The Book of Basketball (34 page)

So if you’re scoring at home, Moses Hot Potato ended up swinging the destinies of six franchises in fewer than five months: New Orleans (never recovered, moved four years later); Los Angeles (landed Magic, won five titles with him); Portland (gave away Walton insurance and God knows how many titles); Buffalo (never recovered, moved within two years, jinxed even today); Houston (made the ’81 Finals with Moses, eventually traded him to Philly, and made the Hakeem-Sampson era possible); and Philly (acquired Moses in ’82, won a title with him). We also nearly witnessed the destruction of one of the most talented players ever: by all accounts,
Moses moved so many times from 1974 to 1976 that he was practically broken by the time he reached Houston; it took the Rockets an entire season to rebuild his confidence. Eventually he became a Hall of Famer and haunts three teams to this day. And to think, it all started because Butch van Breda Kolff decided that Gail Goodrich wore his years well.

4. What if the 1960 Lakers hadn’t crashed
in the perfect cornfield?

January 18, 1960. The Lakers are flying back to Minneapolis after a day game in St. Louis. They’re riding in their own DC-3. It starts to snow. The plane loses its power. The heat goes off. The pilots can’t communicate with anyone. The plane bounces around in the snow for a few hours, with the pilots opening a side window every few minutes to scrape snow off the windshield so they can see. They have about thirty minutes of gas left and can’t find an airport, so finally they decide to land the plane on the best available cornfield in Carroll, Iowa. They keep trying to land but can’t find an area that isn’t flanked by power lines, so the pilots keep having to jerk the plane up and trying more attempts. At this point, police cars, fire trucks and even the town’s mortician are doing their best to follow a plane they can barely see. Finally, the pilots find the perfect snowy cornfield, cut the engines and land the plane smoothly on about four feet of snow. Everyone cheers. To this day, it’s the closest we’ve ever come to losing a professional sports team.
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It would have been the biggest tragedy in NBA history and a crippling blow to a league barely making it at the time. And that’s just the start of it. We lose one of the fifteen greatest players ever (Elgin Baylor) midway through his sophomore season, as well as the most athletic forward of that era and someone who was in the process of knocking down the “basketball can also be played in the air” door. The Elgin/Jerry era never happens.
We endure roughly five hundred documentaries, TV features, books and magazine features about that fateful night had it turned out morbidly.
⁶⁹
The ’60 Lakers either fold immediately or suspend play, then regroup for the ’61 season after filling out their roster with expansion players and extra draft picks … which only means we’re now redoing every part of NBA history from 1961 to 2008, including fifteen different Finals. Finally, another owner grabs that Los Angeles market if the Lakers fold. Would we be watching the Los Angeles Warriors right now? What about (gulp) the Los Angeles Celtics? In the biggest understatement of this entire book, I say it’s a good thing that the plane landed safely.

3. What if ABA commissioner George Mikan
didn’t screw up the Lew Alcindor sweepstakes?

When Alcindor finished his UCLA career in the spring of 1969, his family assembled a team of agents and advisers and spent the next few months debating between the ABA and NBA. Both leagues needed him desperately: the NBA because he was the biggest star to enter the league since Oscar Robertson, the ABA because Big Lew would have legitimized their league, gotten them a TV contract, and forced a merger down the road. If anything, the ABA should have overpaid for Alcindor and hoped to recoup the money with ticket sales and TV money.

Now here’s where it gets crazy. Without ever tipping his hand publicly, Alcindor decided privately that he wanted to play in the ABA. Milwaukee held his NBA rights, but Big Lew was more interested in the Nets; he grew up in New York, loved the idea of playing near family, found the city’s Muslim population appealing and understood the value of a big market. Milwaukee did nothing for him. How do we know this? He confessed as much in his 1983 autobiography
Giant Steps
⁷⁰
—everything I just told
you—and fled Milwaukee as soon as a window opened after the ’75 season. He wanted to play for the Nets. But he wasn’t interested in spending the summer playing the leagues against each another, so Big Lew’s team told the ABA and NBA the same thing:
We will meet you once, we will listen to one offer, and that’s that. Do not lowball us. Give us your best possible offer first.
The jackasses running the ABA somehow came up with one of their only shrewd ideas:
When we meet Alcindor, we’ll give him a certified check for $1 million up front as part of whatever offer we make. Not only will that check prove that we’re serious and we don’t have financial troubles, but it will burn a hole in his pocket and he’ll eventually say yes.

You have to admit, that’s a great plan. Desperate, but great.

Okay, so the NBA goes first and makes an offer that Kareem would later call “extremely good” in
Giant Steps.
Mikan met Alcindor’s people next. They talk numbers. They talk about sticking Lew in New York and maybe even flanking him with a few of his old UCLA teammates. Money gets discussed. Some figures are thrown around. For whatever reason, Mikan never gives Alcindor that check.
It stays in his pocket!
Either he freezes or he forgets. There’s no in-between.
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On top of that, they lowball him with a shitty offer. So Alcindor’s team leaves the meeting wondering why the ABA didn’t totally step to the plate. Alcindor feels insulted and vows never to play in the ABA. The ABA owners flip out when they realize that Mikan never gave him the check. Milwaukee swoops in and signs Alcindor for a record $1.4 million. And Mikan gets canned within a year. As Kareem wrote later, “The Nets had the inside track and had blown it.”

Let’s say Mikan didn’t mess up and Big Lew signed with the Nets. Maybe he steals New York thunder from the ’70 Knicks. Maybe the Nets trade for Rick Barry one year later and become a superpower. Maybe the merger happens sooner than later, maybe the Nets become the team of the seventies, and maybe Lew/Kareem never ends up playing with Magic and the Lakers. Three things definitely don’t happen: the Bucks don’t win the ’71 title, Oscar never ends up in Milwaukee, and we have NBA MVPs in ’71, ’72 and ’74 not named Alcindor or Abdul-Jabbar. I mean, George
Mikan could have gone on the
Tonight Show
, thrown on his goggles and sodomized Johnny Carson on live TV and not done more damage to the ABA than he did by not giving Alcindor that check. My head is spinning.

2. What if Len Bias hadn’t overdosed?

I still haven’t gotten over this one. How can you calculate the short-term and long-term damage? The Celtics had just finished one of the greatest seasons in NBA history and were
adding
Len Bias. You couldn’t have drawn up a better young forward for that particular team, someone who played like a more physical Worthy, but with Jordan’s athleticism, if that makes sense. (Other than MJ and ’Nique, no eighties player attacked the basket like a young Len Bias. It’s true.) If you sat down on June 19, 1986, right after the Celtics thrashed Houston for the title, and drew up a wish list for the perfect rookie to add to the ’87 Celtics, you would have come up with five wishes: an elite athlete capable of playing either forward spot; an overcompetitive MFer with a mean streak; a scorer capable of carrying Boston’s offense for extended stretches off the bench; a rebounder who could bang with young bucks like Barkley and Malone; and just for the hell of it, someone who loved ramming home alley-oops as Bird’s new toy. You would have settled for a forward who hit three of those check marks; four would have had you high-fiving yourself; five would have made you pass out.

Well, this was too good to be true. Bias dropped dead within forty-eight hours of the draft. Coke. And this is one of those what-ifs where the damages are easy to define. You can see them clearly. They stand out. The NBA lost a potential signature player and faced its biggest drug crisis yet. The Celtics wouldn’t fully recover for another twenty-one years. Long-term, they were just
screwed.
Pull Pippen from the ’87 Bulls, Malone from the ’85 Jazz or Duncan from the ’97 Spurs—just make believe they never played a game—and that’s how much Bias’ death meant.
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Short-term, we
missed out on seeing an ’87 Celtics team that would have been the greatest of all time. One of the three greatest teams ever with one of the five best players ever and the greatest front line ever was adding one of the three best forwards of that decade? That’s a lot of greatests and bests. Medium-term, Bird and McHale were forced to play big minutes without Bias; neither of them would be the same after killing themselves that season. Bird’s body finally gave out a year later (first the heels, then the back); McHale injured his foot before the ’87 Playoffs, came back too soon because they didn’t have anyone else, broke the foot, kept playing on it and never really recovered. Bias cuts down everyone’s minutes, keeps everyone from playing injured, makes the actual games easier … it would have been the difference between Bird and McHale traveling 200,000 hours a year in coach or 125,000 a year in first class.

Some other things we missed: a sneering Bias banging bodies with the bad-boy Pistons from ’87 to ’92; a fascinating three-headed Barkley-Malone-Bias rivalry; Bias upping the stakes in any playground game against the Blazers and Hawks; Bird treating Bias like his prized new toy and tossing him as many alley-oops as humanly possible;
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the Celtics improbably becoming “cool”; and an Eastern Conference star who would have stood up to Jordan without blinking or being intimidated. It’s the last point that hurts the most. There was a particular brashness about Bias, a swagger, a playground vibe that nobody else had. These were still the days of tight shorts and awkward high fives; few players were cool and the ones who were (’Nique, Worthy, Jordan, Bernard) kept their emotions in check for the most part. Jordan might have embraced that playground demeanor had he attended a school other than North Carolina, where Dean Smith frowned on anything that could be perceived as showing up the opposition, but the Carolina influence tempered his bluster to some degree. Maybe Jordan landed the sneaker commercials and posters, but Bias was the one who brought the streets to big-time hoops. He resonated with black fans much the way Hawk, Pearl and Doc did back in the day.

When Len’s playground swagger became more fashionable in the ’90s—thanks to UNLV and the Fab Five, postdunk woofing, baggy shorts, trash talk and everything else—that style seemed more contrived, like the players were doing it only to say “Hey, look at me!” Trust me, nothing about Len Bias was contrived. He went out of his way to dunk on people, not because it made him seem cool but because it sent a message and established a tone for the game. He grabbed rebounds in traffic and spat out an occasional “Arrrrrrggggggghhhh!” just to make sure everyone knew who was boss. He barked at teammates, referees and opponents alike. If fans booed Maryland during a road game, he fed off that noise like so many other greats and learned to channel it to shut them up, then thrived on that respectful silence when the game was wrapping up. He played with passion and heart. He showed a mean streak at times but never made you feel like he didn’t give a shit. Quite simply, he stood out. If Bias had arrived on the scene seven or eight years later, I’m sure he would have been wearing baggy shorts and woofing it up just like everyone else, but that’s the beautiful thing: not just that Bias made it big when he did, but that he
wasn’t
contrived. Bias was ahead of his time. He really was. We spent so many years searching for an archrival for Jordan—the Frazier to his Ali, someone who’d bring out the best in him—when really, that player was probably Len Bias. We were robbed. And so were the Celtics.

(The good news: Bias’ overdose combined with Robert Downey Jr. performing gay tricks for his coke dealer in
Less than Zero
fostered a fear of cocaine in nearly every American male growing up between 1986 and 1994. To this day, I haven’t tried cocaine or even thought about trying it. Just would have been hypocritical, you know? I guess that’s a silver lining. No pun intended.)

1. What if the 1984 draft turned out differently?

Oh, and you thought no. 1 would simply be “What if Portland had taken MJ over Bowie?” This draft was so complicated that it inspired Houston and Chicago to create the concept of “tanking” during the regular season. Once Houston won the coin flip and locked into Hakeem, all hell broke loose. Here’s what we know for sure:

1. Both Portland (second) and Chicago (third) would have swapped their picks for Sampson, although that wouldn’t have been enough of a return for a much-hyped rookie center who possessed the third-highest trade value behind Magic and Bird that summer.
   ⁷⁴
   Years later, Dr. Jack Ramsey told Sam Smith, “We had to have a center. We would have done that [trade].” I sure hope so. In his 1996 autobiography
   Living the Dream,
   ⁷⁵
   Hakeem claims that Houston nearly traded Sampson to Portland for Drexler and the number two pick, writing, “From 1984 until today, the Rockets could have had a lineup with me, Clyde Drexler and Michael Jordan, developing together, playing together, winning together. But the Rockets never made the move.” Whether that’s true or untrue, I don’t blame Houston for turning that down because Drexler hadn’t exactly lit the NBA on fire as a rookie. Still, Hakeem, Jordan and Drexler playing their entire careers together? Just staggering. It’s like imagining what would have happened if Microsoft and Apple had merged in 1981.
   

2. The sharks circled a crappy Chicago team for Jordan, giving credence to the “Portland seriously blew that pick” argument. Dallas offered Mark Aguirre straight up for the pick. Philly offered an aging Doc straight up for the pick; they also offered the number five pick plus Andrew Toney. Trades with Seattle (Jack Sikma) and Golden State (Joe Barry Carroll) were discussed. Eventually, the Bulls started feeling like they were sitting on a winning lottery ticket. And they were.
   ⁷⁶
   

3. Patrick Ewing nearly entered the draft before changing his mind and returning to Georgetown. Had Ewing thrown his hat in the ring, he would have gone first, Hakeem second (to Portland) … and then-Bulls GM Rod Thorn told Flip Bondy that Chicago had Jordan rated higher than Bowie because they were afraid of his injury track record.
   ⁷⁷
   Obviously if Hakeem had landed in Portland, we’d enter the Marty McFly Zone and have to reconceive everything that happened in the NBA from 1985 to 1998 (different Finals, different champs, no Ewing in New York,
   etc.
   etc.). I started trying to figure it out and my nose started bleeding. I took this as a sign to stop.
   

4. Jordan’s potential was unclear because he played for Dean Smith in the pre-shot-clock era. Everyone knew he was good, but how good? His ceiling didn’t start leaking out until the ’84 Olympic tryouts, which Jordan dominated to the point that U.S. coach Bobby Knight called his buddy Stu Inman (Portland’s GM) and
   implored
   him to take Michael.
   ⁷⁸
   When Inman demurred and said that Portland needed a center, Knight reportedly screamed, “Well play him at center, then!” We also know that Nike (based in Portland) built an entire sneaker line around Jordan before he played an NBA game. So for anyone to play the “We didn’t know how good Jordan would be” card just isn’t true.
   

5. It’s a myth that Portland “desperately” needed a center. A 48-win team with a perfectly decent center combo—Mychal Thompson (16–9 in 33.5 minutes) and Wayne Cooper (10–6 in 20.5 minutes)—they also possessed trade chips like Drexler, Jim Paxson (second-team All-NBA and a restricted free agent), Fat Lever (an up-and-coming point guard), Calvin Natt (a bulldog forward) and Cooper. What they really needed was a rebounder; Natt and Kenny Carr were both undersized power forwards. For instance, San Diego shopped scorer/rebounder Terry Cummings all summer and finally dealt him for Marques Johnson after the draft. Why didn’t Portland overwhelm the Clippers with a Cummings offer (like a Drexler-Natt package) and take Jordan second? You got me.
   ⁷⁹
   Instead, they sent Lever, Cooper, Natt and their ’85 first-round pick to Denver for Kiki Vandeweghe, an accomplished terrific scorer (29.8 PPG in ’84) who also happened to be the worst defensive player alive. Here’s how lopsided and shortsighted that deal was: Denver jumped from 38 wins to 52 wins and the ’85 Western Finals solely because of that trade. As for Portland, they probably met in the first week of June and debated two potential courses of action: