The Book of Basketball (28 page)

113.
The complete list of players banned for at least one season: Richardson (’86), Lewis Lloyd (’87), Mitchell Wiggins (’87), Duane Washington (’87), Chris Washburn (’89), Roy Tarpley (’91), Dumas (’94, two-strike suspension), Stanley Roberts (’99) and Chris Andersen (’06). Nice nine-man rotation! The starters: Sugar, Lloyd, Dumas, Tarp and Roberts. The coach: Amy Winehouse.

114.
I can’t speak for every other kid in the mid-’80s, but I remember counting down the days to two random events: the first dunk contest and WrestleMania I one year later. In a related story, there wasn’t a girlfriend to be seen during that stretch. Not a one.

115.
Red went ballistic after Thurmond blocked Barry’s shot with 59 seconds left and got whistled for a cheap foul. Hissed Red afterward, “I don’t mind getting beat, but my guys were playing for pride and to win the game, and [ref Norm Drucker] tried to make a joke out of it.” Red was the best. The Old-Timers Game disappeared after someone (can’t remember who) got seriously hurt one or two years later. Nobody wanted to see someone drop dead during All-Star Weekend. Not even if it was Kareem.

116.
The two sides took a staggering 241 shots and made 53 percent of them. As always, two great PGs make for a great ASG, and with Bird involved, it’s even better. Everyone played at least 11 minutes except for the immortal Kelly Tripucka (6 minutes, 1 point), whose hair, mustache and teeth made him look like a mutant John Oates.

117.
Indiana’s pick went for Portland’s Tom Owens in ’81; Cleveland’s went for Dallas’ Mike Bratz in ’81; and the Clips traded theirs for Philly’s World B. Free in ’78. Maybe coke infected not just players but owners and GMs. By the way, the Cavs beat Washington in game 82 for their twenty-eighth win, dropping their pick to number four and costing Dallas a shot at MJ. Ouch.

118.
Busty was a local stripper who became the Morganna of the Bird era. You know whose section she kept landing in? Mine! Busty, thanks to you and your mega-guns for helping me get through puberty. And to the guy who was sitting in front of me during Game 5—I’m sorry for standing up too quickly and knocking you unconscious with my boner. That was uncalled for.

119.
In March ’85,
SI
ran a feature about the decline of TV sports ratings but passed on its usual NBA-bashing, even admitting, “A kind of dry rot [for ratings] has set in for all major sports except pro basketball.” My baby’s all growns up! My baby’s all growns up!

120.
Also, I needed to save something extra for the paperback. Get ready for
How the Hell Did We Get Here: The Sequel
, seasons 1985–2010, available for the 2010 holidays! I am shameless.

FOUR
THE WHAT-IF GAME

WE SPEND AN
inordinate amount of time playing the what-if game.
What if I never got married? What if I had gone to Harvard instead of Yale? What if I hadn’t punched my boss in the face? What if I never invested my life savings with Bernie Madoff? What if I never walked in on my wife banging our gardener?
You can’t go back, and you know you can’t go back, but you keep rehashing it anyway.

There are three great what-ifs in my life that don’t involve women. The first is, “What if I had gone west or south for college?” This haunts me and will continue to haunt me until the day I die. I could have chosen a warm-weather school with hundreds of gorgeous sorority girls, and instead I went to an Irish Catholic school on a Worcester hill with bone-chilling 20-degree winds, which allowed female students to hide behind heavy coats and butt-covering sweaters so thick it became impossible to guess their
weight within a 35-pound range. That was a great idea.
¹
The second: “What if I didn’t quit the
Boston Herald
, take a year off from writing, and tend bar in 1996?” You wouldn’t be reading this book if that hadn’t happened. I needed to recharge my batteries, stay up until 4:00 a.m., date the wrong women, smoke an obscene amount of pot and figure some shit out. That’s what I needed at the time, and nobody can tell me different. And of course, the third: “What if I had tried to write this monstrosity of a book without the help of copious amounts of hard alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, ADD medication, Marlboro Lights, coffee and horse tranquilizers?” I’ll let you decide whether that decision worked out or not.

The what-if game extends to every part of life. For instance, I have three and only three favorite movie what-ifs. In reverse order …
²

• 3. What if Robin Williams played the Duke in
  Midnight Run?
  He signed to play Jonathan “the Duke” Mardukas and backed out before shooting because of a scheduling conflict. The producers scrambled around for a replacement before settling on Charles Grodin, not exactly a scorching-hot name at the time. The rest is history. Maybe Williams would have taken things in a more frantic, slapstick direction—and that’s saying something, since this was the same movie that broke the record for most guys knocked briefly unconscious by a punch—but it wouldn’t have been a good thing. Grodin
  nailed
  the Duke. Understated, sarcastic, never flinched. Williams messes that movie up. I am convinced. And if you don’t agree with me, I have two words for you: shut the fuck up.
  

• 2. What if Leonardo DiCaprio did
  Boogie Nights
  instead of
  Titanic?
  Leo had the choice, mulled it over, opted for
  Titanic …
  and ended up carrying that movie and becoming a superduperstar. (By the way, that movie bombs with anyone else.)
  ³
  But imagine if he played Dirk Diggler. Look, I liked Mark Wahlberg’s performance in that movie. It’s a solid B-plus and he didn’t take anything off the table. But that could have been the defining part of Leo’s career. To rank the best new actors of the past fifteen years, Leo and Russell Crowe are either one-two or two-one, Philip Seymour Hoffman is third and Matt Damon is fourth.
  ⁴
  As much as I like Wahlberg, he’s not on that level. Leo could have taken Dirk Diggler to new heights, which seems significant since
  Boogie Nights
  is already one of my ten favorite movies ever. I even think he could have pulled off the “Feel the heat” and “It’s my dojo!” scenes.
  ⁵
  

• 1. What if Robert De Niro was hired for Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino?
  This almost happened. When Francis Ford Coppola screened them, he liked De Niro so much that he saved the part of young Vito for him in
  The Godfather: Part II.
  This will always be the number one movie what-if because it can never be answered: Pacino was tremendous in I and submitted a Pantheon performance in II. Could De Niro have topped that? Possibly, right? That character was in both of their wheelhouses. I guess it comes down to which guy was better, which is like the Bird-Magic debate in that there isn’t a definitive answer and there will
  never
  be a definitive answer.
  ⁶
  Now that, my friends, is a great what-if.
  

We should set some ground rules if we’re extending the concept to the NBA, like avoiding injury-related what-ifs because injuries are part of the game. (“What if Bill Walton’s feet never broke down?” sounds fine on paper, but if you’ve ever read anything about Walton, you know he never had a chance running around on those fragile clodhoppers. He was predisposed to breaking down, the same way someone like Kurt Cobain was predisposed to becoming a suicidal druggie maniac.) I also want to avoid fascinating-but-nonsensical what-ifs, like “What if Shaq and Kobe had
been able to get along?” (those guys had mammoth egos and were destined to clash),
⁷
as well as draft-related what-ifs unless the right decision was glaringly obvious even at the time and the team still screwed up. And I’m avoiding the “What if Jordan didn’t retire for eighteen months?” question because that decision affected too many subsequent scenarios—it’s like asking “What if Ali didn’t lose four years of his prime?” or “What if Shawn Kemp used condoms?” And besides, it’s not like he
willingly
retired, right? (Wink wink.) Everything else is fair game.

Here are the top thirty-three what-ifs in NBA history, in reverse order:

33. What if the ’63 Royals never
got switched into the Eastern Conference
when the Warriors moved to San Francisco?

The ’63 Royals dragged a Boston team with seven Hall of Famers to a seventh game, then peaked over the next three seasons (55, 48 and 45 wins), only they could never get past Russell’s Celtics (and later Wilt’s Sixers). Playing in the West, the Royals potentially could have made five straight Finals (’63 to ’67); at the very least, they would have made the ’65 Finals because Baylor missed the playoffs. And you know what? It’s impossible to measure the impact of such a seemingly minor decision on Oscar Robertson’s career. Here’s the greatest point guard of the NBA’s first thirty-five years and one of the ten best players ever, only he never reached the Finals in his prime simply because he switched conferences at the worst possible time. Would we remember Oscar differently had he been putting on a show every spring in the Finals on ABC? What if Oscar shocked the Celtics on the biggest stage and won a title? Would his career momentum have built the way Jordan’s did after his first title, like an invisible barrier had been broken down? Would we remember Oscar as the greatest or second-greatest player ever instead of a top-ten guy?

Now here’s what
really
drives me crazy. In 1962, there were four Eastern Conference teams (Boston, New York, Philly and Syracuse) and five Western Conference teams (Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and
Cincy). When Philly moved to San Fran,
⁸
the conferences became imbalanced and one Western team had to move to the East. The Royals were a logical pick because they were located more east than anyone else. I get that. But one year later, Chicago moved to Baltimore and remained in the Western Conference.

Do me a favor and look at a map. Do it right now. I’ll wait.

(Twiddling my thumbs.)

(Humming.)

Good, you’re back. Now check out that map. I mean, What the hell? It’s no contest! How could they keep Cincy in the East and Baltimore in the West when Baltimore was nearly a thousand miles farther east? How does this make sense? How?
⁹
From a commonsense standpoint, why weren’t the NBA powers that be more interested in making it easier for Oscar to reach the Finals? Those shortsighted dopes robbed us of some potentially bravura playoff moments, including three or four Oscar-West playoff showdowns in their primes and at least one guaranteed Celtics-Royals Finals. And all because nobody running the NBA knew how to read a map.

(Amazingly, this wasn’t the league’s biggest geographical screwup ever. After the ABA and NBA merged, Denver and Indiana were sent to the Western Conference while San Antonio and the Nets joined the East. For the ’77 season, Houston and San Antonio played in the East while Milwaukee, Detroit, Kansas City and Indiana played in the West. Check out that map you just found, then explain to me how this made any sense whatsoever. I’ll give you a thousand dollars.)

32. What if the Knicks chose Rick Barry
over Bill Bradley in 1965?

A memorable college player and potential box office draw, Bradley graduated from Princeton and headed right to England, where he planned on
spending two years on a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. There’s a big difference between waiting for a franchise center for two years (like David Robinson) and waiting for a slow small forward, right? It’s unclear if Bradley was a better prospect than Barry (a scoring machine at the University of San Francisco); maybe he was a bigger name and the Knicks desperately needed some star power, but that two-year wait nullified every Bradley advantage, in my opinion.
¹⁰
Had the Knicks taken Barry, maybe their feel-good ’70 title season never happens, but maybe Barry never gets lowballed and makes his stupid jump to the ABA (or loses three years of his prime because of injuries and lawsuits).

And if you want to get technical, Barry was the second-best passing forward of all time behind Larry Legend; if anyone could have fit in seamlessly with those Knicks teams, it’s him. One of two extremes would have played out: either Barry goes down as one of the twelve greatest players ever and a New York icon, or he goes down as a temperamental, annoying asshole whom everyone in New York despised before he finally got driven out of town for eyeballing Willis Reed after a dropped pass, then getting thrown into the fifteenth row at MSG by Willis. It’s one or the other.