1. CP3 and Steals: Just a few days ago, Chris Paul set the records for the most consecutive games with a steal, breaking Alvin Robertson’s record from 1985. Giving such an accomplishment proper weight is a difficult thing to do. On the one hand, steals are clearly a good thing and the fact that a player gets a lot of steals is a good indicator of value. On the other hand, steals are often overstated in assessing the worth of a defender. The best example counterexample is Joe Dumars, who never stole much (high was 1.1 spg) but was a very good defender in his younger years. Indeed, the best stealers per game are quite a mix of lockdown defenders and specialists. Other random league leaders including Rick Barry, M.L. Carr, Gerald Wallace, Larry Hughes, Kendall Gill, and Baron Davis.
Paul is now in his third straight year of leading the league and his far from the only repeat steal titelist. In terms of recurring winners we have the following (note that the stat was not kept until 1973-74):
-Micheal Ray Richardson, 3 times (1979-80, 1982-83, 1984-85)
-Alvin Robertson, 3 times (1985-86, 1986-87, 1990-91)
-Allen Iverson, 3 times (2000-01, 2001-02, 2002-03)
-Mookie Blaylock, 2 times (1996-97, 1997-98)
-John Stockton, 2 times (1988-89, 1991-92)
-Michael Jordan, 2 times (1987-88, 1989-90)
-Magic Johnson, 2 times (1980-81, 1981-82)
Some reflections on stealers:
-Hard to believe but Magic was quite a good stealer and, in fact, has the third-best steals per game season in NBA history (3.43 in 1980-81). His steals gradually fell down to the 1.6 and 1.7 range as he aged. Unlike Magic, most of the other stealers stayed proficient at stealing later into their careers.
-Because the stat was not kept until 1973-74, we are deprived of seeing the stat for some of the greats. One guy I am really curious about is Walt Frazier (who we all remember picking Jerry West’s pocket in the NBA Finals). We have seen his steal stats from post-1973, when Frazier was near the end of his prime. At that time, Clyde was a 2.2 spg guy, which is good but does not necessarily bowl us over. Still, we’ll never know how many steals he was notching at his peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
-As for being the best at stealing, Robertson is clearly the king. He has the best single season (3.67 spg in 1985-86) and the best career rate (2.71 spg). Robertson even had 2.2 spg at age-33, after not having played in the NBA for three years. How that all happened is a story will talk a bit more about below.
-As noted above, stealing a lot does not mean a player is a great defender. Blaylock, Iverson, and Paul aren’t what we call lock down defenders but certainly they use (or used) their quickness to make up for problems defending in the post.
-The best big man stealer ever is Hakeem Olajuown, who has 1.75 spg for his career (22nd best overall). The next best center is David Robinson at 1.41 spg (41nd overall).
-Backing up the theory that steals are a separate skill from man-to-man defense is the fact that less than quick defender Larry Bird has 1.73 spg for his career (23rd just below Olajuwon). Bird’s steals per game stayed pretty much flat his entire career, which means that he must have been working off of anticipation more than quick hands even as he slowed down as a player.
-Of the 34 players with more than 1.5 spg for their careers, the only player who wasn’t an above-average starter is Quinn Buckner, who was a good defender.
2. A-Rob: Alvin Robertson is getting some publicity for having his steals record broken but I haven’t seen any feature stories on him. Perhaps this is because Robertson had quite an interesting, if somewhat star-crossed, career. Indeed, Robertson started with a lot of promise as a player and never had some seminal moment of doom like Micheal Ray Richardson or Roy Tarpley. Nevertheless, Robertson’s fall was swift and no less disappointing.
Robertson was a star guard in college at Arkansas, where he was a tough nosed all-around player (15.5 ppg, 5.5 rpg, and 6.0 apg as a senior in 1983-84). He also had a nice pedigree, as Arkansas had produced two other tough guards in Sidney Moncrief and Darrell Walker. To back up that tough reputation, I also seem to remember stories that Robertson would wrestle members of the Arkansas football team for fun. Robertson also made the famed 1984 Olympic team, which won a gold medal behind Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing (but no Charles Barkley!). Indeed, Curry Kirkpatrick covered the tryouts for Sports Illustrated and called Robertson a “clear-cut backcourt choice” after watching the competitive tryouts and noted that Robertson was a “supreme” defensive stopper. The Spurs took Robertson seventh overall in the 1984 Draft. While he would never be the star that some of the other players in that draft were (Jordan, Barkley, Olajuwon, Stockton), Robertson had a nice career.
As a rookie for the Spurs in 1984-85, Robertson played well as a back up to George Gervin. For 1985-86, the Spurs let the older Gervin go and put Robertson in at two guard and he was instantly quite good (17.0 ppg, .514 FG%, 6.3 rpg, 5.5 apg, and his record-setting 3.7 spg). Letting a legend like Gervin go for Robertson was a bit controversial but Gervin was older (33) and really only a scorer (his stats in 1984-85 were 21.2 ppg, 3.3 rpg, 2.5 apg, 0.9 spg). Jack McCallum wrote a feature article for Sports Illustrated about Robertson’s emergence late in the 1985-86 season and described Robertson’s style of play: “Smooth and calm are not the adjectives to describe Robertson’s game. His shoot-it-on-the-way-up jumper is as ugly as they come and he can’t begin to match Gervin’s ability to score from outside or slither around picks….Offensively, Robertson is most dangerous on the open floor. When he comes down with a defensive rebound, his instructions are to take it and go, even if the point guard is open. In a spread offense against pressure, Robertson stations himself at the top of the circle so he can receive the pass, turn and drive the lane, looking to dish off or draw a foul. (That was Gervin’s spot, too, only his job was to find a way to shoot, which he usually did.) Robertson’s drives to the hoop are most evocative of—don’t laugh—Erving, because he cups the ball and holds it high above his head on dunks. Defense is his specialty, though….Right now, he is the best free-lance defender in the league, as all those steals attest. His quickness enables him to double down on big men and his strength enables him to slap balls away from them.”
Robertson continued to develop the next few years, raising his ppg to 17.7 in 1986-87 and to a career high 19.6 ppg in 1987-88 and making the All-Star team three years in a row. Problem was that the Spurs were getting worse with Robertson. In Gervin’s last season (Robertson’s rookie year), the team was 41-41, in Robertson’s three-year All-Star run, the Spurs won 35, 28, and 31 games respectively. They used those bad results to draft David Robinson after the 1986-87 season and waited for him to comeback from the Navy for 1989-90, presumably with the plan of pairing Robinson with Robertson, as the established star to transition the rookie in to the NBA.
Then in 1988-89, the Spurs hired Larry Brown also to help with the turnaround. One would’ve thought that Robertson was the ultimate Larry Brown player, a tough, hard working defender, who could actually score too. But Robertson slumped a bit and the team was really awful (21-61), though Brown cycled through so many players that it would be hard for anyone to look good. After the season, Robertson was traded to Milwaukee for veteran power forward Terry Cummings. The trade was far from a reflection that Robertson had faded as a commodity. In fact, Cummings was only 28 and coming off of an excellent year (22.4 ppg, .475 FG%, 8.4 rpg, 19.7 PER). Rather, it was a classic challenge trade where the Bucks tried to revitalize their aging team by acquiring another Moncrief and the Spurs got the slightly older big man to play with coming rookie Robinson.
Robertson’s scoring numbers slipped a little in his first two years in the Milwaukee (his ppg dropped from 17.3 with the Spurs in 1988-89 to 14.2 ppg in 1989-90 in Milwaukee) but he was pretty much the same player as he was in San Antonio once you adjust for the slower pace. The Bucks made the playoffs each of those seasons but were bounced in the first round by the Jordan Bulls and the Barkley Sixers respectively. At that time, Robertson also began hoping for a new contract (he had signed a big deal with the Spurs earlier), which became a source of tension with management. Robertson also had his first brush with the law that I could find, after he injured his wife in a domestic dispute in 1990. Despite the criminal issue, Robertson still got a six-year $13 million extension that season.
But in 1991-92, the deal instantly looked bad. Robertson’s play was very poor (12.3 ppg, .430 FG%, 4.3 rpg,, 4.4 apg, 15.0 PER) and the Bucks were out of the playoffs for the first time since 1978-79. According to Zander Hollander’s “1993 Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball” Robertson “drove the Bucks nuts with his maddening inconsistency…[He] came to training camp out of shape and never got the hang of things…Blew breakaway dunks with alarming regularity.” Robertson was only 29 and the hope was that he would bounce back for 1992-93 but he only got worse, reportedly due to chronic back problems, and his scoring dropped to 8.7 ppg before being traded to Detroit for for the washed up Orlando Woolridge halfway through the season.
Robertson started 1993-94 with back problems but remained on the Pistons’ roster. Early in the season, thing got very bad for Robertson. He choked player personnel director Billy McKinney when Robertson was told that he would be suspended for missing practices and treatments on his back. Robertson claimed that “[i]t was a split second when I lost my cool and that split second is going to get me more media attention than I have had for the last two years, so certainly I regret the incident.” The Pistons first suspended Robertson but then were able to trade him a two weeks later to Denver for loose change (Mark Macon and Marcus Liberty). Robertson was immediately waived by Denver and it seemed that his NBA career was over.
Robertson was seemingly done as an NBA player when the original Toronto Raptors signed him out of the blue to start as their two guard in 1995-96. This was an odd signing in that a young team probably did not need an injured and declining player, who had a bad history and had not played in the NBA since 1992-93. Still, Isiah Thomas, then the Raptor GM, had a relationship with Robertson from their time together with the Pistons and decided to give him a chance. Robertson could still actually play but he wasn’t an ideal player for the Raptors. Chris Young described the situation in “Drive”: “Thomas took what he called a ‘clean slate’ approach, forgiving a player for his past if he thought he could play. And so Alvin Robertson was a first-year Raptor, despite having been out of the league for two years with back problems–and a reputation as a dangerous hothead. Robertson had choked Detroit GM Billy McKinney during a Pistons practice and had been in trouble four times before for violent attacks on women….Robertson began his morning [of his Toronto debut]…answering to a charge of assaulting his ex-girlfriend in a SkyDome Hotel room six nights before.
It wouldn’t be the last time for Robertson, who scored the first basket in Raptors history and had a fine season–but only one season, his comeback limited by his worsening personal troubles. In Milwaukee later in the year, he sat at his locker stall, leafing through a sheaf of legal papers that had just been served on him. ‘I told [GM Glen] Grunwald I could never go back to Wisconsin,’ he grumbled, just as [coach] Brendan Malone walked by. ‘I expect you’re popular like that in a number of states, Alvin,’ Malone noted wryly.”
In the end of the season, Robertson had a respectable 9.3 ppg, .470 FG%, 4.4 rpg, 4.2 apg, 2.2 spg in 32.2 mpg. His steals were still the calling card, as he was fifth in the NBA that year. But Robertson’s criminal history was just too much for anyone else to touch him and he was cut by Toronto after the season. Robertson has been arrested several times since then and has spent two stints in jail. At reports indicate that nearly all of his crimes have involved violence against women. When we last saw Robertson in 2007, he was being sent away for violating an order of protection.
What to make of this tail of woe? There are no mentions of drugs contributing to Robertson’s downfall and frankly I don’t know what the NBA could’ve done to fix his problems. Still, Robertson was (and is) a tragic figure. A very good player whose career and life were ultimately ruined by his own foolish and destructive behavior. All we can hope is that he somehow turns his life around both for himself and those around him.