The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

by Bill Simmons

For Jazz fans, watching Stockton was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades. Yeah, you were having regular sex (or in this case, winning games), but you weren’t exactly bragging to your friends or anything. He was very, very, very, very good but never great, personified by all those second-team and third-team All-NBA appearances and the fact that he never cracked the top six of the MVP voting. He bored everyone to death with those predictable high screens with Malone, the blank expression on his face77 and a sweeping lack of flair. He made the Dream Team only because Isiah had burned so many bridges that Stockton was a much safer choice.78 I always thought he was more fun not to like. He didn’t have a nickname and modeled his haircut after the LEGO Man. He deserves partial responsibility for Utah’s appallingly methodical style of play in the nineties. He pulled enough dirty stunts over the years to make Bruce Bowen blush, routinely tripping opponents as they curled off screens, setting moving picks by sticking his knee out at the last second, “mistakenly” punching in the nuts anyone who blind-picked him … and yet nobody ever called him out on this shit because he looked like he could have replaced Brenda and Brandon’s dad on 90210.79