The Book of Basketball (98 page)

It’s possible the answer is still Russell. But everything tangible points to Wilt.
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5. LARRY BIRD

Resume: 13 years, 10 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’84, ’86 … MVP: ’84, ’85, ’86 … BS MVP (’81) … Runner-up: ’81, ’82, ’83, ’88 …
’80 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’80, ’81, ’82, ’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88), Top 10 (’90) … All-Defense (2x) … leader: threes (2x), FT% (4x) … 5-year peak: 28–10–7, 51% FG, 90% FT … 4-year Playoffs peak: 27–10–7, 50% FG, 90% FT (84 G) … ’84 Finals: 27–14–3 … ’86 Finals: 24–10–10 … ’87 Playoffs: 27–10–9, 43.9 MPG (23 G) … career: 24–10–6, 50% FG, 88.6% FT (9
th
) … highest career APG, forwards (6.1) … Playoffs: 24–10–6.5, 89% FT … best player on 3 champs (’81, ’84, ’86 Celts) and two runner-ups (’85, ’87) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 20K Point Club.

And you worried this book would be biased?
Hah!
The Bird-Magic argument mirrors Oscar-West because we reached a definitive conclusion—Oscar was better than West (1965), Bird was better than Magic (1986)—that shifted improbably over the second half of their careers. Would you rather have nine transcendent seasons from Bird, followed by a four-year stretch where he wasn’t remotely the same (and missed 60 percent of his games), or a twelve-year stretch of A-plus Magic seasons without a dip in impact? I’d rather have those three extra Magic years. And if I get struck by lightning or a telephone pole falls on me, so be it.
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We covered Bird’s brilliance in the prologue but didn’t delve into his numbers enough. Bird filled box scores to the degree that Boston reporters started a fantasy league modeled after Bird’s all-around brilliance in 1984 or 1985; as far as I can discern, it was the first of its kind. They threw in money, drafted teams of players, added up their points, rebounds and assists (the 42 Club premise, basically), and the team with the highest total took the prize. Since Bird was the obvious number one pick, they called it the Larry Bird League. Larry even drew their draft order for the first few years—or so they claimed. When people are creating fantasy
leagues and naming them after you, you’re breaking new ground, no? So how do we measure that impact? I created a simple formula that’s the bastard cousin of the 42 Club—add up a player’s final placements in the NBA’s yearly rankings for points, rebounds and assists per game. The lower the number, the better. For instance, Bird ranked second in points, eighth in rebounds and nineteenth in assists in 1985. So … 2 + 8 + 19 = 29.

That’s a better score than you think. If we made 33 the cutoff point, limited the list to players who made the top twenty in all three categories, only counted post-Russell players
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and called it the Legends Club, only eleven post-1969 seasons qualify: 1976 Kareem (18), 1972 Kareem (21), 2003 Garnett (24), 1986 Bird (25), 1974 Kareem (26), 1979 Kareem (26), 1985 Bird (27), 1984 Bird (30), 1970 Billy Cunningham (31), 1981 Bird (32), 1982 Bird (33). That’s it. Magic didn’t make it. Neither did Jordan or LeBron. Bird made it four times and nearly five (with 35 in 1987). He’s also one of three players to crack the top fifty all-time in the three most relevant per-game career categories. As well as the top 75. And the top 100. And the top-125.

Bird: 24.3 PPG (16th), 6.3 APG (41st), 10.0 RPG (46th)
Wilt: 30.1 PPG (2nd), 4.4 APG (126th), 22.9 RPG (1st)
Oscar: 25.7 PPG (9th), 9.5 APG (4th), 7.5 RPG (129th)
Elgin: 27.4 PPG (4th), 13.5 RPG (10th), 4.3 APG (133rd)
Garnett (ongoing): 20.2 PPG (53rd), 11.1 RPG (29th), 4.3 APG (135th)
Cunningham: 21.2 PPG (35th), 10.4 RPG (37th), 4.3 APG (137th)
Magic: 19.5 PPG (63rd), 7.2 RPG (145th), 11.2 APG (1st)

And we didn’t even mention that he’s the ninth-best free throw shooter ever (89 percent), or that he came within a heartbeat of being the only member of the career 50–40–90 Percentage Club (finishing with 50% FG, 38% 3FG, and 89% FT). That’s the crazy thing about Bird: his game was never about stats, but nobody put up numbers quite like his. So there you
go. Allow me three lingering Bird-related what-ifs that don’t include the name Len Bias, just for kicks.

No. 1: What if Bird’s back had held up?
Five Hall of Famers were fascinating from a “How long could they have kept going at a reasonably high level if they hadn’t been sidetracked or retired prematurely?” standpoint. Stockton and Havlicek could have prospered as role players into their mid-forties; they were physical freaks along the lines of Jaclyn Smith still looking boinkable after she turned sixty. Magic would have reinvented himself as a power forward had HIV not derailed him, and since he loved the limelight too much to walk away, his last few seasons could have been more depressing than Pacino/De Niro in
Righteous Kill.
McHale’s Panda Express menu could have worked forever had his legs held up; he could have gone on low-post autopilot. And Bird would have happily evolved into an overseer/faciliator (his role on the ’91 and ’92 Celts when he wasn’t in traction), hanging out on the perimeter, launching threes, swinging the ball, feeding big guys and soaking in the “Lar-ree!” chants. Like Matt Bonner on his greatest day ever. This would have kept going until he turned forty-five or became bored, whichever happened first. Ironically, Bird’s skill set lent itself to an unusually long career even though his back believed otherwise.
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No. 2: What if Boston had traded Rick Robey sooner?
The only NBA player who routinely shut down Bird was teammate Rick Robey, a backup center who doubled as Bird’s drinking buddy and fellow troublemaker. When the Celtics swapped Robey for Dennis Johnson before the ’84 season, Bird immediately rolled off the best five-year stretch in the history of the forward position. This wasn’t a coincidence. As soon as we master
time machine technology, let’s travel back in time and frame Robey for a murder right before the ’82 season. I just want to see what happens.

No. 3: What if Bird had come along ten or fifteen years later?
The dirty little secret of Bird’s success: fantastic timing. His heyday (1980–88) coincided with the last generation of all-offense/no-defense forwards (Dantley, English, etc.),
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and that’s not counting all the fringe swingmen (Ernie Grunfeld, Gene Banks, etc.) and clumsy power forwards (Kent Benson, Ben Poquette, etc.) torched by Bird on a routine basis. His toughest defenders were Michael Cooper, Paul Pressey and Robert Reid, lanky athletes who made him work for every shot; nowadays, nine out of ten opponents would do that. By the late eighties, the small forward spot was teeming with athletes like Scottie Pippen, Xavier McDaniel, Dennis Rodman, Detlef Schrempf, Jerome Kersey, Rodney McCray, Gerald Wilkins and James Worthy, while the big forward spot featured the likes of Karl Malone, John Salley, Sam Perkins, Horace Grant, Kevin Willis, Hot Rod Williams and Roy Tarpley. The salad days of Tripucka and Benson were
long
gone. When Bird floundered in the ’88 Eastern Finals, we assumed he was worn out and ignored a much more logical reason: maybe Rodman just shut his country ass down. Regardless, nobody realized what happened to forwards until the 1989 draft, when Danny Ferry (number two) and Michael Smith (number thirteen) bombed more memorably than Vanilla Ice’s follow-up album. And the thing is, they didn’t do anything wrong! They were just test cases for a totally different league. Had Ferry and Smith entered the NBA in 1975, they might have made multiple All-Star teams in the Don and Dick era. Going against the likes of Pippen, Malone and Rodman every night? Not a chance.
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You know what the Smith Experience was like, actually? Watching the newspaper industry battle the Internet these past ten years.
Sorry, fellas
,
the old days are over. You’re gonna lose. I wish I had better news for you.
So let’s say Bird bridged the gap between newspapers and the Internet for the forward position. If he’d come along ten or fifteen years later, he would have been the
New York Times
or
Wall Street Journal:
still successful, still a must-read, but not quite as iconic. On the other hand, he would have adopted the three-point line much more quickly, and he would have developed all the modern conditioning/training/dieting habits, and shit, maybe something as simple as Pilates would have saved his back … (Now I’m talking myself out of this. Let’s just move on)

4. MAGIC JOHNSON

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’80, ’82, ’87 … MVP: ’87, 89, ’90 … runner-up: ’85, ’91 … Top 5 (’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91), Top 10 (’82) … leader: assists (4x), steals (2x), FT% (1x) … 3-year peak: 22–7–12 … 2-year Playoff peaks: 19–7–15 (40 G) … ’80 Finals: 22–11–9 … ’87 Finals: 26–8–13, 2.1 TO’s, 54% FG … career: 19.5–7–11.2 (1st), 85% FT, 52% FG … Playoffs: 20–8, 12.5 APG (1st all-time) … best or second-best player on 5 champs (’80, ’82, ’85, ’87, ’88 Lakers) and 4 runner-ups … holds 12 different playoff records (including most assists) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 10K Assist Club

My vote for the most fascinating basketball career of all time. He’s one of the most famous college players
and
professional players ever. He had an iconic game (Game 6, 1980) and iconic moment (the baby sky hook). He played in ten championship finals over a thirteen-year span, taking home six titles in all. He cocaptained the single greatest basketball team ever assembled (the ’92 Dream Team). He starred in the greatest Finals ever (1984). He had one of the best porn names ever but became so famous so fast that we never realized it.
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He battled Erving, Bird, Moses, Isiah and Jordan in the Finals over the span of twelve years as the league evolved
from tape delay to mainstream. He meshed with his city on and off the court like nobody in league history. He was called a savior, a winner, a coach-killer, a choke artist and a loser, and then a winner again … and his prime hadn’t even happened yet. He became the first man to kiss another man in prime time. His game will never be re-created in your lifetime or mine. His first retirement announcement doubled as one of the ten biggest sports moments of all time, one of three JFK-assassination-level moments for Generation X (along with the
Challenger
exploding and the O.J. car chase) where everyone my age remembers where they heard the news. He became the focal point of the world’s single biggest health crisis in seventy-five years. And all of these things somehow happened between March ’79 and August ’92.

You know how Microsoft keeps releasing Windows with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on? There have been seven incarnations of Earvin “Magic” Johnson in all. In order:

Magic 1.0.
The skinny kid with the big smile and bad facial hair from Michigan State. We hear too much about his NCAA title win and not enough about Magic becoming the first underclassman to get picked first in the NBA draft,
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or what he specifically meant as the second basketball star other than Doc to transcend color; nobody thought of him as black, just charming and genuine. Throw in his infectious smile, unselfish passing, built-in rivalry with Bird and once-in-a-lifetime game (six foot nine, all arms and legs, capable of playing five positions), and Magic’s color never mattered. For a league battling dueling “too black” and “our guys don’t care” syndromes, this was absolutely crucial.

(Postscript: How terrific was Magic in high school and college that he actually got away with the nickname “Magic”? That’s like giving yourself the porn name Long Dong Silver—you better be able to back that up. I always respected Magic for this one.)
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Magic 2.0.
He quickly added to his legend by rejuvenating the Lakers and winning the ’80 Finals MVP with a surreal 42–15–8 in Kareem’s place—and then all hell broke loose. He missed 45 games of his second season with a knee injury, returned one month before the playoffs, then complained that his teammates (specifically, Norm Nixon) were jealous during an eventual upset loss to the Rockets in the first round, saying, “I try to give everybody the ball, keep everyone happy, but I guess it’s never enough. I never heard of this kind of situation on a
winning
team. Everybody can’t get the pub.”
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Hardened by fallout from his record $25 million contract and a nasty (but not undeserved) reputation as a coach-killer, Magic 2.0 peaked in year three when the Lakers rolled through the ’82 Playoffs. Now a devastating all-around player who played four positions and filled any void—a little like Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell on
Saturday Night Live
in that he could carry the show
and
serve as a valuable utility guy—Magic thrived defensively on L.A.’s deadly half-court trap and topped 200 steals. We’ve never seen anyone quite like ’82 Magic and the stats back it up: no modern player came closer to averaging a triple double (18.6 PPG, 9.6 RPG, 9.5 APG). But the Lakers still didn’t belong to him because he was splitting point guard duties with Nixon (something that seems incongruous in retrospect)
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and his teammates still bristled about his salary and public image. Even Kareem’s 1983 autobiography dismissed the long-believed assumption that Magic’s enthusiasm rejuvenated his career, griped about the 1980 Finals MVP vote and proclaimed, “We didn’t repeat as champs in 1981 because Earvin got injured, and when he came back he had forgotten what made us and him so successful.” Ouch.