Post#27 » by Bel » Thu Mar 26, 2020 11:03 pm
FWIW Red Auerbach considered Bird a wing when he drafted him instead of a big, which was considered the least important position in that era due to rules. "Woolf [Bird's agent] suggested a million a year, and Auerbach, apoplectic at that, countered with half a million, maybe, if you counted the perks. He said, "It's been proven. A cornerman can't dominate the game. A big man, occasionally even a guard. But one man playing a corner can't turn a franchise around."
I think a big part of the value of Bird is that you can put him in pretty much any lineup and he's going to make everyone way better. He barely needs to touch the ball, puts in a huge amount of offball effort, gets lots of boards, and is a great help defender. His teams always had magnificent ball movement, so everyone is getting involved and not feeling frozen out of the game watching some dude dribble for 20 seconds. Bird credited some of the 1980 Celtic turnaround due to their different passing culture, with everyone feeding off of the additional touches, so I get why Bob Cousy said he had the "best [passing ability] I've ever seen" in 1979.
To be clear, Larry Bird is in my top 5 of all time. I don't know what position he would be, but I don't really care that much because his impact dwarfs almost anyone before the game is ever played. The Celtics had sucked for 3 seasons in a row: they had 4 coaches in 3 years. The 1979 season was a disaster and it was clear the problem was only getting worse. The owner made a desperate attempt to turn it around by trading 3 first round picks for Bob McAdoo, late in the season. That didn't work and the team finished 2nd to last, so McAdoo was traded again for picks (that they would flip the next year for McHale and Parish). Other than Cedric Maxwell, who was young and getting into his prime, the rest of the team was exiting their primes in their 30's.
So you have Bird joining the second worst team in the league,filled with older vets, no stability, cancerous ownership that was in a war with the GM (Auerbach), making a trade that signaled tanking, and a recent culture of losing and blame. That sounds like a recipe for excuses that a ton of other top 10-15 players have gotten: 'he has no help out there,' 'he played for the worst ownership who was lucky to get him,' 'there was nothing he could do with that garbage cast' etc.
Larry Bird doesn't get those excuses naturally, since he went out and took that second worst team to first in the league as a rookie [context: the team lost McAdoo for picks, gained a new coach, and Tiny Archibald became fully healthy]. Bird was obviously a much worse player was a rookie than during his MVP streak, so it seems clear from the available anecdotes that it was changes to the team's culture, passing, and off-court intangibles where he made the most impact. It's not reflected in the stats, but when guys see the team leader playing with great intensity, always diving after loose balls, playing through injury never complaining, they play a lot better too.
Halberstam's summary from a bunch of interviews is clearly backed up the results of the 80's Celtics, in contrast with the miserable before and after results:
"Their confidence grew out of the presence of one truly great player, Larry Bird. The team was driven by the sheer force of his will. His greatness and toughness set him apart, and it was contagious. His teammates dared not disappoint him. The one thing they never wanted was for Bird to think poorly of them as basketball players, because in their eyes, he was the best they had ever seen, and therefore he had the right to judge what took place in their small, intense, closed-off universe..."
"Because Bird exuded mental toughness, a hatred of losing and a willingness to play at the highest possible level, his teammates gradually took on the same attitudes, as if absorbing his qualities by osmosis. "I saw that close up," Danny Ainge once noted. "None of us wanted to let him down. All of us wanted to be worthy of him. The great thing about Larry was his effect on his teammates. Everyone on that team rose with him, not just to his expectations of them, which were high enough, but to his expectations of himself, which were even higher." McHale had been known as a talented but not particularly tough played in college, and Parish was thought to be soft when he first entered the league, but they were not soft when they played alongside Bird. He would not permit it."
So while there was a large element of recency bias, one can understand just why Red Auerbach ate his words from 7 years earlier and called Bird the GOAT in 1986: "If I had to start a team, the one guy in all history I would take would be Larry Bird. He is the greatest ballplayer who ever played the game.'' Considering Auerbach's history with Bill Russell, that's quite something to say.
That's real impact on winning. Someone like Garnett isn't even in the same galaxy of getting results.
