The game within the game in the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference playoff finals is for bragging rights: Who is the best Chicago-bred basketball player, active division? Right now it’s Miami’s Dwyane Wade, on the strength of a championship ring, an Olympic gold medal and a style of play that’s vaguely Jordan-like, although the Bulls’ Derrick Rose and his M.V.P. stature as a precocious 22-year-old are closing fast.
Chicago’s best ever? Rose (especially) and Wade (maybe) are still young enough to build a more compelling case, but neither man is there yet.
I can hear the hoots and the catcalls, and I’m bracing for a blizzard of hostile emails. But I’d vote for Isiah Thomas.
I know, he’s a pariah in his hometown, and the damage was self-inflicted. But Thomas’ outcast status can’t obscure the fact that he was a tremendous basketball player, as tough and smart as he was talented, a ruthless steal-your-eyeballs competitor beneath that angelic smile.
Those traits aren’t ideal in a neighbor, don’t add up to Mr. Congeniality, and Lord knows Thomas’ professional life has been a recurring train wreck since he hung up his sneakers. But two N.B.A. rings, an N.C.A.A. championship, a Hall of Fame plaque and that ferocious will to win underscore his stature as the best average-size man ever to play his game.
Remove Wade and Rose from the election because they’re still campaigning. Who else is there? If your Chicago area includes Joliet, George Mikan merits a thought as the game’s first great big man, but man, was it a different game back then. Ol’ George would have his hands full with, say, Dwight Howard. Otherwise, the frontcourt is a little light on candidates beyond Mark Aguirre, Terry Cummings, Eddie Johnson and Cazzie Russell. Kevin Garnett is a South Carolinian who played here one year. Eddy Curry? Just kidding.
The backcourt, though, is rife with possibilities, especially at point guard. I’m old enough to remember DuSable slickster Kevin Porter, who followed in Norm Van Lier’s collegiate footsteps to little St. Francis, Pa., and had a similarly productive, if far less combative, 10-season N.B.A. career than Stormin’ Norman.
Then came Mo Cheeks, Quinn Buckner, Billy McKinney, Isiah Thomas, Doc Rivers, Tim Hardaway and, finally, Rose.
I would like to have seen Ronnie Lester on healthy knees, and an homage here to Dunbar’s Billy Harris, gone too soon two years ago at age 58. Billy the Kid had only the briefest sniff of an N.B.A. career, but he was an amazing shooter, as good as I’ve seen, a shooting guard who took the job title literally.
Point guard, though, is Chicago’s specialty position, and if Rose emerges as the best of the line, it stands to reason he’s the city’s best player. He’s a better scorer than Cheeks or Rivers and better at everything than little McKinney. Hardaway was a better shooter and a pit-bull-nasty defender, but he never got to the rim the way Rose does. For three years we’ve been seeing how good things happen when Rose is attacking the basket, and how they don’t when he doesn’t, as was the case against Miami in Game 2 on Wednesday.
Plus he gains an immeasurable emotional boost from playing in his hometown, which none of his rivals ever did. Rose is beloved here, a monster talent, to be sure. But his humility and his fealty to his family and his South Side roots have done just as much to erase the memory of the test-score scandal that wiped Rose’s lone season at Memphis from the college record books. The episode simply doesn’t come up in coverage of him. It’s as if he has rewritten history.
Thomas forfeited his favorite-son status before he left the West Side as a teenager. His college choice was Indiana over DePaul in those pre-Oprah days when the Blue Demons were Chicago’s No. 1 winter attraction and the city was as small-town provincial as it is now. Then came the freeze-out of Michael Jordan, barely passing him the ball at the 1985 N.B.A. All-Star game, and the unconscionable walkout he organized in which the Pistons refused to shake hands after being swept by the Bulls in the ’91 conference finals, the classless culmination of years of animosity between M. J.’s Bulls and Isiah’s Pistons.
Chicago has never forgiven Thomas. It never will. The nerve of the man when he let it be known he might like to become the DePaul coach 10 months after Florida International pulled him off the bone pile when he was still radioactive from a disastrous stint running the Knicks.
“What were you thinking?” has been the soundtrack of Thomas’ life since he quit playing.
Wade does not evoke such enmity. He’s a great player and a good guy who overcame a lot, and he shows his gratitude by giving back to the community in meaningful ways. But there was something contrived about his interest in the Bulls during last summer’s free-agency circus. He and running buddy LeBron James knew what they were up to all along. The lusty boos that have greeted them during pre-game introductions at the United Center are Chicago’s way of saying, “Don’t play us.”
Beat us, if you think you can, but don’t play us. That would be an Isiah move. It doesn’t work here.