NBA Playoff Update

AFP/Getty Images/Gregory Shamus
 

Yeah, I know I still owe the second part of the Wolves season recap. But I confess that this steady diet of *quality* NBA basketball has made a return to Wolves-think fairly depressing. I will get to it in the next few days. Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on the playoffs thus far…

Celtics and Pistons both in a dogfight

Kevin Garnett and Flip Saunders are back in the pressure-cooker. Both have had very successful careers that are at least slightly besmirched by their (thus far) inability to elevate their game when it matters most. I find it interesting and inevitable that the KG backlash is occurring on the heels of the two losses in Atlanta. First of all, it wasn’t his man torching the club from outside all game–why Doc Rivers chose to ride with Ray Allen on Joe Johnson instead of throwing James Posey or Tony Allen on JJ, or even Rondo, with Allen switching to Bibby, is, ah perplexing. Or incompetent. I could also mention that Garnett had a whopping six steals and a team-best plus +7 in 41:59, meaning the Celts were minus -12 in the 6:01 he wasn’t on the floor.

But KG was around for the entire fourth quarter collapse. And in addition to Joe Johnson’s 20 points in the period, Josh Smith had 12 points and 5 rebounds (versus KG’s 5 and 2), which included 8-8 FT. Going against Smith and Al Horford, both of whom he can finesse and muscle in the low block, Garnett should have stopped deferring to a dinged up Pierce and a defensively-bewildered Allen and started to go for his. Because with Cleveland, either Detroit or Orlando, and the Western champ on the horizon, it is not going to get any easier. I know this is not in KG’s natural make-up. But as one who named him the year’s MVP and steadfastly defended him ever since Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley unfairly called him out in the playoffs five or six years ago, he needs to see that giving himself and his team the crunchtime dimension of him in the low block is crucial to the Celts success further down the road. No time like the present to sift it in.

But KG has it easy compared to Flip Saunders. Always a player’s coach (meaning he doesn’t challenge anybody and relies on self-policing) and a stickler for midrange jumpers, Flip simply doesn’t have the tools most vital for guiding a team through the gauntlet of playoff hoops–the capacity to trigger that extra gear the players themselves didn’t even know they had, and the ability to win games at the free throw line. The Celtics’ losses are fairly easy to explain–they were way too overconfident in Game 3 and then got bushwacked by a white-hot outside shooter in Game 4. But the Pistons’ performance has been horrible thus far–raise your hand if you think Philly won Games 1 and 3 more than Detroit lost them. What happened to Chauncey Billups? Seriously, Andre Miller is exactly the kind of matchup he should be dominating–Miller is if anything a poor man’s Billups–and yet Miller is the one coming up large. And isn’t it time to start running more plays for Tayshaun Prince, who remains a 4th option on this club after Rip, ‘Sheed, and Billups, all of whom seem to be both overconfident and lacking synergy while Prince keeps bailing them out with jumpers on the baseline.

I think the Celts and Pistons will both ultimately prevail. But the second round in the East has suddenly gotten a lot more interesting.

Magic and Lakers first to advance

The only great surprise here is that George Karl is apparently coming back for another year in Denver. Okay, if Karl’s not responsible for what may be the biggest waste of pure talent on an NBA franchise, who is? How can any self-respecting coach sit and watch an entire season of opponents consistently getting into the paint–off the dribble, feeding the post, interior passes, transition, you name it–and not take drastic steps to curtail it? All year long, the Nugs frittered away 15 point leads and made 15 point comebacks on games they lost by 5-10 points. They are a bunch of lazy underachievers who have a pile of individual accolades and absolutely no desire to play as a team. Whether Karl is the instigator or merely the enabler of that culture, he’s got to go.

What won the series for the Lakers was ball movement, which ranks with team defense and superstar wattage as the requisite X factors for a championship ballclub. In Kobe, Gasol and Odom, LA has the perfect front line for the new hand-checking rules, a trio that can all tussle in the paint and extend their games out 17 feet (for Kobe of course it is beyond the 3-pt arc). Each has the combination of height and quickness to be a nightmare matchup one-on-one, so if all decide to sling the rock to the open man, it is difficult to imagine how they are stopped. Then again, they just got through with four games with the Nugs, who can make anyone look good on offense.

In the underground series that nobody watched, the Magic dispatched the Raps in 5, which makes perfect sense when you consider that there is nobody on Toronto’s roster who can match up with Dwight Howard. And yes, it really is that simple.

Spurs and Jazz on the verge

I make no bones about rooting hard for the Houston Rockets in their series with the Jazz. I’ve always regarded Yao as the most overrated NBA player this side of Vince Carter, and so when Houston keep ratcheting up their 22-game winning streak after Yao went down, I egotistically felt validated and started paying attention to what they were doing. And I fell in love with the way rooks Luis Scola and Carl Landry muck it up in the paint at both ends of the court, and noticed the parallels between Tracy McGrady and Kevin Garnett–their mixture of breathtaking talent and self-effacing teamwork. And Shane Battier needs to be on the USA Olympic Team, as he combines the best of the European style (smart in the half court, good from beyond the arc, passes well without a lot of fanfare) with the American grit of tenacious D. I knew in my head Houston would probably not fare well versus the Jazz, especially with Rafer Alston on the shelf for the first two games at home, but my heart went with Houston as I picked them in 7.

My head was right but my heart is satiated. Houston has played inspiring ball thus far, with Landry recovering from a slow start to deliver a key block to win Game 3 on the road, this after Carlos Boozer knocked out his tooth with a forearm that the refs didn’t even whistle. Battier has been marvelous and McGrady is a wonderfully tortured soul, sloe-eyed and pretending implacability as the emotions race across his face. It’s just that the Jazz have the matchup that matters, in this case at the point position. Deron Williams gives the impression that he can abuse Alston off the dribble whenever he feels like it. In Game 4, Rick Carlisle said as much before D-Will turned him into a prophet with a pair of almost-casual crunchtime drives to the hoop. Alston simply doesn’t have the bulk to deter Williams, so no matter how much Scola and Landry and Mutombo negate Boozer–which they have, far more than Yao could ever dream–Utah can get to the rack.

It’s been said many times, but having Kyle Korver along with Okur to stretch the defense makes it absolutely imperative that the opposing point at least throw Williams off stride a bit. If and when the Jazz get by Houston (and I can’t emotionally throw the Rockets under the bus yet), it will be interesting to see how Derek Fisher fares, not to mention Jordan Farmar. The Jazz need a monster series from their point guard to counteract LA’s advantage almost everywhere else, but they just might get it.

Meanwhile, as someone who grew up in Boston and spent his boyhood watching the Celts rack up 11 rings in 13 years (yeah, I’m that old, and yeah it was as much fun as it sounds–why do you think I write about hoops?), I’ve got to say that with each passing year,
the Spurs give me more and more vintage Celtic flashbacks. They aren’t exact matches, of course, but it is hard not to notice the similarities between Bill Russell and Tim Duncan, or John Havilcek and Manu Ginobili. You never hear Tony Parker get mentioned as one of the game’s great point guards, yet there is he, dismantling opponents in the playoffs–ditto Sam and KC Jones, back in the day. As for the coaches, well, Red Auerbach and Gregg Popovich both have an asshole streak that gets transferred into a virtue on the sideline. In Game 3 against the Suns, Oberto didn’t rotate over to stop a layup, allowing Phoenix to pull to 27-14, down 13 instead of 15, late in the first quarter. Pops immediately called a timeout and chewed Oberto up and down.

Think about that for a moment. Or think about Duncan, Ginobili and Parker in crunch time–or, hell, Robert Horry. You think the Suns have three more wins in them to take the Spurs four in a row?

A eulogy for Phoenix, but not for Dallas

I feel badly for Steve Nash, one of the classiest players in recent times, and an amazing competitor who more than anybody has had to sublimate his game since the Shaq trade. I go with the conventional wisdom that the Shaq deal both doomed the Suns to an earlier exit than they otherwise might have achieved with the Matrix, and was still a worthwhile gamble for Steve Kerr to have attempted, given that it also marginally increased their chances of winning it all for a roster that is running out of time. So, kudos to Kerr for having the stones to make the swap, but let’s remember that the flameout of the Suns was utterly predictible. All these jackasses who claimed the Suns would beat the Spurs are now blaming Mike D’Antoni, as if this particular coach has ever played any other way but to exploit opponents who had guys like Shaq on the floor. Do people really want to blame D’Antoni for the way the Spurs have destroyed Phoenix on the pick and roll during this series? I seem to recall a pretty good coach, name of Phil Jackson, who couldn’t get Shaq to play the pick and roll either. It requires a lot of stop and go, plant and pivot, and that is something a man of Shaq’s size had difficulty with before he was old and had to work hard to stay in shape.

But back to Nash: Does anybody else miss the freelancing Nash who flew down the floor, dribbling like a dervish, deciding which hand he was going to use for a delicious bounce pass to a fellow-flying teammate for a showtime slam? Does anybody else miss the frenetic pace that discombobulated opponents and gave the advantage to the selfless passer and deadly long-range shooter who would stick the trey if you sped to guard the hoop and shimmied his way into the paint if you stopped at the arc, secure in the knowledge at least two teammates, and maybe three, were perched at various points outside the arc to take advantage of the driive and kick? The presence of Shaq, and the emergence of Amare Stoudamire’s terrifying midrange game, has pretty much taken the magic out of Nash’s hands, making it extremely difficult for him to build up the rhythms and patterns that bedevil those guarding him. Now when the Suns need Nash to come up with something miraculous, it is totally outside their normal flow of play, and that flow was always Nash’s (and D’Antoni’s) secret weapon. Too bad. Don’t rip Nash or D’Antoni for this debacle; hey, don’t even rip Kerr or Shaq, who have done all they can to turn flax into gold this season down in the desert. But it just ain’t gonna happen.

There is no way I am going to wax rhapsodically in a similar fashion about the way the Mavericks have destroyed their team. The Jason Kidd trade was stupidity incarnate. Consider that the only "defense" people had of the deal when it was made–smart people anyway, who knew they had to acknowledge Kidd wasn’t what he used to be–was to argue that Kidd really hadn’t lost two or three steps on defense, he just became unmotivated in New Jersey. Ah, I see, he’s not old, just a malingerer.

No, he’s old. As I’ve said a few times already on this site, he’s not worth Diop and Harris straight up, without the two draft picks. In fact Dallas is old, and unless Stackhouse and Terry shoot lights out beside Dirk in the next few games, they are going down hard, soon to be dismantled. Too bad for Avery Johnson, who did a marvelous job hatching a Maginot Line defense in place of the unsuccessful traps in an effort to stop Chris Paul. And it has worked the past two games. The problem is that Erick Dampier can’t carry Tyson Chandler’s jockstrap, putting pressure on Dirk to rebound as well as score and distribute. That and the fact that Stackhouse and Josh Howard are wilting under pressure, giving the lie to all those citations about the Mavs’ playoff experience–Dallas is experienced like Hillary Clinton is experienced.

Even if I wasn’t in contempt of the Kidd trade, it would be hard to root against the Hornets. Tyson Chandler is the second-best center in the NBA behind Dwight Howard; better than Yao, certainly, and everything that Marcus Camby is supposed to be. He allows Chris Paul to gamble on defense (or take a play or two off) out on the perimeter, is able to rotate over when the iffy MoPete and Peja lose their man, and has tremendous, almost telepathic, communication with David West when protecting the paint. Then you’ve got heroes coming off the bench–Pargo for 30? The rook Wright in Game 4? Even Peja isn’t choking. So, while I’ll shed a virtual tear for the exit of Nash and (the soon to be scapegoated?) D’Antoni, I’ll cheer the demise of Dallas (despite my affection for Mark Cuban).


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