Shoot If You Must...i Must, Says Mcadoo

One of these crazy nights after Buffalo Bob—Hey, kids, what time is it? It's In Your Face time—McAdoo has scored 92 points, taken down 77 rebounds, blocked 54 shots, handed off 38 assists, made 22 steals, shoveled every snowbank and eaten every beef on kimmelweck in western New York, we may finally believe him when he says, "It be hard not to get buckets in this league. If I be doin' any less, people think I be doggin' it."

McAdoo speaks in earnest. If he is anything else besides the quickest tall man, the finest shooter and the most astounding outside scoring machine ever to play basketball, he is sincere, thrifty, brave and honest. Concentration, self-control and, above all, confidence have gotten him where he is. The Buffalo Braves' coach, Dr. Jack Ramsay, the only Ph.D. in the National Basketball Association and not a man to offer an opinion lightly, says that by the time Bob McAdoo is through he will be the greatest player in history.

McAdoo goes Ramsay one better. "That would be a nice goal," he says, "but it doesn't matter what any coaches or writers or any damn-body else thinks except me." Pause. "I think I'm the greatest already."

McAdoo says this quietly in the privacy of his own home. But it is indicative of his nature—and confidence—that he wants it known that he did say it. Two years ago when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won the Most Valuable Player award, McAdoo came out publicly for himself. He said the NBA players who voted against him had made a mistake. He himself refused to be caught in the same error. When Eddie Donovan, the Buffalo general manager at the time, reminded McAdoo he could not vote for himself, he replied, "Well, then, I guess I can't vote."

Last year, after he won the award, McAdoo said nothing, his silence presumably denoting approval.

Before this season, his fourth in the NBA, the 6'10", 215-pound McAdoo had won a Rookie of the Year award, two scoring championships with averages of 30.6 and 34.5, two CBS-TV Player of the Year awards and one shooting title—in 1973-74, while firing mostly from the vicinity of Buffalo's Peace Bridge, McAdoo had a field-goal percentage of 54.7. At once marvelously cool and enormously intent, he also has set records for nonmalingering and non-bitching at the referees.

The devastation McAdoo has wreaked on the court is etched in memory. Near the close of his second year in the pros, McAdoo whirled here, there and everywhere to score 52 points and cause grave embarrassment to a proud defensive congregation of soon-to-be-champion Boston Celtics. In the fourth game of Buffalo's playoff series with the Celtics that year, he scored 44, bringing the Braves from 10 points behind to victory with, among other things, three straight baskets from the deep corners, even though Dave Cowens, the best defensive player in the sport, was draped all over him.

Last April in Buffalo's chilling seven-game series against the Washington Bullets, McAdoo averaged 37 points and 13 rebounds with highs of 50 and 21 in one game. At the end of the season he had led his team to the third-best record in the NBA and had finished first in scoring, fourth in rebounding, fifth in shooting, sixth in blocked shots and way ahead of everybody in minutes played. Moreover, he had, as they say, "turned the franchise around."

By last week, with the Braves making another desperate run for first place in basketball's toughest division, McAdoo had, in his career, scored more than 50 points in four games, in the 40s in 41 games and in the 30s in 107 games. As they also say, McAdoo can do.

Were it not for the presence of McAdoo's teammates, the explosive guard, Randy Smith, and the smooth cornerman, Jim McMillian, who get their share of points, McAdoo already might have broken all of Wilt Chamberlain's scoring records as well as stolen all the rental cars from his suburban neighbor, O. J. Simpson.