The Book of Basketball (32 page)

Picture:
The ’07 Bulls celebrating after a playoff win.

Caption:
Where Chicago dumps Eddy Curry and his gigantic ass for two lottery picks and copious amounts of cap space happens.

Picture:
The ’07 Raptors celebrating after a playoff win.

Caption:
Where Toronto finds some dummy to take Jalen Rose’s contract off their hands and aid its rebuilding process happens.

Picture:
San Antonio’s 2005 trophy celebration.

Caption:
Where San Antonio dumps Malik Rose’s contract for a cap-friendly center who helps them win the title happens.

Picture:
Steve Francis sitting glumly on the Knicks bench.

Caption:
Where Orlando finds someone to take Steve Francis’ horrendous contract so they can free up $15 million in cap space happens.

Picture:
The ’08 Blazers celebrating after a last-second win.

Caption:
Where the 2008 Blazers become the NBA’s most likable young team because they found a taker for Zach Randolph happens.

Picture:
Anucha Browne Sanders celebrating on the courthouse steps.
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Caption:
Where a humiliating $11 million sexual harassment settlement happens.

Picture:
A white SUV.

Caption:
Where a Truck Party happens.
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Picture:
Curry and Randolph looking overweight, like they just barbecued Nate Robinson on a grill and ate him.

Caption:
Where an NBA frontcourt that includes two C-cups happens.

Picture:
A mostly empty Madison Square Garden.

Caption:
Where a sixty-year tradition of professional basketball going down the tubes happens.

Picture:
Isiah sitting on the bench with that frozen, blank look on his face like he’s either flatlining or planning to kill everyone in the locker room after the game.

Caption:
Where Isiah happens.

(Follow-up note: Has any GM in NBA history ever directly altered the fortunes of seven franchises for the better? Portland, San Antonio, Phoenix, Toronto, Orlando, Chicago, New York … that’s nearly 25 percent of the league! He is missed. By the other GMs.)

11. What if Maurice Stokes never went down?

Not an injury what-if because the Royals star technically didn’t get injured playing basketball; he contracted encephalitis, a fluke of an illness that happens only if an undiagnosed bacterial infection or undiagnosed brain trauma is left untreated, worsens and eventually causes brain damage. Poor Stokes banged his head in the final game of the ’58 season against Minneapolis, flew back to Cincinnati that night, never got treated over the next three days, flew to Detroit for a playoff game and played sluggishly, then finally collapsed on the plane home. So a fluky combination of factors—poor medical treatment, multiple flights (the last thing you want to do with brain trauma) and poor Stokes gutting out a playoff game when he felt terrible—led to brain damage and Stokes spending the rest of his shortened life in a wheelchair.

How good was Stokes? He averaged a 17–16, 16–17 and 17–18 in his only three seasons as the NBA’s first ahead-of-his-time power forward, like a taller Charles Barkley, a six-foot-seven, 275-pounder who pounded the boards, handled the ball full-court, and had a variety of Baylor-like moves around the basket (scoop shots, finger rolls and the like). Had he avoided gaining weight in his late twenties (you never know with this
stuff), Stokes would have been a mortal lock for the NBA’s 50 at 50. Given that Oscar was a future territorial pick for the Royals, we can safely assume that an Oscar-Stokes combo would have altered the course of a Finals or two in the sixties. From a big-picture standpoint, the NBA lost its most charismatic black star of the fifties
and
sixties. What a shame. There wasn’t a single silver lining except for an improbable, feel-good human interest story that we’ll continue in the Jack Twyman section of the Pyramid.
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10. What if Memphis instead of Cleveland landed Lebron?

Take a trip back to the 2003 lottery with me. We’re down to Cleveland and Memphis in the final two. If the Grizzlies draw number two, they turn the pick over to Detroit because they stupidly traded a conditional number one for Otis Thorpe five years earlier (a pick that only had top-one protection in 2003).
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If the Grizz draw number one, then they keep the pick and get LeBron. Suddenly we’re presented with the greatest hit-or-miss moment in the history of professional sports—like going on
Deal or No Deal
, getting down to two suitcases and having a 50/50 chance of winning $500 million. For a few seconds, ESPN’s camera shows Jerry West, who has the same look on his face that Forrest Gump had when he groped Jenny’s boobies for the first time. If Jerry had dropped dead right then and there, nobody would have been surprised. Well, we know how it turned out: Cleveland got the first pick, Memphis got nothing, and a heartbroken West retired and eventually disappeared off the face of the earth, presumably
to spend the next few years playing Russian roulette in Southeast Asia like Christopher Walken in
The Deer Hunter.
(Sorry to throw consecutive movie references at you, but the situation demanded two of them and that’s that.) Now look at the domino effect over the next five years if Memphis gets that pick:

1. LeBron joins a deep Grizzlies team (Pau Gasol, Shane Battier, Mike Miller …) that won 50 games despite getting nothing from that ’03 draft. A little better than starting out on a lottery team with knuckle-heads like Ricky Davis and Darius Miles, right?
   

2. Picking second, Cleveland takes Carmelo and built around ’Melo, Carlos Boozer and Carlos Boozer’s chest hair. Since Denver GM Kiki Vandeweghe took Nikoloz Tskitishvili over Amar’e Stoudemire in 2002, it goes without saying Kiki would have been stupid enough to take Darko at number three over Chris Bosh. The rest of the draft probably unfolds the same way, although Chad Ford still probably has the immortal Maciej Lampe going ninth to the Knicks.
   

3. What are the odds LeBron stays in Memphis after his rookie contract ends? I’m going with between 0.000001 and 0.009 percent. And that might be high. Which means he becomes a free agent following the 2007 season, leading to numerous lousy teams devoting their ’06 and ’07 seasons to carving out enough cap space for him, as well as Isiah failing to plan ahead, inadvertently knocking New York out of the LeBron sweepstakes and a summer of rioting in the streets of Manhattan the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ’77 blackout and the Son of Sam murders. Also, LeBron’s departure swiftly kills basketball in Memphis, with the Grizzlies moving to England and becoming the London Hooligans. (Actually, what am I saying? That still might happen.) And every title from 2008 to 2020 might look different. That’s about it.
   

9. What if Ralph Sampson entered the 1980 draft?

In April 1980 the rejuvenated Celtics were coming off 60 wins and preparing for a bloodbath with Philly in the Eastern Finals … and as this was
happening, they won the coin flip giving them the number one pick (thanks to the McAdoo trade one year earlier). The seven-foot-four Sampson was finishing a much-hyped freshman year at Virginia (15–11, 5 blocks a game); we forget this now, but Sampson ranked right up there with Walton, Kareem and Wilt once upon a time on the This Guy Is Going to Join the NBA and Obliterate Everyone Scale.
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The Celtics quietly started lobbying him:
Come play with us. You’ll compete for a title right away with Bird, Cowens, Maxwell and Tiny on the greatest franchise ever. Why risk getting hurt? You and Bird could own this league for the decade.
When Sampson improbably turned them down, they settled on plan B: trading that pick (along with number thirteen) for Robert Parish and number three (Kevin McHale), then winning three titles within the next six years.

Do they win those trophies with Sampson? That depends on how you project his career had he skipped those last three college years—in which he never improved playing with inferior teammates while facing slowdown tactics and triple-teams—and got thrown into the fire at the highest possible level on a contender. In 1980, Auerbach believed that Sampson had the athletic ability and instincts to become the next Russell. I always thought Sampson was like a postmerger Kareem sans the Sky Hook: same height, same body, slightly disappointing rebounder and shot blocker (though still solid in both departments), but a mismatch for nearly everyone because of his size and quickness. Those last three college years significantly damaged his ceiling. He never developed a money-in-the-bank shot; if anything, he bought into the whole “Sampson is a guard in a big man’s body” hype, started screwing around 20 feet from the basket and tried to run fast breaks like a mutant Bob Cousy Throw in a dreadful Houston team in his rookie season and that’s
four
wasted seasons in his formative years. He never recovered. Imagine Ralph learning the ropes in Boston, mastering the rebounding/shot-blocking thing, playing high-pressure playoff games, running the floor with a great fast-break
team and getting fed easy baskets from Bird from 1980 to 1984. On paper, that would have been the cushiest situation in NBA history for a franchise center.
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Would that have been better than a McHale/Parish combo? Depends on how you feel about Auerbach’s “next Russell” assessment. Red flipped out publicly after Sampson turned them down, hissing that Ralph was being “hoodwinked by glad-handlers” and adding, “The people who advised him to stay in school will have trouble sleeping nights. They’re taking away earning potential he’ll never get back, and they’re forgetting that if he gets hit by a car, it’s the end of the line. It’s ridiculous. If he were an intellectual genius and was planning on being a surgeon, you could see him wanting to go to school.” Considering Sampson only played four healthy NBA seasons and filed for bankruptcy a few years later, maybe Red knew what he was talking about. (Whether he assessed Ralph’s ceiling correctly is another story.) But Ralph stayed in school, leading to …

8. What if the ’86 Rockets never fell apart?

Magic’s Lakers won titles in ’80, ’82 and ’85 and were demolished by the ’86 Rockets. Bird’s Celtics won titles in ’81, ’84 and ’86 and held the number two pick in a seemingly loaded ’86 draft. So who ended up squeaking out two more titles and becoming the Team of the Decade? The Lakers. Why? Because of our number two what-if (sigh), as well as the untimely, unseemly, unprecedented, unfathomable, un-(fill in any other negative word) of the promising Sampson-Hakeem era.

We always hear about the tragic falls of Doc and Darryl, the two Coreys, Mike Tyson, Len Bias and about fifty different bands and singers from the eighties, but nobody ever remembers to include the team Pat Riley once called “the Team of the Future.” For historical purposes, Houston’s “upset” of the ’86 Lakers was eventually dismissed as something of a fluke; during a fifty-month stretch from April ’85 to June ’89 in which we
changed presidents, watched Rocky single-handedly end the Cold War, became terrified of cocaine and unprotected sex, lost the ability to produce decent music, made a former Austrian bodybuilder the biggest movie star alive, learned how to market black athletes, looked on sadly as Eddie Murphy lost his sense of humor and Michael Jackson transformed from biggest star on the planet to full-fledged freak and cautionary tale, and set the table for Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld to become the richest comedians of all time, the Lakers lost only one of their eighteen playoff series … only it was to an upstart Rockets team who fell off the face of the earth almost as quickly as they showed up. So naturally, it must have been a fluke. Right?

Here are the facts: The Rockets lost Game 1 and swept the next four, clinching at the Forum even after Hakeem got thrown out with six minutes remaining for fighting with Mitch Kupchak. (This one ended with Sampson famously making his miracle buzzer-beater and Michael Cooper sinking to the floor in disbelief, adding to the whole “what an upset” myth.)
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If you watch that series carefully, Houston couldn’t have been a worse matchup for the Lakers, whose major weaknesses were rebounding and defending elite low-post scorers. That Sampson-Hakeem combo was their Kryptonite.
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Watching Kareem “try” (repeat: “try”) to defend the impossibly quick Hakeem was like watching one of those slow thirty-five-year-old linebackers (think Tedy Bruschi) getting stuck covering a quick running back (think Brian Westbrook) on a swing pass in the open field without help. Mr. Ninny just had no chance. If they switched him to Sampson (playing the high post), that pulled him away from the rim, robbed the Lakers of their only shot blocker, and allowed Ralph to beat him off the dribble … and that’s before we get to the nightmare of undersized or athletically challenged forwards like Kupchak, A. C. Green or James Worthy trying to handle Hakeem on the low post. If that weren’t
enough, Houston was blessed with lanky, athletic perimeter guys (Robert Reid, Lewis Lloyd,
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Rodney McCray) who could rebound and cause problems for Magic. In retrospect, the only thing Houston was missing was a coaching staff of female call girls who could have seduced the Lakers after games and gotten them into trouble. That’s how good the matchup was for Houston. Throw in pesky point guard John Lucas (who suffered a drug relapse two months before the playoffs) and they were put on the planet to beat up on those mid-eighties Lakers teams.