The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons Page B

I‧ll take Bird, Magic, Jordan, Kareem, LeBron … What does that even mean? Did you like prebaseball or post-baseball Jordan? Did you like alpha dog Magic or unselfish Magic? I need more information. Think like a wine snob and regard players like vintages of wine and not the brands themselves. Ask any wine connosseur for their ten favorite Bordeaux of the last seventy-five years and they wouldn’t say, “ Mouton-Rothschild, Lafite, Haut Brion, Latour …” They would give you precise vintages. The ’59 Mouton Rothschild. The ’53 Lafite. The ’82 Haut-Brion. The ’61 Latour. If you prodded them, they would happily accept this challenge, “I’ll give you five dinner menus and you give me the ten best Bordeaux, two per dinner, that match up with the food.” That’s part of being a wine connoisseur—not just knowing the wines but knowing the vintages and how they relate to food. They would have a grand old time figuring this out. 1
    Doesn’t that sound like basketball? It’s all about the vintages. I loved watching Bird, but I really loved watching ’86 Bird. Why? His teammates peaked in ’86, allowing him to explore parts of his game during his prime that couldn’t be explored otherwise. You could say his career year became special because of luck and timing. With wines, the determining factors for career years also hinge on luck and timing—like 1947, an unusually hot summer in France that created wines of high alcohol and low acidity. That’s how the ’47 Cheval Blanc emerged as a famous vintage and the best its vine-yardever produced … you know, just like ’77 Bill Walton. Not every decision is that easy. Mouton-Rothschild peaked in ’53, ’59 and ’61 … you know, like how Magic peaked in different ways in ’82, ’85 and ’87. Wine connoisseurs disagree on the best Mouton-Rothschild vintage, just like we might disagree on the best vintage of Magic. His best scoring season occurred in ’87, but I have more than enough firepower on my Wine Cellar Team. If I’m already grabbing a Jordan bottle (either ’92 or ’96) and a bottle of ’86 Bird, and I’m definitely picking a few more scorers, why would I need Magic to assume a bigger scoring load? Why not start ’85 Magic (the ultimate for unselfish point guards) or maybe even bring ’82 Magic (younger, better defensively, capable of playing four positions, talented enough to average a shade under a triple double) off the bench as my sixth man?
    So really, the Wine Cellar Team is a jigsaw puzzle. I made my decisions easier with three ground rules:
     
Only vintage seasons that I remember witnessing live. That makes the ABA-NBA merger our cutoff date and gives us a time frame from 1977 to 2009. 2
Emulate the best basketball team ever (the ’86 Celts) as closely as possible, not their talent as much as their unselfishness and we-can-do-anything flexibility.
Don’t forget that a formula of “unselfishness + character + defense + rebounding + MJ” will run the Martians out of the gym unless they have an eight-foot-three center we didn’t know about. 3
    From there, I worked backward and started with the following have-to-have-them guys who received check marks in the following categories: totallyunselfish, awesome teammate, enjoyed making others better, incredibly high basketball IQ, complete comprehension of The Secret. There were three in all.
’86 Larry Bird
25.8 PPG, 9.3 RPG, 8.2 APG, 2.1 SPG, 52–93–41 (18 playoff games)
    Give him superior teammates and he’d reinvent himself as a complementary player, drain a few threes, post smaller dudes up, rove around on defense like a free safety, make everyone else better and take over if you needed him. Mike Fratello summed up Bird’s better-with-great-teammates qualities after coaching an ’88 All-Star game in which Bird scored six points and Jordan and ’Nique combined for sixty-nine: “Michael played well, Dominique played well, but the thing which really impressed me was the way