cowell
   

3. Tyler Perry
   

4. Moses Malone
   

5. the Bee Gees
   

6. Jeff Foxworthy
   

7. Vanna White
   

8. Robert Wuhl
   

9. Oprah’s friend Gayle
   

10. Phil Niekro
    

11. Jared from Subway
    

12. Monica Lewinsky
    ¹
    

Why Buffer over Simon? Because Buffer’s gimmick worked so well that he spawned a career for his brother, Bruce, who became the Frank Stallone of ringside announcing for the UFC. I don’t know if that’s more of an insult to Bruce or Frank.

Back to Moses and his one gimmick: he crashed the boards. He crashed the living hell out of them. He annihilated them. He left them for dead. And it wasn’t just about numbers—Moses finished as the greatest offensive rebounder ever by any calculation, grabbing a higher percentage of
his team’s rebounds in ’79 (38.4 percent) than Russell or Wilt ever did in one season—but about the relentless way he attacked the boards. The best way to describe it: Imagine a quality prison basketball game in the playground where players had to maim someone to draw a foul. Imagine the game included one inordinately good rebounder: perfect instincts, light on his feet, supertough, superphysical, uncanny rejumpability (© Jay Bilas). Imagine this guy had all kinds of positioning tricks and always seemed to know where the ricochets were going (to the point that it always seemed unfair). Imagine this guy loved crashing the boards, lived for it, couldn’t get enough of it. Then imagine the warden told him before an organized playground game against inmates from another prison, “We’re playing four 10-minute quarters. I met a bet with the other warden that you couldn’t grab 40 rebounds in 40 minutes. If you can do it, I’m paroling you. You have my word.”

Now, imagine watching that guy rebound. That was Moses from 1978 to 1983.

Moses was the Marilyn Chambers of rebounding. He was insatiable. He chased them with a zest that we haven’t seen before or since. Rodman’s rebounding barrage made us feel like he was doing it partly for numbers and attention. Moses did it out of pure love. That’s just the way he played. He protected the glass with such ferocity that his Houston teammates incorporated a “play” loosely called “If Moses has position, just throw up a shot and he’ll tip it in if it misses.” Remember the first Clubber-Rocky fight in
Rocky III
when Rocky returns to his corner after the second round and says in a terrified mumble, “I can’t keep him off me”? Every center who battled Moses had that same look by the fourth quarter. He particularly loved sticking it to Kareem, a finesse center who wanted no part of banging with him. When Houston stunned the ’81 Lakers in their three-game series, Moses finished with 94 points and 53 rebounds, doing everything short of actually marinating Kareem, grilling him and eating him. When Philly swept the ’83 Lakers, Moses averaged a 26–18 and outrebounded Kareem by a 70–30 margin.
¹
Nobody from Moses’ peak could
handle him. What I always found interesting: the same blue-collar themes appeared in every Bird article or feature, but Moses worked equally hard and exacted just as much from a similarly challenged body. His hands were so tiny that he could barely palm a basketball. Listed at six-foot-ten (a stretch) with short arms, Moses was such a string bean during his early years that Houston played him at power forward.
³
He wasn’t a good passer, didn’t have any post-up moves, couldn’t shoot from more than 8 feet. None of it mattered. Like Bird, he grew up dirt-poor, fell in love with basketball, succeeded early, kept plugging away and developed a tunnel vision for the sport. Like Bird, he busted his ass and concentrated only on the things he could do. Like Bird, he was blessed with one supernatural quality that set him apart: quick feet for Moses, hand-eye coordination for Bird. And like Bird (with his contagious passing), Moses had one unforgettable trick that transformed his career and hasn’t been duplicated since.