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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Simmons
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August 16, 2021 - June 1, 2022
Still, I was biased for one reason: I had watched nearly every minute of that Celtics season, whereas I had only seen pieces of 25–30 Hornets and Lakers games. My affection for the Celtics didn’t taint my opinion but my constant exposure to them did. Did I know exactly what Chris Paul did for the Hornets?
Ideally, I want a player who can’t be replaced, then an alpha dog, then someone who owned that season to some degree, then a pick who doesn’t need to be overdefended to a prejudiced party … and after everything’s said and done, a choice who vindicates my support by kicking ass in the playoffs.
But Elgin’s 38–19–5 makes no sense. A United States Army Reservist at the time, Elgin worked in the state of Washington during the week, living in an army barracks and leaving only whenever they gave him a weekend pass. Even with that pass, he had to fly coach on flights with multiple connections to meet the Lakers wherever they were playing, throw on a uniform and battle the best NBA players, then make the same complicated trip back to Washington in time to be there early Monday morning. That was his life for six months.
Even if some votes were strategic—no Laker was voting for Russell, no Celtic was voting for Elgin, and maybe no Royal was voting for Elgin or Russell—it’s telling that inexplicable votes always seemed to be for white guys.
Well, this was the most racist MVP voting year ever. You had Pettit’s bizarre landslide win (six times as many first-place votes as Russell?), half the league ignoring Elgin, the Cooz stealing four of Russell’s first-place votes and four other white players (Arizin, Schayes, Sears and Hagan) unaccountably earning first-place votes. You can’t play the “Pettit was a sentimental choice” card because he’d already won in ’56. And if you’re not buying the race card, remember the times (pre-MLK, pre-JFK, pre-Malcolm, pre-desegregation), the climate (in baseball, the Red Sox signed their first black
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Their three black players (Baylor, Boo Ellis and Ed Fleming)41 were not allowed to check into their hotel or eat anywhere in town except for the Greyhound bus station.
clothes. I said, ‘What they did to you isn’t right. I understand that. But we’re friends and this is my hometown. Play this one for me.’ Elgin said, ‘Rod, you’re right, you are my friend. But Rod, I’m a human being, too. All I want to do is be treated like a human being.’ It was then that I could begin to feel his pain.”
But the indignity of a hotel clerk acting as if you aren’t there, or people who won’t sell you a sandwich because you’re black … those are the things you never forget.”
Much like Steve Nash in ’05 and ’06, this was the proverbial “nobody else jumps out, I really like watching this guy … fuck it” vote. You felt good about yourself if you voted for Wes; it meant you knew your hoops and appreciated the little things about basketball.
What is it? An honor that says definitively, “The majority of us agreed that this guy was the most important player of this particular season.” And since that’s the case, everyone screwed up because four months after the ’81 playoffs ended, Bird graced the cover of SI for a feature titled, “The NBA’s Best All-Around Player.”
When Shaq battled minor injuries and Dwyane Wade escalated his game to “poor man’s MJ” heights, there were just enough cracks in Shaq’s MVP campaign that the door opened for Nash, colored by a slew of “It’s been such a delight to watch someone this unselfish who handles himself with so much class” media comments (in columns or on radio), a nice way of saying, “I’m glad he’s not one of those me-first black guys with tons of tattoos who pounds his chest after every good play.”
For my buddy House’s bachelor party in 2008, a group of us trekked to Vegas for four days and landed at the world-renowned Olympic Garden one night. Normally in strip joints, I suggest we find a corner and surround ourselves with those big comfy chairs—I call it the “Chair Armada”—so we aren’t continually approached by below-average strippers trying to pull the “Maybe if I plop right down on his lap, he’ll feel bad for me and buy a lap dance” routine. There wasn’t a corner this time around, so we grabbed a few chairs facing the stage and it worked almost as well. Unable to dive-bomb us from
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Just like Monty’s stripper, the Mail Fraud circled the MVP voters for ten solid years and never finished higher than third.
Then SI’s Jackie MacMullan wrote the following piece for her March 19 column: Headline: “The Jazz Master” Subhead: “Malone is playing like an MVP—not that anyone has noticed.” First sentence: “Jazz forward Karl Malone knows Michael Jordan will win the league MVP trophy again.” You get the idea. You can’t blame Jackie for looking for a cute angle—she spent about 800 words talking about how underappreciated Malone was over the years.
the Tipping Point Friend. Every group of female college friends goes between eight and twelve girls deep. Within that group, there might be three or four little cliques and the backstabbing is through the roof, but the girls get along for the most part and make a big deal about hanging out, doing dinners, having special weekends and everything else. Maybe two of them get married early, then the other ones start dropping in their mid-twenties until there’s only five left—the cute blonde who can’t get a boyfriend because she’s either a drunk, an anorexic or a drunkorexic; the cute brunette who
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wish Utah and New Orleans would switch last names so New Orleans could be the Jazz again. Let’s do the right thing here.
Let’s add one ESPN analyst with a snarky sense of humor, someone who will say things to Jay Bilas like “You hate short wingspans more than Lindsay Lohan hates dignity.” (Fine, fine, I’ll do it. Count me in.)
What about Jim Nantz saying, “Let’s go to Verne Lundquist on sixteen, where there’s apparently been some gunfire again”?
I wish the All-Star Game would be changed to the following format: best two players in the league buck up for first choice, then proceed to pick their teams like they’re on a playground.
I wish we would shorten the regular season by six games, guarantee the top six seeds in each conference, then have a double-elimination tourney for the seventh and eighth seeds between the remaining
no team could tank down the stretch for draft picks without insulting paying customers beyond repair.
Because I despise the following argument: Come on, that’s the way we’ve always done it! When those nine words become the sole reason for keeping something intact, it’s a bigger red flag than the one Nikolai Volkoff waved.
If you don’t keep moving, that means you’ve stopped. With the Basketball Hall of Fame, we stopped. The place doesn’t work. It’s been a failure for twenty-five years and counting.
The trip works because there’s no easy way to get there; the closest airport is an hour away, making it more rewarding since it’s a sacrifice just to get there. It works because they built a gigantic hotel in Otsego, New York, and flanked it with a fantastic golf course. It works because of 150 years’ worth of baseball memories and memorabilia, and because of the generational twinge with any Cooperstown trip.
So why hasn’t the NBA dumped Springfield and built its own Hall of Fame? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it! Hence the problem: what you’re about to read, for all intents and purposes, is a pipe dream. It will never happen. The NBA would never do it—they’re too invested in the Springfield location, just like they’re too invested in the WNBA.14 This is the closest you will ever come to a pure NBA Hall of Fame:
Ideally, the Hall of Fame should be a place where someone could stroll in, spend weeks walking around and absorb everything about the game; by the time they departed, they would know everything there is to know about that particular sport. Cooperstown, Springfield and Canton are more interested in showcasing as much stuff as possible; even their Hall of Famer plaques are randomly showcased with no real thought given to each player’s specific place in history. It’s like having a Hall of Fame for models and putting the plaques for Gisele Bundchen and Christie Brinkley right next to the one for
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Nash is a much better shooter, he’s in better shape, he plays harder, he tries harder on defense, he’s more technically sound … he’s just better. But he didn’t have anything close to Cousy’s career, nor did he match Cousy’s impact on his generation (as a player, personality, winner and innovator). So how do we judge which guy mattered more?
So the Nash model wins the “Who were the most talented players ever?” question, but the Cooz model wins the “Who were the most groundbreaking players ever?” question. And both matter.
Then Russell showed up and ruined everything. Satch Sanders jokes that Russell terminated the careers of Johnston, Harry Gallatin, Ed Macauley, Charlie Share and every other old-school center (translation: white guy). Sifting through the stories and anecdotes, unleashing Russell in the mid-fifties sounds like what might happen if Dwight Howard joined the WNBA.
You know how casinos can only be built in Nevada, in Atlantic City or on Indian reservations if they’re on land, but you can have gambling as long as there’s water around? In French Lick, they built a casino with a man made mini lake around it; you go inside by walking over a moat. And you thought people in Indiana were dumb.
they refuse to weigh the impact of each inductee, so there’s never a cutoff guy for each position—aka the guy who barely made it, the “wall” everyone else needs to climb—so you can’t evaluate a power forward’s candidacy simply by asking, “Was he better than Tom Chambers?”
Twyman’s finest contributions came off the court: after teammate Maurice Stokes was felled by a career-ending illness, Twyman’s family took Stokes in, cared for him, raised money to pay his bills and was eventually immortalized in the 1973 movie Maurie, as well as a phenomenal Twyman/Stokes video exhibit in Springfield that I watched during every visit as a kid.7 Throwing in the racial wrinkle (Twyman was white, Stokes was black) and social climate at the time, this has to rank among the better feel-good sports stories. So how does everyone remember Brian’s Song and nobody remembers Maurie?
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KJ was like the high school slut who spends time with everyone on the football team … then a new transfer comes in senior year, starts dating her and everyone on the team gets a big kick out of it. That’s what KJ was like. We all went a few rounds with KJ. I miss having him around for comedy’s sake.)
(Nobody meant more to his teammates. When Paul appeared on Kimmel’s show in 2008, the other Hornets sat in the audience. After the show, when Kimmel asked him to film a comedy bit and Paul agreed, his teammates tagged along instead of hitting Hollywood for a night out. They all left together. These are the stories I want to hear about my Pyramid Guys.)
I’ve never been a fan of gifted offensive stars who couldn’t defend anyone, screwed over entire cities and thrived in dunk contests versus playoff games. In a related story, Vince has played eleven years without making it past the second round. Even weirder, his cousin Tracy McGrady never made it past the first round.
His legacy? He’s the premier “so talented, shoulda been so much better” guy of his generation.
With the notable exceptions of Howard and Young Shaq, there hasn’t been a force of nature like Young Kemp: he ran the floor better than any big man ever, finished off alley-oops from every conceivable angle (and some that hadn’t been conceived yet) and dunked on everyone in sight
Pantheon). We haven’t seen anyone like him before or since. He also had one of the better nicknames of the past thirty years: “Reign Man,” definitely the name of his sex tape had he ever released one.
In the ’96 playoffs, he outplayed Hakeem in a sweep of Houston, bested Mailman in the Jazz series, and thrived in the Finals against Dennis Rodman. Then Seattle signed semi-stiffy center Jim McIlvaine, for the reprehensibly dumb figure of $33 million. Kemp was saddled with a crummy contract and coming off a breakthrough spring in which he nearly busted down the Pyramid door like a SWAT cop. Instead of using excess cap space to fix Kemp’s deal, Seattle paid a backup center twice as much. A bitter Kemp wiped the gym every day with the much wealthier McIlvaine, eventually falling into a
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Like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Horry was always there if you needed him. He was a terrific help defender who constantly covered for teammates: big enough to handle low-post players, quick enough to handle perimeter scorers. He only asserted himself when his team truly needed him, never caring about stats or touches—giving him something in common with maybe 1.87 percent of the league—and routinely getting better when it mattered. What more would you want from a supporting player?
For a mailbag, a reader asked me once if I would rather have Horry’s career (seven rings and rich) or Barkley’s career (no rings and obscenely rich). I picked Horry without blinking. Imagine playing on seven champions, ending up with a cool nickname, earning $55 million and the everlasting respect of everyone who ever played with or against you … and never dealing with any residual superstar BS? Have a great game, everyone notices you. Have a terrible game, nobody notices you. Is there a better gig? In a league loaded with players who have a distorted belief in their own talents, Horry
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If you played for ten years in the fifties and sixties, peaked for five, and starred for a champion and a couple of runner-ups, that was a really good career during the Mad Men era, when everyone traveled coach, shared hotel rooms with roommates, smoked butts and drank coffee, got plastered after games, didn’t work out, didn’t eat right, didn’t take care of their bodies and banged bodies like they were playing rugby.
If the Best Damn Sports Show Period34 ever did a countdown of the top fifty racists in sports history, Hagan’s Hawks teams would have ranked up there with Jimmy the Greek, Al Campanis, Dixie Walker, Tom Yawkey and everyone else.35 In an extended section about Lenny Wilkens in Breaks of the Game, it’s revealed that Hagan was the only Hawks teammate who reached out to Wilkens and treated him like an equal.
Call it the Bob Lanier Corollary: if someone is loved and respected as a person by fellow players and media members, his actual talents rarely match the way he’s evaluated.
“All Dandridge is—a fact known to his peers for a couple of years now—is the best all-round player at his position.”
someone who did all the little things, drifted between three positions, defended every type of forward (famously outdueling Julius Erving in the ’78 Playoffs) and routinely drained monster shots
Getting the number eight pick in the Scott trade allowed him to use the number six pick on Bird. Like always with Red from 1950 to 1986, even when something like the Westphal/Scott trade didn’t work out, eventually it worked out.
polarizing superstars of the last decade, then Howard already has this decade sewn up.
What?????? If Jordan was consumed by winning, then Howard is consumed by winning people over.
Gentle giants don’t win titles. They only bring you close enough to break your heart.
