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

by Bill Simmons

If you ever played basketball, you know there’s one rule with big guys: make sure they touch the ball enough. When big guys don’t get enough touches, they get cranky. They stop running the floor. They stop setting good picks. They stop crashing the boards. Big guys are like women—they need affection, they need to be stroked every so often, and if you ignore them, they start resenting you. Except in Dwight Howard’s case. See, nobody in Orlando ever has to worry about keeping him happy. He’s always happy!

Both were ridiculously gifted offensive players who had unusual weight with their peers, although McGrady was never discussed reverentially like Maravich was and is.

I couldn’t put Issel ahead of Artis for one reason: After Kentucky won the ’75 ABA title, the Colonels needed to trade a big guy (Gilmore or Issel) to save money. Which one did they keep? Gilmore. So that settles that.

The real Hall inducted Joe D. in 2006 even though Westphal, Moncrief and Dennis Johnson hadn’t made it yet. Why Dumars and not the others? Because of the Lanier Corollary: Dumars was the one decent soul on those bad-boy squads, a splendid team player who lifted his game when it mattered, a gifted defender who handled MJ better than anyone except John Starks. When the Association struggled with character issues in the mid-nineties, Joe D stood out for his class and professionalism. Watching him coexist with the crotch-grabbing jerks on Dream Team II was like seeing Nic Cage stuck traveling on the Con Air plane.

Instead, he’ll have to settle for no. 74, as well as being the second-greatest Sidney of all time—just behind Sidney Crosby and just ahead of Sydney the whore from Melrose Place, Sidney Rice and Sidney the lawyer from Midnight Run. Sidney, siddown, relax, have a cream soda, do some fuckin’ thing.

But that’s the thing about real life: you don’t have a reset button, and if you make a couple of poor decisions along the way, those decisions sometimes end up shaping the player or person you become.

Which leads us to a tangent: why hasn’t a team tried a player-coach since Dave Cowens did double duty on the ’79 Celtics? I believe it could work for four reasons. First, real coaches get fired all the time, relentlessly, over and over again. So we’re doing something wrong.

Look at Phil Jackson: he’s been more spiritual adviser/caretaker/relationship therapist than X’s-and-O’s teacher and the dude has eleven rings. The best NBA coaches don’t overthink things, which is perfect for a player-coach since you don’t have time to overthink.)

Would a player ever tune out one of his best teammates, someone who leads by example on the floor each night? It’s the foundation of all teams: two or three players rising as alpha dogs, everyone else falling in line. Who knows the strengths and weaknesses of players better than someone playing with them? It’s no different from George Clooney directing a movie, right?

We’ll remember Thompson as the Intellivision to Jordan’s PlayStation 2, an original prototype for every high-flying two-guard who followed. Blessed with a lightning first step, a reliable jump shot, and a 44-inch vertical leap that had him handling jump balls for North Carolina State (not strange until you remember that seven-foot-four behemoth Tom Burleson played for them), Thompson had everything you’d want in your shooting guard except height.

He didn’t need a running start and didn’t need to bend his knees. Honestly, it was like watching a squirrel, or a lousy sports movie with bad special effects where the lead character gets magic sneakers or something. You don’t earn the nickname “Skywalker” unless there’s a really good reason. I just wish someone had told this to Kenny Walker.

So what happened to him? He developed a monster coke problem like so many other rich celebs in the late seventies, battled a variety of injuries and eventually blew out his knee after falling down a Studio 54 stairwell.

So MJ, Kobe, Iverson,62 T-Mac and Wade made the leap from twenty-three to twenty-four, but Thompson took a step backward. Why? Two words: nose candy. I can’t explain why twenty-four becomes such a pivotal age for athletic shooting guards,63 but that’s the year things apparently fall into place from a physical and mental standpoint, and drugs robbed Thompson of reaching his true potential.

Imagine if Jordan had started doing loads of blow after the ’87 season, blew out his knee during a Mars Blackmon shoot and was washed up at twenty-eight? That’s basically what happened to Thompson. I’m using the word “basically” because it’s unclear if Thompson had the same fiery competitive streak as Jordan; it’s also unclear if he was victimized by the cocaine era and/or too weak to handle fame and success. So let’s figure that out once and for all.

(Hold on …) (Cue up the ominous Behind the Music music …) And that’s when everything turned.

He also understood something that Kobe and Jordan didn’t know right away: namely, that his team would win more if he sacrificed some

“All of his teammates loved him because he helped you win games, and he was the type of player that made everyone on the court better, not a player who subtracted from everyone else on the team to get his stats.”

68 As the years pass, nobody will remember that those numbers in San Antonio and Detroit spiked partly because Rodman never strayed from the basket and cared more about rebounding than anything else, even if that meant not helping a teammate who had just been beaten off the dribble.

Could the ’96 Bulls have won 72 games with Robert Horry instead of Rodman? No way. And doesn’t he deserve credit for fitting in so seamlessly with two pathologically competitive, historically unique teams (Isiah’s bad-boy Pistons and MJ’s postbaseball Bulls)? That’s why I have Rodman ranked fifteen spots higher than Horry.

We always hear that Bird and Magic saved the NBA from the depressing seventies. Doesn’t that mean they saved it from players like Maravich?

Like Maravich, the Pearl wasted two potential All-Star years in college because NBA teams were only allowed to draft four-year seniors. By the time he joined the Bullets, the Pearl was twenty-three years old and carrying God knows how much asphalt mileage on his knees.

We’re invoking the Walton Corollary here: even if a guy peaked for just two or three years as a truly great player, that’s more appealing than someone who never peaked at all.

We’ll probably see twenty more Englishes before we see another Dantley, only because Dantley’s physical, unorthodox style isn’t something taught at basketball camps and AAU scrimmages, where every quirk and idiosyncracy get banged out of every player by the time he turns fifteen.

Dantley was a pain in the bum, wearing out his welcome with five teams (all of which accepted 30 to 80 cents on the dollar to get rid of him).79 Everyone loved English. That’s the biggest reason.

there are two types of great players: guys we’ll see again, and guys we’ll never see again. Any rational fan would agree that Jordan was the greatest basketball player ever.

But we’ve seen variations of Jordan already. Jordan was an evolutionary version of Thompson (his hero, by the way); Kobe and Wade have re-created Jordan’s game reasonably well.

Unlike Stockton, McHale, Worthy, Drexler, DJ and Pippen, Reggie never played with anyone better than him

Someone should do a study on the shooting percentage of the guy guarding Reggie in playoff games. I’ll bet it’s like 37 percent. That kind of work away from the ball is as valuable as being a great passer or great rebounder because it creates shots for everyone (think Rip Hamilton). Also, the Indiana offense benefited greatly by his movement without the ball. Many mediocre players were successful playing with Reggie. Name one significant player on the team who got better after leaving the Pacers (Best, Davis, Rose, etc.). You can’t.”

I’d compare the modern advantage for older NBA stars to Sandra Bullock continuing to carry chick flicks and heartwarming Disney-esque movies at age forty-six. In Bullock’s era, female stars have remained more ageless than ever because of teeth whitening, better hair-styling, better dieting, weight training, yoga, Pilates, liposuction, Botox, implants and everything else. Bullock’s shelf life outlasted Meg Ryan’s shelf life for the same reason Allen’s shelf life will probably last longer than Miller’s shelf life: nowadays, you can remain more ageless than ever.

If he were a baseball player, he would have been Wade Boggs—not a franchise guy, but someone with a few elite skills (milking pitch counts, getting on base, stroking singles and rarely missing a game, in Boggs’ case) that made him a genuine asset as long as you surrounded him with other quality players.

With Denzel in the house, L.A. missed a chance to screw with Allen before Game 5 of the 2008 Finals: they should have shown Denzel scoring those four He Got Game baskets on the JumboTron, then cut to a grinning Denzel sitting courtside.

When fans notice if you’re trying, there’s a 100 percent chance you failed to reach your potential as a player.

Have you ever been riding the subway when a crazy person jumps on and starts doing Crazy Guy things—loud whoops, deranged eye contact, inexplicable pointing and so on—and everyone moves to the other side of the subway car to get away from him? That’s what Shawn Kemp does during Blazers games. He acts like the crazy guy on the subway.”

Cazale played Fredo Corleone and had crucial roles in five movies before dying of cancer: The Godfather, Godfather II, The Deer Hunter, The Conversation, and Dog Day Afternoon. Would you rather have Cazale’s career or be a bigger star that wasn’t respected as much (someone like Patrick Swayze or Rob Lowe)? For me, it’s no contest—I would rather be Cazale (except for the cancer part), and I would rather be Horry than Karl Malone.

I think it comes down to one issue: You know when you go to a car wash and they offer you the “everything” package? Only a few NBA players are chosen every generation for the “everything” package. If they fuck it up even a little, it’s disappointing.

he watched everyone’s eyes when he defended them, never buying any fakes until they actually looked at the basket … but Pearl was the one guy who never looked at the basket until right when he was releasing the ball, making him impossible to defend.

He shakes his head, just a beaten man headed back to prison who needs to get one final message across, finally keeping eye contact with Allen and telling him, “You get that hatred out of your heart, or you’re just gonna end up another nigger … [pause] … like your father.” Now that, my friends, is a chill scene.

I would argue that McAdoo was overrated and underrated. Maybe the merger exposed him, but he also peaked in the worst possible era for his personality and game.

His career is remembered unfairly because everyone mentions the “only guy to lead the league in points and assists in the same year” first, which is like remembering Bruce Springsteen’s career by praising him for selling so many Born in the USA albums.

Of all the point guards I’ve watched in person in my lifetime, only seven completed that final mission: Tiny, Isiah, Kevin Johnson, Steve Nash, sober John Lucas, young Tim Hardaway and Chris Paul. You never forgot any of those guys were on the court, not for a second.

We always hear about stars like Maravich who never found the right team; here’s a case where someone found the perfect team.

If you named a sandwich after Bernard, it would be a corned beef sandwich with Russian dressing, Swiss cheese, cole slaw and a dash of spicy mustard. Why? Because that’s the single greatest sandwich that nobody ever talks about, just like Bernard is the best basketball player that nobody ever talks about.

What really stood out was Tommy’s playoffs record. For one thing, he played for nine years and won eight titles as either the third- or fourth-best player on those teams.

So Sharman was significantly better than any other two-guard from his era; the numbers, awards and titles back this up, as does the fact that Sharman held off Sam Jones for four solid years. Sharman even moonlighted as a third baseman in Brooklyn’s farm system from 1950 to 1955, getting called up at the end of the ’51 season and being thrown out of a game for yelling at an umpire, becoming the only player in major league history to get ejected from a game without ever actually appearing in one. Bizarre. But that gives you an idea of his athletic pedigree.

We’ll remember Hayes as his generation’s Karl Malone, a gifted power forward with terrific numbers who played differently when the bread needed to be buttered … although Malone carried a little more weight with his peers and weaseled his way into two MVP awards, whereas Hayes never cracked the top two in the balloting.

For instance, Jordan, McHale and Hakeem all had tremendous fall-aways—in fact, MJ developed the shot to save his body from undue punishment driving to the basket—but it was one piece of their offensive arsenal, a weapon used to complement the other weapons already in place.P33

it. Could you make the case that the fall-away, fundamentally, is a loser’s shot? For a big man, it’s the dumbest shot you can take—only one good thing can happen and that’s it—as well as a symbol of a larger problem, namely, that a team’s best big man would rather move away from the basket than toward it.

the fall-away says, “I’d rather stay out here.” It says, “I’m afraid to fail.” It says, “I want to win this game, but only on my terms.” In a related story, Elvin Hayes attempted more fall-aways than anyone who ever played in the NBA. Draw your own conclusions.

each player had skill sets and personalities that lent themselves to semicomplementary roles on winning teams (we covered the benefits in Parish’s section), so it’s tough to penalize them for being that way. You can win titles with guys like Pippen, Frazier and Worthy. You know, as long as they aren’t the best guy on your team.P34

which explains why Worthy’s legs went so quickly after just ten quality NBA seasons. You can’t penalize him for a lack of longevity.