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Not
True Kings Yet by DMD Basketball has always been my favorite sport. Though I love to play it (and not necessarily all that well--but effortfully), I am known to have watched it on television more than a time or two. I began compulsively following the NBA the year after the Warriors won the championship just over twenty five years ago. There has not been a whole lot to get excited about since then. There was one nearly exciting stretch with Don Nelson as General Manager and coach, but Chris Webber ended the potential of that era in one fell swoop of "I've been playing basketball all my life and I just met the first coach who told me I had some things to work on so I'm outta here." In other words, it was the first time in his life he was coached. So a quarter century of basketball rooting where the team I loved was not only not in the finals, but almost never made a dent in the playoff field. Oh yeah, and pretty early on in my basketball cheering career, the best announcer on Earth (and not just because he is one of the few who also has an appreciation for the arts), Bill King, decided basketball was lame and focused on football and baseball instead. Most of Bill King's criticisms are absolutely right. Too much selfishness/individual play, weak fundamentals, and a whole bunch of personalities that are especially un likable (a sports wide commentary unto itself). So I missed Bill King. And I hated the Bay Area's lack of discussion about basketball. Yes, when a team is hot KNBR (the main sports talk show station out of San Francisco) entertains some discussion about the team, but it still tends towards being extremely broad and they are most concerned with appealing to anyone who might possibly be listening so want to stick to: "How about Shaq and those free throws? What are the chances the Warriors will win the championship? Is Kobe better than Michael was at his age, Is Michael better than Kobe's dad before he was Kobe's dad and before Michael got divorced and was a dad, and who will win a one-on-one between Kobe and Michael when they are both over 60?!?? Important stuff. And stuff that is easy to decide. Whereas I wanna hear about the sixth seventh eighth guys on the bench, and what can be done to make a given team (every team in the NBA I'm interested in quite frankly) play better as a unit. So I'm looking for better basketball radio journalism than I am finding in the Bay Area. I turn the dial to AM 1140 and usually pick up a Sacramento station that is discussing the Kings all the time. They are talking about the bench players. They are even talking about the guys who don't play who they think should. Not only this, two of my favorite ex-Warriors, Mitch Richmond and Sarunas Marciulionis are now playing for the Kings. They stink winning and losing wise, but it is a forum where I actually here detailed discussion about basketball. I like it. So I find myself rooting for the Kings at least as much as the Warriors, even though the Warriors are the better team at the time. Now this is another issue that deserves a whole commentary into itself: I may not be able to root for a winner. I have an underdog obsession. I don't think it's my modest 5'5" frame stature (gee, I chose basketball for my favorite sport to play...hmm) but something drives me to the underdog. I think it is in part that I am an extremely empathetic person. I know everyone is human, even people who have committed atrocious acts have good sides. Certainly people who just happened to lose a given game have a good side. And I feel for them. Though I feel for them a little more if I think they played the game in a good-basketball manner. Most of the same radio personalities are still at that station in Sacramento. Most of the same personalities and style are still on KNBR. So I still listen to the Sacramento station whenever I can, maybe even a little more often now as I find the Kings playing really well. Last year it was really hard to root for them because their starting point guard, who was far from their best player but was the most popular player in the NBA in terms of jerseys sold, was racist and homophobic. These are not assumptions. He made this clear multiple times with immature, ignorant hurtful things he said to paying audience members. I have empathy for him, but I have a lot different approach in mind to deal with his hatefulness than giving him a $70 million dollar contract. I'm not sure this appropriately addresses the worst possible conduct for a role model who consistently exhibits openly racist and homophobic behavior. Fortunately, that contract was not offered by the Kings. The Kings were not perfect this year. They were downright annoying at times. But they were far and away the most exciting team in the league. The reason: they all passed very well, they played as a unit, and they all seemed to genuinely care about one another. All of those things are of course interrelated. But they disappointed us all in the end. The Lakers are not playing well this year. Really. Did anyone watch the Spurs series? With no David Robinson and a 19-year old French point guard, the Spurs dominated the Lakers through most of every game. Yes, I read the paper. I know the Lakers won four out of five game. Yes, I know that's what championship teams do. But great championship teams just flat out win. The Lakers were a team struggling, and they found ways to win those games. They continued to struggle against the Kings, and the Kings had an opportunity to knock off the Lakers. Here are the top five real reasons they did not. 5) Not enough bench play. I like Rick Adelman. He's a nice enough guy. He's probably a very smart coach. But this decision almost all year to play only up to eight guys is a bad one. As I have mentioned, the kings are all about team unity. They like each other and they like the guys on the bench. Chris Webber likes Lawrence Funderburke. I am not privileged to watch their practices, but if Funderburke is not a complete jackass in practice, he deserves more playing time. He deserves it, and moreover he could help the Kings consistently. Chris Webber gets tired. When he doesn't get tired, it is because he is not playing all out because he knows he will be playing almost the entire game. Chris Webber should play under forty minutes every night, unless a game goes into overtime. It wears on him each night he plays more than that, and it wears on him over the course of the season. If for no other reason, he should not play more than that because he is, quite frankly, injury prone, and we are all more injury prone when we are exhausted and extending ourselves. I would play a tenth guy too. Maybe the Kings will feel Gerald Wallace is ready next year, but they have enough depth to have done it. It is not just a question of: are my best players better when they are tired than my reserves are fresh? The real question is: Are my best players at their best when they are dead dog tired in the fourth quarter and overtime because I have not rested them sufficiently over the course of the game. The answer to that is all too obvious to me. 4) The Free Throws. Chris Webber significantly improved his free throw percentage from 45.4% in 1998-1999 to 75.1% in 1999-2000. He shot a respectable 70.3% in 2000-2001 and was at an impressive 74.9% this year. But he stunk in the playoffs from the line: 59.6% but the worst of it was against the Lakers.. Made Shaquille O'Neal look like Rick Barry. Chris Webber has a good touch. A Nice shot. He relies on his outside jumper from farther than the free throw line. Maybe he needs to shoot them from the corner of the line. You can do that. Maybe that timeout at the end of his college career was no fluke. Maybe he really is not clutch. Maybe he is tired (see #5). Maybe he knows I care (see #1). He was not alone in his free throw misery, certainly not in the all important Game Seven. Maybe that part of the Kings game will benefit by another year's experience. Buy free throws or not, you cannot guarantee a return to that possibility again. Please check the talent of the Western Conference if you think you just need a touch up job to return to the precipice of the NBA Finals. 3) The Shaq problem. The league does not know how to referee the play of Shaquille O'Neal. I respect Shaq. I think he is the most dominant player in the game today. I think he could be way more dominant. If he kept in better shape and played hard more of the time on both ends. But the issue is, if the rule says you "can't dislodge the defensive player" it doesn't say "unless you're strong enough to do it easily." If he dislodges a set NBA player, even if Vlade or whomever hams it up--it's an offensive foul. He needs to try to go around him (and Shaq is incredibly agile and skillful enough to do that pretty well) or settle for another shot. If you made a highlight film of the fouls Scot Pollard got called for in this series, you'd see how ridiculous it is. It also highlights how ridiculous the refereeing of "stars" is versus bench players. This could be an argument against my previous point about more bench play by saying Adelman knows the refs don't respect the bench players and so don't put them out there where they won't get any calls at all. I have a pre-emptive argument on that: put them out there consistently so the refs know who they are and that they are legitimate NBA players. Webber was lauded for taking on Shaq down the stretch of game seven, but perhaps Pollard being in the game would have helped more once Shaq went out. Rebounding was a significant problem down the stretch, which brings me to... 2) Boxing Out. Oh, did I mention near the beginning of this epic that Chris Webber did not take real well to criticism, er coaching. Well I may be wrong, but let's take a look at his rebounding numbers: Eight in game seven. The Lakers had four players with more rebounds than Webber. This is not a Webber problem alone, but it is a big Webber problem that has been bothering me for a long time. He came out strong in game seven with some nice blocks and great defensive effort, but boxing out is just not his thing. He's a jump up and get it kind of guy. Box out. I just like the sound of it. There is something so blue collar about it. There is something so un-NBA about it. Precisely because a box out does not mean you are necessarily more likely to get the ball but that the guy you box out is unlikely to and that if everyone on your team is in position defensively we're talking about here you stand a much better chance of securing the rebound. I know the Lakers bricked innumerable three pointers and those had some long funky rebounds. I saw Vlade foul out of game seven on a ridiculous loose ball foul. But I'd like to watch the footage just of Webber as every opponent's shot go up and see exactly what he does. I know what Scot Pollard does. I know what he has to do for the coaches to play him. What does Chris Webber have to do for the coaches to play him? I do not think boxing out is a requirement from them. Maybe it's been hinted at. But I don't think it has been made adequately clear to him. Maybe Don Nelson tried.
Look, I was an A's fan all through the late 70s (yes just after they won their championship) up until the 1980s, when I just didn't like the bash brothers. Maybe it's the size thing again: they were so huge in every way and I am not. Maybe I already knew deep down what Jose Canseco is now telling the world and every potential publisher: they were all doing steroids, and I'm not even comfortable exhibiting any of the so called traits of "masculinity" that they must exhibit ten fold on that stuff. And look how huge they are now. Who would have known they would make their 1988 selves look like stick figures by now. Point being, I stopped rooting for the A's just before they won their championship! Who did I root for then? The Giants--who were pretty darn good--in fact, they made it to the World Series against the A's in 1989: My Childhood Dream--the A's and Giants in the World Series. But instead of my full seven game played out fantasy where Shooty Babbitt hits a game winning homer in the bottom of the ninth to win game seven (interesting enough, it was the diminutive infielder's sixth home run of my series, probably more than he had in any one complete season, perhaps in his career (maybe I was on steroids that week!)), no instead of that, the A's, who I had just seconds before (as they became the almighty favorites) become unable to root for, trounced the Giants in four games. Oh yeah, and in the midst of my childhood fantasy come true, the entire West Coast and those of us in Santa Cruz in particular got a reality check about the importance of baseball with the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, seconds before game three. So the series seemed insignificant and disappointing in every way. Unless I could have somehow reverted to being an A's fan. But that couldn't happen could it. It happened in the last few year, though. With the A's sporting a modest (what, only $40 million or something) budget by baseball standards and sporting relative no-names, it was easy to root for them. Especially when the Giants got their fancy schmancy dot com lovers ballpark by the bay. KNBR's virtual desire to drive the A's out of town was never clearer. But the A's protested by being the superior baseball team. And they were about to knock off the defending World Champions, when Jeremy Giambi was too busy thinking about his celebratory joint that night and Derek Jeter was doing what a baseball player who tries hard and always finds a relevant place to be on the field at any time instead of the 21st century spoiled millionaire. Knock off defending champs? Playing the game fundamentally sound? Oh yeah, we were talking about basketball. And why the Kings cannot be crowned yet. Advice for next many years (because please don't assume their is some stairstep process to winning a championship and the Kings will necessarily be back next year: please ask former Blazers coach Rick Adelman about that; ask Don "defense doesn't matter" Nelson about that; ask all the teams that lost all those years to Bill Russell's Celtics about that; ask Karl Malone and John Stockton about that; but don't ask me, I just told ya): Box out. Practice your free throws (mimic Shaq, better yet call Rick Barry). Don't play more than forty minutes a night except on really special occasions. Don't expect Mike Bibby to carry you down the stretch of every game--I like Bibby and he was great--but tell me you are going to put all the eggs in the basket of a twenty foot jumper at the end of every big game--again: good basketball versus some lucky days basketball. Most importantly: do something really obnoxious that I hear about so I can't be your fan any more (maybe put Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh in heavy rotation on 1140 AM or something scary like that). But one thing is for certain: you'll never win with me by your side. I just would not know how to handle the success. The final thought must be: I truly appreciate the Kings and the season they had. They are an exciting team who plays basketball with an infectious, enjoyable style. They played in the most exciting basketball series I have every watched in 25 years of watching way too much basketball when I could have been out practicing and trying to get my free throw percentage above 50 percent. I hope they do make it back to this plateau again and climb it the rest of the way and I'll endure the rhetoric of it just taking experience at every level. There is some validity in that. But every game has a tremendous amount of luck, flukeyness, and randomness to it as well. Otherwise, how would any team I'm on ever win a game. Or how will a team I root for ever win the biggest game? Finally, if you think this commentary was too short, I will root for you with all of my heart for all of my life, because you are also a true underdog of the world. Please send your comments and feedback and let me know if you would like them to appear on this page. You can also
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The time is now for homosexual and bisexual professional athletes to
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even the mediocre oft-timed lame basketball played by yours truly, is
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