Getting Nihilistic with Bias and the Sports Guy

A "footnote title" respects the champion while also acknowledging that, "Look, SOMETHING funky happened and you can't discuss that postseason in detail without mentioning that one funky thing."

-- Bill Simmons, The Footnote Title

The other day, when Derrick Rose was injured, Bill Simmons tweeted a curious tweet. He said that the 2012 title was officially an "asterisk" title. I was a bit confused by this. I'm of the opinion that if you squint hard enough, you'll fail to find a single NBA champion who didn't play in a season where something funky disqualified a strong contender. We love to delve its pores for meaning, but sports is primarily a game of ephemera and luck. When your team wins the title, they deserved it essentially as much as any other, and relied on luck essentially as much as any other. According to Bill, quite literally every Spurs title deserves a footnote, as he stated outright the reasons that each and every championship they've ever won was fishy. This was a pretty big come-to-Jesus moment for me -- if my team's titles aren't really titles, well, damn, what does anything mean anymore? I feel like I've come out of the experience a better, more nihilistic person, fast approaching @NickFlynt levels. Given that this was helpful to me in my personal development, I figured I'd do our readers a solid and help fans of every team that's ever won the title learn why their titles can't be discussed without important, team-degrading footnotes.

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One footnote I was actually shocked that Simmons didn't mention was the pall hanging over his beloved Celtics during the Auerbach tenure. One of the most underreported and understated stories from the Red-and-Russ era was the pernicious facilities tampering that Red engaged in for virtually his entire tenure as coach. I'm not talking about small-scale stuff, either -- Auerbach openly admitted after he'd retired that while he was a coach and General Manager, he did a number of things to make sure the Celtics had the absolute most home court advantage they possibly could. This includes (but is in no way limited to):

• Redirecting the Garden's sewage system into the visiting team's water fountain. (Really. I realize this is so disgusting we don't like talking about it, but it's been confirmed by multiple sources and even made his obituary. Absolutely insane.)

• Bugging the visitor's locker room, leading to most teams talking in code when discussing strategy knowing that if they said what they were doing outright Red would listen in on them. J. Edgar Auerbach?

• Cutting the heater in the visiting locker room, leading to a freezing mess in the winter. In Boston. He also turned the heat all the way up during hot summer days, ensuring that the players would be sweating like stuck pigs and desperately need water, which in turn was connected to... oh yeah. The sewage. Whoopsies.

It shows, too -- consider the Celtics' home and away records during the Auerbach era. Not only did they never lose a game 7 at home (something that has never happened before or since), their regular season records were often comically disparate. As a teaching example, look at the 1958 Celtics. That team ended up 11-17 on the road over the season, but went a sparkling 24-4 at home. Including a double-overtime game 7 against the Bob Pettit-led, defending champion St. Louis Hawks (at home, of course!) to win the title. The invented Auerbach-based enhancement of their home court advantage generally tended to -- ever so slightly -- inflate the win totals of the 60s Celtics. From 59 to 69, not a single Celtics team had a higher expected record than their actual record. For those not in the know; expected wins and losses are calculated based on a team's point differential.

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