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

by Bill Simmons

What sets him apart is the way he runs and never stops running; he has the endurance of a Kenyan marathoner. Nobody can keep up. He runs and runs and runs. He fills the lane on every fast break. He sprints back and forth along the sideline trying to get open. He’s such a remarkable athlete that Boston sportswriters openly wonder if he should pitch for the Red Sox in his spare time.

“He is the best all-around player I ever saw.” He goes down for eternity as a physical specimen and elite basketball player of the highest order. The end.

Other than LeBron, no perimeter player fulfilled more functions on a basketball court than Hondo. Other than Malone and Kareem, nobody played at a higher level for a longer and more durable time. Other than Russell and Sam Jones, nobody won more titles. Other than Jordan and Bird, nobody had more memorable clutch moments. Other than Magic and West, nobody did a better job of reinventing his game as the years passed. Behind Bird, Magic, Russell and Duncan, he might rank fifth on the Winnability Scale. Only Russell and Jordan came through more times for championship teams.

And if you have any doubt about his resume, remember that Havlicek was so consistently cool under pressure that everyone started calling him “Hondo.” That’s right, John Wayne’s nickname. The guy was named after John fucking Wayne!

He could bring out the best in the players and communicate the best. Leadership, real leadership, is one of his strengths. Everybody would say Michael is a great leader. He leads by example, by rebuke, by harsh words. Scottie’s leadership was equally dominant, but it’s a leadership of patting the back, support.”

out. LeBron never played with a true All-Star, only a peculiar blend of specialized role players, discount guys, unpolished young guys, washed-up veterans, misguided free agent signings and bargain pickups from teams cutting payroll. His best teammates from 2004–2010: Mo Williams, Larry Hughes, Ricky Davis, Antwan Jamison, Anderson Varejao and a washed-up Shaq. He emulated Jordan’s first seven years without a Pippen or a Grant.

If he had a drawback, it was a legendary weakness for the ladies—he even knocked up a beat writer who covered Philly in the late seventies (fathering future tennis player Alexandra Stevenson with her). When they said Doc was the greatest interview in the league, they weren’t kidding.

Much like no pitcher wanted to be the dick who broke Cal Ripken’s hand and ended his streak, nobody wanted to be the dick who broke Doc’s leg with a hard foul. Let’s agree that he was superdurable and superrespected.

He’s your answer for the trivia question “Who’s the only person to play professionally with Bill Russell and Jim Brown?”

I just spent the last two hours trying to figure out the top twelve modern celebrities who extracted the most success (financial and careerwise) from one gimmick.

Rodman’s rebounding barrage made us feel like he was doing it partly for numbers and attention. Moses did it out of pure love. That’s just the way he played.

What I always found interesting: the same blue-collar themes appeared in every Bird article or feature, but Moses worked equally hard and exacted just as much from a similarly challenged body.

Like Bird, he grew up dirt-poor, fell in love with basketball, succeeded early, kept plugging away and developed a tunnel vision for the sport. Like Bird, he busted his ass and concentrated only on the things he could do. Like Bird, he was blessed with one supernatural quality that set him apart: quick feet for Moses, hand-eye coordination for Bird. And like Bird (with his contagious passing), Moses had one unforgettable trick that transformed his career and hasn’t been duplicated since.

Moses Malone attacked people with his ass. That’s what he did. Of the hundreds and hundreds of games I watched while researching this book, nothing startled me as much as the Moses Ass Attack. Once you notice it, you can’t stop looking for it.

And he hasn’t endured like other seventies/eighties legends for a relatively unfair reason: his unpolished personality worked against him.

It was all little stuff, like how he dealt with the same Houston beat reporters for years and refused to call them anything more than Post and Chronicle … but at the same time, your legend can’t grow unless media members are talking and writing about you, or teammates and peers are gushing with mythical stories about you. There has to be something there to capture.

Solid analogy at the time, even better now. Dominant, but not the best. Memorable, but not the best. Unstoppable, but not the best. Shaq won three Finals MVP’s in overpowering fashion, but he only took home one regular season MVP. He won four rings and could have won a fifth if Dwyane Wade hadn’t gotten hurt in 2005 … but he somehow got swept out of the playoffs six other times.

He only took basketball seriously for one entire season (1999–2000) and intermittently for the other eighteen … and yet, his playoff performances from 2000 to 2002 rank among the all-time greatest. He played for five teams in all (nobody else in the top fifteen played for more than two except Moses) … but made the first three better when he arrived and significantly worse when he left.

On the other hand, Shaq left everyone with superstar blue balls. He became rich and famous before accomplishing anything worthy of those words; midway through his rookie year in Orlando, he’d already signed a seven-year, $40 million contract, starred in Blue Chips, recorded a rap album and become a household name.

Once he moved to Miami and transformed the Heat, we appreciated him a little more fully—his locker room presence, his passing ability, how teammates had a knack for peaking when they played with him, how he quietly had the most engaging personality of anyone—and I wrote during that season, “Shaq is like DeNiro in the seventies and eighties—everyone in the cast looks a little better when he’s involved.” His fourth title in Miami gave his career some extra weight;

Shaq shrewdly created a controversy to deflect that he was leaving because it was time to go. He blamed Penny Hardaway’s budding hubris for splitting Orlando; really, Shaq just wanted to live in California and play for the Lakers. When they dumped him because of his poor conditioning and because he made it clear that he’d go on cruise control without a mammoth extension, he deflected local blame by declaring war on Kobe (one of his smartest political moves and another reason why Shaq should run for office someday). When Miami dumped him because he looked washed-up and out of shape, he went right after Pat Riley and played the “I’m totally betrayed” card. Much like preelection Obama was a savvier politician than people realized, Shaq was a savvier athlete than people realized. Nobody made more money playing basketball. Ever.

(like when he compared his three most famous teammates to Corleones, with Wade being Michael, Kobe being Sonny and Penny being Fredo).

Shaq turned out to be the least competitive superstar of his era, someone who enjoyed winning but wasn’t destroyed by losing, someone who kept everything in its proper perspective. Chuck Klosterman pointed this out on my podcast once: for whatever reason, we react to every after-the-fact story about Michael Jordan’s “legendary” competitiveness like it’s the coolest thing ever.

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.

But 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).

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

(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.)

Teammates lived in perpetual fear of letting him down. Coaches struggled to reach him and ultimately left him alone. Referees dreaded calling his games, knowing they couldn’t toss the league’s best all-around player even as he was serenading them with F-bombs. Fans struggled to connect with a prodigy who had little interest in connecting with them.

He is, has been and probably will grow old a bitter man, convinced that it was all a plot.” Of course, Oscar included this excerpt in his book thirty years later as proof that the notoriously right-wing newspaper was bigoted. Maybe both sides were right.

When Oscar’s Crispus Attucks High School became the first all-black champion in state history in 1955, Indianapolis rerouted its annual championship parade toward the ghetto, with the implication being, We don’t trust the blacks to behave themselves, so let’s keep this self-contained.

At some point, the Big O snapped, shut himself off and settled for taking his frustrations out on everyone else. I don’t blame him one iota—even in photos of Oscar from high school to the NBA, you can actually see the grim transformation in his face. Young Oscar is wide-eyed, innocent, grinning happily in every photo. Older Oscar looks like he’s smoldering, like he’s barely happy enough to fake a smile for the photographer.

So in a Pyramid that hinges on five dynamics—individual brilliance, respect from peers, the statistical fruits/spoils of whatever era, team success and an intangible connection with teammates—Oscar’s career remains the toughest to project. Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, his opponents and teammates revered him. Yes, he took advantage of some undeniable gifts from his particular era. No, his teams didn’t succeed as much as you’d think. No, his teammates didn’t love playing with him (as much as they respected him). His statistics were remarkable, sure, but didn’t we just spend a book that’s now the size of War and Peace proving that basketball is more than just numbers?

nowadays. Every Oscar quote makes it sound like Dana Carvey should be playing him with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tropic Thunder makeup.

level. But since every laudatory Oscar story centers around his uncanny consistency and not quotes like “nobody was better when it mattered” and “this guy could turn chicken shit into chicken salad,” how can we reconcile his phenomenal individual success with his undeniable lack of team success?

Both were famously brutal with teammates, only Jordan’s competitiveness boosted his team’s collective confidence while Oscar chipped away at it. Can you succeed when you’re petrified of letting your best guy down? Beyond that, can you succeed when your best scorer also happens to be the guy running your team? Obviously not.

Much like Wilt, Oscar was four or five years ahead of his time from a physical standpoint. There were only four “modern” guards during Oscar’s rookie season; since the other three (Sam Jones, Greer, and West) were shooting guards, Oscar physically overpowered defenders the same way that Wilt boned up on the Darrell Imhoffs and Walt Bellamys.

There were eight teams and eighty-eight players total, along with an unwritten “don’t have more than two black guys on your roster” rule. So in a peculiar twist, some of Oscar’s early success happened because of racism. Unleashing Oscar on a mostly white NBA in 1960 was like unleashing a horny Madonna on a nightclub filled with good-looking twenty-year-old Hispanic dancers.

The Big O mastered a deadly high-post game that hadn’t even been invented yet—like watching a Wild West duel where one guy pulls out a revolver and the other guy pulls out an Uzi.

(Before you excuse his behavior by saying, “The guy was frustrated, he just wanted to win,” consider Magic Johnson’s plight late in his career. He was saddled with Kareem’s corpse in ’89, a Mychal Thompson/Vlade Divac center combo in ’90, then a Divac/Sam Perkins combo in ’91. His best teammate was Worthy, an excellent player who couldn’t crack my top forty-five. His second-best teammate was Byron Scott, never an All-Star and a textbook “right time, right place guy.” In a loaded league, did Magic give up, point fingers or demand a trade? Nope. He averaged 59 wins per year and dragged the Lakers to two Finals.)

Nobody sifted through Oscar’s never-ending acrimony well enough to figure him out. Even when he heroically donated a kidney to his ailing daughter in 1997 (saving her life), the moment came and went; you probably didn’t remember until I reminded you. His biggest legacy had nothing to do with talent: Oscar’s ballsy performance as president of the Players Association led to skyrocketing contracts, the ABA/NBA merger, an overhaul of free agency and every eight-figure deal we see today, only he never gets credit because the struggles of NBA players haven’t been romanticized by writers or documentarians.

He can’t go back home like Russell/Bird in Boston, or Magic/West/Kareem in Los Angeles, or even Willis/Clyde/Ewing in New York, simply because home doesn’t exist. He’s a historical nomad. He belongs to nobody. And maybe it’s better that way.

To this day, Oscar remains damaged goods—a victim of his vile racial climate, someone who battled a rare form of post-traumatic stress disorder that can’t be defined.

To re-borrow the car analogy from much earlier, you’d rather race a 2010 BMW than a 1964 BMW; you’d rather drive cross-country in a 2010 BMW; you’d rather bet your life on getting 250,000 miles out of a 2010 BMW. You just would. It’s the safe pick. They make finer automobiles now—better torque, better engines, better shocks, better balance, better acceleration, better engineering, better everything. With that said, they did make a couple of transcendent cars in the sixties.

Moses was the perfect self-made center, Bird the perfect self-made forward, and West the perfect self-made shooting guard—a little undersized (only six foot three, but with an 81-inch wingspan),46 a good athlete (but not great), never dominating (but routinely unstoppable), and someone who willed himself to be better than he should have been.

You won’t find a better stretch of all-around basketball. And that was a common theme of West’s career: he always delivered whatever his team needed. They needed him to shut a hot shooter down and he did it.48 They needed him to make a big shot and he did it.

And that’s what stands out about West’s career more than anything: he had horrible luck.