Basketball (And Other Things) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  FOREWORD

  BY REGGIE MILLER

  What Year Was Michael Jordan the Best Version of Michael Jordan?

  Who’s Your Frankenplayer Made Out Of?

  Who’s the Greatest Dunker in NBA History?

  What’s the Order of the First Round of the Fictional Basketball Player Draft? PART 1

  What’s the Order of the First Round of the Fictional Basketball Player Draft? PART 2

  What’s the Order of the First Round of the Fictional Basketball Player Draft? PART 3

  Which NBA Players Get Remembered for the Wrong Reasons?

  How Many Points Should [SHOT] Actually Be Worth?

  Which Dunks Are in the Disrespectful Dunk Hall of Fame? PART 1

  Which Dunks Are in the Disrespectful Dunk Hall of Fame? PART 2

  Who Is Your Memory Hero?

  Which NBA Player’s Group Are You Joining If the Purge Begins Tonight?

  What’s the Most Important NBA Championship? PART 1

  What’s the Most Important NBA Championship? PART 2

  What’s the Most Important NBA Championship? PART 3

  Basketball Court: Who’s More Important to the History of Basketball, Allen Iverson or Dwyane Wade?

  How Do Players’ Legacies Change If We Change Their Names?

  What’s the Plot for Death Hammer 2: Hammergeddon?

  If 1997 Karl Malone and a Bear Swapped Places for a Season, Who Would Be More Successful?

  What If Nick Anderson Made One of Those Free Throws?

  What Happened in the Moment Before “the Moment”? PART 1 (1986–1991)

  What Happened in the Moment Before “the Moment”? PART 2 (1992–2001)

  What Happened in the Moment Before “the Moment”? PART 3 (2002–2016)

  Was Kobe Bryant a Dork? (And Also: How Many Years During His Career Was Kobe Bryant the Best Player in the League?)

  What Attributes Make for the Best Basketball Villain? (And Also: Who’s a First-Ballot Selection for the Basketball Villain Hall of Fame?)

  Should We Do a Chapter That’s Just a Bunch of Lists?

  Am I Allowed to ___________ During Pickup Basketball? PART 1

  Am I Allowed to ___________ During Pickup Basketball? PART 2

  Who Had the Better Big-Name Game Under Duress?

  What Would’ve Happened If Shaq and Hakeem Had Played That One-on-One Game?

  Which Was the Most Perfect Duo in NBA History?

  If You Could Dunk on Any One Person, Who Would It Be?

  Which NBA Player’s Legacy Is the Most Greatly Affected If We Give Him the Championship He Never Won?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

  AN INTRODUCTION, BY WAY OF ELEVEN QUESTIONS

  1. Are you really going to just answer questions for the introduction to your book?

  Yes.

  2. Why? Why do that?

  It just makes sense to me to do it that way. The entire book is a bunch of different questions getting answered. I think the introduction should be the same.

  3. Will you tell me a little about the book?

  Sure. The book has 33 chapters. Each chapter is a different basketball question that, as I just mentioned, gets answered. And they’re not traditional, normal, regular questions. They’re not things like, “Was Larry Bird better than Magic Johnson?” or whatever. They’re new questions. Questions that you’ve (hopefully) not seen before or thought about before. That’s what the book is.

  Oh, also: The questions are not related to each other, and what I mean when I say that is the book isn’t a thing that has to move front to back. It doesn’t flow from one chapter to the next like the way a regular book would. In most cases, you don’t have to read one chapter to read a chapter that comes after it. You can jump in wherever.

  Oh, another also: There’s a lot of art in here, and also some charts. That part doesn’t really need to be explained, though.

  4. Is the book all NBA-related stuff?

  Pretty much, yes. There are two chapters that are about pickup basketball, and there’s one chapter that’s about an NBA player who’s not an NBA player anymore, and there's a section about basketball players from TV shows and movies, but other than that, yes, it’s all NBA-related stuff.

  5. What did you mean in your answer to the third question when you said, “In most cases, you don’t have to read one chapter to read a chapter that comes after it”? Why the “in most cases”?

  Well, some of the questions ended up requiring answers that were way longer than I was anticipating, and so I just took them and, say, rather than having a single chapter that was 6,000 words, I’d take it and break it into two chapters that were 3,000 words. So there are some double chapters in here and even a couple of triple chapters, which is truly dumb.

  6. I read your other book, The Rap Year Book, and when I got to the end of it I realized that you’d tricked me into reading a book that was secretly the history of rap. Is this one going to be like that? Is this book secretly the history of basketball?

  No. It’s not that. It’s definitely not that. I mean, yes, there’s lots of information in here that, after you’ve read it, you’re going to be like, “Whoa, I know a lot about basketball now,” but that’s not the point of the book.

  7. Okay, so what’s the point of this book then? Does it have a bigger idea hidden away inside of it that I won’t realize until I’m done reading it?

  It does, yes. I’m not going to tell you what it is, though.

  8. Since it’s a basketball book, am I going to have to know a lot about stats, or learn a lot about stats? There are stats that get mentioned in the book, definitely. Mostly, it’s just regular stuff (points per game, blocks per game, things like that), but there are some spots that reference advanced stats to help prove a point or strengthen a point. Here’s a quick summary for you:

  • Player Efficiency Rating (PER): This one uses a calculation of all the pieces of the traditional box score to tell us how efficient a player is. The average NBA player has a PER of 15. All-Star players are usually around, or above, 20. League MVPs tend to hover near 27.5. Anything above 30 is exceptional. The highest-ever PER was 1963 Wilt Chamberlain (31.82).

  • Box Plus/Minus (BPM): This is a box score–based measurement that estimates a player’s performance relative to the league average, and it’s expressed on a Per 100 Possessions basis. What that means is, okay, if a player has a BPM of 5, that means he is 5 points better than an average player over 100 possessions. Anything above 8 is very good and anything in double-digits is unquestionable. The highest-ever BPM was 2017 Russell Westbrook (15.6).

  • Value Over Replacement Player (VORP): This converts BPM into an estimate of each player’s overall contribution to the team. So basically it tells us how valuable a player is versus replacing that player with someone else, or a “replacement player,” in this case defined as “a minimum salary player not in a rotation.” Same as BPM, anything above 8 is very good and anything in double-digits is unquestionable. The highest-ever VORP was 2017 Russell Westbrook (12.4).

  • Win Shares (WS): This is an estimate of the number of team wins a player is responsible for on his team during a particular season. If you add up all the Win Shares on a team, it’ll equal up to somewhere near however many games that team won that season. Anything near 15 typically means an MVP-caliber season. 1972 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had the highest WS ever at 25.37.

  Now, one of two things just happened in that stats section above. Either you started reading it and were like, “Wow, this is interesting.” Or you started reading it and were like, “Nah, fuck this,” and then skipped it. If you’re in that second group, a
ll you need to know is that whenever a stat gets mentioned somewhere, high numbers are good and low numbers are bad.

  9. The phrase “(AND OTHER THINGS)” that appears in the title of this book—what does it mean?

  It means that, on occasion, some of the basketball conversations in here will go sideways for a second. The reason I did it that way is because that’s how talking about basketball works for me, which means that’s how writing about basketball works for me. I don’t think in my life I have ever had a conversation about basketball that traveled in a perfectly straight line. (I suspect it works that same way for a lot of people.) The talks always kind of veer off in different directions, touching on this thing or that thing along the way, before arriving at the conclusion. So, when I was writing the book, I wanted to be careful to keep that feeling intact, and that spirit intact. It just felt natural.

  10. You mentioned earlier that this isn’t a history book. Was there a cut-off point in time that you decided on?

  What I did is I just traveled backward to 1980, the season that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson entered the league, which was the birth of the modern NBA, and then I walked forward from there. There are tiny pieces and footnotes that reference points and events and people from before then, but all of the bigger thoughts and questions and ideas are built up around people and things from 1980 forward.

  11. Why did you ask Reggie Miller to write the foreword?

  I grew up in San Antonio, and so the Spurs were of course my favorite basketball team growing up and still are my favorite basketball team now. Reggie, though—Reggie was the first basketball player I ever loved. I remember watching him play a game on TV in middle school in the mid-90s and just being absolutely in awe. He was doing all of the things I thought were cool (shooting threes, talking shit, shoving people, etc.), and when you’re 13, 14, 15 years old, the only stuff that matters to you is stuff that’s cool, you know what I’m saying? He was a king to me; a basketball lord, of sorts.

  I watched Reggie without fail for a good decade after I found him, all the way up until his retirement in 2005. His last game was a loss to the Pistons in the playoffs. In the final seconds, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle called a timeout so he could take Reggie out so the crowd could cheer for him. Reggie walked toward the bench and raised his hand and everyone was just glowing with love and it was this very touching, very moving scene. And right when it was about to end, Larry Brown, who was coaching the Pistons, called a timeout, too, and the only reason he did was so everyone could keep cheering for Reggie. The camera cut to the crowd and it was person after person after person in tears. Even after all these years, it remains the only time I ever cried while watching someone’s final game.

  I didn’t know in that moment I’d eventually write a book about basketball and that Reggie would write the foreword for it, but I did know I was going to carry Reggie in my heart forever, and that basketball meant more to me than I’d allowed myself to realize.

  FOREWORD

  BY REGGIE MILLER

  I have a memory from before I was in the league that I think about to this day. I hope I’m right on the dates here. This was in 1986. It was a Sunday and it was during the playoffs. I woke up that morning—this must’ve been my junior or senior year at UCLA. I remember waking up and getting ready to watch the CBS game. It was between Chicago and Boston. It was the game when Jordan scored 63; the one where he went crazy; the famous game.

  I remember just lying in bed watching it. By that point I felt like I was going to be drafted—or, I was assuming I was going to be drafted. You’re never totally sure that you’re going to be in the NBA until you’re actually in the NBA, but I definitely thought I could play there. So there’s that connection there between me and the NBA because I know—or, I hope—I’m going to be a part of it soon. And I’m watching the game and I’m shaking my head. I’m looking at Michael Jordan and, I mean, Jordan was playing at such a high level. I was like, “I can’t believe what I’m witnessing.” It was like one-on-five. He was just two steps faster than everyone on the court. And I’m thinking, “How is this humanly possible?” I had played against him in a pickup game once or twice at UCLA during the summer, and I’d also met him when he and my sister both won the Naismith Award. So I’m watching him and I’m like, “I . . . I know I guarded him better than that. This is unbelievable what I’m watching.”

  Usually you watch a game and you come in and out and you’re doing other things. But that game I remember just being fixated on the TV. That’s one of the games that always stood out to me because he was playing like he just wasn’t from this world, if that makes any kind of sense. My friends were going to eat, they were trying to go out. They were asking me to go with them. And I was like, “What? No. Go. Leave me alone. Just go.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV. I’ve seen so many games. I’ve watched so many great players. But it was something about that game, about that performance. I think part of it was of course because of how great he was playing, but also another part was how I was feeling about becoming a part of that world. It was this really overwhelming feeling of knowing. It felt good. It felt surreal. I’ll never forget that.

  During my four years at UCLA, every summer in the men’s gym we played these pickup games. They weren’t just normal pickup games, though. Our UCLA team, we stayed together and we played on one team, okay. And we were good. But there were all these pros that would come through and play, too. Magic was always there and he had a team. Isiah Thomas and Mark Aguirre would be there and they’d have a team. Kiki VanDe-Weghe would have a team. And there was a team of overseas players. Larry was there. Michael showed up a couple times. Everyone came through, because during the summer everyone was in LA.

  So we had all these different teams, with all these different pros and we all played round robin on two courts. It was absolutely the best basketball I had ever seen. I mean, it was Magic and Kareem and all those guys unscripted, uninterrupted. Everyone was just flowing. Think about that. Think about being 20 years old and you’re playing pickup basketball with Magic Johnson, with Larry Bird, with Michael, with Kareem. That’s what we were doing. Two and a half to three months out of the year that’s what we were doing. It was pure.

  There’s something to be said of those moments where you’re on the bus or you’re on the plane or you’re in the locker room with your team and you’re just laughing and vibing off one another. Just being in the back of the bus with the LaSalle Thompsons, the Mark Jacksons, the Vern Flemings, the Herb Williamses, the Chuck Persons—it’s an incredible experience. That’s a part of the NBA that a lot of people never get to see so I guess maybe that’s what makes those memories feel so special; they belong to so few people.

  I remember being on the bus in the back during my rookie year and it was our first road trip. I’m 22 years old and Clint Richardson—I remember this story so vividly—he pulled me aside. This was when he was in his last year in the league or close to his last year, I believe. He pulled me aside and he said, “Look, be yourself. Don’t be a follower. Be a leader. You don’t have to dress like everyone else. Be unique in this league.” That sounds like real general or basic advice, but to hear it from a veteran when you’re a rookie, that’s a big thing. It’s a big moment. It was a real big moment for me.

  John Long, who was my mentor my rookie year, he was 31 at the time and I was 22. He was the shooting guard. I only started one game that season. He started all the other games. And before every game we would sit down and we would watch tape of the opposing guard and we would talk about how we were going to guard him. And for a guy that’d been in the league for as long as he had—he was there for, like, a decade before I got there—for him to sit down with a rookie who was going to take his spot eventually and teach me what the NBA was, it was incredible. “Reg, you can’t talk to Alvin Robertson.” “Reg, this is how we’re gonna guard Ricky Pierce.” “Reg, you see how Randy Wittman is using the screen here? Look at his arms. You wanna knock his arms down and lock and go on
this one.” “Reg, when you play Ron Harper you’re gonna wanna play physical with him. But be smart. You’re gonna hold him with your left hand and keep your right hand up because the ref is right behind you and he’s looking at your right hand.” It was those lessons that were invaluable as a rookie. And more than that, it is those things that I remember the most.

  The shots are great, you know. Hitting big shots against the Knicks and the Nets and the Sixers and the Celtics and the Bulls; those were great. Those are the things everyone talks about, the things everyone asks about. But it’s those little lessons I learned from John Long, from Byron Scott, who came to our team in the mid-’90s and really made us feel like we could win in the playoffs, from anyone who sat down and just talked in private, those are the special moments. It’s those things that I’ll remember and always look back on so fondly.

  During the first lockout year, I got cast in a small part in Gang Related, a movie starring Jim Belushi and Tupac. It was shot out in LA and my whole scene was . . . I think I was a hotdog vendor. That was my part. But I was playing Reggie Miller as a hotdog vendor because of the lockout. And the whole scene with Jim Belushi was like, “Oh, God. It must really be hard out here for you right now, Reggie.” And I was supposed to be like, “Well, I gotta find extra money doing something.” That was the whole thing. It was real short. But still, it was just so cool to be on set. And then when Tupac showed up, it was like he just took the whole set to another level. His voice—that voice alone would just get you hyped for every take, every scene. And he and I would talk and he was a big basketball fan so we had that instant connection over our love of the game of basketball.

  Of the four sports, I think it’s easiest for basketball to become absorbed into other parts of pop culture because think about it: A lot of times people aren’t going out to play a casual game of baseball. It’s not a thing you can just jump up and do. Everyone’s gotta have a glove, there’s gotta be a big field. And with football, it takes a lot of people to play a game. Basketball, though, you don’t really need much beyond a ball and something to throw it in. You can play it one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three. It’s just an easy game to access. Plus, the players are in jerseys and shorts. You can see them. They’re very recognizable. A football player has to wear a helmet all the time. Baseball players have hats on and their uniforms also feel a little more official. Basketball, to me, it just feels more accessible. It feels more available.