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

by Bill Simmons

His NBA clock was ticking and he knew it; he had become an attractive single woman in her late thirties with rumbling ovaries. Garnett’s famed intensity slowly morphed into something else: frustration and despair, with a touch of “I might kill everyone on my team tonight” thrown in. Still, he couldn’t ask out. He just couldn’t do it to everyone in ’Sota. To keep the domestic analogies going, he was like an unhappy husband who couldn’t stomach the thought of divorce because he didn’t want to hurt the kids.

Would that become KG’s legacy: the coulda-shoulda-woulda star who ended up being the Ernie Banks or Barry Sanders of basketball? Every time I watched him play in person, I always admired his command of the room, how he seemed larger than life at all times, how it was nearly impossible to stop glancing at him. The guy just seemed famous. He stood out.

Poor Garnett had become the Tiffani-Amber Thiessen of the NBA, someone with all the tools who should have been more successful than he was. It just didn’t make sense.

“If Duncan had Garnett’s teammates from 1998 to 2007 and vice versa, wouldn’t KG be the guy with four rings?” I thought that was bullshit—what set Duncan apart was his ability to raise his game to another level in big moments.

Meanwhile, Garnett never wavered from how he played—ever—even if it meant passing the game-winning shot because some untalented doofus like Troy Hudson had a better look.

Once Pierce and Allen were flanking him in Boston, that freed him to do Garnett things (protect the rim, make high-percentage decisions, control the boards, draw centers away from the hoop with his killer 18-footer, throw up a 20–12 every night and raise everyone else’s play with his unparalleled intensity) without dealing with the pressure of making big shots.

The signature moment: a three-point play when KG got knocked down and flung a line drive that banked in, then lay on the floor with his arms raised, screaming at the ceiling as the crowd went bonkers. We were like 18,000 people pouring Red Bull down his throat that night. He finished with a 26–14, played his usual terrific defense and found his swagger: a level of passion and intensity unique to him and only him. Let the record show that KG played one of his better games to clinch a championship. It’s something Elvin Hayes can’t say, or Karl Malone, or Patrick Ewing, or Chris Webber, or anyone else from the not-so-clutch group that Garnett escaped.

What Garnett did for the ’08 Celtics can’t be measured by statistics; it would belittle what happened. He transformed the culture of a perennial doormat. He taught teammates to care about defense, practice, professionalism, and leaving everything they had on the court. He taught them to stop caring about stats and start caring about wins. He single-handedly transformed the careers of three youngsters (Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe and Kendrick Perkins), one veteran (Pierce), and one embattled coach (Doc Rivers).

I have never watched a more contagious, selfless, team-oriented player on a daily basis. By Thanksgiving, the entire team followed his lead. Every time a young player went for his own stats or snapped at the coach, KG set him straight.

We’ll remember him like Jimmy Page or Keith Richards, a gifted guitarist who needed an equally gifted band to make a memorable album … and any solo album would ultimately be forgettable.

In other words, Isiah was actually a worse shooter for his era than Cousy. J-Kidd sucked more than both of them combined, the seventh-worst shooter from 1995 to 2008 of anyone who played 500 games or more (40 percent).

can you think of a valid reason why West (one title) and Oscar (one title) have endured historically as all-timers, but everyone has been so anxious to dump Cousy (six titles)?

Cousy has, in truth, gone much further: he has opened the road to better basketball. Perhaps no player or coach in the game’s history has understood the true breadth of basketball as well as he. He has shown, in what has amounted to an enlightened revolution, that basketball offers a hundred and one possibilities of maneuvers no one ever dreamed of before.

And it’s not like Cousy was playing like some reckless “and-1” tour scrub; every move had a purpose, every decision stayed true to the player he was.

“I’ve seen Johnny Beckman, Nat Holman, that wonderful player Hank Luisetti, Bob Davies, George Mikan, the best of the big men—to name just a few. Bob Cousy, though, is the best I’ve ever seen. He does so many things. He’s regularly one of the league’s top five scorers. [He’s] been a top leader in assists for the last five seasons. He’s become a very capable defensive player, a tremendous pass stealer. He always shows you something new, something you’ve never seen before. Any mistake against him and you pay the full price. One step and he’s past the defense. He’s quick, he’s smart, he’s tireless, he has spirit, and he is probably the best finisher in sports today.”

Beyond the statistics and testimonials, Cousy deserves credit for forming the Players Association and empathizing with blacks during an era when few whites stuck up for them.

Ernie Johnson. “As a fan—and I’ve said all year that LeBron James was the best basketball player in the world—but I’m 100 percent disappointed. Not the fact that he didn’t have a good game, he clearly didn’t have a good game. But his mentality … I go back, I played against a Michael Jordan, a Karl Malone, a Patrick Ewing, listen, their gun was gonna be empty by the end of the game. And I did not see that tonight.… This was clearly the biggest game of the season. I did not see the aggression that I needed from an MVP at home.”

Trapped on his second straight lousy team in 2005 (LeBron led them to the playoffs, anyway), I compared his situation to an early Tom Hanks movie, where you spend most of the time feeling sorry that he’s not in something better.

He won me and everyone else back during the 2007 playoffs, getting swept in the Finals, but not before submitting an ESPN Classic performance in Game 5 at Detroit: scoring twenty-nine of Cleveland’s last thirty points, overpowering the Pistons and hushing their fans like nobody since Jordan. Along with so many other sports junkies, I watch thousands of hours of games every year hoping something special will happen, whether it’s a sixty-point game, a no-hitter, a seven-run comeback, a back-and-forth NFL game, a boxing pay-per-view or whatever else. Occasionally, it pays off. Maybe there are degrees of the word, but still, every time we click on a game or attend one, deep down, we’re hoping something special happens. That night was special. Watching King James finally earn his nickname made me feel like my basketball life was being irrevocably altered. Hold onto your seats, everybody.… It’s happening! LeBron James is making the leap!

He always gave them at least two highlights: usually his Nitrous Cannister Coast-to-Coast Dunk (as patented by Doctor J, in which LeBron swipes a pass, flicks his nitrous switch, kicks into fifth gear, needs just four strides to go from midcourt to the rim and rips home a dunk, and as he’s doing it, the court briefly shrinks in size) and his Smoke Monster Block (when he comes flying out of nowhere for a hellacious weak side block, causing the opponent to briefly react like they just got attacked by the Smoke Monster in Lost).

Few players in history had more fun playing basketball than LeBron James during that 2009–10 season. That February, I worried that everything came too easy to him, that for true greatness to manifest itself “you need to lose a few times, need to lick your wounds and taste your own blood, need to sit in silence in the locker room of another lost season wondering what went wrong, and then you need to say, ‘Never again, not ever, I am not letting this happen again.’ Given how easy basketball comes to him right now, given how many people probably kiss his rear end on a day-to-day basis, given how much he enjoys playing and being part of a team, I just don’t think LeBron James has hit that point yet.”

Chris was right: in Cleveland, LeBron wanted to amaze over anything else. Once he finally tired of carrying lesser players and sought help, he announced his decision during a callously hateful free agency special on ESPN, just two days after his Twitter account opened, a few days before his website and management company launched, and a few weeks before he started filming his first sports movie.

There’s a chance The Decision was really about embracing The Secret: someone sacrificing individual glory because Miami gave him the best chance to win, and because nobody knows how to push that button better than Pat Riley. There’s a chance I will feel differently about this five years from now.

But today? August 2010? I feel like LeBron James copped out. In pickup basketball, there’s an unwritten rule to keep teams relatively equal to maximize competitiveness of the games. If two players are noticeably better than the rest and have any pride at all—especially if they play similar positions—then beating each other trumps any other scenario. They want that test. Otherwise, what’s the point? If two alpha dogs land on the same team by coincidence—like Kareem and Magic, or Shaq and Kobe—that’s one thing. That’s sports. Shit happens. But two perimeter players willingly deciding that it would be easier to join forces than compete against each other? There’s no “secret” to that.

He couldn’t top Barkley in those early Philly years, when Chuck was a frightening blend of power and finesse and even he couldn’t harness it.

He ate up Bird’s best teams because they lacked athletes who could handle him in transition, especially when he grabbed a rebound and took off on one of those rollicking full-court forays that usually ended up with him throwing a two-handed tomahawk in DJ’s mug as the Spectrum erupted. That’s his legacy, at least for me.

Malone routinely and famously shrank from the moment; Barkley thought he was better than he was. Always better off playing Tony Almeida than Jack Bauer, Chuck measured himself by Jordan and wanted to dominate close games like MJ did … and that’s what usually ended up killing his teams in the end.

He always wanted to be The Man even though he wasn’t totally that player. And that’s why he doesn’t have a ring. I actually think you’d have a better chance of winning a hypothetical ring with Malone than Barkley—like Garnett, Malone always secretly knew his place. Barkley didn’t.

Plenty of great players didn’t totally have “it” inside them. Here’s what can’t be forgiven: Barkley’s refusal to stop partying or get into reasonable shape; his career should have been 15 percent better than it was.

What happens to professional basketball without Julius Winfield Erving? Elgin and Russell turned a horizontal game into a vertical one, but Doc grabbed the torch, explored the limits of gravity and individual expression, ignited the playgrounds, delighted fans, inspired the likes of Thompson and Jordan and stamped his creative imprint on everything we’re watching today.

He’s like Cousy in this respect; Cousy showed that you could entertain NBA fans while you tried to win and so did Doc. They just did it in different ways. Cousy modernized professional basketball; Doc colorized it, repossessed it, turned it into a black man’s game. If he’d never showed up, would it have happened anyway? Yeah, probably. But it’s like Apple with home computers, Bill James with baseball statistics, Lorne Michaels with sketch comedy … maybe the seeds for the revolution were in place, but somebody had to have the foresight to water those seeds and see what would happen. For basketball, that person ended up being Doc.

Doc’s eye-popping statistics overshadow the meat of the story: few professional athletes were ever described in such glowing, you-had-to-be-there-to-understand terms. It’s like hearing William Goldman try to describe watching Brando in his prime on Broadway and ultimately failing, but in the process of failing, he was so passionate about it that the point was still made.

dunk. Because Doc played the NBA’s most stacked position (small forward) and dealt with a steady stream of Walter Davis, Bernard King, Dantley, Dandridge, Havlicek, Barry, Wilkes, Kenon, Bobby Jones, Bird, Dominique (note: this list keeps going and going) every night for the next decade.

Just the NBA portion of his career easily propels him into the Hall of Fame. For all-time purposes, the length of Doc’s career also sets him apart: sixteen seasons, all good/excellent/superior to varying degrees with remarkable durability,63 and even when he faded a little near the end, he never disgraced himself like so many others.

That was Doc’s fatal flaw: he couldn’t totally make teams pay for playing off him.

All I can tell you is this: I was young, but I was there. And Julius Erving remains one of the most gripping, terrifying, and unforgettable players I have ever seen in person. If he was filling the lane on a break, your blood raced. If he was charging toward a center and cocking the ball above his head, your heart pounded. Over everything else, I will remember his hands—his gigantic, freak-show, Freddy Krueger fingers—and how he palmed basketballs like softballs.

If you don’t think the city is teeming with black people now, you should have seen Minneapolis in 1958. America hadn’t started changing yet. Blacks were referred to as “Negroes” and “coloreds.” They drank from different water fountains, stood in their own lines for movies and were discriminated against in nearly every walk of life. When Elgin entered the NBA, the unwritten rule was that every team could only employ two black players. Nobody challenged it except the Celtics.

You could call him the godfather of hang time. You could call him the godfather of the “wow” play. You could point to his entrance into the league as the precise moment when basketball changed for the better.

How many stars have the dignity to walk away when it’s time? How many would have walked away from a guaranteed ring? When does that ever happen? Elgin lived through some things that we like to forget happened now. Lord knows how many racial slurs bounced off him, how many N-bombs were lobbed from the stands, how much daily prejudice he endured as the league’s signature black forward.

If you read about black stars from the fifties and sixties, everything comes back to the same point: the respect they earned from peers and fans was disproportionate to the way they were treated in their everyday lives.

When Elgin was serving our country in 1961 and potentially sacrificing his livelihood, there were dozens of towns and cities strewn across America who wouldn’t serve him a meal.

Every time I ever question my choice in life for a profession, I always come back to moments like this: talking hoops with someone like Elg, someone who will live on long after we’re both gone. The Dunleavy thing just killed him. You could see it. Even though Elgin was the most beloved figure in the Clippers office—and that’s an understatement—Dunleavy knew how to play the political game and Elgin was too freaking old to bother.

At seventy-four years old, he was the oldest high-ranking NBA employee by far, the last link to the days of Russell and Cousy, when black players ate at a Greyhound bus station because nobody else would serve them, when you wrecked your knee and were never the same, when you played twenty-seven exhibition games in twenty days because your owner made you. One time I asked Elg how he felt about chartered planes and he flew off the handle. “Sheeeeeeeeeet,” he said. “When I played, we flew coach and carried our own bags! We landed two, three, four times! You ever hear about the time we crashed in a cornfield?”

It’s the closest an American professional sports team ever came to perishing in a plane crash. For Elgin Baylor, it was just another thing that happened to him.

We elected our first black president six weeks later, something that wouldn’t have happened without the strength of people like Elgin once upon a time. You are probably younger than forty, so when you think of him, you probably remember Elg wearing one of those Bill Cosby sweaters and wincing because the Clippers’ lottery number came too soon. That’s the wrong memory. Think about him creating hang time from scratch.

Think of his eyes narrowing as they passed along his owner’s condescending message during that snowy night in Boston. Think of him retiring with dignity because he didn’t want to hang on for a ring. Think of him telling Rod Hundley that he couldn’t play that exhibition game in West Virginia, not because he was trying to prove a point, but because it would have made him feel like less of a human being.

If the Association nearly went under because it was too black, then why would Havlicek’s color be a negative? Because color never stops being the elephant in the room for white guys, that’s why.

Those moronic “he’d be just another good guy if he were black” claims from Rodman and Isiah. The pinnacle of the career of one of the five greatest players ever and people were still talking about color. This time, unfairly. But it always seems to come up. It’s a black man’s game. It just is. Shit, one of my first choices for a title was The Book of Basketball: A White Man’s Thoughts on a Black Man’s Game. My publishing company talked me out of it. Can’t play the race card in the title. Or something. Everyone’s sphincters tighten whenever a white guy discusses race and sports.

an extended footnote where I compared the all-time teams for Whites, Blacks, Biracials and Foreigners and figured out who’d win a hypothetical tournament. He’s biracial. He loves talking about race. And I do too … but when you’re white, the degree of difficulty skyrockets. You can’t screw up. You have to say everything perfectly. You have no leeway.

When we evaluate them, they fall into six categories. Either “undeniably and stereotypically white” (think Mark Madsen), “white but effective” (think Matt Bonner or Steve Kerr), “deceivingly white” (the Billy Hoyle All-Stars), “nonissue white” (guys who excelled to the point that you stopped thinking about their color, like Bird or West), “totally overrated white” (guys whose stock became inflated specifically because of their color: think Danny Ferry or Adam Morrison), and “totally underrated white,” which I will define as “someone who was unfairly evaluated in the past tense because he was white.” We have one example for that last category and only one: John Havlicek.