Man wrote book on NBA excellence

By David Mullen

On October 21, the National Basketball Association announced its 75th Anniversary Team, selected by a blue-ribbon panel of current and former NBA and WNBA players, coaches, general managers and team and league executives, sportswriters and broadcasters. Voters were asked to select the 75 Greatest Players in NBA History without regard to position. Selections were not ranked.

Longtime sportswriter and statistician Dave Heeren could have saved the league the trouble. He invented the formula to measure success on the basketball court before Michael Jordan, Steph Curry and LeBron James were even born. 

Heeren is known for creating the TENDEX rating system in 1961, which is the gold standard for ranking the best players and teams in NBA history. He has witnessed all 75 years of the NBA as a fan and through his work as a team statistician for the New York Knicks and author of several books on basketball.

“My dad was an assistant sports editor at The New York Times,” working with greats like Red Smith, Heeren said. “And I was at [the University of] Delaware. My dad said to me ‘Can you get me the scores and a brief synopsis?’ I’d call in and they would always ask me the same three questions: ‘Who won? What was the score? Who was the leading scorer?’ Something popped in me. I had already seen that the highest scorer was not always the best player. Sometimes they were a liability because they would just come down and shoot.

“Delaware had a guy like that. He was All-Conference but a lousy player. I started messing around with some of the statistics I was keeping, and one thing led to another. I figured out the importance of ball possession, which every player can have. I gave it a plus one. A turnover is losing the ball, so I gave it a minus one. When I start putting things all together, I discovered that the high scorer may not be very good at all. And then I expanded it.” He found 10 key characteristics and hence the name TENDEX.     

Heeren, a remarkably lucid 83, just released the book “Seventy-Five: Best NBA Players and Teams Rated by Statistician who has Seen Games Since 1947,” published by URLink and available at amazon.com, bn.com and other book retailers and e-tailers. Among the gems for basketball junkies was that in 1984, by the TENDEX rating, Jordan was clearly the best player coming out of college. Scouts had him ranked third, and Jordan was drafted third by the Chicago Bulls behind Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie.

Jordan is generally recognized as the greatest professional basketball player of all time.

In “Seventy-Five,” Jordan ranks as the third greatest player of all time, in front of James. Wilt Chamberlain is second, and the greatest player is one that generations weaned on ESPN highlights and NBA2K for PlayStation may not even be familiar with.

“The Big O” Oscar Robertson is not only the No. 1 player in the TENDEX rating system, but he is also Heeren’s all-time favorite player. “Robertson was taking horrible teams and making them win 50-55 games,” Heeren said. “He played in Indianapolis [high school], Cincinnati [college and pro] and Milwaukee. Small market teams couldn’t win back then. The [NBA champion Boston] Celtics deliberately lost a game at the end of the season so they wouldn’t have to play him [Robertson] in the playoffs.” 

The 1980 Hall of Fame inductee was a 12-time All-Star and the first NBA player ever to average a triple-double in a season (points, rebounds and assists).  

 Without the benefit of an oversized chalkboard in an antiseptic lecture hall, the TENDEX system is a basketball mathematical statistical formula to determine the playing efficiency of a basketball player. It is based on points plus rebounds, assists, steals and blocks minus turnovers, missed field goals, missed free throws and fouls committed divided by minutes played. Other factors include strength of schedule and player’s shooting range. “Everything had to be logical,” Heeren said.

It is much easier to comprehend than it sounds.

“Wilt would look over my shoulder and want to know what his TENDEX rating was, and he was only a kid,” Heeren said of the 7-foot-1 Chamberlain. “He was a big kid, but he was only a kid.” 

Dallas Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki ranks 38th in the TENDEX rankings ahead of Elgin Baylor and just behind Scotty Pippen. The statistical distance between the Top 4 players and the fifth best player — James Harden — is a half-court shot away. Kobe Bryant is ranked 15th. “That doesn’t seem very high, but when you see who is ahead of him [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Durant, Larry Bird and others], he’s at the top of the second echelon.”

My all-time favorite NBA player, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, ranks as the 14th best player in Heeren’s book. “This is something that I didn’t know,” Heeren said, “but I got it from two prominent Lakers coaches that Magic couldn’t play defense at all. 

“What the Lakers had to do — illegally, because it was not legal in the NBA at the time — was play a two-three zone. They said he was ‘adequate’ back there. But they had [defensive stalwart] Michael Cooper on the bench, and if they were having a problem, they would stick him in there.” Heeren had a kind manner of taking the magic out of my belief in Magic.  

According to TENDEX, Tracy McGrady is the 30th best player in NBA history. Inexplicably, he is not on the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. Willis Reed, “Pistol” Pete Maravich, Nate “Tiny” Archibald, Nate Thurmond and Lenny Wilkins are on the NBA 75. They are not in “Seventy-Five.”

“It seems to me that the four greatest players [Robertson, Chamberlain, Jordan and James] — and TENDEX identifies four — just all stand out,” Heeren said. “They are all different because they played different positions with different standards. But they all had great pedigree.” And as Heeren points out, they had the statistics to back it up.