The jackasses running the ABA somehow came up with one of their only shrewd ideas: When we meet Alcindor, we'll give him a certified check for $1 million up front as part of whatever offer we make. But he wasn't interested in spending the summer playing the leagues against each another, so Big Lew's team told the ABA and NBA the same thing: We will meet you once, we will listen to one offer, and that's that. How do we know this? He confessed as much in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps 70 - everything I just told you - and fled Milwaukee as soon as a window opened after the '75 season. Milwaukee held his NBA rights, but Big Lew was more interested in the Nets he grew up in New York, loved the idea of playing near family, found the city's Muslim population appealing and understood the value of a big market. Without ever tipping his hand publicly, Alcindor decided privately that he wanted to play in the ABA. If anything, the ABA should have overpaid for Alcindor and hoped to recoup the money with ticket sales and TV money. Both leagues needed him desperately: the NBA because he was the biggest star to enter the league since Oscar Robertson, the ABA because Big Lew would have legitimized their league, gotten them a TV contract, and forced a merger down the road. When Lew Alcindor finished his UCLA career in the spring of 1969, his family assembled a team of agents and advisers and spent the next few months debating between the ABA and NBA. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball.Ĭomprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.This excerpt is from a chapter called "The What Ifs?", in which I rank the 33 biggest NBA "What Ifs" of all time. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball.
From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens-and then closes, once and for all-every major pro basketball debate.
it might just represent the next phase of sports commentary.”- The Atlanticīill Simmons, the wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining basketball addict known to millions as ESPN’s The Sports Guy, has written the definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA. The NBA according to The Sports Guy-now updated with fresh takes on LeBron, the Celtics, and more!įoreword by Malcom Gladwell.
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