Historical black hole leaves league defensive records to speculation

Though considered the best shot-blockers in NBA history, neither Bill Russell nor Wilt Chamberlain rank among the league's official all-time leaders in the category. AP

Some recent news items around the NBA all pointed in one historically unfortunate direction:

ORLANDO -- Hornets point guard Chris Paul, frustrated Thursday by New Orleans' 88-68 loss to the Magic at Amway Arena on Christmas Day, also saw the end of his NBA-record streak of 108 consecutive games with at least one steal ...

Maybe, maybe not.

HOUSTON -- Veteran center Dikembe Mutombo signed a pro-rated $1.2 million veteran's exception contract to play the rest of the season with the Houston Rockets. A four-time Defensive Player of the year, Mutombo ranks second to former Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon in career blocked shots ...

Oh yeah?

LOS ANGELES -- With 23 points, 22 rebounds and six blocked shots in the Magic's 95-88 victory over the Clippers, center Dwight Howard made NBA history Monday night. The performance -- along with his 21 points, 23 rebounds and six blocks against Oklahoma City Friday -- made him only the fourth player to reach 20, 20 and six in consecutive games. The others: Bob McAdoo (1974), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1975, twice) and Rich Kelley (1979) ...

Somehow, that list seems a little light.

Consider that Wilt Chamberlain scored 20 points or more in 126 consecutive games, stretching from 1961 into '63. averaged 25.7 rebounds in '61-62 and 24.3 in '62-63. So all you'd have to do is check Chamberlain's blocked shot totals for back-to-back games in which he swatted a measly six and -- uh-oh.

Uh-oh, as in there ain't no such thing. Uh-oh, as in blocked shots and steals weren't even kept as official statistical categories by the NBA until '73-74, the season after Chamberlain retired. Uh-oh, as in we've got a significant, maddening failure in the record books, as deserving of asterisks as anything Roger Maris or Barry Bonds ever did in a ballpark.

It would be one thing if all media outlets dutifully noted, when chronicling achievements such as Howard's, Paul's and even Mutombo's, that numerical line in the sand drawn 35 years ago by a more ambitious and complete NBA stats database. But that's like waiting for ESPN to trumpet some sports feat that occurred prior to its own inception in 1979. It's like getting the kids to watch a black-and-white movie or show on TV ("Yeah, well, that's all we had -- and we liked it!''). Too often, the little qualifier -- "... since the NBA began keeping the stat in 1973-74 ...'' -- invariably gets left on the cutting room floor somewhere (Orlando's PR crew is the rare exception, mentioning it in all correspondence). Then you end up with silly history like this:

Philadelphia 76ers single-season records:

Points: Chamberlain, 2,649 (33.5 ppg), 1965-66
Rebounds: Chamberlain, 1,957 (24.2 rpg), 1966-67
Blocked shots: Shawn Bradley, 274 (3.34 bpg), 1994-95

Three-point-three-four? Wilt used to block 3.34 shots before breakfast, undoubtedly with some appreciative lady nearby, scrambling the eggs. "I came into the NBA as a defensive player," Chamberlain said during the NBA at 50 anniversary season of 1996-97. "I used to go up and grab balls in the air. Everyone was afraid of my defensive game more so than my scoring game. ... For every one shot that Bill Russell blocked, I probably blocked three."

Russell generally is regarded as the best shot-blocker in NBA history, even if the stats don't exist to call him the most prolific. Tales of the Boston Celtics' Hall of Fame center and his swats live mostly in legend, with limited newsreel footage, like Walter Johnson's fastball or Jesse Owens' foot speed. The whole art of the controlled block -- tipping an opponent's shot to yourself or to a teammate rather than smacking it into the third row -- originated with Russell. He is still around to talk about it, of course, but he rarely chooses to. That leaves it to others.

"I asked Russell, whom I consider the best of all shot-blockers, if he had any idea how many blocks he may have averaged in a season," Hall of Fame coach Jack Ramsay wrote to me in an e-mail Monday. "He said he had no idea. I suggested double digits, like 10 or 11. He said that maybe he did that in his early years, but fewer later on -- because teams stopped taking the ball to the rim again him."

Ramsay recalled a game against his 76ers team when Russell blocked Luke Jackson five times on the same possession ("Russ remembered that, too," Ramsay said). Also, he recalled that Harvey Pollack, the one-of-a-kind Philadelphia stats guru and the keeper of Chamberlain's flame of dominance, used to have a member of his crew pick out an unofficial category and track it for an entire game to have something different for the reporters. "He remembers such a game when Wilt had 25 blocks," Ramsay said. "And Harvey is very accurate and trustworthy."

You can still find fans walking around who were present when Chamberlain allegedly blocked 20 shots in consecutive games of the Lakers' '72 playoff series against Milwaukee -- 11 of the blocks supposedly at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's expense when he was 25 and Wilt was 35. Late referee Earl Strom used to tell people that Chamberlain and Russell probably averaged about eight blocks each in their prime, which would have gotten them to Hakeem Olajuwon's "all-time" record -- that is, his post-'73, modern mark of 3,830 -- in less than six full seasons.

Abdul-Jabbar (3,189) ranks third behind Olajuwon and Mutombo (3,278) on the modern list of blocked shots, but spotted everyone the first four seasons of his career before the category was kept. His best official average was 4.12 in '75-76, his first season with the Lakers, though his "career" number -- not counting Abdul-Jabbar's first 321 games -- was 2.57. That wasn't good enough for Ramsay's pre-'74 list of Russell, Chamberlain, Nate Thurmond, Elvin Hayes and Bob Pettit.

Utah's, Mark Eaton, had a career blocks average of 3.50 and "officially" ranks fourth (3,064), although his spot gets taken on the league's "combined NBA/ABA" list by Artis Gilmore. An estimated 1,431 of Gilmore's 3,178 swats were of red-white-and-blue basketballs, coming in his first 420 pro games. In other words, he averaged 3.41 blocks through five ABA seasons, then only 2.39 in 909 NBA games.

Dikembe Mutombo, despite his famous finger-wag, his 7-foot-2 stature and his four Defensive Player awards, has led the league in blocks just three times. His career average is 2.76. But back now on Houston's roster, Deke has a chance to pad his total and move closer to Olajuwon on the NBA list.

But where Mutombo or any modern era player really ranks in history is little more than an educated guess, because the data does not exist. These days, when everything up to and including the dribbles each player takes before each free throw gets tabulated, that seems ridiculous, way more than quaint. Blocks and steals -- and the breakdown of offensive and defensive rebounds, also not recorded until '73-74 -- are building-block stats, right after points, rebounds and assists in dressing up a player's resume.

With steals, at least, the all-time leader is awfully credible, on his own merit and for lack of any steals "giants" comparable to Russell and Chamberlain. Utah's John Stockton was credited with 3,265 steals in 19 seasons, which is 751 more than runner-up Michael Jordan's 2,514. That's a margin of 30 percent, nearly as impressive as Stockton's Gretzky-like advantage in career assists (15,806 to Mark Jackson's 10,334). And since no guard in NBA history played as many games as Stockton's 1,504 -- Reggie Miller got to 1,389, Gary Payton to 1,335 (and 2,445 steals) -- it is conceivable that no one pilfered the ball away more often. Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, whose NBA career spans from '65-66 to today, instantly picked Russell and Chamberlain in order as the league's best shot blockers, but backs his guy, Stockton, as tops in steals.

Not that some others weren't capable. Ramsay suggested K.C. Jones among the pre-1974 players, and had Lakers legend Jerry West right behind him. "The first player I saw who would pick a ball off the jump shooter's hand from behind and go the other way with it, while the jumper shooter went through the motion of his shot somehow thinking the ball was still there," Dr. Jack said.

Stockton amassed his total averaging 2.17 steals per game. West, in his 932 regular-season games, would have had to average more than 3.5 to match. Jones, who played only 675 games, would have needed 4.84. Stockton's number seems similarly beyond the capabilities of the other pre-'74 crowd Ramsay lauded: Tom Gola (698 games), Lenny Wilkens (1,077) and Wally (Wali) Jones (607). Wilkens would have had the best shot, needing to average about 3.03. And the early gold standard for point guards, Boston's Bob Cousy, never came up in chats with various league old-timers; Cousy played 924 games and would have needed 3.54.

Impressive numbers all, let's just not call it the "all-time" list.