I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [8]
It’s a huge responsibility for every single guy in the league. But it’s an even bigger responsibility for the stars. It might not be exactly that way in baseball and football. But in the NBA, it all comes down to the stars, because stars get all the credit and all the blame. All those guys who were talking shit on a Tuesday night in December, you can’t find ’em with the game on the line late in the season or in the playoffs. Remember that Indiana Pacers series against New Jersey in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference playoffs last spring? There were a whole bunch of guys talking shit all week long, but in the last five minutes of the most important game of the series, it was Reggie Miller against Jason Kidd on every play. The only time other guys made a basket was off a pass from Reggie or Jason.
It’s all about star power. You can have all the damn role players you want to, but if you don’t have stars you’re wasting your time. Hey, I think stars are the most underappreciated people in the world of sports. As great as Michael Jordan was, he was underappreciated, because he was able to be Michael Jordan every single night for thirteen years. Only the stars can do that. It’s like being on Broadway; you don’t pay $100 a seat to see the understudy or the costars. You go to see the stars. If you look at the NBA the last fifteen years . . . The Celtics lost Larry Bird after the ’92 season and you couldn’t look low enough in the standings to find their asses for ten years. The Suns haven’t made it past the first round of the playoffs since I left in ’96. Every team that has lost their stars went straight to the bottom. The 76ers didn’t make the playoffs for eight years. How’d they get back? They drafted a star. Allen Iverson is a star. People wonder how the Lakers have been able to keep it at the highest level since Magic retired. It’s no mystery. Jerry West was able to get Shaq and then he was able to foresee that Kobe would be a star. Look at the Seattle Mariners. They’ve got a great manager in Lou Piniella. He’s a great manager of people; look at the guys he’s lost over the last few years . . . all of ’em stars, too. Piniella is great, man. It takes a helluva manager to lose all those people and keep a team in contention. They’ve got all those terrific role players, but they’re just not quite good enough to win the World Series.
I had a guy tell me recently that my high school had never made it to the state championship until I got there, my college had never made it to the NCAA Tournament until I got there, and the 76ers didn’t make it to the NBA playoffs for eight years after I left. And the Suns haven’t made it past the first round since I left.
We didn’t win, but I know I was doing something right. But people don’t appreciate stars. They take stars for granted. You know a guy is a star when people feel like “He’s supposed to play great.” The key thing is doing it every single night, being the guy the fans expect to do it, management expects to do it, and the other players on the team expect to do it. And the role players can do what they do because of the star player’s presence.
Malik Rose on San Antonio is a really nice role player. You’d like to have him on your team, right? If he wasn’t playing with Tim Duncan, people would be boxing his ass out instead of blocking out Duncan when there’s a rebound. You see the difference? That’s the way it is for a whole lot of guys. Role players never are guarded by the best defensive player on the other team.
In that context, Michael Jordan is underrated. Look at the levels of success those other guys had once they left him. When Horace Grant left and went to Orlando he helped them get to the championship, but