The Book of Basketball (16 page)

By the mid-eighties, the comedy world had figured it out and reached the place it needed to be. But it didn’t just
happen.
The civil rights struggle, three assassinations (JFK, RFK and MLK), and a growing discontent about Vietnam altered the comedy scene in the sixties; people became more serious, less trusting, more prone to discuss serious issues and argue about them. That’s how we ended up with Woody and Lenny. The seventies were marred by a polarizing war and the Watergate scandal, pushing disillusioned Americans into cynical, outspoken and carefree directions (drugs, free sex, etc.), a spirit that quickly manifested itself in comedy. The comedians of the late seventies and early eighties learned from everyone who had pushed the envelope—what worked, and more importantly, what didn’t work—and developed a more somber, reflective, sophisticated attitude stemming from how the previous generation’s pain shaped their perspective. A perspective that, for better and worse, hasn’t really changed since. And now we’re here. Were Bird and Magic better in ’84 than LeBron and Wade are right now? It’s a nice debate. Was Eddie Murphy funnier in ’84 than Chris Rock is right now? It’s a nice debate. But if you’re asking me whether a
Get Smart
episode from 1967 is funnier than a
South Park
episode in 2009, no. It’s not a debate.

So it’s all about context. The ebbs and flows of the years (and with the NBA, the seasons) affect our memories and how we evaluate them. If we’re figuring out the best players and teams of all time—don’t worry, we’re getting there—we need to examine every season from 1946 (year one) through 1984 (year thirty-nine) and the crucial developments that helped us get here. Consider it a brief and only intermittently biased history of how the NBA became the NBA.
²

1946–1954: GROWING PAINS

Heading into the summer of ’54, everyone thought the NBA was going down in flames. And they believed it for five reasons.

Reason no. 1.
Without rules to prevent intentional fouling, stalling, and roughhouse play, league scoring dropped to an appalling 79.5 points per game. Every game played out like a Heat-Knicks playoff slugfest in the mid-nineties, only with clumsy white players planting themselves near the basket, catching lob passes, getting clubbed in the back and shooting free throws over and over again. If you were protecting a lead, your point guard dribbled around and waited to get fouled. If you were intentionally fouling someone, you popped him to send a statement. Players fought like hockey thugs, fans frequently threw things on the court and nobody could figure out how to stop what was happening. You can’t really overstate the fan-unfriendliness (I just created that word) of the stalling/fouling tactics. There was the time Fort Wayne famously beat the Lakers, 19–18. There was the five-OT playoff game between Rochester and Indy in which the winner of each overtime tap held the ball for the rest of the period to attempt a winning shot, leading to a bizarre situation in which Rochester’s home fans booed and booed and ultimately started leaving in droves even with the game still going. The ’53 Playoffs averaged an unbelievable
eighty
free throws per game. The anti-electrifying ’54 Finals featured scores of 79–68, 62–60, 81–67, 80–69, 84–73, 65–63 and 87–80. You get the idea.

Reason no. 2.
The league suffered its first betting scandal when Fort Wayne rookie Jack Molinas was nabbed for wagering on his own team.
³
Even after Molinas had been banned and commissioner Maurice Podoloff prohibited gambling on any NBA games, the damage was done and the league took an inordinate amount of abuse on sports blogs and radio shows.
⁴

Reason no. 3.
The ’54 playoffs were screwed up by an ill-fated “What if we slapped together a six-game round robin with the top three teams in each conference?” proposal, which led to the Knicks getting knocked out in a nationally televised quagmire that lasted longer than any NFL game. According to Leonard Koppett, “The game encompassed all the repulsive features of the grab-and-hold philosophy. It lasted three hours, and the final seconds of a one-point game were abandoned by the network. The arguments with the referees were interminable and degrading. What had been happening, as a matter of course, in dozens of games for the last couple of years, was shown to a nationwide audience in unadulterated impurity.”
⁵

Reason no. 4.
Since everyone traveled by train and bus back then, the league stretched only from Boston to Minnesota, with just three “major” television markets in place (Boston, Philly and New York) and seven smaller markets (Minneapolis, Syracuse, Baltimore, Rochester, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Milwaukee). Let’s just say that the Minneapolis-Syracuse Finals in ’54 didn’t knock
I Love Lucy
out of the number one Nielsen spot.
⁶

Reason no. 5.
The lily-white league desperately needed some, um … how do we put this … um … I want to be politically correct … you know, especially after the whole Imus/Rutgers thing … so let’s just say this as discreetly as possible … um … well
… the league needed more black guys!

1954–1955: THE LIFESAVER

When Syracuse owner Danny Biasone
⁷
created the 24-second shot clock, his brainstorm didn’t do much except for speeding up possessions, eliminating
stalling, hiking league scoring by 13.6 points per team and basically saving the league. How did he arrive at 24? Biasone studied games he remembered enjoying and realized that, in each of those games, both teams took around 60 shots. Well, 60 + 60 = 120. So Biasone settled on 120 shots as the minimum combined total that would be acceptable from a “I’d rather kill myself than watch another NBA game like this” standpoint. And if you shoot every 24 seconds over the course of a 48-minute game, that comes out to … wait for it … 120 shots! Biasone came up with the idea in 1951 and spent three years selling the other owners on it, even staging an exhibition game for them in August 1954, using a shot clock, to prove the idea worked. That’s how we ended up with a 24-second clock. Of course, the nitwits in Springfield didn’t induct him until 2000, which would have been touching if poor Biasone hadn’t been dead for eight years. Really, inventing the shot clock and saving professional basketball wasn’t enough of an accomplishment to make the Basketball Hall of Fame for forty-one years? And you wonder why I’m blowing it up later in the book. Personally, I think we should create a $24 bill and put Biasone’s picture on it.

The karma gods rewarded Biasone when Syracuse beat Fort Wayne in seven for the ’55 title
⁸
(the second-lowest-rated sporting event of all time behind Fox’s
Celebrity Boxing 2).
Coincidence? I say no. Scoring cracked 100 per game by the ’58 season. One year later, Boston beat Minnesota by a record score of 173–139, with Cousy finishing with 31 points and a record 29 assists. And the NBA never looked back.

One other essential change: the fouling rules were revamped. A limit was placed on team fouls (six per quarter, followed by a two-shot penalty); an offensive foul counted as a team foul but not free throws unless the offending team was over the limit; and any backcourt foul counted as a team foul. The first change prevented teams from fouling throughout games without repercussions; the second change sped up games; and the third change made teams pay a price for fouling anywhere on the court. Sounds like three simple, logical, “why the hell didn’t they always do that” tweaks, right? It took the league
eight years
to figure it out.
I’d compare the NBA’s first eight years to the first eight years of porn (1972–80)—yeah, some good things happened and everyone who was there remembers those years fondly, but ultimately we moved in a much better, more logical, and more lucrative direction. The porn industry didn’t take off until it transferred everything to videotape; the NBA didn’t take off until it created a shot clock.
⁹

1955–56: MIKAN II: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

After his ’56 Lakers floundered to a 5–15 start and attendance petered, Big George stepped down as general manager, made an ill-fated return
¹⁰
and couldn’t handle the game’s increased speed. As Koppett described it, the plodding Mikan “simply wasn’t equipped for the 24-second game. The widened foul lane he could handle; the constant running he could not.” And I’m supposed to rank Mikan as one of the top thirty players of all time? Bob Pettit filled Mikan’s void by winning the league’s first MVP trophy, leading the league in scoring and rebounding for a Hawks team that fled Milwaukee for St. Louis before the season—in retrospect, a bad career move given the success of
Happy Days
two decades later.
¹¹

1956–1957: RUSSELL

Boston’s Red Auerbach traded future Hall of Famers Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan for Russell’s rights before the 1956 draft. Why? Because he
needed a “modern” center who could handle the boards, protect the rim, and kick-start fast breaks for his speedy guards. Red anticipating in 1956 exactly where the sport was heading—to a T—remains his single greatest accomplishment. Well, that and living into his mid-eighties even though he lived on Chinese food and went through cigars like breath mints. For the Celtics, Russell carried them to the ’57 title. For the NBA, Russell imported previously foreign concepts like “jumping,” “dunking,” “shot blocking” and “blackness.” The ultimate win-win.

1957–1958: BASKETBALL CARDS

After Bowman’s 1948 set bombed with fans, Topps waited a full decade before trotting out its first NBA set. Eighty players (including veterans like Cousy and Schayes) suddenly had their own “rookie card.” Six decades later, it’s practically impossible to find those cards in mint or near-mint condition for obvious reasons (the set sold poorly) and less obvious reasons (most of the cards were miscut, off-center, and either overprinted or underprinted).
¹²
Russell’s short-printed rookie trails only Mikan’s ’48 Bowman rookie (worth $9K-plus in near-mint condition) in the Most Valuable Basketball Card Ever race. Another four years passed before Fleer made an ill-fated, one-year jump into the card business with a now-valuable, hard-to-find 1961–62 set that featured rookies for Wilt, West and Oscar (and might be the least exciting cards ever made). Three sets, three failures. No more basketball cards were produced until the 1969–70 season, when Topps released a “tall boy” set of ninety-nine cards that doubled as rookies for Kareem, Hondo, Willis, Pearl, Frazier and Wilkens.

Why is this important? Every relevant rookie card from 1946 to 1970 can be found in the ’48 Bowman, ’58 Topps, ’62 Fleer and ’70 Topps sets. If this book becomes the
Da Vinci Code
of NBA books, I’m using part of my financial windfall to buy these four sets in mint condition. The rest of
the money will be spent on a Manhattan Beach house on the water, a minority stake in the Clippers that includes courtside seats, a BMW M6 convertible, hookers, divorce lawyers, a Hollywood production company that takes a ton of meetings and lunches but never actually produces anything, and expensive Zegna shirts that show off my chest hair. Move over, Donald Sterling—there’s a new sheriff in town.

1958–60: COLORIZATION

Not only did Lakers rookie Elgin Baylor follow Russell’s lead by bringing hang time, explosiveness, and midair creativity into the league, but Wilt Chamberlain was finishing a one-year Globetrotters stint
¹³
and planned on joining Philadelphia the following year. (The Warriors had drafted Wilt as a territorial pick in 1955 when he was a senior in high school. Don’t ask.) Anticipating his arrival, the league created an offensive goaltending rule, nicknamed the Wilt Chamberlain Rule, that prohibited offensive players from tipping shots on the rim. The rule evolved over the years because, in the tape of Wilt’s 73-point game in ’62, he redirected a number of jump shots from teammates into the basket
before
they hit the rim, something that wouldn’t be legal now. They had to have tweaked the rule in the mid-sixties. By the way, you know you’ve arrived in life when you get a rule named after you.
¹⁴

The Dipper exceeded all expectations in his rookie season, averaging a record 37.6 points, capturing the Rookie of the Year, MVP, and MLBHC (Most Likely to Bang Hot Chicks) awards and even inspiring NBC to expand its telecasts to Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
¹⁵
On the other hand, Wilt became so frustrated by constant pounding from smaller opponents
that he briefly retired in the spring of 1960. With other stars like Cousy complaining about the interminable length of the season
¹⁶
(as well as constant traveling, low salaries, the physical toll from a brutal schedule and the league’s refusal to protect them from doubleheaders and back-to-back-to-back games), the NBA suddenly faced its second crisis: a public breach with its stars. This wouldn’t fully manifest itself for another four years. And then? It manifested itself. Like a bitch.

1960–61: THE SCORING BOOM

Not necessarily a good thing. Why? Nobody played defense, and every game looked like a disjointed All-Star contest or even worse a college pickup game where nobody runs back on D because they’re sweating out the previous night’s keg party. The ’61 Celtics led the league in scoring (124.5 per game) and averaged 119.5 field goal attempts and 33.5 free throw attempts. To put those numbers in perspective, the 2008 Celtics averaged 76 field goal attempts and 26 free throw attempts per game. That’s insane. Play suffered so badly that NBC dropped the NBA one year later despite a memorable ’62 Finals.
¹⁷
The following season (’63), commissioner Maurice Podoloff slapped together a production team to “broadcast” the All-Star Game and the NBA Finals, then sold a syndication package to local affiliates around the country like it was
American Gladiators
or
The Steve Wilkos Show.
Unbelievable.