Spiked!
In Best Seat in the House, Spike Lee shares his unbridled opinions on many of the NBA's past and present greats. Use the pull-down menus to match each quote with the player Spike describes. Submit your answers at the end to see how you did. Are you "sweet" or just a "clank"?

1. Whether at UCLA or as a rookie in the NBA in 1969, ____ and his Afro were imperious and inevitable. What happens when a New York ballplayer grows to 7 feet 2, is coached by Wooden, gets fed in the post as an NBA rookie by the O, then years later by Magic Johnson?

2. ____ was my favorite ballplayer, not only on the Knicks but in the entire NBA. He was my hero and idol....I wanted to emulate his cool professionalism and style. I admired everything about him. He made me see that producing while making it look easy was the epitome of skill.

3. ...one of the best all-around athletes in the league, a former major league pitcher with the Chicago White Sox, a 6-6, twenty-eight-year-old named ____....I loved his game from the get-go. I loved his superior athletic ability -- very strong, very willing to bang and board, combining a great base, good legs, with touch outside. He and Frazier may have been the best athletes on the team.

4. Tall, gangly, long arms, clean-cut, though in a year or two he grew an Age of Aquarius white boy Afro; hook shot, good timing, not real robust, but you can't have it all. Had a basketball player body, long arms, coat-rack shoulders, sinewy legs. I remember the shoulders. Never seen any like them, before or since.

5. There was speculation, most of it negative, about whether ____ -- who sometimes in Baltimore would take over a game -- would blend with the other Knicks, who played with each other so unselfishly. Was ____ going to play Knick ball? Would he sacrifice his game to fit into the Knicks' team concept? ____ did sacrifice a lot, because...he wasn't as flashy with the Knicks as with the Bullets..... ____ was the Miles Davis of hoop. But in the end he gave up a part of his individual style for classic Knick ball.

6. He was a dribbling and passing wizard. He was a willowy 6-5, looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over, wore dingy, floppy gray socks, and nobody could stop him. He averaged 44.5 a game one season at LSU and 24.2 during his ten years in the NBA. His game was lateral, horizontal, all about magic....____ could make you look bad.

7. For me there is no argument that ____ is the best offensive basketball player Brooklyn ever produced. At 6-5, with a pop-chest, a rump-roast high butt, ____ was nearly unstoppable, especially from the left side. He averaged 26.3 a game in 1983-84, and a monstrous 32.9 in 1984-85 to lead the league. ____ was our only answer, but a damned good one -- just not good enough to win the NBA title with the help provided.

8. ___ came to the Knicks as the eighteenth pick of the 1987 draft....Nobody could solve ____'s change of pace on offense when he came in. He would lull you, go by you, and he made great decisions with the ball. He's intelligent, competitive, like most New York guards. He wasn't the fastest, or the greatest on defense, couldn't always stay in front of the other team's point guard. But we had Patrick back there cleaning up mistakes, grabbing all garbage.

9. ___'s been one of the two or three best players in the league for a few years now.... even today, at $2.25 million a year, ____ is one of the bargains in the NBA.... [Coach ___] told me. "As great a player as he is, there's always going to be the stigma that he sat out the last second and a half of a ball game."

10. ____ has to be the funniest and craziest player in the league. Whatever he thinks, he says. Not all of it is intelligent, but it's honest. During the Olympics, the United States played Angola, and ____ elbowed an Angolan player -- actually it was mostly show, not nearly as bad as the media played it, probably scared the Angolan player more than anything. Asked why he did it, ____ snapped, "Well, he might have pulled a spear on me....." It was either that or a totally ignorant statement, but I gotta admit, I laughed when I heard it, so maybe ____ knows what he's doing.