The Book of Basketball (94 page)

10. HAKEEM OLAJUWON

Resume: 18 years, 14 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’94, ’95 … ’94 MVP … ’93 runner-up … Top 5 (’87, ’88, ’89, ’93, ’94, ’97), Top 10 (’86
,
’90, ’96), Top 15 (’91, ’95, ’99) … All-Defense (9x, five 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’93, ’94) … 4-year peak: 27–13–2 … playoff record: most blocks (10) … record: career blocks … season leader: rebounds (2x), blocks (3x) … best player on 2 champs (’94, ’95 Rockets), one runner-up (’86) … ’86 plus ’94–’95 Playoffs: 29–11–4 (65 G) … ’95 Playoffs: 33–10–4.5, 62 blocks (beat Malone, Barkley, Robinson, and Shaq) … Playoffs (145 G): 25.9 PPG (6th), 11.2 RPG … 25K-10K Club

Here’s a new game show for you:
See If You Can Replicate Hakeem Olajuwon’s Career!

We have the blueprint. Just go out and find one of the best young athletes in a country that’s obsessed with soccer. (The country doesn’t matter—could be South American, could be European, could be African, whatever.) Has to be someone who spent his childhood dreaming of a professional soccer career and developed world-class balance and footwork at a precocious age. (I’m talking thirteen, fourteen or fifteen, or as those years are sometimes called, “the dawn of masturbating.”) We need to make sure he never considers basketball, not even in passing. (Unofficial odds of this happening now that basketball has gone global: 100 to 1.) We need to hope the kid starts growing, only the growth spurt doesn’t affect his world-class balance and footwork. (Unofficial odds of this happening: 50 to 1 … so just between the last two variables, we are now talking about 50,000-to-1 odds.) We need to make sure an authority figure says, “Wow, this kid was put on earth to play basketball” and pushes him in that direction, then the kid takes to the sport naturally, as if he’s been playing hoops his whole life. (Not as likely as you’d think.) We need to make sure the kid voyages to America, finds the right college, makes all the necessary cultural adjustments, figures out the sport and its nuances on the fly, welcomes the attention and pressure and somehow keeps his “little man trapped in a big man’s body” athletic skills. (Okay odds, not great.) We need to make sure this college resides near an NBA team that features one of the six best centers ever during his zenith, and not just that, but we need to hope this guy is nice enough to play pickup with our kid every summer, take the kid under his wing and teach him every conceivable trick. (Hakeem’s mentor? That’s right, Moses Malone. Are you
kidding me?)
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We need to hope our kid emerges as the best young center in basketball and doesn’t handle his chance in America like Borat did. (Definitely unlikely.) We need to make sure the right professional team drafts him and his body slowly fills out without costing him that world-class athleticism. (Unlikely, but not improbable.) We need to hope he develops the best collection of unstoppable low-post moves by anyone not named Kevin McHale. (Now we’re talking lightning in a bottle multiplied by three.) And finally, we need to hope that he has the necessary competitive chops, truly gives a shit, measures himself by his peers and takes great pleasure in destroying them. (Since only fifteen or twenty basketball players have been wired like that over the past seventy-five years, you do the math.)

Add everything up and here are your odds that we’ll see another Hakeem Olajuwon: a kajillionpilliongazillionfrazillionfriggallionmillion to one. You will see fifty reasonably close replicas of Jordan (and we’ve already seen two: Kobe and Wade) before you see another Dream. So go on YouTube, watch his highlights and congratulate yourself for seeing the only Hall of Famer who would have made it had he been anywhere from five foot eleven to six foot ten (his actual height). We knew something special could happen when he was whipping through Kareem and the ’86 Lakers like an Oklahoma twister. Strangely, the soon-to-be-ousted champs couldn’t stop heaping praise on him. Maurice Lucas simply said, “The rebirth of a bigger Moses Malone.”
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Magic decided, “In terms of raw athletic ability, Akeem is the best I’ve ever seen.” Mitch Kupchak summed it up best: “I can compare him to, maybe, Alvin Robertson in terms of being able to do everything. That tells you something, since Robertson is a guard. I’ve never seen anyone that strong, that quick, that relentless and who also happens to be seven feet tall.”

Thank you, Mitch! You just did my job for me. Hakeem finished his
coming-out party by averaging a 25–12–3 (blocks) in the ’86 Finals and holding his own against the greatest slew of big men in NBA history. During a must-win Game 5 where tag-team partner Ralph Sampson was ejected for starting a brawl, an inspired Hakeem exploded for 32 points, 14 rebounds and 8 assists. Put it this way: If I did my “Who has the highest trade value?” column that summer, Hakeem would have finished first even after Jordan’s 63-point game in Boston. But that’s when things peaked for a while. A promising Rockets juggernaut quickly self-combusted in a haze of drugs and bad luck, with Sampson getting shipped to Golden State for lemons Sleepy Floyd and Joe Barry Carroll (cleverly nicknamed “Joe Barely Cares” by Peter Vecsey).
²⁰
Poor Hakeem wasted his youth toiling away on undermanned teams while submitting dazzling across-the-board numbers and at least three “Holy mother of God!” displays of athleticism per game. We always hear about the lack of support for superstars like KG or Oscar, but jeez, the Rockets baked Hakeem a shit soufflé of teammates for six solid years (1987–1993). He complained for much of that time, explaining to
Sports Illustrated
in 1991 that it was nothing personal, but “all I was saying was, you don’t build with these guys. I wasn’t criticizing my teammates. I was only saying that it’s O.K. to have one or two guys [like that], but not a whole team of them. After all, my career’s on the line.”
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By this point, Dream’s reputation as a head case was gaining steam. During his first few seasons, he spelled his name “Akeem” and played with a trigger-happy fury, starting multiple fights and near-fights, constantly blowing up at officials, and pacing around like some menacing hothead at a bar.
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He eventually rededicated himself to Islam, found inner peace,
started fasting during Ramadan (even though it chewed up a month of every regular season), changed the spelling to “Hakeem” and channeled his hostilities into his play (still superb) … only when he started bitching about his supporting cast, it became difficult to discern whether everything was screwed on correctly. After he battled a mysterious heart ailment during the ’91 season, his stock dropped to the degree that I distinctly remember driving around once and hearing Boston radio host Glenn Ordway—someone whose basketball opinion I had always respected—pooh-pooh a caller’s idea of a Reggie Lewis/Hakeem swap, saying the Celtics would never do it. I loved Reggie as much as anyone, but this was Hakeem Olajuwon! You only had to see him in person once to think, “I will probably not see fifteen better basketball players while I am alive.” When his supporting cast improved for the 1992–93 season—which doubled as a career year for him, not so coincidentally—he broke through during Jordan’s “baseball sabbatical,” winning the 1994 MVP, winning back-to-back Finals MVPs and pillaging Shaq, Robinson and Ewing in the process. At no other point in NBA history has one superstar specifically and undeniably thrashed his three biggest rivals in the span of thirteen months. It remains Hakeem’s greatest feat. He would remain relevant for another five seasons, making All-NBA teams fourteen years apart (second team in ’86, third team in ’99). Now he’s one of the twelve greatest players ever by any calculation. And to think, it all started on a soccer field in Nigeria with somebody saying, “Man, I bet that kid would be good at basketball.”

My one historical nitpick: you could argue that Hakeem’s prime (1992–95) worked so well because he
didn’t
play with another transcendent guy. Hakeem was something of a ball stopper: he caught the entry pass, thought about it, checked the defense, thought about it some more, made sure he wasn’t getting double-teamed, tried to get a feel for which way his defender was leaning, then picked an In-N-Out Burger move to exploit the situation.
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As weird as this sounds, he was better off playing with a band of three-point shooters and quality role players; he didn’t need help from a second scorer like Dominique or Kobe, nor did he need an elite point guard to keep hooking him up the way Stockton helped Malone. He just needed some dudes to spread the floor and one other rebounder. For a salary cap era that hadn’t even really kicked in yet, Hakeem became the ideal franchise player: a guaranteed 44–49 wins even when flanked by mediocrity, and if you upgraded his supporting cast from crap to decent, you could beat anyone in a playoff series as long as Dream was inspired.
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So he was like Schwarzenegger or Stallone at their peaks—you were having a big opening weekend with Dream regardless of the script or the rest of the cast—and if you had to pick any franchise center to carry a crappy team for a few years, you would have picked Dream over anyone but Kareem. That quality separated him from every nineties contemporary except Jordan; he really
was
a franchise player. On the other hand, I’m not convinced Dream could have tailored his game to an up-tempo team like the Showtime Lakers, or even a brilliant half-court passing team like the ’86 Celtics. Playing with the likes of Kenny Smith, Sam Cassell, Robert Horry, Mario Elie, Otis Thorpe and aging Clyde Drexler worked perfectly, even if it didn’t totally make sense why. Throw in Jordan’s “sabbatical” and an unlucky career turned into a fairly lucky one, and that’s before we get to the kajillionpilliongazillionfrazillionfriggallionmillion-to-one odds that he made it in the first place.

Now that we have that settled, let’s quickly delve into something that I normally hate: numbers. You always hear about stats with Wilt, Oscar, Bird, Magic and LeBron, but Hakeem never comes up even though he’s the all-time “holy shit” stat guy other than Wilt. He averaged a 20–11 as a rookie and never dipped below a 21–12 for the next twelve years, seemingly peaking in ’89 and ’90 (averaging a 25–14–3 with 2.3 steals and 4.1 blocks), then peaking again from ’92 to ’95 (a 27–11–4 with 3.9 blocks). If we created a stat called “stocks” (just steals plus blocks), Hakeem topped 300-plus stocks with at least 100 blocks/steals in twelve different seasons (nearly double anyone else),
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notched 550 in 1990 (the only time anyone’s ever topped 500) and finished with 1,045 combined in ’89 and ’90 (the only time anyone ever topped 1,000 combined in two years). During his peak, Dream caused
five turnovers
per game along with countless other layups and runners he probably affected from game to game. (Note: I like “stocks” because it gives you an accurate reflection of his athletic ability and the havoc he wreaked on both ends. No modern center was better offensively
and
defensively than Dream. I should have come up with “stocks” four hundred pages ago. Crap.) He finished with 5,992 career stocks in 1,238 games (and another 717 stocks in 145 playoff games), coming within 8 stocks of becoming the only living member of the 6,000 Stock Club. As it is, he’ll have to settle for being the only living member of the 5,900 Stock Club. And the 5,500 Stock Club. And the 5,000 Stock Club. And the 4,500 Stock Club. Robinson, Ewing, Kareem, Mutombo, Jordan, and every other post-1974 guy couldn’t come within 70 percent of that 5,992. Seriously. You can look it up.

And then there’s this: During the slow-it-down, overcoached, way-too-physical mid-nineties, he played 197 games in ’94 and ’95 (over 8,000 minutes in twenty months as his team’s only all-around threat) and averaged a 31–10–4 with 53 percent shooting and 218 stocks in 45 Playoffs games against eight opponents with win totals ranging from 47 to 62.
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With the league battling image/style/likability problems during Jordan’s “sabbatical,” that stretch of brilliance never resonated like it should have. Neither did Hakeem’s longevity: he averaged a 21–12 as a rookie, with a 21–13 and 20 stocks in the ’85 Playoffs (5 games); fifteen years later, he averaged a 19–10 (regular season) and a 20–11 with 21 stocks in the ’99 Playoffs (5 games). He made the playoffs every year for his first fifteen except ’92, never winning fewer than 42 games or more than 58, yet he only played with four All-Stars during his career (Sampson, Thorpe, Drexler and Barkley). He led the Rockets to the ’86 Finals and came within a break or two of leading them there eleven years later;
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except for Kareem, no center stayed
that
good for
that long.
Fifteen
years? Even
ER
didn’t last as long as Hakeem. When you remember that Hakeem never would have made it without a series of miracles and mini-miracles that could never be replicated, I’m going out on a limb and saying that nobody will ever end up winning the
See If You Can Replicate Hakeem’s Career!
game show. Not even if they change cloning laws in this country.
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9. OSCAR ROBERTSON

Resume: 14 years, 13 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’64 MVP … ’61 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’67, ’68, ’69), Top 10 (’70, ’71) … 3 All-Star MVPs … 5-year peak: 30–10–11 (first 5 seasons) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 31–11–9, 47.2 MPG (22 g’s) … leader: assists (6x), FT% (2x) … career: 25.5 PPG (8th), 9.5 APG (3rd), 7.5 RPG, FT’s (3rd), assists (4th), points (10th) … 2nd-best player on champ (’71 Bucks), starter on runner-up (’74 Bucks) … 25K Point Club

Back in February 2008, I was killing time in an airline club waiting for my delayed flight to board. Sitting only twenty feet away? NBA legend Oscar Robertson. Did I jump at the chance to make small talk with one of the ten greatest players who ever lived? Did I say to myself, “This is a gift from God, I can introduce myself to Oscar, tell him about my book, maybe even have him help me figure some Pyramid stuff out”? Did I even say, “Screw it, I gotta shake his hand”?