Tark Was Left Out, But Alas, So Was Dj

Jerry Tarkanian did not get into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Life is good.

Dennis Johnson did not get into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Life bleeps.

I don’t care if Tarkanian has compiled a better record than the Globetrotters. The Hall of Fame should stand for something more than bending rules and making a total mockery of the system. If Tarkanian ever does get in, it would not surprise me in the least if some living members show up the next day with black sheets to place over their own plaques. I might organize a picket line myself.

How close did The Tark come? We’ll never know. Unlike the Baseball Hall of Fame, whose voting procedure is very public (although individual voters aren’t forced to reveal their selections, the final totals are published), the Basketball Hall of Fame voting is conducted a la elections to the Skull & Bones Society. Voters are chosen on a rotating term basis and they participate in a vacuum. They are asked not to reveal their appointment, so none of the voters is supposed to know who the other voters are. Only those who receive the requisite amount of votes are announced, so we don’t know who came close and who is a no-hoper in future elections.

What I’m saying, therefore, is that I don’t know to whom I should address a threatening letter in which I will propose that if said individual even thinks about voting for a reprobate such as Tarkanian, I will see that he or she is visited by people with baseball bats in their hands and malice in their hearts.

Nor, meanwhile, do I know whom I must educate on the finer points of DJ lore. What about his candidacy eludes them?

Some people might think he did not score enough. He retired in 1990 with a career average of 14.1 points per game over a career that encompassed precisely 1,100 games. So, right, no Jerry West was he.

But humungous scoring numbers weren’t what Dennis Johnson was all about. DJ was sort of the Jack Morris of basketball players. Morris didn’t always have the gaudiest ERA; all he did was win the damn game. He did what he had to do. Witness Game 7 in 1991, when he threw what will go down in history as the greatest clinching game in World Series history (1-0 10-inning shutout, for you diamond-impaired folk). DJ was the same way. He never had a 20-point season (he did have a 19.0, 18.8 and 19.5 in successive seasons). He could have, but he didn’t. When he was young, he probably did confuse scoring prowess with greatness to some degree. The older he got, however, the more he realized that scoring alone does not produce championship rings.

DJ was, in fact, a great offensive player, especially in the clutch. Few guards in history could take it to the hoop with the authority of a Dennis Johnson, and fewer still had his knack of knocking down killer jumpers when they were most needed. Of all the guards I’ve ever seen, Johnson is the one I’d most want taking the last shot on a day when he was zero for 10 or three for 14.

It’s difficult to comprehend now, but when DJ came here from Phoenix, he was viewed exclusively as an off guard. In fact, one of the stated reasons for the deal from the Suns’ viewpoint was the need to break up the DJ-Walter Davis backcourt, since neither was regarded as a playmaker. Yet from Day 1 in Boston, DJ was the backcourt leader.

If he wasn’t really a lead guard, he certainly provided us with a spectacular impression of one for the next seven seasons. He “distributed,” as we say. He got the ball to the right people. He scored when he had to. He walked like a duck and quacked like a duck and he sure as hell looked like a playmaking guard to me.

His offensive ability alone would have made him a Hall of Fame candidate, but what really distinguished Dennis Johnson was the fact that he was a unique defensive force in the backcourt. The greatest legacy an athlete can leave is neither a number nor a record, but an image that is his and his alone. In his prime, no one played defense from the backcourt with the ferocity of Johnson.

There is no doubt in my mind that one of the handful of great all-time NBA performances was submitted by Johnson in the 1979 Finals. He was coming off a humiliating zero for 14 in Game 7 the year before, and he was being given a chance for redemption against the same opponent. You can name any guard in NBA history, and I can assure you that none of them played defense the way Johnson played it during the five games of the 1979 Finals. No guard has ever been more destructive. He swallowed up anyone put in front of him and he led the series with an astonishing 11 blocked shots. From the backcourt! This, to go with 23 points per game. There has never been a defensive backcourt display to match it, and the voters acknowledged his play with the series MVP award.

Switch to 1984 and the final four games of the Finals, during which he battled Magic defensively while scoring 20 or more in each game. A career 80 percent free throw shooter, he nailed a vital 12 for 12 in the seventh game.

Two years later, he rose to another challenge, clamping an iron overcoat on Robert Reid as the Celtics brought home title No. 16 with a Game 6 triumph in Boston. There had been a lot of talk about how Reid was hurting the Celtics, and that’s all DJ needed to hear.

Perhaps the voters don’t get out much. Perhaps not all of them were paying attention in the ‘80s. Perhaps they were sailing in the Mediterranean on the many occasions when Larry Bird declared that of all the tremendous players he had been privileged to play with, the best was Dennis Johnson.

So they got it half right this time. They kept out someone whose presence would call into question the Hall of Fame’s very existence. Good for them. But they also kept out a unique force in basketball history. There have been a lot of great players, but very few who create their own legitimate aura. Dennis Johnson is one of those people, and his exclusion from the Hall of Fame should be viewed as an embarrassment.