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

by Bill Simmons

(The bigger problem arose when NBA stars used those artificially high numbers to negotiate legitimately high deals, leading to the salary explosion that transformed the NBA as we knew it. And not in a good way. Well, unless you enjoy watching wealthy, coked-out, passionless basketball. Then you were pumped.)

Haywood symbolized an increasingly erratic sport: wealthy and empowered just a little too soon, looking out for himself only, thriving during an era with too many teams and younger stars being given too much money and responsibility waaaaaaaaay too soon.

The Broken Mirror became its defining figure, peaking too early, earning a ton of money and spending it just as fast, switching teams every few years (always after letting the previous one down), helping to destroy the post-Bradley Knicks, souring Sonics coach/GM Bill Russell on professional basketball, marrying a celebrity (the model Iman), developing a massive cocaine problem and even being involved in the single greatest known coke story in NBA history (we’ll get there). It can’t be a coincidence that Spencer Haywood retired after the 1982–83 season and the league immediately took off. It just can’t.

During the final year of its latest four-year contract with ABC—the network that helped nurture professional basketball into a mainstream force—the NBA negotiated a deal with CBS mandating that the winning network had to show NBA games starting between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoons. Since ABC couldn’t dump crucial college football games in October and November, a bitter Roone Arledge dropped his right of first refusal and decided to destroy the NBA on CBS. Which he did. Easily.

Bidding wars and swollen contracts damaged the new generation of NBA up-and-comers.

Darryl Dawkins is the perfect example. The guy could have been a monster, should have been a monster, but nobody had the controls. Armed with a long-term contract, Darryl had the security of dollars coming in. I’ve seen this happen so many times.… It’s not just the length of the contract that hurts, it’s the length of the guaranteed lifestyle. Unless you’re talking about athletes who are truly dedicated to the game, the only time these guys bear down is when their security is threatened.

“I don’t know what you expected. You guys just signed Sam for some serious dough, didn’t you? So obviously he must assume management thinks quite highly of him. And his wife certainly thinks he’s great. His mother thinks he’s great. His agent thinks he’s great. You’re the only guy telling him he’s not great. So, Cooz, who do you think he’s going to listen to?”

“The officiating at the end of the ABA was like the players—it was just an incredible amount of talent, just staggering. And nobody knew it. The officials were a bigger secret than the players.”

(You really want me to say it?) (Fine, I’ll say it.) Too many white guys! Okay? All right? I said it! The league needed more black guys! The ABA stole too many of them! It was a freaking problem! Okay? To be fair, it wasn’t “blacks” as much as “young athletes.”

From a quality-of-play standpoint, the ABA grabbed nearly every athletic rebounder and exciting perimeter scorer,

That’s why I have trouble taking the numbers from ’72 to ’76 seriously—particularly some of the gaudy scoring/rebounding numbers that don’t jibe with the drop in scoring—because such a relatively small talent pool spread was stretched over twenty-eight teams and two leagues.

the buzz surrounding Doc had made him cooler than any NBA player. With the Lakers and Knicks fading and the NBA’s younger stars failing to resonate with the public, for the first time the ABA finally had something the NBA needed, and a merger seemed more likely than ever. Alas, the Oscar Robertson suit was still holding it up. The NBA was like a separated rich guy who falls for a mistress from the wrong side of the tracks (the ABA), develops a relationship with her kid (Doc) and wants to marry her even though it’s probably the wrong idea … only he has to wait another five years for the divorce to clear and keeps wondering if he’s doing the right thing getting married again.

The 1975 Finals made sports history: for the first time, a championship game featured two black coaches—Al Attles for Golden State, KC Jones for Washington—and if that weren’t enough, they were wearing superhip seventies leisure suits!

Jones took heat because CBS’ inside-the-huddle cameras kept catching him crouching submissively during time-outs as assistant Bernie Bickerstaff furiously diagrammed plays and seemed to be the one coaching the team. So what if Bickerstaff happened to be black as well? This just proved that blacks shouldn’t be coaching NBA teams. Or something. Poor KC got fired a year later and didn’t get another crack at a head coaching job until 1983.

But Doc was one of the few NBA stars to successfully strike that delicate balance between “articulate spokesman and ambassador” and “slick dude who lives for dunking on heads.”

If you could pick one image that defined each league from 1970 to 1976, you’d pick Cowens skidding across the floor in the ’74 Finals and Doc dunking from the foul line in the Dunk Contest. One league played with passion and did all the little things, while the other league embraced the schoolyard elements of the game, but in either clip you’ll see fans jumping out of their seats. Still, basketball purists discounted the ABA because nobody played defense and everyone went for their own stats, so the fact that the league’s signature moment happened in a Dunk Contest wasn’t helping matters.

For one thing, nobody had seen one of these contests before, so they didn’t know what to expect; once the dunks started coming, the fans were like thirteen-year-old boys looking at porn for the first time, almost overwhelmed by the sight of everything.

So the four ABA teams that joined the NBA got crushed financially, but Brown bought in and pocketed $1.5 million? Huh? Meanwhile, the St. Louis owners struck the greatest mother lode in professional sports history, folding their shitty franchise for $2.2 million and one-seventh of the TV money from the four remaining ABA teams—money they were guaranteed in perpetuity. In other words, they received four-sevenths of a cut of the TV contract every year forever

This was the single biggest sticking point—the owners wanted compensation, the players did not—and it could have dragged on for another few years if not for a brainstorm by NBA Players Association head Jeff Mullins: give the owners compensation for four years because that’s how long it would have taken for the case to reach the Supreme Court, anyway. Everyone agreed and that was that. Compensation would be awarded by O’Brien’s office as long as the two teams involved didn’t agree first.

All hell broke loose in 1977, with two trades netting Milwaukee the first, third and eleventh picks in a superb draft—and, of course, they botched two of them (Kent Benson and Ernie Grunfeld, back when teams could waste two top-twelve picks on slow white guys without getting creamed on the Internet and talk radio).

Kermit whirls around, sees Rudy Tomjanovich running toward him and throws what Lakers assistant Jack McKinney later called “the greatest punch in the history of mankind,” breaking Rudy’s face on impact and his skull after it slammed off the floor. Kareem later described the punch as sounding like somebody had dropped a melon onto a concrete floor. Rudy rolled over, grabbed his face, kicked his legs and bled all over the court as everyone watched in horror. The final damage: two weeks in intensive care, a broken jaw, a broken nose, a fractured face and a skull cracked so badly that Rudy could taste spinal fluid dripping into his mouth.

“Why do I want to follow a league that allows black guys to keep kicking the crap out of white guys when I’m a white guy?” doubts (the underlying concern that nobody mentioned out loud unless you were sitting in the clubhouse of a country club, as well as the subplot that scared the living shit out of CBS and the owners).

Since sports fans in 1978 and 1979 took their cue from SI, everyone was thinking the same thing: “The NBA is in trouble.” Even if it wasn’t necessarily true.

You couldn’t find better advertising than slickly packaged game summaries that featured every exciting dunk, pass, and big shot and left out all the unseemly stuff. (You know, like fistfights, empty seats, utter indifference and players jogging around and looking spent for the wrong reasons.)

How bad could things have been if rich guys were throwing out $12 million checks to join the NBA?

That meant one of the most famous basketball games ever played (Magic starting at center in place of an injured Kareem, then carrying the Lakers to the title) happened well after midnight on tape delay in nearly every American city. Think how many young fans could have been sucked in for life. On the other hand, can you really blame the CBS affiliates there? I mean, both The Incredible Hulk and The Dukes of Hazzard plus Dallas to boot? That was a murderer’s row!

So yeah, it stinks that nobody watched Magic’s famous 42-point game live. But it stinks more that the NBA screwed up by not scheduling that game for Saturday afternoon so everyone could see it.

even though a star-studded affair between Philly and Boston doubled as the greatest Conference Final ever played, CBS aired only nine of a possible fourteen Final Four games (six of those nine were tape-delayed) and showed four of the six ’81 Finals games on tape delay (including the clincher).

The ’81 Warriors suspended Lucas for their last eight games while fighting for a playoff spot; then again, he didn’t leave them much choice after no-showing six games and missing three team flights and over a dozen practices.

“We were becoming a jump-shot league, so we went to the coaches and said, ‘You’ve screwed the game up with all your great defenses. Now fix it.’ And they did. The new rule will open up the middle and give the great players room to move. People like Julius Erving and David Thompson who used to beat their own defensive man and then still have to pull up for a jump shot because they were being double-teamed, should have an extra four or five feet to move around in. And that’s all those guys need.”

But as the egos of coaches swelled, so did the egos of players who didn’t feel like getting ordered around. One famous youngster battled injuries during his second season and threw up a series-losing air ball in a stunning Round 1 playoff upset. As the player headed into his third season, the team’s owner handed him the biggest contract in sports history: $25 million for 25 years. When the team struggled coming out of the gate, the player told reporters that he couldn’t play for his coach anymore and demanded to be traded. The coach got canned the following day. Now disgraced and considered a selfish jerk, the young player was booed at home and became the poster boy of the Too Young, Too Rich, and Too Immature NBA. One of his teammates wondered, “If he got mad at a player, would the player be gone the next day?” SI called him a “greedy, petulant and obnoxious 22-year-old” and decided he’s “clearly a great player. Just as clearly, he’s no longer a great guy.” The player? That’s right … Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

I’ve purposely avoided them in this book for the following reason: there’s no concrete evidence that they make a genuine, consistent difference except for a small handful of gifted leaders (Pat Riley, Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly, Larry Brown, Jerry Sloan) and forward thinkers (Mike D’Antoni, Don Nelson, Jack Ramsay).

Which brings me back to my point: unless you’re teaming an elite coach with a quality roster, coaches don’t really matter. You have your top guys—usually three or four per year—and everyone else ranges between functional, overrated, replaceable, incompetent, “my God, what a train wreck” and Vinny Del Negro. Most of them tread water or inflict as much damage as good.

Doc Rivers lost 18 straight games and won a title within a sixteen-month span. Hubie finished with a record of 424–495 and somehow became known as a memorably good coach in the process. Paul Westphal led the Suns to the ’93 Finals; within eight years, nobody would hire him. KC Jones made the Finals four of five years in Boston, took two years off, then lasted 118 games in Seattle. We have amassed overwhelming evidence that coaches are exceedingly dispensable—they’re only as good as their talent, with a limited number of exceptions.

Donald Sterling spent $13 million on the Clippers, watched the first home game from midcourt with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, then jumped in coach Paul Silas’ arms and kissed him when they won; within a few months, he’d failed to make deferred payments to players, refused to pay operating expenses and owed over half a million to the NBA’s pension fund and various creditors.

(They also passed the Stepien Rule—teams weren’t allowed to trade first-rounders in consecutive years. How many guys can say they owned an NBA team and had a rule named after them?)

This launched a twenty-eight-year pattern of franchises stupidly overpaying for players, then warning the players’ union it had to do something to keep the costs down. How could so many rich people be so dumb?

There’s a ton of hyperbole in this book, but the following statement does not qualify: no eighties song overachieved from a pop culture standpoint more than “I’m So Excited.” See? That was important.)

Why did the owners want it? Because it put a lid on escalating salaries and gave them (relatively) fixed costs. Why did the players want it? Because it forced every team to spend money; that season, Philly and New York were spending five times as much as the Pacers. As the years went along, the cap became more and more elaborate and confusing, a luxury tax component was added and Larry Coon became an Internet hero for writing a forty-thousand-word FAQ that explained every conceivable cap/tax rule and loophole.

The important thing to remember: not only was the NBA committed to cleaning things up, fans felt like the league had committed itself to cleaning things up. The days of bleary-eyed superstars drifting through games was almost over. At least until they switched to pot in the nineties.

Just know that he’s either the first- or second-best sports commissioner ever (depending on how you feel about Pete Rozelle); he was overqualified for the job (and still is); he had a dramatic impact not just on the league itself but also on the NBA’s marketing/entertainment/legal/corporate staffs (having Larry O’Brien as a boss and then Stern was like jumping from single-A to the majors);

Maybe Stern didn’t make the league take off, but he was flying the plane masterfully when it happened.

you watch the YouTube clips, the pivotal moment happens right before the finals, when Doc crouches on the sidelines and diagrams potential dunks with his two young sons and teammate Andrew Toney (replete with different phantom dunk gestures); this was one of those rare “Wow, maybe these black guys aren’t all on drugs; they actually seem like normal people” moments that the NBA needed so desperately in order to connect with secretly-still-a-little-racist America. Within

When Nike signed Jordan to a then-mammoth $2.5 million deal during the same summer when Bird and Magic filmed their famous Converse commercial, the door opened for NBA players to cross over to mainstream advertisers and become their own mini-corporations.

Anytime you have a position that features two Dons and three Dicks and your league is supposed to be entertaining, that’s probably not a good thing.

Feinstein was a big influence on The Book of Basketball because he rushes his books to get to the next one. I want you to feel the opposite with mine. I want you to say, “Not only did I get my money’s worth, but honestly, I’m burned out on Simmons for like 9 months, that book could have been about 200 pages less.” Wait, you’re already saying that? What the hell? We’re not even at the halfway point yet! Get some coffee or something.

You can’t go back, and you know you can’t go back, but you keep rehashing it anyway.

The second: “What if I hadn’t quit the Boston Herald, taken a year off from writing and tended bar in 1996?” You wouldn’t be reading this book if that hadn’t happened. I needed to recharge my batteries, stay up until 4:00 a.m., date the wrong women, smoke an obscene amount of pot and figure some shit out. That’s what I needed at the time, and nobody can tell me different.

If ’Melo goes to Detroit, you know what happens? Detroit loses the ’04 title. He screws up their chemistry and threatens Prince’s confidence just enough that we wouldn’t have seen the same Pistons team that fileted the ’04 Lakers. Also, Brown coached ’Melo in the 2004 Olympics and they loathed each other to the degree that a bitter ’Melo went into a yearlong tailspin. Do you really think these guys wouldn’t have clashed in Detroit?

Picking the wrong guy ended up winning Detroit that one championship. As for the “What if they had taken Bosh or Wade?” argument, there was a definitive top three at the time (LeBron, Darko and Carmelo), and Detroit would have been skewered for taking anyone else second. Those guys didn’t have the same value.