The Book of Basketball (108 page)

LEVEL ONE: A TEAM CAPTURING ITS FIRST TITLE

Think of it like hiking a gigantic mountain: you don’t know if you can do it, you nearly get derailed a hundred times, you dig deeper than you ever thought you could, you tap into a level of passion that you didn’t know you had, you still don’t totally trust that it will happen … and then it happens. Level One teams never fully believe that they will become champions until the champagne is dripping off their heads. A crucial layer of confidence is missing. For instance, let’s say you’re handsome, funny, well dressed, and wealthy—like me, only if I were single.
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Let’s say someone introduces you to Kate Bosworth at a cocktail party in Manhattan. And let’s say you’re thinking, “Holy shit, I’m talking to Kate Bosworth!” and assuming you don’t have a chance in hell with her. Are you hopping in a cab with her later that night? No way. Now, let’s say you dated Meadow Soprano for three months, hooked up with an Olsen, and fooled around with Minka Kelly when she was between Mayer and Jeter … and then someone introduced you to Bosworth. You’ve been there before with female celebs. You’ve broken that barrier down. You have an inner confidence
that you might not have had otherwise. Even better, she knows about you and Minka Kelly, giving you a little celebrity cachet with her. She doesn’t have to worry about you high-fiving yourself after an orgasm or waiting for her to fall asleep so you can film her with your cell phone.
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So who has a better chance of sealing the deal with Kate Bosworth: Great-on-Paper You or Great-on-Paper-with-Confidence You? The second guy. It’s not a debate. Well, basketball works the same way. Great-Team-on-Paper will never be as good as Great-Team-on-Paper-with-Confidence.

LEVEL TWO: A CHAMPION DEFENDING ITS TITLE

Sure, they might get bored during the regular season, battle overconfidence problems, struggle against the Disease of More and fail to find the same passion that carried them the previous year … but they snap into “You have no chance, we’re the champs” mode as soon as there’s money or pride on the line. When Lloyd Neal hissed in the locker room, “That’s why we’re the fucking champs!” after the ’78 Blazers annihilated Philly, that’s the definitive Level Two story. MJ’s parade of threes in Game One of the ’92 Finals is the definitive “That’s why we’re the fucking champs” game. L.A.’s roll through the 2001 playoffs was the definitive “That’s why we’re the fucking champs” postseason.
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LEVEL THREE: A GREAT TEAM WITH THE EFF-YOU EDGE

Only one scenario applies, and it requires a run-on sentence: you need an elite former championship team with a transcendent star in his prime coming off a disappointing playoff exit who regrouped and made the necessary
tweaks before locking themselves into Söze mode for eight months trying to climb back over the mountain and reclaim what’s theirs while taking out their frustrations from a previous collapse along the way. Think ’86 Celts or ’96 Bulls.

Now, you can’t enter the Söze zone as a Level One team. You can come close and have motivation oozing out the wazoo, but a shred of doubt loiters over everything.
Are we that good? Can we actually win? We aren’t gonna blow this, are we?
The ’91 Bulls are the best example: on paper, they were one of the six or seven greatest teams of all time by any statistical calculation. But I was there. I can report with complete certainty that most “experts” (including me)
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thought the Lakers would beat them in the Finals. You know, the old “experience over youth” thing. When the Bulls blew Game 1 at home, nobody thought Chicago would sweep the next four games. Not even Michael Jordan. (I specifically remember the Lakers being 5-to-2 favorites after Game 1.) And honestly? They didn’t become great until the last few minutes of Game 5, when Phil Jackson finally convinced Jordan to trust his teammates once and for all—the much-retold, “Michael, who’s open?” story—and the Bulls took care of business.

Level Two and Level Three? That’s another story. These teams
know
how to take care of business. They
know
what works. They
know
how to win. They
know
what it feels like to climb the mountain and know how to get back there. At this point, we’re arguing degrees. So what’s more impressive: a dethroned champion channeling its hostility into the following season and wreaking havoc, or a defending champion welcoming all comers, relishing every challenge, developing an air of invincibility/superiority and sticking it to everyone for an entire “Show me what you got!” season? Fortunately, we have the perfect case study (the ’96 and ’97 Bulls) and perfect person to answer the question (Steve Kerr, a starter on both teams and one of the more thoughtful ex-players, someone who genuinely wonders about this stuff). On paper, the ’96 and ’97 Bulls were closer than you probably remember.

1996 Bulls: 72–10 (reg. season), 15–3 (Playoffs), 13.4 point differential

1997 Bulls: 69–13 (reg. season), 15–4 (Playoffs), 12.0 point differential

Now throw these wrinkles in:

• Chicago’s ’96 playoff record was skewed because of the Eastern Finals, when a much-anticipated Orlando rematch was derailed in Game 1 after Horace Grant (Orlando’s best rebounder and a former Bull with an ongoing grudge) left with a series-ending left elbow injury. When Nick Anderson (a worthy foil for Jordan in ’95) went down in Game 3, the Bulls ended up sweeping a Magic team that should have been a worthy opponent. Remember, Penny made first-team All-NBA that year; the Bulls had nobody to defend Shaq; and Orlando had already beaten them once.
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• The ’97 Bulls signed Brian Williams
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  for the stretch run, giving them something they lacked in ’96: a lefty who could score with his back to the basket. Williams grabbed all of Bill Wennington’s minutes in the ’97 Playoffs. You’ve seen Bill Wennington play, right? That’s a bigger upgrade than Ashton Kutcher going from January Jones to Brittany Murphy.
  

• The league was better in ’97 and Utah provided a more experienced Finals opponent than the happy-to-be-there ’96 Sonics. The ’96 Bulls rolled through Orlando and Seattle; the ’97 Bulls faced a frisky Bullets team (C-Webb, Juwan, and Rod Strickland), Riley’s feisty Miami team (Mourning and Hardaway) and the Jazz during Malone’s (cough, cough) first MVP season. So going 15–4 in the ’97 postseason was no less impressive than 15–3 in ’96.
  

Before I asked Kerr the “Who was better?” question, I had been leaning toward the ’97 Bulls. The last part of my email: “Considering that you weren’t in ‘Eff You’ mode in ’97 because you had already climbed the mountain, but you guys still went out and kicked everybody’s ass to 98.9 percent of the same degree you did the year before, in my mind, that’s a greater accomplishment than just winning the title in ’96 when you had all the necessary incentives in place. Does that make sense?”

Kerr’s response:

Very interesting. I guess the question is, do you reward a team for having less motivation, or do you take points away? I could make an argument that the ’96 team was better
because
we were more motivated. The hunger factor was huge for us that year and that helped make us a great team. Two things come to mind when I compare those teams. First is the Brian Williams factor. We got him for (the final 17 games) and he was huge for us down the stretch. Having a legit post-up scorer and athletic shot blocker was something we didn’t have before. Secondly, when you’ve won a title already, there’s a sense of superiority and invincibility that wasn’t there before. The great teams use that in a positive way, which is what we did. Instead of ‘eff you’ mode like in ’96, it’s more like “You have no chance against us” mode. We were so confident from already having won a title that we
knew
we were going to crush everyone that year. That’s a dangerous mentality to have, obviously, if you don’t have a mature team. It would be easy to stop working hard. But with MJ and all of our vets, there was no way that was going to happen. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought the ’96 team was better because of the edge we had. The “eff you” is a powerful force. But the ’97 team was better on paper.
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Perfect! Thank you, Steve Kerr. We couldn’t have asked for a better guy to solve that problem. That’s why I have the “eff you” mode ranked as Level Three and the “superiority/invincibility” mode ranked one level below: because Kerr lived through both seasons, he’s wicked smaht (© Will Hunting’s buddy) and we can trust him. So if we’re figuring out the single most invincible basketball team ever, really, there are three choices and only three: the ’86 Celtics, ’87 Lakers or ’96 Bulls … although we’re covering the best ten, because God forbid I ever took a shortcut in this book. One Stanley Roberts–size disclaimer: For any “most invincible” argument, it can’t be forgotten that the NBA peaked competitively from 1984 to 1993, a few years after the merger but before overexpansion, the megasalary boom and underclassmen flooding the college draft. Check out the roster of the ’84 Celtics, who won two seventh games to clinch a fifteenth banner, outlasted a seemingly unbeatable Lakers team, and were never considered for my top ten:

STARTERS: Larry Bird (first of his three MVP years), Cedric Maxwell (’81 Finals MVP), Robert Parish (top–fifty-five Pyramid guy), Dennis Johnson (top–fifty-five Pyramid Guy, ’79 Finals MVP), Gerald Henderson (good enough to get swapped for Seattle’s unconditional number one pick that summer)
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BENCH: Kevin McHale (top-forty Pyramid guy, best sixth man ever), Danny Ainge (two-time All-Star, fourteen-year veteran), M. L. Carr (one of the league’s better bench players), Scott Wedman (two-time All-Star, best player on an ’81 Kings team that came within one win of the Finals), Quinn Buckner (former top-ten pick, 10-year veteran).

See the benefits of a smaller league (just twenty-three teams) with incompetently run teams routinely screwing up drafts and giving away number one picks? Once the league began adding franchises and diluting its talent pool, it became nearly impossible to construct juggernauts like the ones from the Bird-Magic era. In the last fifteen years, we’ve only seen two competitive monsters: Jordan’s post-baseball Chicago teams and the
first two Shaq-Kobe teams. In a thirty-team league with nearly every front office knowing what it’s doing,
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with owners constantly fearing the salary cap and luxury tax, you cannot build a contender with a three-time MVP, three Finals MVPs, four Pyramid guys, McHale coming off the bench, Ainge as your third guard and Wedman as your eighth man. It’s not happening. You can’t get lucky enough times; the odds are too great.

Hence, for the purposes of this chapter, I’m ignoring the pre-1960 teams (not enough black players, defense or quality shooting), severely penalizing the 1970–76 teams (because of the expansion/ABA double whammy) and pre-1970 teams (because I’ve seen the tapes and you can’t tell me with a straight face that the ’65 Celts or ’67 Sixers wouldn’t have gotten swept by the ’01 Lakers by 25 points a game), and I’m discounting the post-MJ teams (because it’s impossible to put together a ridiculously talented team in a thirty-team league with cap/tax constraints). The teams left standing will be judged by four factors and only four.

1. 1. Invincibility at the time coupled with a willingness of everyone else to concede, “We had no chance against those guys.” This is a clear-cut yes-or-no question. You can easily tell from the articles written during the season and after the Finals. If writers are raving about the team and struggling to put them in a historical context, and if their opponents are gushing about them, then something magical just happened.
   

2. 2. Level of consistent/methodical/transcendent greatness from October to June. You can figure this out with regular-season/Playoffs records, double-digit winning streaks, high point differentials, few Playoffs losses and high margins in closeout games. The last one is my favorite: when invincible teams smell blood, they shift into “we aren’t just winning this, we’re going to hopefully ruin their confidence for the next five years and give our fans a lifelong memory” mode.
   

3. 3. Their defense of that “greatest season” the following year. Sorry, if you just submitted a historic season that might be remembered for eternity, shouldn’t that mean something to everyone who was involved? Show some pride. Protect your title. Make us feel like you’d rather die than lose your championship belt. What’s the point of winning a title if you aren’t going to defend it?
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   4. Hypothetical ability to transcend eras and succeed no matter the year. And yes, this is the single toughest ingredient to project; we’re eliminating nearly everyone before 1980 for the reasons laid out in the “How the Hell” chapter. God bless Russell’s Celtics teams, but they weren’t beating MJ’s Bulls with Hondo and Sam Jones handling the ball, and they definitely weren’t beating Bird’s Celtics with Tommy Heinsohn guarding Kevin McHale. As for the hypothetical stuff, you’re just going to have to trust my expertise. You’ve come this far. In the words of Bobby Knight, relax and enjoy it. Whoops, he was talking about rape. Bad example. Um, just relax and enjoy it.
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In my humble opinion, only twenty NBA champions deserved special commendation for this chapter. I narrowed it down to ten honorable mentions and an elite ten.

HONORABLE MENTION

THE ’61 CELTICS (57–22, 8–2 IN PLAYOFFS)