The Book of Basketball (52 page)

So what about Howell? Well, he was the Dandridge of the sixties and played a big role on two title teams. It took Howell twenty-seven years to make the Hall of Fame. Dandridge still hasn’t made it. The lesson, as always: the Basketball Hall of Fame sucks.
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78. PAUL WESTPHAL

Resume: 12 years, 5 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’77, ’78, ’80), top 10 (’79) … 5-year peak: 23–3–6, 52% FG … best player on 1 runner-up (’76 Suns), averaged 21–5–3, 51% FG (19 G)

Red Auerbach was the most successful NBA GM ever, so take the following with a grain of salt because it’s impossible to nail
every
major roster decision. (Or in Billy King’s case, any of them.) But Red gave away at least one title with two boneheaded decisions: swapping Westphal for Charlie Scott before the ’76 season and replacing Paul Silas with anti-Celtics Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe before the ’77 season. Both were financially motivated moves by a stubborn guy who couldn’t accept where the league was headed yet. Had Red kept Silas and Westie, Boston could have won in ’77 and possibly ’78. But here’s why Red was the luckiest bastard ever (and I mean that as a compliment): As the ’77–’
78
team was self-combusting in Havlicek’s final season, Auerbach swapped Scott for Kermit Washington, Don Chaney and a number one pick. A few months later, Boston had the number six and number eight picks in the ’78 draft. With their own pick (number six), they rolled the dice on a junior-eligible named Larry Bird. With K.C.’s number eight pick, they took a prolific scorer named Freeman Williams to replace Havlicek.
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Without that extra pick, would Red have “wasted” the number six pick on someone who couldn’t play in Boston for a year?
Getting the number eight pick in the Scott trade allowed him to use the number six pick on Bird.
Like always with Red from 1950 to 1986, even when something like the Westphal/Scott trade didn’t work out, eventually it worked out.
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Westphal would have been just another forgotten great player if not for a heroic performance in the triple-OT game—a game that lives on forever on ESPN Classic and NBA TV—when he single-handedly saved the Suns more than once with a superhuman performance (crazy steals, ludicrous reverses for three-point plays and his trademark 360 banker, when he
drove left at breakneck speed, planted about 8 feet from the basket, then did a 360-degree twirl and banked it home as his incredulous defender was twisted in nine different directions). If Havlicek had missed that running banker in the second OT, Phoenix could have clinched the title at home and Westphal could have joined the hallowed list of Best Guys on a Championship Team (and jumped thirty spots on this list). Instead, he’s remembered as the league’s best guard for five years (’76 to ’80), as well as a memorably entertaining All-Star Game performer and the starting two-guard on the White Guys Who Played Like Black Guys team (don’t worry, we’re getting there).

77. DAN ISSEL

Resume: 15 years, 13 quality, 7 All-Stars (6 ABA) … top 5 ABA (’72), top 10 ABA (’71, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76) … 3-year peak: 29–11–2 … ABA leader: scoring (1x) … ABA Playoffs: 24–11–2 (80 G) … 2nd-best player on ABA champ (’75 Colonels) … 25K-10K Club (25K-plus points, 10K-plus rebounds)

76. ARTIS GILMORE

Resume: 17 years, 12 quality, 11 All-Stars (5 ABA) … ’72 ABA MVP and Playoffs MVP … ’72 ABA Rookie of the Year … top 5 ABA (’72, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76) … 5-year peak: 22–17–3 (ABA) … season leader: rebounds (4x), FG% (6x), mins (3x), blocks (2x) … all-time NBA/ABA leader, FG% … best player on two ABA champs (’72 and ’75 Colonels) … 20K-15K Club

I couldn’t put Issel ahead of Artis for one reason: After Kentucky won the ’75 ABA title, the Colonels needed to trade a big guy (Gilmore or Issel) to save money. Which one did they keep? Gilmore. So that settles that. Issel thrived for six ABA seasons but only made one NBA All-Star team after the merger. That’s a little telling. Still, there’s something to be said for a
perimeter center who never missed games and gave his teams somewhere between a 19–8 and a 25–11 every night, averaging 29.9 points as a rookie in ’71 and 19.8 as a fourteen-year veteran in ’84. You can’t blame Issel for a lack of NBA playoff success because the ’78 Nuggets came within two games of the Finals (losing to Seattle), then fell apart because of David Thompson’s drug problem and one of the single dumbest trades in NBA history: Bobby Jones straight up for George McGinnis.
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On a personal note, Issel was one of my favorite visiting players because he was missing his front four teeth—every time he walked by us in the Garden tunnel, he looked like a vampire. These are the things that delight you when you’re eight.

Meanwhile, Artis would have started at center for the Looks Better on Paper All-Stars if not for Bellamy. I’m barely old enough to remember Artis in his NBA prime, when he was a mountain of a man (seven foot two, 300 pounds) with a mustache/goatee combo that made him look like a half-Chinese, half-black count.
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He looked intimidating until the game started and you realized that (a) his reactions were a split second slow (eventually earning him the nickname “Rigor Artis”), (b) he only took shots he could make (dunks, layups, and a lefty jump hook), and (c) it was unclear if he had a pulse (Artis made Kareem look like Kevin Garnett after twenty Red Bulls). Artis grew up so poor in Florida that he wore sneakers two sizes too small in high school, so there was always something beaten-down about him, like his confidence didn’t match his physique. Fans believed he should dominate more than he did and tougher players pounded him with no repercussions.
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Without any big rivals who could handle him in a quicker ABA, Artis dominated just like the token tall guy
dominates an intramural game in college. He never enjoyed the same success in the NBA, but there are worse things than a center giving you a 20–12 every night, clogging the paint, shooting 60 percent and looking like he’s about to film a
Dracula
movie. If that’s not enough, he appeared in the opening credit sequence of
The White Shadow.
Top that, Issel.

75. TRACY MCGRADY

Resume: 12 years, 7 quality, 7 All-Stars … top 5 (’02, ’03), top 10 (’01, ’04, ’07), Top-15 (’05, ’08) … 4-year peak: 28–8–5 … leader: scoring (2x) … ’03 season: 33–7–6 … Playoffs: 29–7–6, 43% FG (38 G) … never won a Playoffs

A resume jarringly similar to Pete Maravich’s even if McGrady was significantly better defensively. Both were better known by nicknames (“T-Mac” and “Pistol”). Both carried lousy teams for much of their primes. Both were ridiculously gifted offensive players who had unusual weight with their peers, although McGrady was never discussed reverentially like Maravich was and is. Both suffered bad luck at pivotal points of their careers—Pistol not getting Doc as a teammate, T-Mac losing a hobbled Grant Hill for his entire Orlando tenure. Both were traded in their primes, although Houston underpaid for T-Mac and New Orleans overpaid for Maravich. Both were original prototypes: T-Mac was the first six-foot-eight guard with three-point range (an Evolutionary Gervin crossed with a touch of Dr. J); Pistol was simply unlike any guard before or since. And honestly? Both of them were ten to twelve spots too high on this list until the last stages of this book-writing process, when McGrady tarnished his legacy so badly during the 2008–9 season that I had to drop him seven spots. Originally I had projected the rest of his career and assumed he would enjoy two or three more quality seasons, even if the words “never won a Playoffs in his prime” stick out more egregiously than Jaye Davidson’s dick in
The Crying Game.
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It was hard to imagine anyone
ever taking his career
that
seriously if he never played in a second-round game, right? Then he murdered the ’09 Rockets so completely and totally that he prompted me to craft this one-paragraph drive-by shooting in a February column about the collapsing NBA economy (and I stand by the venom):

Nobody loves basketball more than me. I mean,
nobody.
But when an NBA player with two years remaining on his contract for a total of $44 million shows up for the season out of shape, complains most of the year, lets down his teammates and fans again and again, lands in some trade rumors and decides, “Instead of getting traded to a team I don’t like, I’m going to announce that I’m getting microfracture surgery four days before the trade deadline and kill any potential trade, and even better, I’ll be healed by next spring, just in time to showcase myself for another contract,” and successfully pulls this off—with no repercussions from anybody—then yes, the system is broken and needs to be fixed. Because that was disgusting. Tracy McGrady, you are officially indefensible for the rest of eternity. Even your cousin Vince wouldn’t have done that. And that’s saying something.

74. JOE DUMARS

Resume: 14 years, 7 quality, 6 All-Stars … ’89 Finals MVP … top 10 (’93), top 15 (’90, ’91) … All-Defense (5x) … 4-year peak: 21–2–5 … 2nd-best player on two champs (’89, ’90 Pistons)

73. SIDNEY MONCRIEF

Resume: 11 years, 5 quality, 5 All-Stars … top 5 (’83), top 10 (’82, ’84, ’85, ’86) … All-Defense (5x) … Defensive Player of the Year (’83, ’84) … 4-year peak: 21–6–5, 51% FG, 83% FT … 3-year Playoffs peak: 21–6–5 (33 G)

Here’s why we need a new Hall of Fame, Part XXXVII: The real Hall inducted Joe D. in 2006 even though Westphal, Moncrief, and Dennis Johnson hadn’t made it yet. Why Dumars and not the others? Because of the Lanier Corollary: Dumars was the one decent soul on those bad-boy squads, a splendid team player who lifted his game when it mattered, a gifted defender who handled MJ better than anyone except John Starks. When the Association struggled with character issues in the mid-nineties, Joe D stood out for his class and professionalism. Watching him coexist with the crotch-grabbing jerks on Dream Team II was like seeing Nic Cage stuck traveling on the
Con Air plane.
(There was a famous story about two of the Dream Team IIers—definitely Shaq and someone else, I can’t remember the second guy—pulling the players together before a key Olympic game and Dumars thinking, “Great, they’re finally going to take this seriously.” Then the two guys started singing a rap song they had written for the game. Poor Dumars.) And after his career, Dumars remained in the limelight by building Detroit’s ’04 championship team, remaining classy and manipulating the media as well as anyone except Donnie Walsh.
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But Dumars was never a franchise player or a transcendant one (again: left off the Dream Team), and that ’89 Finals MVP happened after a four-game sweep against an aging Lakers team that lost Magic and Byron Scott midway through the series. During certain pivotal playoff games (Game 5 of the 1990 Finals, for instance), Dumars sat for Vinnie Johnson in crunch time. When the Pistons aged so quickly after the ’92 playoffs, Dumars became the alpha dog on teams that won 40, 20 and 28 games. There’s no possible way, under any criteria, that anyone can prove Dumars was superior to Moncrief or Dennis Johnson. In my opinion, he was the worst of the three. But the other two have been rejected by the Hall. Repeatedly. Which is why we need to blow that baby up.
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Meanwhile, Moncrief was one of the defining what-if guys. If not for
chronic knee problems that eventually derailed his career, Moncrief would have been the best all-around guard of the eighties and one of the top forty-five Pyramid guys. Before the days of arthroscopic surgery and ligaments that could be transferred from corpses, you were never the same after an ACL tear and that was that. In Moncrief’s case, he jumped out of the building to the point that he gave us my beloved
Sports Illustrated
cover (the tomahawk dunk from Arkansas), but by the time the ’87 Playoffs rolled around, he was limping around on one leg like a war veteran. Too bad.
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A healthy Moncrief would have been a more polished, less combustible version of Dennis Johnson. And that’s saying something. Instead, he’ll have to settle for no. 74, as well as being the second-greatest Sidney of all time—just behind Sidney Crosby and just ahead of Sydney the whore from
Melrose Place
and Sidney the lawyer from
Midnight Run. Sidney, siddown, relax, have a cream soda, do some fuckin’ thing.

72. CHRIS WEBBER

Resume: 14 years, 6 quality, 5 All-Stars … ’94 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’01), top 10 (’99, ’02, ’03) … 3-year peak: 25–11–5 … leader: rebounds (1x) …’02 playoffs: 24–11–5 (16 G) … played 70 or fewer games in 9 seasons, missed 294 games total

Of all the great talents who never fulfilled their promise, Webber was the only NBA player without a legitimate excuse. On paper, he had everything you’d ever want from a power forward: superior athletic ability, great footwork on the block, soft hands, the rebounding gene, even the passing gene. His background couldn’t derail him because Webber hailed from a middle-class, two-parent family, attended a respected Detroit prep school, and learned quickly how to juggle a Jonas Brothers–like public persona with a much more urban private persona. He shone in the biggest spotlight possible at Michigan and helped create the iconic “Fab Five,” who became
genuine trendsetters with their chest thumping, yelping, baggy shorts and everything else. Everything that happened during his first twenty years seemed to be shaping an influential and successful professional career, a sure thing along the lines of Shaq, Ewing and Robinson.