The Book of Basketball (18 page)

With players finally earning real money and achieving fame on a mainstream level, the player-coach dynamic was shifting—it was becoming
more difficult to scream at players Lombardi-style or make them run wind sprints until they keeled over, that’s for sure—and salary hikes made it harder to keep great teams together.
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Auerbach lowballed his players by convincing them they’d make the money back in the playoffs; he knew that if they bought into that bullshit, then he’d never have to worry about motivating them. Once salaries started climbing past a certain point, you couldn’t play the playoff-money card. Like always, Auerbach read the league’s tea leaves perfectly and left at the perfect time. From the moment Biasone created the shot clock, Red determined where the sport was heading, embraced the influx of black players and capably handled the enigmatic Russell, a ferocious competitor, lazy practice player and overly sensitive soul who was affected by everything he couldn’t control: the plight of African American athletes, his lack of acceptance in Boston, the lack of a labor agreement, Wilt’s reported salary, even the civil rights movement and his place in it. Other than Muhammad Ali, Russell was the single most important athlete of the sixties and it’s impossible to imagine him playing for anyone else, as evidenced by the fact that Red never gave us the chance. They were a perfect match, a little Jewish guy from Brooklyn and a tall black guy from Louisiana bringing out the best in each other, dominating the league for a solid decade and changing the way basketball was played. Will a professional basketball coach ever matter that much again? No. No way.

1966–67: THE SECOND RIVAL

The American Basketball Association formed in February of 1967 and announced plans for its first season in October. The intentions of the league’s founders were unclear: did they want to compete with the NBA or force a potentially lucrative merger? Within a few months, they named George Mikan commissioner, announced franchises for eleven cities
(New York,
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Pittsburgh, Indy, Minny, Oakland, Anaheim, Dallas, New Orleans, Houston and Denver) and promised to (a) sign current NBA players and incoming rookies (happened); (b) get themselves a TV contract (didn’t happen), (c) play with a multicolored ball and a three-point line (happened), and (d) encourage their players to grow gravity-defying afros, dunk as much as possible and try all kinds of drugs (happened).
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Instead of accepting that a rival was inevitable, NBA owners panicked and moved up their expansion plans, adding five more teams (Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Milwaukee and Phoenix) over the next three years and then three more (Portland, Cleveland and Buffalo) for the 1970–71 season. As an ABC executive joked in
Breaks
, when they put in a clause in the 1965 TV contract allowing ABC to cancel if any NBA team folded, they should have gone the other way and placed a limit on the number of expansion teams. After all, nothing ruins a sports league faster than overexpansion, diluted teams and the death of rivalries, right?
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Throw in competition for players, a potential antitrust lawsuit and the new Players Association potentially challenging the reserve clause, and suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy for the National Basketball Association. Although nobody knew it yet.

1967–71: THE BROKEN MIRROR

That would be Spencer Haywood. He was bad luck. For everyone. Sure, you make your own bad luck to some degree, and in this case the NBA allowed salaries to escalate too rapidly during the latter part of the sixties. In 1966, Knicks rookie Cazzie Russell (the number one overall pick) signed a three-year, $250,000 contract, pushing the Association into the “okay, guys, you don’t have to have a second job during the summers anymore” era.
The following year, college star Elvin Hayes passed up ABA money (and the chance to play for Houston) for a $350,000 deal with the Rockets. Jimmy Walker (Jalen Rose’s dad) parlayed the ABA’s interest into a lucrative $250,000 package with Detroit, becoming the first of dozens of talented young NBA players who didn’t reach their potential partly because somebody paid them too much too soon. Warriors star Rick Barry jumped leagues, signed with Oakland and became the first professional athlete to dispute the reserve clause in contracts (a clause that allowed teams to keep a player’s rights for one year after his contract ended). The legal challenge went poorly and Barry spent the season as Oakland’s TV announcer. As far as career moves go, this ranked right up there with David Caruso ditching
NYPD Blue
and Andy Richter leaving Conan O’Brien’s show. On the bright side,
somebody
had to challenge the reserve clause, right?
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Here’s the irony: Even as money was poisoning professional basketball for the first time, the NBA couldn’t have been in better shape as a whole. During the 1968–69 season, the Lakers opened up the league’s first state-of-the-art arena (the 17,000-seat L.A. Forum), attendance topped 4.4 million, ratings rose from 6.0 (1965) to 8.9 in 1969, and ABC even televised a few prime-time playoff games (including Game 7 of the 1969 Finals during May sweeps). But everyone was getting greedy: players, owners, agents, you name it. And you know how that plays out.

Enter the Broken Mirror. Haywood started his professional career when Lew Alcindor did, so we can blame his bad karma for swaying the NBA’s number one pick that year: Phoenix would have been a better market for Big Lew, but Milwaukee won the coin toss and the Suns took Neil Walk second.
³⁵
Haywood became the first nonsenior to play professionally, signing with the ABA’s Denver Rockets as a “hardship” case and unwittingly giving the ABA an enormous advantage: Now the ABA had first crack at nonseniors and high schoolers because the NBA stuck by its antiquated four-year draft eligibility rule. So you could blame Haywood for the eventual influx of underclassmen and teenagers who nearly submarined
the NBA in the 1990s, as well as the NBA preventing more dangerous Haywood signings by arranging a merger in May 1971. The NBA accepted ten ABA teams (everyone but Virginia). In return, the ABA dropped its antitrust suit, each ABA team agreed to pay $1.25 million over ten years, and ABA teams were deprived of TV money until 1973. The NBA Players Association quickly sued to block it, arguing that the merger created a monopoly and preserved the unconstitutional reserve clause. The ensuing legal dispute (nicknamed the Oscar Robertson suit) would drag on for another five miserable years. In retrospect, it’s hard to fathom how the NBA could have handled twenty-eight teams in 1972, so the timing of that lawsuit looks like divine intervention. Regardless, I blame the Broken Mirror (Haywood) for putting it in motion.

After winning three ABA awards as a rookie (MVP, Rookie of the Year and All-Star MVP),
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Haywood left tread marks fleeing for the 1970–71 Sonics after realizing his quote-unquote three-year, $450,000 Denver contract only paid him $50,000 per year, then another $15,000 annually for twenty years starting when he turned forty. He had been victimized by a brilliant ABA trick called the Dolgoff plan, in which they offered contracts with deceivingly high dollar figures but backloaded most of the deals. How did they pull off such chicanery? According to
Loose Balls
, by routinely bribing agents to talk their clients into those deals.
³⁷
(The bigger problem arose when NBA stars used those artificially high numbers to negotiate legitimately high deals, leading to the salary explosion that transformed the NBA as we knew it. And not in a good way. Well, unless you enjoy watching wealthy, coked-out, passionless basketball. Then you were pumped.) Haywood signed with Seattle and successfully contested the NBA’s hardship rule, leading to a slew of prospects filing early and claiming financial “hardship” even though nearly all of them were getting paid under the table in college.
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Haywood symbolized an increasingly erratic sport: wealthy and empowered just a little too soon, looking out for himself only, thriving during an era with too many teams and younger stars being given too much money and responsibility waaaaaaaaay too soon. That’s how the seventies became the Too Many, Too Much, Too Soon era. The Broken Mirror became its defining figure, peaking too early, earning a ton of money and spending it just as fast, switching teams every few years (always after letting the previous one down), helping to destroy the post-Bradley Knicks, souring Sonics coach/GM Bill Russell on professional basketball, marrying a celebrity (the model Iman), developing a massive cocaine problem and even being involved in the single greatest known coke story in NBA history (we’ll get there). It can’t be a coincidence that Spencer Haywood retired after the 1982–83 season and the league immediately took off. It just can’t.

1971–72: THE STREAK

Why hasn’t anyone made a documentary about the ’72 Lakers? You had the league’s most beloved star and tragic figure, Jerry West, winning his first title on a 69-win team. You had Elgin retiring two weeks into the season and becoming the first superstar to retire without winning a ring,
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paving the way for Dan Marino, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and every other star who took heat for falling short. You had Wilt playing the way we always wanted him to play. You had an increasing number of Hollywood celebs hitting home games at the “hip” L.A. Forum, a trend that Doris Day had pioneered in the early sixties. Best of all, you had L.A.’s 33-game winning streak, which happened in a diluted league but remains remarkable when you remember the previous record was 20 (the ’71 Bucks).
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I’ll save my thoughts on the ’72 Lakers for the “Keyzer Söze”
chapter, but let’s rank that streak against the unbreakable records in NBA history. Here’s my top ten:

1. Wilt’s 50 per game.
   Perfect storm of the right era, the right guy, the right rules and the right ball hog. We might not see 40 a game again, much less 50.
   

2. Wilt’s 55-rebound game.
   Since nobody has come within 20 boards of this mark in the past two decades, and since it’s difficult for an entire team to snare 55 rebounds these days, I’m declaring this one safe. The guy who came within 20? (Wait for it … wait for it …) Charles Oakley in 1988.
   

3. Russell’s eleven rings.
   Too many teams, too much movement, too tough to keep a great team together for more than a few years. I just can’t imagine someone getting twelve. Even if someone had a Horry-like career as a role player and played contender roulette for fifteen years, landing in the right situation over and over again, could they get twelve? Nobody had better timing/luck than Horry and he
   only
   has seven. Could someone be 55 percent luckier than Big Shot? I don’t see it.
   

4. L.A.’s 33-game win streak.
   Like Bob Beamon’s long jump in Mexico, only if he jumped 39 feet instead of 29 feet. Here’s how it happened: you had a veteran, experienced, talented nucleus that had been together for years dismantling a diluted league that, except for Milwaukee and Baltimore, had seen too much player movement because of expansion and the ABA. In a three-season span from 1969 to 1972, we witnessed four of the thirteen longest streaks ever: 33 games, 20 games, 18 games and 16 games (the ’71 Bucks again). Coincidence? No way.
   

   I have a goofy theory on the 33-gamer: Bill Sharman took over the Lakers that year and may have been the first “real” NBA coach ever. Back then, NBA game days consisted of players showing up an hour before the game, farting around, then getting advice from coaches like “Keep Willis off the boards” and “Don’t let Monroe kill us” while everyone smoked Marlboro Reds. Sharman was a stickler for detail, conditioning and repetition—things today’s generation takes for granted but everyone ignored in the fifties and sixties—forcing his players to stretch every day, pushing them to eat healthy and quit smoking, scheduling game-day shoot-arounds so players could get accustomed to rims and shooting backgrounds at different arenas, requiring them to watch game films and basically doing everything that modern coaches do. For a veteran team like the Lakers, those little things pushed them to another level. He also handled Chamberlain better than any other coach, becoming the first to convince Wilt to buy into Russell’s rebounding/shot-blocking routine, even pulling a Jedi mind trick by soliciting Wilt’s opinions and ideas all season so Wilt felt part of everything that was happening.
   ⁴¹
   The Dipper sacrificed a ton of shots but fully embraced the whole unselfishness/teamwork thing,
   ⁴²
   and over everything else, that’s what made his team so great. So yeah, on paper, it doesn’t make sense that the ’72 Lakers were better than the ’69 Lakers … but when you factor in a diluted league, Sharman’s influence and Wilt’s reinvention, it makes sense.
   

5. George McGinnis’ 422 turnovers.
   Disclaimer: This happened in the ABA. McGinnis holds the first (422), second (401), and third (398) all-time turnover spots, making him the Chamberlain of turnovers.
   ⁴³
   The NBA didn’t start keeping track of turnovers until the ’78 season, robbing us of two landmark George years before he notched 312 in 1978 and a whopping 346 in 1979. Who made more turnovers over the years, George McGinnis or Rachael Ray? Will we ever see someone else average more than five turnovers a game without getting benched or killed by his own fans? If I’d had my column back in the mid-seventies, I would have been ragging on George constantly: between his ball-stopping habits, ugly one-handed jumper, moody attitude and disinterest in defense, George took more off the table than any “superstar” ever. You can’t believe how much McGinnis secretly sucked until you watch his stink bomb in the ’77 Finals. I know he peaked two or three years earlier (most famously with a 52-point, 37-rebound game in 1974) and had a miserable series, but still, you can’t tell me someone that sloppy and simple to defend belonged on a championship team.
   ⁴⁴
   Regardless, I can’t imagine anyone breaking George’s hallowed 422 or averaging a quadruple nickel like he did in ’75 (29.9 points, 9.2 boards, 6.3 assists and 5.3 turnovers). Kevin Porter and Artis Gilmore set the current NBA record with 360 turnovers apiece in ’78. Allen Iverson approached that mark with 344 in 2005; nobody else in the 2000s topped 320. George, your record is safe. Future generations will remember you as the one and only member of the Quadruple Nickel Club.
   

6. Wilt’s 100-point game.
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   Kobe’s 81-point game made this one seem slightly breakable. The right perimeter player at the right point in his career with the right touch of officiating could definitely challenge it with help from the three-point line. In his 81-point explosion, Kobe played 42 minutes and made 21 of 33 two-pointers, 7 of 13 threes and 18 of 20 free throws against a mess of a Toronto team. (The key for Kobe that night: Toronto’s perimeter defenders were Jalen Rose, Mike James, Morris Peterson, Joey Graham and a washed-up Eric Williams. Those guys couldn’t have stopped a David Thompson nosebleed.) So let’s tweak those numbers slightly, have him hog the ball a little more and make him slightly more accurate. Had he played 46 minutes and made 24 of 37 two-pointers, 10 of 15 threes and 22 of 24 free throws, that’s exactly 100 points. Look at the two sets of numbers again; is the second set
   that
   big a stretch from the first?
   

7. Chicago’s 72-win season.
   The perfect storm of the right era (the league at its most diluted), right team (a pissed-off Bulls team hell-bent on reclaiming its throne) and right alpha dog (a possessed Jordan coming off his “baseball sabbatical” and a humiliating playoff defeat). I can’t imagine anyone finishing a season with fewer than 10 losses. It’s too improbable.
   

8. Scott Skiles’ 30-assist game.
   Some perfect storm potential because the record happened against Paul Westhead’s nonsensical ’91 Nuggets team that attempted Loyola Marymount’s run-and-gun style and failed so memorably. Whether it’s broken or not, let’s agree that we’ll never see another balding white dude shell out 30 assists again.
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9. Rasheed Wallace’s 41 technicals.
   In just 77 games! In other words, Sheed averaged an astonishing 0.53 technicals per game for the 2000–1 season; it’s like Teddy Ballgame’s .406 but for semi-homicidal sports marks.
   

10. Jose Calderon’s 98.1 free throw percentage.
    This just happened—Calderon made 151 of 154 free throws in ’09 and shattered Calvin Murphy’s seemingly insurmountable 95.8 from ’81 (right before they changed the 3-to-make-2 rule). Murphy made 206 of 215 FTs and still holds the 200-plus record. Larry Bird holds the 300-plus (93%, 319 for 343) and 400-plus (91%, 414 for 455) records. And Magic Johnson (91%, 511 for 563) holds the 500-plus record. Regardless, don’t feel bad for Murphy, because he still owns one of the great records in sports history: fourteen kids by nine different women, the unofficial siring record for athletes as far as I’m concerned. Put that thing away, Calvin! And you wondered why they called him the “Pocket Rocket.”