In the NBA, there's good selfishness and bad selfishness

In professional sports, where curse words are sprinkled as casually as salt or pepper, the real profanities come in different forms. One of the worst things you can call a pro athlete isn't a four-letter word, it's a three: d-o-g. Then there's the seven-letter epithet that can taint and shadow a player until his retiring days.

Selfish.

Better you weave your way through traffic at 73 in a 45-mph zone than to get branded a selfish teammate. Once you start checking stats sheets during timeouts, looking off other players to force your own shot and otherwise inserting an "I'' into "team,'' you are branded, categorized and downgraded. Maybe even done.

Selfishness has been in the headlines a lot lately. Allen Iverson, whose Hall of Fame career has been alternately built on and dogged by selfishness, added another chapter with his detour onto and off of the Memphis Grizzlies' bench. Stephen Jackson put his personal welfare over the good of the Golden State Warriors, a team that annually seems to degenerate into selfishness.

After a 106-84 loss to San Antonio Saturday, Washington guard Gilbert Arenas groused in the Wizards' locker room: "Everyone's got their own individual goals, I guess. Hidden agendas.'' Even when Milwaukee rookie Brandon Jennings spotted Golden State a whole quarter and then scored 55 points two weeks ago, some folks wondered if Jennings had veered into selfishness given his role as the team's point guard.

"You don't score that many points if you don't take over the offense,'' Jon McGlocklin, the Bucks broadcaster and former teammate of volume scorers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, told me the next day. "But Jennings was patient. He didn't force his hand any until the team wasn't making shots. Then he took it on himself to say, 'I've got to get us going.' In the second quarter, he got us going. In the third quarter, that's when it really lit up.''

Was it Jennings' fault the Warriors played his pick-and-rolls with Andrew Bogut as if they were seated? Still, even as the Bucks newcomer was boosting his reputation as an impact player, you wondered if he wasn't gaining a teensy one, a little less savory. "When Mo Williams was here and Sam Cassell,'' McGlocklin said, "you'd hear the argument constantly from fans and half-informed talk show hosts who'd say, 'Well, he's supposed to be a point guard but he's a scoring guard.' I even posed it on the air [during Jennings' points explosion], asking when the critics are going to say this kid scores too much.''

Basketball fans should be grateful that their game is weighed regularly on the selfish-unselfish scale. It doesn't work that way in baseball, football or hockey. Hoops, as Doc Naismith drew it up, is the ultimate democratic sport; everyone can shoot, everyone can dribble, everyone can pass, everyone can rebound. Except, of course, when some guys are way better than others.

Question: Who would you rather have on a given night in the NBA? A player who scores 43 points or a guy who gets 16 with 10 assists, seven rebounds and three steals? In a vacuum, it's impossible to say with certainty. You'd want to know what impact it had on the game, how his teammates reacted and naturally, which side won.

And yet.

Calling someone a "great scorer'' has become faint praise, with something italicized in the tone of voice that hints at ... well, things undone. An incompleteness. Maybe even a me-first, then-the-team approach.

But wasn't Michael Jordan selfish 98 percent of the time with the Chicago Bulls --- and weren't the Bulls and their fans happy with the results? Heck, it could be that Celtics legend Bill Russell, the consummate team guy, had a selfish streak, though we'll never know for sure because Russell played before, y'know, broadband.

We have fallen in love with "versatility'' and efficiency ratings. The Church of the Triple Double is very nearly a cult. It's the reason a guy like Bernard King --- who did precisely what his teams needed from him, given his abilities --- isn't in the Hall of Fame and why someone such as Dominique Wilkins had to wait. Ask LeBron James if there's such a thing as "good'' selfishness in basketball and he'll instinctively recoil.

"My whole life, I've always loved the sight of my teammates scoring more than me,'' James said earlier this season. "Or seeing them happy about the game of basketball and me being part of that. It's not like I go into a game saying, I'm going to pass this quarter and I'm going to shoot the next quarter. It's just my game. I'm an all-around player.''

This is a guy, mind you, who got accused of selfishness on a night last season when he had 52 points and 11 assists in New York because he tried hard to grab a 10th rebound before time expired.

Doug Collins thinks selfishness ends up forced on players according to the job and his co-workers. "I've always said LeBron James has the personality of a passer. I've always felt he was more like Magic Johnson than Michael Jordan,'' said the former Philadelphia shooting guard turned coach and TNT announcer. "But when you play on a team that's bad, you've got to do more of the scoring because you don't have the help around you. Then if all of a sudden you get better players, people start seeing that other side of your game.''

Collins suggested that numbers can track selfish play. "I look at the efficiency,'' he said. "There are guys who are volume shooters who shoot 41 or 42 percent who put up big numbers. Coaching against it, if you can keep a great player to a point per shot, you've got a great chance to win the game. When you see these great players like Kobe or LeBron start getting to 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 [points per shot], you're not going to beat 'em. If you can keep them to a point a shot, normally that means you're making them take more shots and you're keeping them off the foul line.''

Oscar Robertson was the NBA's ultimate Everything player, averaging a triple-double in 1961-62 and nearly doing so over a five-year period. His take? "I don't think it's selfish to score,'' he said. "Scoring is a very important part of it -- because they're still going to keep score.'' They don't keep standings based on rebounds, assists or steals, after all.

"But if four guys are working with you to score,'' Robertson added, "and you're shooting 35 percent and not guarding anybody or getting any rebounds, then what do you call it? Then they might say it's kind of selfish. But that might be all that player can do.

"I think people who understand and have been around basketball can tell whether you're a selfish player or not. I mean, I certainly can. If you're taking all the shots and the other people are working for your benefit and you're not winning big, then goodness gracious, don't you think you should be moving the ball around some?''

"Scorer'' need not be a synonym for "selfish.'' Point guards might be their teams' best source for points. Bryant shooting from behind the backboard might be a better play than some Lakers teammate shooting from out front.

If there can be an upside to anger, there can be a plus side to selfish.

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA for 25 years. You can e-mail him here.

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