The Book of Basketball (44 page)

23.
The case for Wallace: 23 games, 10.3 PPG, 14.3 RPG, 100 combined blocks/steals, excellent D on Shaq in the Final, and a splendid afro.

24.
Again, I’m ignoring the ’99 season. I went to most of the Celtics games that year because my dad never wanted to go—the lockout ended too abruptly and three-fourths of the league was out of shape. Awful season. No award should have been given out other than the Eff You Award. Which, by the way, would be an awesome award. “Ladies and gentlemen, our five-time Eff You MVP, Mr. Vince Carter.”

25.
Goes to show you where the league was in 1962—it couldn’t even pull some strings to get its most exciting player out of military duty.

26.
Kobe settled with the alleged victim for a significant amount of money before the case went to trial. We never heard from her again. You could have a good “Has anyone ever paid more money for one sexual encounter that we know about because of ensuing legal arguments?” argument between Kobe and Michael Jackson.

27.
Those numbers stand for first-, second-and third-place votes. Russell’s 51–12–6 means he had 51 firsts, 12 seconds, and 6 thirds.

28.
The ’62 Knicks were outraged by his 100-point game against them, specifically how Wilt hogged the ball and the Warriors fouled near the end to get him the ball back. It’s safe to say he didn’t get any of their votes.

29.
Here’s how we know this: If Boston called L.A. and proposed a Russell-Elgin trade, L.A. would have initially thought, “Wow, Russell is available?” and maybe even had a meeting. If the Lakers proposed the same trade, Auerbach would have hung up on them.

30.
Barnhill was a rookie guard for St. Louis who averaged a 12–5–4 and didn’t make the ’63 All-Star team, but somebody gave him a third-place vote. Inexplicable. His nickname was “Rabbit.” Don’t you miss the days when athletes had animal nicknames?

31.
I am not an unbiased observer. Wait until we get to the Pyramid section; I do everything but splooge on Walton’s ’77 Topps card.

32.
“Messy” is an understatement: Walton demanded a trade, filed a medical malpractice suit, lost some friendships and signed with the Clips in 1979. This was one of the ugliest sports divorces ever. Right up there with Clemens and McNamee.

33.
That was also the year he cut down his afro. Big mistake. That afro made him look six foot ten and added at least a foot to his vertical leap.

34.
I have no clue what the scoring system was this season; all they released were final points. For all we know, the players voted right after plowing through a pile of cocaine the size of a Gatorade bucket. I can’t make enough coke jokes about this era.

35.
If I ruined the movie, too bad—it’s been out for two years. That reminds me: at a New Year’s Eve party in ’95, my buddy JackO told me that he hadn’t seen
The Usual Suspects;
I had a few in me and blurted out, “Kevin Spacey is Keyser Söze.” He’s still pissed 14 years later. And you know what? I don’t care. If you haven’t ruined a movie twist for a friend as a way to bust his balls, you’re missing out in life. I’m telling you. We’ve had probably a hundred hours worth of conversations about me blowing
The Usual Suspects
for him. Even right now, he’s fuming. This is great.

36.
Anytime “he smacked his wife, let’s get him the hell out of here” is the only reason for dealing one of the best top-ten point guards ever, I’m sorry, that’s a shitty reason. By the way, this footnote was written by Ike Turner.

37.
This backfired when Kidd dove into the stands for a loose ball, landed on his son and broke his collarbone. Karma is a bitch, isn’t it? No young child should be allowed to sit courtside or in the first few rows of a basketball game. It’s too dangerous and any worthy parent would know that. I never liked Joumana after that. Hold on, I have to get off my high horse.

38.
Ironically, Kidd had a career year in ’03 (19–9–6, 41% FG) and finished ninth in the voting because everyone was still mortified by how ’02 turned out.

39.
You can still find pieces of Todd MacCulloch’s body sticking to the ceiling of the Staples Center after Shaq ripped him apart like a pit bull.

41.
Elgin won Rookie of the Year and finished with a 25–15, yet earned as many first-place votes as Sears and Schayes combined. Huh?

42.
Totally underrated sports nickname: “Boo.” When I’m the tsar of sports, I’m going to demand that we always have athletes nicknamed “Boo,” “Goo,” “Night Train,” “Blue Moon,” “Goose,” “Rabbit,” “Cool Papa,” “Turkey” and “Bad News.”

43.
The Bullets were weakened before the playoffs when Gus Johnson blew out his knee, but still … an MVP can’t get swept in the first round, right? The Grumpy Old Editor says Bullets coach Gene Shue blew that series with the not-so-brilliant idea of having Unseld bring the ball up like a point guard. The ruining-to-helping ratio over the course of history with NBA coaches has to be 8:1.

44.
As a freshman in college, I made the rookie mistake of buying Janine Cunningham a half dozen roses after sucking face with her a few nights before. She left treadmarks running the other way. I could have given her a handful of plutonium and it would have gone better. And she was a cool chick. In fact, I guarantee she loves being referenced in this book. The point is, don’t overreact with women or MVP votes.

45.
The real outrage was that Russell didn’t win Coach of the Year. Name me another coach that was also playing 45 minutes a game.

46.
In fairness, Mac had a monster series, averaging a 37–13 in a whopping 327 minutes and even interacting with a teammate two different times.

47.
Barry defended himself from this rap in a December 1974
SI
feature with this eye-popping quote: “We like each other for what we are, not for the color of our skins. I was kidding Charlie Johnson the other day, saying, ‘Don’t tell me about you guys being put down. You had all the great detectives, didn’t you? There was Boston Blackie, Sam Spade, The Shadow …’ It’s a great atmosphere.” Yikes! Cut off his mike! Imagine if somebody said that now. ESPN would have a 12-hour town hall meeting about it. I think Rick Barry made this book 3 percent better. I really do.

48.
You couldn’t really call it a “race” because neither guy was at his peak.

49.
The complete list: Barry (retired after the ’80 season), Calvin Murphy, Rudy Tomjanovich, Allen Leavell, Billy Paultz, Mike Dunleavy, Tom Henderson, Bill Willoughby. Oof.

50.
I made that decision using the same facts, theories, and rules of thumb that govern every other inch of this chapter. If you still think I’m a homer, then allow me to introduce you to my law firm, Buh Low Mee. P.S.: Bird got screwed out of the ’81 Finals MVP as well; Cedric Maxwell won by a 6-to-1 margin in a Duncan/Parker-type situation. Personally, I think people were just excited to vote for someone nicknamed “Cornbread.”

51.
The answers: Gilbert Arenas (question 1); Kobe (question 2); either Nash, T-Mac, or LeBron (question 3). As I wrote, “Usually, the most logical MVP candidate owns two of those questions (and ideally, three). Not this season.” Question 4 hadn’t been created yet.

52.
It was part protest (for the shitty season) and part parody (because
Time
magazine had named “You” the 2007 Man of the Year). One of my dumbest ideas ever. It almost caused an Internet riot. I still get emails about it.

53.
Nash and the Suns nearly toppled the San Antonio Donaghys in the playoffs. By the way, the MVP debate should have been decided by a Dallas-Phoenix game in mid-March when Nash emerged as the top dog, notching a 32–8–16 and nearly every clutch play in a double-OT victory. I watched the game with House and JackO and we agreed that it was a seminal moment of the 2007 season; Nash just wanted it more than Nowitzki did. You could see it. I still remember House hissing, “So much for the MVP race.” How did Dirk end up winning? I have no idea. The one silver lining: when we learned in 2009 that Dirk was engaged to a thirty-seven-year-old former stripper with eight aliases and outstanding warrants for credit card fraud, I spent a solid week refreshing eBay hoping she put his 2007 MVP trophy on there.

54.
That’s not a racial argument. The same process would have happened had he looked like Earl Boykins. People will
always
gravitate toward an underdog, especially if he has bad hair.

55.
My favorite MVP voting fact of 2005: some idiot gave a first-place vote to Amar’e Stoudemire, whose career had been invigorated and reinvented by Nash. That’s like giving your vote for the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Frankenstein’s monster instead of Dr. Frankenstein.

56.
The Lakers were shocked by Phoenix in the ’90 playoffs mainly because Kevin Johnson ripped them to shreds. Put it this way: if you were a speedy point guard from 1987 to 1991 and you
couldn’t
light up the Lakers, you really needed to reevaluate things.

57.
The Bucks believed Jones was using drugs, hired PI’s to follow him, placed him on medical suspension for “loss of weight and stamina” and finally fired him. Jones professed his innocence and sued the Bucks for the rest of his owed salary, getting his money when Milwaukee’s “Any time someone loses weight and acts irrationally they’re on drugs” defense held about as much legal weight as the “She was asking for it” defense.

58.
I say ’87 was the best modern race. Magic finished first with a remarkable 24–12–6 and finally seized control of L.A. from Kareem. MJ averaged 37 a game, officially became the Next Great Player and finished second. And Bird submitted his finest season ever (28–9–8, 53% FG, 40% 3FG, 90% FT and a superb blondafroperm) and finished a distant third only because everyone was tired of voting for him. When you get career years from the greatest forward and point guard ever, along with a breakout year for the best player ever, that’s a pretty good MVP race.

59.
This had to be the greatest first-team All-D ever: Pippen, Hakeem, Rodman, Jordan and Dumars, all in their primes. Wow. Not a bad Best Starting Five of the ’90s if you wanted to kick ass defensively.

60.
He also passed question 4: none of the fans from opposing teams would have been outraged by a Kobe pick.

61.
His stats: 35.4 PPG, 5.3 RPG, 4.5 APG, 45% FG, 27.2 FGA … and he won 45 games with Smush, Kwame, Brian Cook, and Chris Mihm playing big minutes—or, as Lakers fans called them at the time, the Shit Sandwich.

62.
Shades of the ’04 Red Sox here: the event itself was eventually exceeded by the media and fans telling everyone how great it was and desperately trying to put everything in perspective. By the way, I include myself—my Red Sox opus was called
Now I Can Die In Peace.
Still in bookstores with a third edition!

63.
That’s reason number twenty-five why MVP votes need to be made public: if you make a pick
that
dumb, you should be obligated to defend it. I’m against anonymous incompetence in all forms.

64.
I’m springing one of my favorite theories here: 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-20s 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 only attracts assholes; the 185-pounder who’d be cute if she lost weight; the not-so-cute one with a great sense of humor; and the sarcastic chain-smoker with 36DDs who isn’t quite cute enough to land anyone but hooks up a lot because of the 36DDs. In this scenario, the cute brunette is the Tipping Point Friend—as long as she’s in the group, guys will approach them in bars, clubs or wherever. Once she settles down with a non-asshole, now all the pressure is on the drunkorexic and if she can’t handle it, then the girl with 36DDs has to start wearing crazy shirts and blouses to show off her guns. My point is this: the Jazz were the sarcastic chain-smoker with 36DDs who hooked up often but never found a serious suitor. By 1997, their competitors had dropped out and they were suddenly the hottest friend in their group. Does that mean they were hot? No!!! No!!!!!!!!! For the love of God, no!!!!!!!!!