MVN: Most Valuable Network

With this summer's scandal of gambling in the NBA, previous ties to gambling have been revisited and further examined.  I clicked over to True Hoop today to find this story about Wilt Chamberlain's history with gambling.  If Wilt would have kept his nose clean, I have no doubt he would have unequivocally been the best player to ever play the game.  As it turned out, that claim was disputed because of Bill Russell's successes against him with the Celtics and somebody named Jordan who came to dominate in a later era.

Wilt was a special player who changed the rules of the game.  His free throw was a flying dunk.  His inbounds play under the basket was to jump out of bounds with the ball and slam it down.  The game had no rules in place to stop this.  He is the reason the painted area with the three second rule was instituted.  He was so much better than the rest of the field, that he could do anything he wanted on a basketball court.  Most of the time, he did.  Occasionally, he grew bored and would do things just to prove a point.  The point was sometimes that he could dominate a game without scoring a point, but sometimes it was as bizarre as "you only score when I let you."  He'd block one guy's every shot and leave his teammates' shots alone.

From TrueHoop and The Smoking Gun, Wilt was allegedly involved betting on games in which he played.  The documents, with several pages blacked out, also indicated that the Boston Celtics were heavily involved in gambling.  There's a flurry of activity in November 1966, the one season in which Wilt and the 76ers won 67 games and blew away the Celtics.  Chamberlain averaged 24 points, 24 rebounds, and 8 assists that year.

In my mind, he could have averaged 40+ points, 25+ rebounds, 10+ blocks, and 7+ assists every single year he played.  Every play should have run through Wilt.  In a high school game for Overbrook, Wilt scored 60 points in 12 minutes while Roxborough was trying to freeze the ball.  Sixers head coach Alex Hannum is credited with telling him not to score as much, but focus on the other aspects of the game.  With Wilt, everytime he touched the ball, it was something special.  Unfortunately, other interests got in the way.