The Book of Basketball (46 page)

1. I wish we would shorten the regular season by six games, guarantee the top six seeds in each conference, then have a double-elimination tourney for the seventh and eighth seeds between the remaining eighteen teams. I suggest this for five reasons. First, it would be entertaining as hell. In fact, that’s what we’ll call it: the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament. Second, I’m pretty sure we could get it sponsored. Third, the top twelve teams get a reward: two weeks of rest while the tournament plays out. Fourth, a Cinderella squad could pull off some upsets, grab an eighth seed and win fans along the way. And fifth, with the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament giving everyone a chance, no team could tank down the stretch for draft picks without insulting paying customers beyond repair. Why are we paying full price to watch forty-eight minutes of garbage time as four starters pretend to be injured on the bench?
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2. I wish we could blow up the Basketball Hall of Fame and start over.
   

I care about the thirty-third wish more than the other ones. Why? Because few arguments cause more problems than this one:
Come on, that’s the way we’ve always done it!
When those nine words become the sole reason for keeping something intact, it’s a bigger red flag than the one Nikolai Volkoff waved. Change is good. Change leads to hockey masks for goalies, wheels for suitcases, baby seats for little kids and seats atop the Green Monster. Change leads to iTunes, breast implants, Madden video games, Tommy John surgery, plasma televisions, Black-Berrys, podcasts, JetBlue and Patrón tequila. Change leads to Vegas casinos making decisions like “What if we put a blackjack section outside next to a topless pool?” If you don’t keep moving, that means you’ve stopped.

With the Basketball Hall of Fame, we stopped. The place doesn’t work. It’s been a failure for twenty-five years and counting. Consider the following true story: Of all my friends, only my buddy House loves the NBA as much as me. We’ve been buddies since my freshman year in college, road-tripped numerous times, smelled each other’s farts, eaten hundreds of meals together, had thousands of inane sports calls … hell, we even ran the high screen like Stockton and Malone once upon a time. We’re probably in the top 0.0000000000000001 percent of NBA fans, as evidenced by me writing this book and House owning game-worn jerseys of Tom Gugliotta, Manute Bol, and Bobby Sura.
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If two college students in Massachusetts ever would have declared, “Screw class today, let’s road-trip to Springfield,” it would have been us. Even after college, when I lived in
Boston for the next decade, House visited me twice a year and we were only a brisk ninety-minute drive from Springfield.
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Well, from 1988 to 2002, guess how many times we went to Springfield together? Zero. Zero! We didn’t go once!

You know what that tells me? That the Basketball Hall of Fame doesn’t work. Cooperstown works because of the gorgeous drive through upstate New York, a throwback trip that makes you feel like you’re traveling in a Volkswagen Bug with Ray Kinsella and Terence Mann. The trip works because there’s no easy way to get there; the closest airport is an hour away, making it more rewarding since it’s a sacrifice just to get there. It works because they built a gigantic hotel in Oswego and flanked it with a fantastic golf course. It works because of 150 years’ worth of baseball memories and memorabilia, and because of the generational twinge with any Cooperstown trip.
My dad took me there because his dad took him there, and now I’m taking my son there.
You know, the whole
Field of Dreams
angle. If you’re fortunate enough to sire a son, you’d feel like an inadequate father if you didn’t take him to Cooperstown. Like you were cheating him.

Springfield doesn’t work that way. There’s no father-son angle because the NBA hasn’t been popular long enough. There’s no beautiful ride, just a bunch of ugly highways and a downtrodden city that battles a complex about being the poor man’s Hartford.
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The Hall itself is constantly being renovated and re-renovated; because it attempts to “celebrate” the history of basketball, college basketball
and
professional basketball, the end result feels like three different agendas competing at once. Back in 2002, they opened a $45 million, 80,000-square-foot home near the old one—the third by my count—and surrounded it with retail stores and restaurants. Did it work?
Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. There’s been too much residual damage, like a restaurant that burned its customers with too many bad meals over the years … and now they’ve reached a point where they could hire the best chef on the planet and it wouldn’t make a difference for me. So why hasn’t the NBA dumped Springfield and built its own Hall of Fame?
Because that’s the way we’ve always done it!
Hence the problem: what you’re about to read, for all intents and purposes, is a pipe dream. It will never happen. The NBA would never do it—they’re too invested in the Springfield location, just like they’re too invested in the WNBA.
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This is the closest you will ever come to a pure NBA Hall of Fame: a pipe dream.

How would it work? Well, we need the right location. Only one place works. Only one.

(Think about it.)

(Keep thinking, it will come.)

(And … time!)

Indiana.

Has to be Indiana, right? That’s the basketball capital of the world. They filmed
Hoosiers
there. The Basketball Jesus grew up there. Bobby Knight coached there. They have the most rabid basketball fans on the planet. If you’re looking for the same elements that make Cooperstown work—an out-of-the-way destination, the
Field of Dreams
drive, a sense that basketball matters more than anything else—then Indiana should be the place. Personally, I’d stick it in French Lick. Bird grew up there, they already have a casino (seriously, they have a fucking casino)
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and there’s something exciting about road-tripping to a place named French Lick. It just feels right. All of it. The heart of Indiana doubles as the heart of basketball. That’s where the NBA Hall of Fame should be.

We also need a hook that separates it from Springfield and every other Hall of Fame before it. That brings me to an idea that first trickled into my columns in 1997, the same year baseball launched interleague play, when I drove to Shea Stadium for the first ever Red Sox-Mets regular-season series
with my buddy Gus Ramsey and his father, Wally (two die-hard Mets fans whom I’ve known forever). On the way to the game, Wally came up with a brainstorm to inject some much-needed life into baseball’s Hall of Fame voting.
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Ideally, the Hall of Fame should be a place where someone could stroll in, spend weeks walking around and absorb everything about the game; by the time they departed, they would know
everything there is to know
about that particular sport. Cooperstown, Springfield and Canton are more interested in showcasing as much stuff as possible; even their Hall of Famer plaques are randomly showcased with no real thought given to each player’s specific place in history. It’s like having a Hall of Fame for models and putting the plaques for Gisele Bundchen and Christie Brinkley right next to the one for the “before” model from the first “before/after” Weight Watchers ad. Shouldn’t careers be weighted in some way? We spent the rest of out ride figuring out the number of levels (settling on five in all, with Level 5 being the highest) and arguing topics like “Was Koufax an L4 or an L5?” and “Was Nolan Ryan even an L2?” That’s when I knew the Pyramid idea could work. Anytime a brainstorm immediately leads to heated arguments in a sticky rental car, and any time cool abbreviations manifest themselves organically like “L4” and “L5,” you know you’re on to something. So screw it—if we’re building an NBA Hall of Fame from scratch, why not make it a five-level pyramid (like a mini-replica of the Luxor casino in Las Vegas,
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only without cigarette burns on the carpets) where great players aren’t just elected to the Hall of Fame but elected to a particular level depending on their abilities?

Pour yourself some scotch and break out a stogie … this is about to get good. Imagine you fly to Indiana, rent yourself a car and make the ninety-minute drive to French Lick. You check into the Larry Bird Luxury Golf Resort, drop your stuff off, head over to the Pyramid and buy your ticket. They direct you to the second floor of the basement (everyone starts their
tour there), where you can find relevant memorabilia from seven NBA decades: old jerseys and exhibits, seats from the old Madison Square Garden, pieces of the parquet from the Boston Garden, all the different basketballs and sneakers used over the years, the first 24-second shot clock, the evolution of NBA video games and everything else of that ilk. Consider this the most historical floor on the building. From there, you take the escalator up to the top floor of the basement, where you find special sections devoted to the greatest games and playoff games, as well as plaques to recognize five distinct groups of players. None of them would be considered Pyramid guys, but we couldn’t have a Hall of Fame without them. Remember, the goal is to learn everything you possibly can about the history of the NBA, as well as who mattered and what happened.
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So here are those five groups:

GROUP 1: THE PIONEERS

Celebrating the greats who launched their careers between 1946 and 1956, when the league was still evolving into what it eventually became. Think George Mikan, Bob Cousy, Joe Fulks, Ed McCauley, Bill Sharman, Dolph Schayes, Bob Pettit, Arnie Risen, George Yardley, Vern Mikkelsen, Dick McGuire, Harry J. Gallatin, Ed Macauley, Buddy Jeanette, Larry Foust, Cliff Hagan, Neil Johnston, Bobby Wanzer, Clyde Lovellette, Al Cervi, Tom Gola, Slater Martin, Johnny Kerr, Jim Pollard, Bob Davies, Richie Guerin, Bob Feerick and Max Zaslofsky.
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GROUP 2: THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS AND OTHER AFRICAN AMERICAN PIONEERS

I’m not nearly black enough to write this paragraph. But here’s what I’m thinking: tributes to pioneers like Sweetwater Clifton, Chuck Cooper, Ray
Felix, Cleo Hill, Don Barksdale and Earl Lloyd; a “History of the Globetrotters” memorabilia section and video room; talking holograms of President Obama, Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and others discussing the effects of the pioneers on their games and their lives; and the documentary
Black Magic
playing on a twenty-four-hour loop. Also, we could probably hire down-on-their-luck stars from the sixties, seventies, and eighties like Marvin Barnes and Spencer Haywood to work there as congenial ushers and pay them an obscene rate like $50 an hour. This would clearly be Jabaal Abdul-Simmons’ favorite floor in the Pyramid.

GROUP 3: GREATEST ROLE PLAYERS

Celebrating underrated players with specific skill sets who were inordinately valuable for good playoff teams. I’d start with these twenty-five: Michael Cooper, K. C. Jones, Frank Ramsey, Horace Grant, Bobby Jones, George Johnson, Don Nelson, Satch Sanders, Al Attles, Ben Wallace, Eddie Johnson, Vinnie Johnson, John Paxson, Bill Laimbeer, Bill Bradley, Kurt Rambis, Paul Pressey, Ricky Pierce, Bruce Bowen, Steve Kerr, Paul Silas, Rudy LaRusso, James Posey, Downtown Freddie Brown and Jack Haley.
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We could vote a new one in every three years. Also, Bowen’s plaque could come with a device that accidentally trips people as they walk by.

GROUP 4: THE RECORD HOLDERS

Guys like Scott Skiles (dished out a record 30 assists in one game), Elmore Smith (a record 11 blocks), Larry Kenon (13 steals), Frank Layden (58 nose picks), Rasheed Wallace (41 technicals) and Wilt Chamberlain (20,000 sexual partners) get their due.

GROUP 5: THE COMETS

Potential Hall of Famers who suffered a career-crippling injury or were derailed by personal problems, extenuating circumstances or even death. I’d start with these eighteen: Micheal Ray Richardson, Andrew Toney, Penny Hardaway, James Silas, Marvin Barnes, Gus Johnson, Ralph Sampson, Brad Daugherty, Maurice Stokes, John Lucas, Sam Bowie, Terry Cummings, Roy Tarpley, Reggie Lewis, Grant Hill, Alonzo Mourning, Drazen Petrovic and Tim Hardaway.
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We’re leaving out Lenny Bias only because I’d end up staring sadly at his plaque and screaming, “Why? Whyyyyyy?” for ten to twelve hours before security pulled me away.

Okay, we’re done with the basement. After wading through the lobby on the ground floor—which features an oversized NBA Pro Shop; Bennett Salvatore’s new steakhouse, Two Shots for Wade; Rik Smits’ Dutch Oven Pizza; and an NBA-themed diner owned by Hubie Brown called the Tremendous Upside Café—we start climbing the levels of Pyramid guys. Please pay attention because this is super-duper important. Here are those five levels:

LEVEL 1 (GROUND FLOOR)

Just-made-it Hall of Famers or better, either because of the David Thompson Factor (great career, not long enough), the Dan Issel Factor (very good for a long time, never great) or the Pete Maravich Factor (memorable career, never won anything). This will all make sense in a few pages.

LEVEL 2 (SECOND FLOOR)

No-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers who couldn’t crack Level 3 for one of five reasons: they never won a title as an elite guy; something was missing
from their career totals; they never peaked for two or three years as a top-five guy; at least two or three guys played their position at the same time and were better; or their careers were shortened by injuries and/or rapidly declining skills. To fill out this floor, we’re adding sections devoted to the twelve greatest teams of all time (as voted by our Hall of Fame Committee), along with screening rooms so fans could sample our extensive video library.
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We’ll also have a giant section devoted to everything you ever wanted to know about the ABA.