The Book of Basketball Read Free Page B

At the eight-minute mark, Jordan, Kareem, Bird, Magic and McHale return. We bring back Duncan for the final 4:00 unless McHale is destroying his guy and can’t be taken out.
Minutes breakdown: Jordan (34), Bird (34), Magic (34), Kareem (27), Duncan (24), McHale (20), LeBron (15), Wade (14), Paul (14), Walton (13), Pippen (11), Allen (0). 12
    (We are gonna fuck those Martians up! Don’t come into our house!) My toughest omissions: ’92 Robinson, ’01 Kobe, ’89 Rodman, ’06 Nash and ’96 Kerr (three-point shooting and free-throw shooting), ’79 Gervin (instant offense), ’84 Bernard (ditto), ’04 Garnett (in LeBron’s place), ’83 Toney (in Wade’s spot), ’89 Dumars (defense and intangibles), ’79 Moses (only for his rebounding), ’87 Barkley (in the LeBron spot, although we couldn’t press with him), ’87 Isiah (instead of Paul). 13 The toughest cut? I can’t believe I’m saying this … but it’s Rodman. We could have used him on the Murderous Press. Oh, well.
    For a head coach, I’m grabbing ’07 Gregg Popovich (perfect sense of humor, proven success with veteran teams like this one) over any of the Phil Jackson or Pat Riley vintages, just because we don’t need any of their cutesy motivational tricks on a team this good. Pop’s assistants: ’06 Mike D’Antoni (our offensive guru), ’09 Mike Brown (our guru for defending high screens and rotating correctly), ’88 Rick Pitino (pulled from college to run our killer press) 14 and ’77 Willis Reed (big man coach and protectionjust in case an alien starts a bench-clearing brawl). Also, we need 1984 Red Auerbach involved—we’re making him the team president, just so we’d have a crusty old guy happily accepting the All-Universe Trophy in the raucous locker room after the game and saying something sarcastic like, “I kept hearing that the aliens were more advanced in every respect.” (Holds up the trophy.) “Here’s your advancement, I got it right here!”
    Speaking of Red, how would a pre-merger team look operating under the same principles? You wouldn’t have the same athleticism—hence, no press with the bench guys—and you’d have serious outside shooting issues since nobody consistently drained anything past 20–22 feet back then. So I’d twist this unit around with a different focus. Check it out.
Starters. The ’74 Kareem (first scoring option); ’64 Russell (moves to power forward as my leader, shot blocker, and rebounder); ’72 Havlicek (my glue); ’66 West (slightly poor man’s MJ); ’64 Oscar (the maestro). These are my best five guys and the most “modern” of the pre-1977 guys. I want them playing together as much as possible. 15
Bench. The pre-1977 guys weren’t nearly as flexible stylistically and lacked length because the Duncan/KG types just didn’t exist. So what do we do? I thought about run-and-gun with ’61 Elgin, ’59 Cousy, ’62 Wilt, ’76 Doc and ’73 Cowens, but they’d have no outside shooting and might get pancaked defensively. So what if we just unleashed Wilt, revolved the bench around him and re-created the ’67 Sixers or ’72 Lakers as closely as possible? We tell ’67 Wilt going in, “Look, you’re not starting. You will never start. You will also never finish a game. Here’s all we want from you. For six minutes each half, we want you to score as many points as you possibly can. You will be our number one option for those twelve minutes. We will only careabout getting you the ball and playing defense. That’s it. Otherwise, you’re not coming, you’ll never see the future and you’ll never find out what sex with an alien groupie is like. Do you accept this mission or not?” I think Wilt accepts. Maybe even with a hard-on. Then we build a bench unit around him that resembles the ’67 Sixers as closely as possible: ’70 Frazier (reasonable Oscar imitation, plus someone to carouse with Wilt after games); ’70 DeBusschere (rebounding, defense and long-distance shooting); ’75