The Book of Basketball (47 page)

LEVEL 3 (THIRD FLOOR)

No-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers who ranked among the best for a few years with every requisite resume statistic to match; no MVP winner can drop below Level 3 unless there is a
fantastic
reason. To fill out this floor, we’re adding sections devoted to influential coaches, referees, writers, owners, and innovators. That’s right, Danny Biasone and Borsalino hats finally get their due! Maybe we can even hand out complimentary $24 bills with Biasone’s face on them. In fact, let’s do this. It’s my elaborately fake idea that will never happen. Done and done.

LEVEL 4 (FOURTH FLOOR)

Basically L3 guys, only there’s something inherently greater about them. Possible tip-offs: Do they have to be considered in any “best of all time” discussion? Did they have transcendant games or memorable moments? Were they just
dominant
at times? Will you always remember watching them play, even when you’re ninety years old and peeing on yourself? Are they in the mix for some all-time benchmarks? To fill out this floor, we’re also throwing in sections devoted to the four NBA commissioners—Kennedy, Maurice Podoloff, O’Brien and Stern—as well as the Scottie
Brooks Hadlen Memorial Library and Bookstore featuring every relevant NBA-related book ever written. Including this one. On its own shelf. Just dozens and dozens of copies. And maybe even a six-foot cardboard cutout of me. What, you’re going to deny my self-serving participation in my own fake idea? How dare you!

THE PANTHEON (PENTHOUSE)

Take a deep breath. We’re at the top of the Hall of Fame Pyramid, literally and figuratively. These are the twelve greatest players of all-time, the best of the best … the Pantheon.
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There would be windows on all sides, a few balconies and maybe even a view of lovely Indiana from all directions. I’d have a conference room with seats where famous people could give speeches or presentations, or even a Q & A, just so they could make announcements like “Ladies and gentleman, just a reminder, Elgin Baylor will be taking questions on the Pantheon Floor at three o’clock.” We also need a bar that opens at five every night (with a Happy Hairston Hour) and eventually turns into a hopping nightclub called Pantheon, equipped with one of those special elevators that take you from the ground floor right to Pantheon (like they have in the Palms). All right, I’m getting carried away. But here’s what I love about the Pyramid model:

• Fans and writers would (I hope) argue about which players belong on which levels; it would become the “Jessica Biel vs. Jessica Alba” of sports debates. Is Shaq an L4 or a Pantheon guy? Does Reggie Miller make it past L1? Does Kobe crack L4? Where does Elgin land since he never won a title? What about Oscar, the greatest guard before MJ and Magic? Was Cousy great enough to be an L4? You get the idea.
  

• After we decide on the Pyramid guys—remember, we’re dumping some current Hall of Famers into the basement in the “Pioneer,” “Role Player,” and “Comet” exhibits—a special selection committee would reassign levels to every player who made the cut. Let’s say the committee features fifty well-known former players, journalists, and broadcasters. Each would vote on levels for every existing Hall of Fame member from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest); the average score for each member (rounded up) would determine his level; and each person would have to vote for twelve players (no more, no less) for the top level of the Pyramid. Makes it a little more interesting, no? Especially when we make the votes public. If you’re the dimwit who kept Scottie Pippen from being an L3 because you voted for him as an L1, everyone needs to know that you’re a dimwit
  

• The Pyramid structure would
  look
  cool. Besides the aesthetic benefits of a five-story building housing every meaningful nugget of NBA history and resembling an actual Egyptian pyramid, can you imagine climbing each level as the floors get smaller and smaller … and finally reaching the Pantheon? Unbelievable. I’m getting chills just thinking about it.
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  Even if it can never happen, that’s the great thing about pipe dreams … you can still have fun with them, right?
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  So here’s how my levels would break down and why, and if you think this wasn’t a convoluted excuse to rank the best NBA players in reverse order from 96 to 1, well, you don’t know me well enough. These rankings were weighed by the following factors:
  

1. How well did he grasp The Secret?
   

2. Did he make a difference on good teams? Did he get better when it mattered? If your life depended on one game, would you want him out there trying to win it for you? Would you trust him completely and totally in the final two minutes of a do-or-die game? In short, would you want to be in an NBA foxhole with him?
   

3. Would he have been not-so-fun, semifun, fun or superfun to play with? We’ll explain this in the Nash section.
   

4. Did he get traded at any point in his prime? If so, why? This doesn’t matter as much with Level 1 or Level 2, but I need a
   really
   good reason to forgive trading a Level 3, 4 or 5 guy in his prime.
   

5. As a personal preference, I value someone who was great for a short period of time over someone who was good for a long period of time. Give me two transcendent years from Bill Walton over fourteen non-transcendent years from Walt Bellamy. I’m not winning a championship with Bellamy; I’m winning one with a healthy Walton. So I’d rather have two great Walton years and twelve years of patchwork nobodies than fourteen straight Bellamy years, if that makes sense.
   

(Note: Bellamy’s career exemplifies why we need the Pyramid. He averaged a 29–17 during his first three seasons—1961–63, before the league changed color and got bigger—and never made another All-Star team after ’64. He’s one of nine players to finish with 20,000 points and 14,000 rebounds, only Wilt owned him to the degree that the Dipper once shook his hand before an opening tip, promised Bellamy that he would get demolished, destroyed him for an entire half, then told him before the second-half tip, “Okay, now you can score.” His teams never won—in fact, Bellamy’s teams won just two playoff series and dealt him twice in his prime. When the ’68 Knicks traded Bellamy and Howie Komives for Dave DeBusschere, the deal quickly turned them around and ushered in a six-year run of contention. The great George Kiseda
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even wrote, “Walt Bellamy is the skeleton in the closet of the 20,000-Point Club.” Clearly, Bellamy missed his calling—if he’d come along thirty years later, he would have been revered by fantasy owners and remembered in an entirely different light. Same for Jerry Lucas.)
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• 6. How deceiving were the guy’s stats? Issel’s numbers look fantastic until you remember that he couldn’t have guarded the best guy on a WNBA team.
  ³⁰
  Karl Malone’s gaudy stats don’t reflect how his face looked like he’d been given a monster Botox injection at the end of every big game. You
  have
  to factor this stuff in. Statistics are extremely helpful, they fill in a lot of holes, but that’s it. Beyond that, how much did the guy’s era affect his stats? Remember the lessons from the “How the Hell?” section.
  

• 7. Did he have at least two memorably remarkable qualities about his game? We’ll explain in the Pippen section.
  

• 8. Was he a great teammate, a decent teammate, a forgettable teammate or a gaping asshole? We’ll explain in the GP section.
  

• 9. Did he make at least one first or second All-NBA team in his career? If the answer is no, we need a reason that makes sense, like Nate Thurmond falling short only because Kareem, Wilt, Cowens, Unseld and Reed peaked during his prime. We’ll call this the Bill Laimbeer Corollary because I was looking for any possible reason to keep him out of the Pyramid—after all, he was a world-class douche and that was the best reason that worked. Screw him.
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• 10. Did he resonate on a level beyond stats? Did he connect with fans on a spiritual level or an “I’ve never seen anyone in my life like this guy” level? Was he an original prototype? Could he ever be re-created? Think Earl the Pearl.
  

• 11. If it’s a player from 1946 to 1976, how well could his game have translated to the modern era?
  

That last question is a biggie. Say we brought ’61 Wilt to 2009 and matched him against a slew of modern athletes with strength and speed. Wouldn’t they handle him or slow him down? He might average a 20–10 or even a 25–14 nowadays, but with superior talent, smarter defenses, complex coaching strategies and unfavorable-for-him rule changes, hell
would freeze over before ’62 Wilt scored 100 in a single game.
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From the tapes I watched, Wilt notched such brow-furrowing numbers mainly because he was a superathletic big man feasting on undersized, overmatched stiffs. You could say he was before his time physically. Do we credit him for that? Do we ignore the fact that 2000 Shaq may have surpassed Wilt’s stats in 1962? Wasn’t Wilt fortunate for not having been born ten years later? Russell had a much better chance of thriving in 2009 because of his competitiveness and defensive instincts, even if he was built like Thaddeus Young. Would he dominate like he did in 1959? Of course not. You can’t forget that twenty-first-century stars are evolutionary versions of the best guys from the fifties and sixties. Take Steve Nash and Bob Cousy. (Note: Let’s make sure that there is a team of doctors surrounding Tommy Heinsohn before he reads these next few lines.) Nash is a much better shooter, he’s in better shape, he plays harder, he tries harder on defense, he’s more technically sound … he’s just
better.
But he didn’t have anything close to Cousy’s career, nor did he match Cousy’s impact on his generation (as a player, personality, winner, and innovator). So how do we judge which guy mattered more? Really, it’s like comparing an ’09 Porsche with a ’62 Porsche: the ’09 would easily win a race between them, but the ’62 was a more groundbreaking car. So the Nash model wins the “Who were the most talented players ever?” question, but the Cooz model wins the “Who were the most groundbreaking players ever?” question. And both matter.

That’s why I made the following decision: you can’t effectively compare players from different eras unless both players thrived after 1976, when basketball fully evolved into the sport we’re watching now. A few of the early stars would be effective today, but too many of them would flounder to the degree that it’s difficult to project them being better than eleventh or twelfth men (if that). Take Dolph Schayes, the best player on Syracuse’s ’55 title team and a member of the NBA’s Silver Anniversary Team. Could a slow white guy who played below the rim and lived on a deadly
set shot
succeed at a high level in 2009? Would Dolph be more useful in 2009 than Steve Novak? Um … I don’t know. I really don’t. After careful deliberation,
I bumped nearly every pre-Russell star from the Pyramid for two big reasons. First, basketball didn’t totally become basketball until they created the shot clock in 1954. Second, there was a center in the fifties named Neil Johnston who finished with the following resume:

Eight years, 6 quality, 6 All-Stars … top 5 NBA (’52, ’53, ’54, ’55), top 10 (’56) … second-best player on champ (’56 Sixers), averaged a 20–14 (10 games) … 4-year peak: 21–12 … season leader: points (3x), rebounds (1x), minutes (2x), FG percentage (3x).

Pretty good, right? For the league’s first decade, Johnston was its most effective all-around center other than Mikan: a six-foot-eight 210-pounder who thrived as long as everyone played below the rim and you could unleash clumsy hook shots without getting them swatted away. Then Russell showed up and ruined everything. Satch Sanders jokes that Russell terminated the careers of Johnston, Harry Gallatin, Ed Macauley, Charlie Share and every other old-school center (translation: white guy). Sifting through the stories and anecdotes, unleashing Russell in the mid-fifties sounds like what might happen if Dwight Howard joined the WNBA. (By the way, this is the only scenario that would get me watching the WNBA other than my daughter joining the league someday. It’s really those two and that’s it.) Send the likes of David West or Hedo Turkoglu to the early fifties in Doc Brown’s time machine and they’d win four straight MVPs. Sorry, every reader over sixty years old, but it’s true. Also, remember not to get carried away with scoring/rebounding stats from 1959 to 1967, or how they allowed variations of offensive goaltending until 1966. (FYI: When Wilt dropped 73 on the ’62 Knicks, the Dipper got himself an extra 22 points and 13 rebounds just from offensive goaltending and redirecting shots.)
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And all information from 1970 to 1976 (stats, All-Star nods, All-NBA nods) should be taken with three hundred grains of salt, so if you’re wondering why someone like Spencer Haywood
(two top fives, two top tens, a five-year peak of 24–12) or Lou Hudson (four-year peak: 25–6–4, 51% FG) didn’t make the cut, or why Bob McAdoo and Tiny Archibald are ranked as L1 guys … well, that’s why.
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Last thought: I kept the cutoff at ninety-six for
The Book of Basketball
, first edition. Why? Because we need to leave spots open for Kevin Durant, Al Jefferson, Yao Ming, Derrick Rose, Carmelo Anthony, Ricky Rubio
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or whoever else might emerge over these next few years. Which four will sneak in? Who knows? I’m excited. For now, we’re sticking with 96 Pyramid guys and 96 only.

Also, this pyramid had to be finalized for editing reasons in April 2009, so we weren’t able to account for career-altering moments by Dwight Howard, Ray Allen, LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant in the final order. I did add a few afterthoughts when necessary.