(If you haven’t read the apologia already, you may want to start here. Trust me, everything will make more sense.)
The Secret
P. 30-56
I’m going to tweak the format of my analysis from here on out, or at least for the next couple of chapters. Instead of working from big themes, I’m just going to snag the quotes that grab me and offer my thoughts about them.
One quick and very general impression. One of Simmons’s strengths is telling stories starring himself that feel as candid as grainy home video footage from the ’50s even though he’s every bit aware of how what he’s writing may be interpreted. Consider the story he tells about the blonde at the Vegas blackjack table who vows to flash everyone if she wins:
“When she finally nailed her blackjack, our side of he blackjack section erupted like Fenway after the Roberts steal. She followed through with her vow, departed a few minutes later, and left us spending the rest of the night wondering how I could write about that entire sequence for ESPN The Magazine without coming off like a pig.” (33)
How many writers this side of Hunter S. Thompson would even consider telling this story let alone invite his readers inside twisted mind? Not many.
(By the way, the ESPN The Magazine plugs scattered throughout this chapter are out of control. No matter what, they always feel intrusive and extravagant. Isn’t there some appropriate acronym? ETM maybe?)
On a serious note, I don’t know how to feel about Simmons’s “pulling the goalie” stunt. For those who haven’t read the book, it means “eschewing birth control and letting the chips fall where the may.” Or, planting a seed without telling your wife your planning to expand the garden.
Why am I okay with Simmons regaling me with stories of topless bimbos in Vegas but sort of uneasy about him telling me how knocked up his wife because he was ready for kid number two? What does that say about me? Am I selectively sexist? Is this something deeper. I literally had to put down the book for a while after I read the “pulling the goalie” footnote.
But then I picked it back up again.
- “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.” (39)
This chapter is all about Isiah Thomas telling Simmons the secret of basketball at a topless pool in Vegas. We know this from the very beginning of the chapter, but we only get to the part where Isiah actually tells him The Secret after Simmons does his Curly Neal impersonation for nearly nine pages. (You remember how Curly used to pass up open layups so he could dribble around and give the crowd a good show; Simmons does the same thing). Finally, Isiah (I can still picture the oblivious grin he wore the entire ’07-’08 season in New York) comes out with it. “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.”
That was it. I felt cheated, even more so because Simmons actually pretends like he’s been hipped to some metaphysical wisdom that’s so damn deep that he can’t quite wrap his head around it. “That makes no sense, right? How can that possibly make sense?”
(Bill, we know when you’re bullshitting us. This is bullshit.)
How do I know this is bullshit?
This is a guy who emerged from his mother’s womb with encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston Celtics, a guy who witnessed five championship runs before he graduated high school. A chapter from now (spoiler alert, again) he’ll kill Wilt Chamberlain for coming to pretty much the same conclusion after years of selfish play. (I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but I’m going to do it anyway.) Following a quote from Wilt’s autobiography wherein the HOFer writes, he was “learning to keep my teammates happy if I wanted to win,” Simmons destroys him. “As far as epiphanies go, that ranks somewhere between Pete Rose admitting that he had a gambling problem and John Holmes glancing at his fourteen-inch schlong and realizing he needed to try porn. Better late than never, I guess.” (72) (We’re going to get to the Russell-Chamberlain chapter in the next blog post, but for now just know this: Simmons can’t stand Wilt.)
I could only come up with three plausible explanations for Simmons’s bogus awakening: a) he was giving Isiah a pass, b) he needed a legend to confirm his opinion that teams win because of sacrifice and unselfishness (which is also obvious), or c) it was actually really deep and I needed to look a little closer.
a) To his credit, Simmons doesn’t let Isiah off entirely:
“He [Isiah] knew there was more to basketball than stats and money, that you couldn’t win and keep winning unless your players sacrificed numbers for the greater good. So why place his franchise’s fate in the hands of Stephon Marbury, one of the most selfish stars in the league? Why give away two lottery picks for Curry….? What made him think Randolph and Curry could play together, or Steve Francis and Marbury, or even Marbury and Jamal Crawford?” (45)
I’ll tell you what. In his early years as a Piston no one thought he’d be winner. Even when the Pistons started winning, they got no respect. Even now they get no respect from basketball historians. Simmons hit the nail on the head when he called Isiah “the most underappreciated star of his era.” Like Francis and Marbury, Isiah caught hell for being a scoring point guard. He thought he could make winners out of Curry and Randolph the way he’d made a winner out of Rodman. If anything, Isiah’s Achilles heel as a GM was his charitable hubris: he believed he could take a band of talented misanthropes and turn their careers around by giving them The Secret.
b) Writers do this all the time. We look for devices to say what we want to say but can’t without sounding like we made it up.
c) In college I used to carry around a copy of Tao Te Ching. Around the same time I also started reading new agey books like The Celestine Prophecy and The Alchemist. All three books are full of allegedly deep but stupefyingly statements like,
“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.” (Tao Te Ching)
“Once you learn what life is about, there is no way to erase the knowledge.” (The Celestine Prophecy)
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” (The Alchemist)
So where does Isiah’s, “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball” fit? Is it “deep” or “duh”?
The answer depends on what you think basketball is “about.” If you’re someone who thinks you’re supposed to shoot the ball every time it touches your hands in a pick up game, then you might think it’s deep. If you’re someone who wants to strangle that guy, then it’s duh. I’ve played with countless people who know how to dribble, shoot, chase after the ball, and, theoretically, pass, but who don’t have a clue how to play team basketball. They don’t know how to call out screens or fight through picks or tap the ball to a teammate rather than grab the rebound or look up the court or when to throw a bounce pass rather than a chest pass or where a player likes to catch the ball or who’s got the mismatch or who needs to be rewarded for busting their ass on defense. They don’t know any of these things. What’s worse is that they they don’t know that they don’t know. It’s that simple. And it’s that deep.
- “The Pistons couldn’t risk having [Adrian] Dantley knock the Jenga stack down. They quickly swapped him for the enigmatic [Mark] Aguirre, an unconventional low-post scorer who caused similar mismatch problems but wouldn’t start trouble because Isiah (a childhood chum from Chicago) would never allow it.” (40)
I remember this. And I remember hearing that Isiah orchestrated it. And I remember wondering why, especially since A.D. was their only real low-post threat and Mark Aguirre was essentially the same: methodical, wide-hipped, slightly undersized, highly skilled post player with a dangerous mid-range game. (Guys like Dantley and Aguirre really don’t exist in the league anymore. Think about it. A far better rebounder, Elton Brand may be the closest undersized pure post player. A guy like Caron Butler may be the next iteration of Dantley and Aguirre: multi-dimensional 6’6”/6’7” players who creates matchup problems because he can go into the post on smaller players and take bigger players out on the wing. When Barkely was the state of the art small forward, Dantley and Aguirre were a tier down. Now Carmelo Anthony is the state of the art and Butler is a a tier below. In chapter 3 Simmons asserts that you could drop any good player or good team from 1984 into today’s game and they’d be fine; My buddy G.G. believes A.D. would kill it in today’s game because he was so offensively skilled. I wonder about this. We’ll come back to it later.) Anyway, I remember the way it was framed: Isiah was the bad guy; he wanted his homeboy from Chicago on his team. Adrian Dantley was the workhouse who was put out to pasture prematurely. The story Isiah told Simmons was completely different: A.D. was threatening the chemistry. He wasn’t willing to buy into The Secret. He had to go. I went to basketball-reference.com to run some numbers myself. The ’89 Pistons were 29-13 before trade. After the trade they went 34-6 in the regular season and an astounding 17-2 in the playoffs. Pretty convincing stuff. But do I agree with Simmons’s assertion that the Pistons wouldn’t have won the championship had they not made the trade? Not entirely. After 42 games in ’88 they were 26-16. Had Isiah not sprained his ankle in Game 6 against the Lakers, the Pistons would have won the series that night and Dantley would’ve (or at least should’ve) been named MVP of the series. By ’89 the Celtics were finished. The Bulls weren’t ready. The Lakers were on fumes. Everyone knew the Pistons were going to win it, and they would have done so with Dantley.
- “Nobody writes about The Secret because of a general lack of sophistication about basketball…” (45)
I actually think it’s deeper than a lack of sophistication. People aren’t interested in the game. Basketball has always been a second-tier sport in this country. Look at what time people show up to games. You never hear about late arriving crowds at football games or tennis matches. Also, it’s marketed as a sport of stars. Teams don’t do Nike commercials; individual players do. The Lakers and Cavaliers are playing on Christmas because Kobe and Lebron draw an audience. The fact that they play on two of the best teams in basketball is just icing on the cake. The reality is that our attentions spans aren’t long enough to watch an entire basketball game, let alone a season’s worth of games, (which explains why you have fans who don’t watch until after the All-Star break). Watching games is work. We need Kobe and Lebron just to hold our attention.
With this in mind, I’ve created a quick and easy guide to efficient game viewing.
1st quarter: Watch the first five minutes of a game. Don’t pay attention to who’s winning. It’s not important. Pay attention to the pace, who it favors. Pay attention to whose stroke looks confident. Scorers like Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony tend to work their mid-range games early. Jordan mastered the art of the 30 point game by using the opening quarter to rack up eight or ten quick points. Basketball players are rhythm/repetition athletes. They need to feel comfortable on the court. They need to run up and down a few times and just feel the ball in their hands. That takes a couple of minutes. Start to pay attention to the score with about 3 minutes to go. Good teams typically try to close quarters out strong.
(In the rarest case the first quarter will have a playoff feel to it, in which case feel free to skip the rest of this guide and just watch the game.)
2nd quarter: If there is a quarter you can miss, this is it. Typically the marquee players are sitting on the bench for the first five minutes or sub out early in the quarter for their routine five-six minute breather. If you don’t mind watching second stringers, enjoy. If you want to maximize the time you’re watching a game that lasts 2.5 hours, sit this one out. Just know this, the last three minutes of the second half are when the stars tend to check back in. By then, they’re ready and fresh.
3rd quarter: Check in at about the 8 minute mark. This is where the game really begins. Statistically speaking, this is the most important quarter of an NBA basketball game. (It’s also the most important quarter of the NBA season). Sacramento’s 35 point rally against Chicago last week began with Tyreke Evans’s layup at the 8:32 mark. Against Minnesota last season Dallas found itself down 29 at the 10:00 mark. By the end of the period they were only down 12. They went on to win by seven. In the 2008 Finals, Los Angeles was up 20 at the 6:04 mark. Boston went on a 21-3 run to close the period down just 2. They went on to win by 6. The rules of thumb I follow are,
Watch if:
A. The home team is up by eight or more and the away team has 1) a better record, 2) playoff tested veteran leadership, 3) a superstar and/or dangerous scoring threat (Monta Ellis, Jamal Crawford, Kevin Durant)
B. The home team is up by six or less and they 1) are young (Memphis, OKC), 2) are erratic (Detroit), 3) go through inexplicable but routine dry spells (Chicago), and (4) are selectively focused defensive team (Wizards) and/or playing a team with any of the three qualities mentioned in A.
C. The away team is up by any amount (within reason) and the home team has any of the qualities mentioned in A.
Don’t watch if:
D. The home team is up by eight or more and has any of the qualities mentioned in A.
Other factors to be considered: injuries, time-period in the season, playoff implications, and days of rest prior to the game (especially for older teams).
4th quarter: Regular season: Watch if necessary, keeping in mind that statistically speaking the 4th quarter has the least overall impact on the outcome of a game. A team may go on a spirited run that’ll leave you wondering why it took them getting down by 10 or 12 to finally start playing, but more often than not time will run out before they can catch up. (Which begs another question: Why wait until 5 minutes left in the fourth to start diving for loose balls and pounding the boards? One solution I’ve been tossing around is getting rid of the total score outcome and going with a quarter by quarter game. Imagine if the team that wins more quarters wins the game. In the case of the two to two tie, we go to overtime.) If a younger, less experienced team has the lead, it could get good. If the Lakers have it, forget about it. Even if the opposition fights all the way back, they’re still going to have to deal with free throw shooting and number 24 at the end. Playoffs: as long as the starters are on the court, keep watching.
If you’re interested in seeing some interesting data about team quarter by quarter scoring, check this page on 82games.com
- “…even the latest “revolution” of basketball statistics centers more around evaluating players against one another over capturing their effect on a team.” (45)
When I read this quote I thought of the Jay-Z line from Renegade (“Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?”). Jay was talking about music critics, but the same can be said of some of the new metricians. Here’s my question: If you’re so busy coming up with new formulas, how closely are you watching the game? I find some of the analysis interesting, but some of it just seems like an exercise in mental masturbation. Who cares who’s the most clutch shooter in a last second situation? I care that the player is willing to take the shot. I’m more concerned with the team’s ability to execute the play its coach draws up. What bothers me most about the stats revolution is that it isn’t about basketball or about the players; it’s about making something really simple really complicated only to verify what we can alreadysee if we just watch the game.
- “We have three guys who who are the best players and everyone else fits around them.” (48)
This was actually a Greg Popovich quote from Sports Illustrated. Simmons uses it to cement his sermon about virtues of The Secret. I thought about it in relation to San Antonio’s acquisition of Richard Jefferson and the struggles he’s had so far this season. Here’s a guy, meaning Jefferson, who was part of a Big Three in New Jersey. He grew comfortable with that role. He understood what he was expected to do each night. Just as important, he played alongside Jason Kidd and Vince Carter, two of the most unselfish stars in the game. Now he’s playing in a system where another Big Three has already established itself. That’s an adjustment. It’s a matter of minutes (how they are distributed throughout the night), touches (when and where he gets the ball), and rhythm (if he’s on, will the Big Three defer to him?). It’s one thing when you come into a situation and you know your job is to provide veteran leadership (Ben Wallace), rebound (Antonio McDyss), score (Jamal Crawford) or give high-energy minutes off the bench (Hakim Warrick). It’s something else when you come to team that already has all those things and you’re job is simply to put them back on top.
