The Book of Basketball (65 page)

Greer: “Consistency. For me, that was the thing, I would like to be remembered as a great, consistent player.”

Dolph Schayes: “Hal Greer always came to play. He came to practice the same way, to every team function the same way. Every bus and plane and train, he was on time. Hal Greer punched the clock. Hal Greer brought the lunch pail.”

Herald-Tribune: “
If there were an award given for a player who is most respected by basketball insiders, while getting the minimum public appreciation, Greer could win hands down.”

Al Bianchi: “We called Greer ‘Bulldog’ because he had that kind of expression on his face and it never changed.”

Did you enjoy that round of Cliché Bukkake? I’d throw in this quote: “There’s never been an exciting guy named Hal ever, not in the history of
mankind.” I could only unearth one interesting tidbit about Greer: everyone from that era raves about his gorgeous jumper.
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In
Tall Tales
, Alex Hannum calls it “the best medium-range jump shot ever” (hyperbole alert) and Bianchi gushes, “No one could ever stop and take a jumper faster than Greer.” In fact, Greer’s jumper was so reliable that he’s the only player who shot his jumper for free throws; remarkably, he finished his career shooting 80 percent from the line. See, I knew I could dig up something interesting about Hal Greer.

45. DAVE DEBUSSCHERE

Resume: 12 years, 10 quality, 8 All-Stars … top 10 (’69) … All-Defense (6x) … 4-year peak: 17–12–3 … Playoffs peak: 16–13–3 (41 G) … 3rd-best player for 2 champs (’69, ’73 Knicks) and 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks) … player-coach (’64, ’65 Pistons)

Two changes would have transformed Dave’s career historically. First, they didn’t create the All-Defense team until the ’68–’69 season. (From that point on, Dave made the first team every year until he retired.) Second, they didn’t create the three-point line until the ’79–’80 season. (Dave had been retired for six years, having spent his career shooting threes that counted as twos.) Add those tweaks and we’re looking at twelve All-Defenses, a career average of 20–11 and a well-earned reputation as the best three-point-shooting forward of his era. Even so, he left a borderline top-fifty resume, transformed the Knicks defensively, sparked countless “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” chants at MSG, banged bigger bodies, controlled the boards, made clutch shots and never cared about stats. Everyone remembers Willis sinking those first two jumpers in Game 7 of the ’70 Finals, or Frazier finishing with a magnificent 36–7–19, but nobody
remembers DeBusschere finishing with 18 points and 17 rebounds and refusing to let Elgin breathe.
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I was always fascinated that he retired on the heels of his best all-around statistical season (18 points, 11 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 76 percent FT shooting), at the tender age of thirty-three, after the Knicks were smoked by Boston in the ’74 Eastern Finals. Maybe Dave thought he was slipping defensively. Maybe he wanted to go out on top when he was still good. I don’t know.

Sadly, every NBA fan under forty remembers DeBusschere for one thing and one thing only: when he was running the Knicks in the mid-eighties and practically passed out with joy during the Ewing lottery. That shouldn’t be the first thing we remember about one of the great winners of his era, one of the few guys you absolutely would have wanted in your NBA foxhole. And since he resonated with so many New Yorkers, I asked one of the most famous Knick fans to explain why DeBusschere mattered so much. Here’s William Goldman
⁶⁶
remembering his favorite Knick:

I thought it was a dumb trade, even for the Knicks. We get rid of our center, Walt Bellamy, who one season averaged 30 points a game and our rugged point guard, Howie Komives.

And for what? This guy from Detroit.

That’s all he was to those of us who lived in Magic Town back then. Oh, sure, we knew some stuff—none of it thrilling. Like he was the youngest coach in NBA history, and a total wipeout until he quit. And a major league pitcher. For a couple of years. No Koufax. There was no one, not one Knick nut in the city who predicted that our lives were going to shine till he retired six years later.

What we didn’t realize was that the greatest defensive forward in history had come to save us.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that Michael Jordan was the greatest player ever. Not just the championships or the stats, it’s this: We have TV. We can see him play. Plus he is still with us, young enough to spark rumors that maybe, just maybe, he might come back for one more year.

Not a lot of footage on Dave. Retired in ’74. Died five years ago, at an unfair sixty-two.

If you are reading this, obviously you have your all-time team. No one would attack you if your guys are West and Oscar, Magic and Elgin and Russ.

Here’s mine:

Michael and Clyde.
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Wilt.

Bird.

And Dave.

I was at his funeral and of course a lot of famous NBA people were there. You expected that. What was so shocking was how devastated they were. Not just the tears. It was the look of blind disbelief on their faces.

Because they knew this: Dave was the toughest of them all. And he would attend all their funerals.

None of them were meant to come to his….

44. NATE THURMOND

Resume: 14 years, 9 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’67 MVP runner-up … All-Defense (5x) … started for two runner-ups (’64, ’67 Warriors) … ’67 Playoffs: 16–23–3 … 4-year peak: 21–20–4 … recorded the first-ever quadruple double (22–14–13–12)
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Congratulations, Nate! You’re the winner of the “Wow, I had no idea how good this guy was until I started busting my butt on this book!” award. Let the record show that:

1. You were the third-best center of the late sixties and early seventies, only you never made an All-NBA team because you had the misfortune of going against the Wilt/Russell combo, then Willis/Wilt and Kareem/Wilt. And that you averaged
   exactly
   15.0 points and 15.0 rebounds for your career (kind of amazing).
   

2. You were a proven warrior whose career was altered historically by two decisions that had absolutely nothing to do with you: Rick Barry jumping to the ABA (crippling a Warriors team that would have contended for the next six or seven years), and Golden State trading you for Clifford Ray in a money-saving deal right before Barry peaked and they won the ’75 title. You landed in Chicago and lost an agonizing 7-game series in the West Finals to (wait for it) G-State. Not fair.
   ⁶⁹
   

3. The Warriors traded Wilt in his prime partly because they wanted to make you their center. And partly because Wilt was a selfish head case who made too much money. But still.
   

4. Wilt and Kareem called you their toughest defender in the early seventies. You averaged 2.9 blocks during the first year they kept track, when you were just about washed up, so who knows how many you were getting in your prime. God forbid we kept track of blocks until 1974. What were stat guys doing back then? Do you think Maurice Podoloff suggested blocks in the early sixties and the NBA’s lead statistician angrily responded, “Look, we’re fucking overworked as it is—we have to keep track of points, rebounds,
   and
   assists! Get off our backs”?
   

5. You had the greatest bald-head/full-beard combo of anyone in the history of professional sports with the possible exception of Granville Waiters. So there’s that. We penalized you a few spots only because of your curiously terrible shooting: 42 percent for your career (other than Chris Dudley, the worst percentage by any center who played 750 games or more); 38 percent in the ’69, ’71, ’73, and ’75 Playoffs combined (35 games); 37 percent in the ’75 Playoffs (13 games).
   ⁷⁰
   So you were like Dikembe Mutombo but better. Who wants to sex Nate Thurmond?
   ⁷¹
   

43. CLYDE DREXLER

Resume: 15 years, 14 quality, 10 All-Stars … ’92 MVP runner-up … top 5 (’92), top 10 (’88, ’91), top 15 (’90, ’95) … 4-year peak: 25–7–6 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 23–8–7 (58 G) … 2nd-best player on one champ (’95 Rockets), best player on two runner-ups (’90, ’92 Blazers) … Playoffs: 20–7–6 (145 G) …’90 Finals: 26–8–6 …’95 Playoffs: 21–7–5 (22 G) … career: 22K-6K-6K … member of ’92 Dream Team

Gets the nod over Greer for one reason: during the most competitive stretch in league history (1990–93), Portland made the Finals twice with Drexler as its lone blue-chipper. We’ll remember him as the only basketball player other than Michael J. Fox who succeeded at a memorably high level even though he dribbled on fast breaks with his head down. We’ll remember him as the poor man’s ’Nique in the “ignite the home crowd with a fast-break dunk” department. We’ll remember him for battling male pattern baldness but refusing to shave his head like so many others. We’ll remember him for one of the truly great nicknames: “Clyde the Glide.” And we’ll remember him for being the fragile, too-unselfish-for-his-own-good leader of a memorably unpredictable Blazers juggernaut that consistently shot itself in the foot at the worst possible moments. Poor Clyde never
seemed to make smart decisions at pivotal times, never seemed to understand when a game was slipping away and his team needed him to assert his will, and never grasped the basic premise of “Look, I’m good at a lot of things, and I’m not so good at other things, so maybe I should just do what I’m good at.”
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For instance, of any player who attempted at least two 3-pointers per playoff game, guess who has the worst percentage? That’s right—Clyde at 28 percent. Twenty-eight percent! That didn’t stop him from clanging 133 of 178 threes (23 percent) in Portland’s 58-game Playoffs run from 1990 to 1992. During the ’92 Playoffs, Clyde was 19-for-81 on three-pointers (23.5%) and 179-for-344 (53%) on two-pointers. If you were a Portland fan, what made you happier that spring, Clyde launching a three or Clyde either driving to the basket or pulling up for a 15-footer? He just didn’t get it. Ideally, Clyde should have been the second-best guy on a great team—like a McHale, Worthy or Pippen—an unselfish sidekick who wasn’t quite great enough to carry someone to a title. This finally happened when Houston reunited Clyde and Hakeem, leading to a rare “gunning for a ring late in his career” success story when the Rockets swept Orlando in the ’95 Finals. Because of that, I have Clyde ranked forty-third … and yet I feel terrible for him because his career was swallowed up by Jordan. The MJ shadows are everywhere. This goes beyond Clyde being the poor man’s Jordan, a rival shooting guard who filled the stat sheet 85 percent as well but wasn’t the same crunch-time guy or suck-the-soul-out-of-you competitive killer (and that’s an understatement). Consider three things:

• Clyde started one year earlier than Jordan and showed enough promise that when Portland landed the number two pick in the ’84 draft, the Blazers decided, “We’re all set in the Exciting Perimeter Scorer department, so let’s pick a center with surgically repaired tibias.”
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  Besides being the single greatest NBA what-if, did you know Portland allegedly offered that pick plus Drexler for Ralph Sampson? What if Houston had said yes? Can you imagine? How many titles would the Hakeem/Clyde combo have won? Would we remember Jordan’s career differently? And if Sampson had played in Portland and never injured his back in that freak fall in Boston, would we remember him as a top-thirty guy? The biggest loser of that near-trade was probably Clyde: he could have played with a Pantheon center for his entire prime. You know, instead of going to battle with Sam Bowie and Kevin Duckworth. Alas.
  

• Clyde peaked as the ’92 Blazers blew through the playoffs (25–7–7, MVP runner-up, a slew of “Drexler has arrived!” features), with the defending champion Bulls waiting for a Finals that many believed was a toss-up. As the argument went, Drexler and Jordan could potentially cancel each other out—I know, heresy in retrospect—and Drexler’s supporting cast was deeper, giving Portland a legitimate chance as long as MJ didn’t destroy Clyde. That led to a few days of “Jordan or Drexler?” hype, which in retrospect, given everything we know about Jordan’s homicidal competitiveness, was like covering a screaming child in teriyaki sauce and waving it in front of a pissed-off Rottweiler. In Game 1, Jordan nailed six threes in the first half—the famous Shrug Game—obliterating the MJ-Clyde argument once and for all. As the series kept going, Drexler was pounded by a disappointed national media for “not taking over” and “not asserting himself” and “not standing up to MJ,” with Peter Vecsey angrily leading the way.
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  The series stretched to a sixth game in Chicago with the Blazers taking a commanding 15-point lead in the fourth quarter, then giving much of it away with Drexler on the floor and Jordan resting on the bench. Chicago finished them off, Jordan easily won the Finals MVP and nobody ever mentioned the “Jordan or Drexler?” argument again.
  

• One month later, Drexler and Jordan were both on the Dream Team, only MJ hadn’t fully resolved the “Jordan or Drexler?” argument to his liking. By all accounts, he attacked Drexler in scrimmages with particular relish and kept talking trash about the Finals; as the story goes, Magic pulled him aside and asked him to ease up before Clyde’s confidence was ruined for the Olympics. And apparently Jordan did ease up. But between that and the ’92 Finals, the psychological damage was done. Clyde slumped for the next two years, with his stats dipping to 19–6–5 in 112 combined games, his shooting percentage free-falling (49 percent from ’85 to ’92, 43 percent from ’93 to ’94) and the Blazers subsequently floundering (consecutive first-round exits). Was Jordan responsible for Drexler’s funk? It’s hard to figure a thirty-year-old suddenly dropping from the top five to barely an All-Star unless it was the late seventies and he was plowing through booger sugar. Anyway, it’s tough to remember one star affecting another star’s career in so many different and distinct ways. Even when Drexler finally climbed the mountain and won a title in Houston, it happened when Jordan had just returned from his wink-wink baseball sabbatical and couldn’t get past Orlando. Had that Bulls team somehow made the Finals and gotten thrashed by Houston, Clyde would have gotten his sweet revenge. Didn’t happen. Years later, many would discount those two Houston championships because they happened during Jordan’s baseball years. Shit, even Clyde Drexler’s ring has Jordan’s shadow looming over it.