Thursday, January 31, 2013

How To Undermine Your Own Point (part one), by Bill Simmons

     Page 157 of The Book of Basketball is the first page of a chapter called "The What-If Game." This book is 701 pages long; couldn't it have survived without sixty pages of pure conjecture? It's not like TBOB was so weighed down with dispassionate analysis to necessitate a chapter like this.
     Bill's number one choice for the greatest What-If in NBA history is: What if the 1984 draft turned out differently? That question is so broad as to render it almost meaningless. Differently for who? Which player? Which franchise?
   But Bill Simmons is far too smart to box himself in. "Oh, and you thought #1 would simply be 'What if Portland had taken MJ over Bowie?'" Bill must have anticipated that question because it's the most natural one to ask. But he explains his reasoning behind his lack of specificity:

     This draft was so complicated (emphasis mine) that it inspired Houston and Chicago to create the concept of "tanking" during the regular season.

     What exactly was complicated about the 1984 draft? Is he referring to the strategy of tanking, which is only as complicated as "You got a game tonight? Good, go lose it."? Is the famous depth of that draft the complicating factor? Because I would think a low-talent draft would be more complicated than a high talent draft. No larger point; I just thought it was a very poor choice of word.
     As usual, Bill Simmons is confused. He says from the outset that he's not focusing on Portland's failure to draft MJ; but that's almost entirely what he does with this question. In laying out the back story, Bill makes the following enumerated points:

The highlighted numbered points in dark blue bold are my paraphrasing of Simmons. Some of what he wrote was just imprecise enough to allow for some confusion. I'm still putting Simmons' verbatim quotes in bold and quotation marks.

1. Portland and Chicago were each willing to swap their pick for Ralph Sampson. Not about Jordan, but Bill can't resist devoting part of this paragraph to Jordan. And there's something else I need to point out here.

Remember that our theme is that Bill Simmons undermines his points or outright contradicts himself frequently. And in this #1, Bill sets the stage for one of many self-contradictions in just this What-If alone. After quoting Dr. Jack Ramsay of Portland saying that they had to have a center and would have made the Sampson trade, Simmons' comment is "I sure hope so." This tells me that Simmons' agrees with the idea that Portland needed a center. Keep this in mind, and refer back to it as you need to.

2. Many teams offered deals for Chicago's #3 pick, which lends weight to the idea that Portland screwed up by taking Bowie. "Eventually, the Bulls started feeling like they were sitting on a winning lottery ticket. And they were."

Uh, Bill? You know that it was no lock that Jordan would fall to #3, right? Teams were offering deals because it was a very deep draft. If Olajuwon or Jordan were off the board by #3, they could take Barkley or Stockton. Or even Kevin Willis, Otis Thorpe, or Alvin Robertson. My point is that teams were not out there saying, "If we get that number three pick, we'll get to draft the best player in NBA history!"

3. Patrick Ewing almost declared for the draft. "...Bulls GM Rod Thorn told Filip Bondy that Chicago had rated Jordan higher than Bowie because they were afraid of his injury track record." (Boy, what a horrible sentence) What's not clear is whether Thorn told Bondy this before or after the draft. I'm guessing after based on how teams typically operate, but who knows?

***THIS IS WHERE IT ALL GOES TO SHIT FOR BILL SIMMONS***

Just another reminder: We're discussing Bill's truly impressive ability to contradict himself, and boy does he.
(The next highlight is a verbatim quote)

"4. Jordan's potential was unclear because he played for Dean Smith in the pre-shot-clock era."
Okay, thesis established. First supporting sentence: "Everyone knew he was good, but how good?" We're all with you so far.

Then Bill starts the contradiction process.

"...Bobby Knight [Jordan's coach in the 1984 Olympics] called his buddy Stu Inman (Portland's GM) and implored (emphasis Bill's) him to take Michael. When Inman demurred and said that Portland needed a center, Knight reportedly screamed, 'Well, play him at center, then!'"

We're not there yet, but in passing this anecdote along Bill seems to think that Bobby Knight was a supreme judge of NBA talent. This is funny for two reasons: 1) In a footnote, Bill lists some of the players that were cut and some that were kept on the 1984 US men's team. The cut players? Karl Malone, John Stockton, Charles Barkley, Joe Dumars, and Terry Porter. The kept players? Jeff Turner, Joe Kleine, Steve Alford, and Jon Koncak. Bill makes a joke about David Duke being involved in the selection process, but I'm certain that most/all of the power rested with Bobby Knight. (Would a maniac like Knight even bother with coaching the Olympic team without that power?) 2) Bobby Knight coached Isiah Thomas, Calbert Chaney, a few guys who played a season or two in the NBA, and a zillion guys who were lucky if they made it to the CBA. Bobby Knight won national championships, but he wasn't doing it with future All-Stars the way Dean Smith did. So to appeal to Bobby Knight's authority on this matter just isn't true.

(Did that last sentence end poorly? It was on purpose and you'll soon see why)

"We also know that Nike (based in Portland) built an entire sneaker line around Jordan before he played an NBA game."

And you know, no one ever gave out a bad shoe deal before.

"So for anyone to play the 'We didn't know how good Jordan would be' card just isn't true." (emphasis mine)

See what I did there?

Oh, how badly I wished that was the biggest problem with this whole paragraph. The biggest problem was...well, I'll put the first sentence of the paragraph and the last sentence of the paragraph together and you tell me what's wrong:

"Jordan's potential was unclear because he played for Dean Smith in the pre-shot-clock era."
"So for anyone to play the 'We didn't know how good Jordan would be' card just isn't true."

Part two comes later.

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