The Book of Basketball (68 page)

Eventually they decided that Ewing’s career was either “frustrating” (the glass-half-full take) or “phenomenally disappointing” (the glass-half-empty take). He peaked during the ’90 season, averaging a 29–11 with 4 blocks and 55 percent shooting for a 45-win Knicks team, saving the Knicks with a 44–13 in a must-win Game 4 against Boston, then leading them to a shocking upset in the decisive fifth game (31 points). Sitting in the Garden as Ewing took over and swished an improbable backbreaking three, I remember thinking, “Shit, he’s putting it all together; we’re in serious trouble.” But Detroit easily dispatched them in the second round and Ewing was never that good again. Why? Because of his knees. College Ewing prowled the paint like a tiger, jumped around like House of Pain and contested every shot within fifteen feet of the rim. NBA veteran Ewing picked his spots, jogged with huge strides and crouched before every jump. Never a great rebounder
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or passer, never someone with a treasure chest of low-post moves, that subtle erosion of athleticism turned him into an elite center who did everything well and nothing great. Actually, it was a little sad. Poor Ewing perfected his “intense” game face, bellowed at the MSG crowd, pounded his chest after big plays, played up the whole “I’m a warrior!” angle in interviews and even made a clumsy effort to become an intimidating enforcer. All of it kind of worked … but not really. The sophisticated Knicks fans saw right through him, endlessly debating his virtues and repeatedly coming back to the same conclusion:
As long as this is our best guy, we probably can’t win the title.

That’s when Pat Riley nearly salvaged Ewing’s superstardom, remaking the Knicks into Bad Boys II, adopting thugball tactics to exact as much as he could from his secretly limited center (and nearly ruining basketball in the process). They lost back-to-back slugfests to Chicago before catching a break with Jordan’s “baseball sabbatical,” reaching the Finals behind a monster effort from Ewing in Game 7 (22–20–7 with 5 blocks and the
winning tip against Indiana) before squandering a disheartening Finals. The following year, Reggie Miller ripped out their hearts in the Eastern Semis, with Ewing missing a series-deciding 6-foot bunny. And just like that the Ewing window had closed, although it took a few more years for everyone to realize it.
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Before the 2001 season, the Knicks finally cut the cord (and inadvertently destroyed their future) by turning Ewing’s expiring deal into a slew of horrendous contracts; then we watched Ewing slog through the “fifteen-year-old poodle with cataracts who starts going to the bathroom in the house and needs to be put to sleep” stage. Did we ever figure out why centers age in dog years once they hit their late thirties? They always have one final season where they gain 20 pounds, lose all hand-eye coordination, run in slow motion, and jump like their shoes are loaded with razor blades; all they have left is their turnaround jumper. It’s like an automobile being completely stripped except for the radio, which is left behind for some reason. That’s the turnaround jumper. For Ewing, that season happened twice, in Seattle and Orlando. And then he was done.

He hasn’t endured for a few reasons. Ewing lacked charisma and may have been the most uncomfortable postmerger interview other than Moses Malone.
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He had some legitimate weaknesses—horrendous hands, shaky at crunch time, dubious rebounder, awful passer out of double-teams, couldn’t make his teammates better—and he lacked a fan-friendly game that wouldn’t exactly be remembered fondly. Even Ewing’s shining moment (the ’94 Finals) turned into a train wreck: Ewing averaged 18.9 points and shot 36 percent, while Hakeem averaged a 27–9 with 3.9 blocks and 50 percent shooting. And it wasn’t even THAT close. Ewing ranks this highly because you could build a contender around him in his prime, and because he absolutely could have won the ’94 championship
playing with Richmond, Rice, Miller, or really any good two-guard other than John Starks. Much like fellow Dream Team players Drexler, Robinson and Malone, we’ll remember Ewing as a second banana masquerading as a first banana, even if Knicks fans never wanted to admit it at the time. Now they do.
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One last Ewing thought: When I was writing for my old website, a reader named Dave Cirilli sent in his elaborate Ewing Theory, which centered around the inexplicable phenomenon that both the Hoyas and Knicks seemed to play better every time Ewing was sitting on the bench. After tinkering with it and finding various examples,
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Dave emailed me and we honed the language over the next few weeks, eventually deciding that two crucial elements were needed for any situation to qualify for Ewing status: a star athlete receives an inordinate amount of media attention and fan interest, yet his teams never win anything substantial with him; and that same athlete leaves his team (either by injury, trade, graduation, free agency, or retirement) and both the media and fans immediately write off the team for the near future (for either the rest of the season or the following season). I wrote about the theory and had some fun with it.
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A few months later, Ewing tore an Achilles tendon during Game 2 of the ’99 Eastern Finals. The heavily favored Pacers seemed like a mortal lock … only with Ewing himself involved, suddenly this had become the
ultimate test
of the Ewing Theory. Heading into Game 3, Dave was oozing with confidence and predicting in no uncertain terms, “Ewing’s injury is the best thing that ever could have happened to the Knicks; they’re definitely making the Finals now.” Incredibly, the Knicks won three of the next four and advanced to the Finals
as I was playing up Dave’s Ewing theory prediction on my website!
My three thousand readers at the time couldn’t have been more impressed. From there, Ewing Theory instances
kept happening—Mo Vaughn (’99 Red Sox), Barry Sanders (’99 Lions), Trent Green (’99 Rams), Griffey and A-Rod (’00 and ’01 Mariners), Dan Marino (’00 Dolphins)—and I finally unveiled Dave’s Ewing Theory to a national audience on
ESPN.com
in 2001, predicting that Drew Bledsoe was the single most logical Ewing Theory candidate for the future. Only a few months later, Bledsoe went down, the ’02 Patriots won their first Super Bowl without him and I looked like Nostrasimbo. You have to admit, that was amazing. Since then, we’ve had some other classics (Nomar and the ’04 Red Sox and Tiki and the ’07 Giants being the best ones), but none could have happened without the great Patrick Ewing.

Here’s my point: If your prime inspired a sports theory that hypothesized why your teams played better without you, you probably shouldn’t crack the top thirty-five of a Hall of Fame Pyramid.

38. STEVE NASH

Resume: 13 years, 9 quality, 6 All-Stars … MVP: ’05, ’06 … ’07 MVP runner-up … BS MVP (’07) … top 5 (’05, ’06, ’07), top 10 (’08), top 15 (’02, ’03) … leader: assists (3x), FT% (1x) … 4-year peak: 17–4–11, 51% FG, 45% 3FG, 90% FT … 3-year Playoffs peak: 21–4–11, 49% FG, 40% 3FG, 90% FT (46 G) … career: assists (9th), 3-point FG% (5th)

The case for Nash cracking the top forty: Won back-to-back MVPs, a sentence that looks so unbelievable in print, my eyeballs just popped out of my head Allan Ray–style (only Bird, Magic, MJ, Russell, Wilt, Duncan, Moses, Kareem and Nash did it) … along with Larry Bird and Dirk Nowitzki, one of three living members of the 50–40–90 Club (and he did it twice)
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… exceptionally fun to watch on the offensive end … willed himself into a Stockton-like crunch-time assassin … helped bring back three dying art forms: passing, fast breaks and crappy hair … four-time winner of the Guy Everyone in the League Would Have Killed to Play With award (’05, ’06, ’07, ’08) … replaced Wayne Gretzky as the most
popular athlete in Canada after the Janet Jones gambling scandal … along with Mike D’Antoni, improved the careers of Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire by at least 35 percent … the only player this decade who inspired Tim Thomas to give a shit
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… drew a handful of “that’s one bad-ass white boy” compliments from Charles Barkley over the past four years … probably would have played in a Finals if (a) Phoenix’s owner weren’t such a cheapskate, (b) Joe Johnson hadn’t broken his face early in the ’04 playoffs, (c) Tim Donaghy reffing Game 3 and the Amar’e/Diaw leaving-the-bench suspensions
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had never happened in ’07, (d) Tim Duncan hadn’t hit that crazy three in Game 1 of the ’08 Spurs-Suns series, and/or (e) Phoenix’s owner weren’t such a shameless cheapskate … you could call him the Evolutionary Cousy, like Cousy with a jump shot … the more he plays with his teammates, the better he gets (almost like Wayne Gretzky during his Edmonton days).

The case against Nash cracking the top forty: Struggled with a bad back during his first four seasons, missing 64 games in all (and rendering the first third of his career moot) … an ineffective defensive player who doesn’t get steals and can’t be hidden against elite point guards … looks like a cross between Jackie Earle Haley and James Blunt … the validity of his consecutive MVP trophies can be easily picked apart, although he probably should have won by default in ’07 … of all players who benefited from the rule changes before the ’05 season, Nash was number one on the list
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… after seeing how Mike D’Antoni altered the statistical careers of many of the ’09 Knicks, coupled with Nash’s regression back to
his Dallas numbers from ’01 to ’04, it’s hard to argue the theory that D’Antoni’s system made Nash to a large degree … creamed offensively in the playoffs by Mike Bibby (’02, ’04) and Tony Parker (’07, ’08), a huge reason for his team’s exits in those years … you have to wonder about the top-forty credentials of anyone who was offered a perfectly reasonable six-year, $60 million free agent offer by Phoenix in his prime, asked Mark Cuban to match that offer, and had Cuban basically say to him, “Sorry, that’s a little rich for my blood; we’d rather spend that money on Erick Dampier.” I mean, when Cuban wonders about the fiscal sanity of a contract, THAT is saying something.

So why stick Nash this high? For three reasons that went beyond everything we just mentioned. First, he played for a series of all-offense/no-defense teams in Dallas and Phoenix and never landed on a quality defensive team that protected him the way the Lakers protected Magic. His deficiencies were
constantly
exposed on that end, so we were always thinking about them. That’s not totally fair. If you think Nash sucked on defense, you should have seen Magic pretending to be a bullfighter in the late eighties and early nineties.
Olé! Olé!
But Magic’s teammates could protect him. When Nash’s opponents beat him off the dribble, they scored because he never had smart team defenders or a shot blocker behind him. It’s like Kate Hudson’s performance in
Almost Famous
—she’s a semi-abysmal actress, but give her a fantastic script and a great part and suddenly she’s getting an Oscar nomination. Had Nash switched places with Tony Parker (another lousy defender) for the past four years and gotten protected by Popovich and Duncan, we wouldn’t have complained about his defense as much. It’s all about situations. When we think about him historically, it has to be remembered that he would have been better on a smart defensive team with one good shot blocker to protect him. It’s just a fact.

Second, former teammate Paul Shirley argued Nash’s MVP credentials with me once by emailing me an excellent point about how valuable Nash really was to Phoenix, saying that Nash’s style was contagious to the rest of the Suns as soon as he showed up from Dallas. Within a few weeks, everyone started playing unselfishly and getting each other easy baskets, like his magnanimity had seeped into everyone else by osmosis … and when you think about it, that’s the single most important way you can affect a basketball
team. In my lifetime, only Bird, Magic, Kidd and Walton affected their teams to that same degree. And Isaiah Rider, if this were Bizarro World.

Third, Nash’s magnificent performance during the ’07 season—ironically, the season when he
didn’t win
the MVP—pushed him up a level for me. He never had a killer instinct until that year; even when he dropped 48 in an ’05 playoff game because the Spurs were blanketing his teammates and daring Nash to score, he seemed sheepish about it afterward. But falling short in ’05 and ’06 hardened him; maybe he didn’t go to the dark side like Danny LaRusso during the Terry Silver era, but he developed a nasty edge that nobody remembered seeing before. My guess: Nash spent the summer mulling over his career and everything that had happened, ultimately realizing that he couldn’t do anything more other than win his first title. Then he thought long and hard about how to do it, ultimately cutting off his hair (feel the symbolism, baby!) and getting in superb shape so he wouldn’t wear down in the playoffs again. When he showed up for training camp and realized the Marion-Stoudemire soap opera would be an ongoing problem,
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Boris Diaw was out of shape, and new free agent Marcus Banks couldn’t help, something snapped inside him. Exit, nice Steve Nash. Enter, icy Steve Nash. Suddenly he was tripping guys on picks, barking at officials and getting testy with his own teammates, eventually righting the ship and leading the Suns to the highest level of offensive basketball we’ve witnessed in twenty years. Really, it was a virtuoso season for him as an offensive player and a leader; borrowing the same tactic that once worked so well for Magic, Isiah and Stockton, Nash used the first 40 minutes to get everyone else going, then took over in crunch time if the Suns needed it. Sometimes he’d even unleash the “Look, there’s no way we’re effing losing this game!” glare on his face, an absolute staple for any MVP candidate.

Somewhere along the line, he won me over. Once one of the harsher critics of the voting for his back-to-back MVPs, I ended up writing the following about Nash during the ’07 Playoffs: “Regardless of what happens
in San Antonio, I love what happened to Nash this season; his competitive spirit, toughness and leadership reminds me of Bird, Magic, MJ and Isiah back in the day. That’s the highest praise I can give. At the very least, you know the Suns won’t get blown out—they’ll be in the game and fighting until the very end. You can count on that from them. He’s the reason.” You could go to war with Steve Nash, and really, that’s all that matters.