Category: NBA Finals (Page 57 of 58)

Dallas 90, Miami 80 (Mavs lead series, 1-0)
In my preview of the Finals, I mentioned the Dwayne Wade vs. Jason Terry matchup as one of the keys to the series. Terry held up his end in Game 1, scoring 32 points on 13-18 shooting. Wade scored 28, but the Heat aren’t going to win very many games if they can’t contain Terry. Miami came out on fire, scoring 31 points in the first quarter to take an eight point lead into the second period. But thanks to some tough Dallas defense as well as some inaccurate shooting from long range, Miami only managed 49 points in the final three quarters, leaving the door wide open for the Mavs to seize the victory. Dirk Nowitzki had a quiet game, scoring 16 on 4-14 shooting. Udonis Haslem actually did a pretty good job on the big German, but Nowitzki was surprisingly passive for most of the game. Expect him to be more agressive in Game 2. Shaquille O’Neal scored 17 on 8-11 shooting, but the double-teams came early and often, forcing Shaq to give the ball up for most of the game. The Mavs have to feel pretty good about the victory – they won despite poor offensive performances from everyone except Terry, leading me to believe that Miami is going to have a tough time in this series. But it’s all about adjustments, and you know that Pat Riley still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Game 2 is on Sunday at 9 PM ET on ABC.

Bob Ryan (of the Boston Globe) wrote a piece about Pat Riley’s transformations throughout his career. First he discusses Riley’s success with the Lakers:

“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been the same person,” he said. “I was a lot different in Los Angeles, and I think most of you portrayed me accurately in those years as a very sort of selfish, ambitious young man in a lot of ways to get whatever.”

As time went on, he did get a little more full of himself. It’s only natural. When one championship turns into four, and when two of your triumphs come over the great archrival from the other end of the country, it is probably inevitable that you’re going to change somehow.

Then, Ryan touches on Riley’s stint with the Knicks:

He came to New York as a conquering hero and with an apparent determination to reinvent himself. Left behind in LA was all that “Showtime” stuff. His Knicks were rough, tough, and rock ’em, sock ’em, and he had poster boys Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley, plus hardscrabble John Starks. They were the antithesis of a finesse team, but they were good at what they did and Riley got them to a point in the 1994 Finals where they were up, 3-2, heading back to Houston for Games 6 and 7.

By this time Riley had become almost totally imperial. Though he never won it all in New York, his mystique was as fixed as ever, because he turned away from not just “Showtime” — how could you have a proper “Showtime” without Magic? — but full-court transition basketball (i.e. pretty basketball entirely, as did the rest of the league). Riley, it turns out, was viewed as the lead dog for almost the entire NBA coaching community. Riley was into slug and thugball, and the coaching lemmings followed him in his leap from the cliff.

The undeniable truth is that Pat Riley did more to slow down the NBA and bring on its arctic Dark Ages period than any single individual. That’s power.

Finally, he describes the Riley/Heat marriage:

He moved down to Miami, where he was invested with enormous gobs of power and money and where, with Alonzo Mourning as a marquee attraction, he delivered more of the hard-hat style of basketball, with ever-diminishing results. Things deteriorated so much that he quit a second time, retreating to the front office while allowing the rumpled Stan Van Gundy to coach the team.

He made news in the summer of 2005 when he let slip something to the effect that he wished to be more “hands-on,” at which point the general assumption was made that his return to the sideline was in the “when,” not “if” category. Said assumptions were proven correct when Riley took over from Van Gundy 21 games into the 2005-06 season.

The latest Pat Riley reinvention is to find a middle path. The Heat have an uptempo point guard in Jason Williams, but they’re not going to be “Showtime” because he’s not Magic Johnson and neither is anyone else. They have Shaquille O’Neal, but they don’t play thugball because he certainly is light years better than that. No, they are a nicely balanced basketball team that can score inside with Shaq and on outside shots and drives to the hoop by Dwyane Wade, and who during this playoff run have gotten the requisite help from the various offensive role players such as Udonis Haslem, James Posey, Williams, Gary Payton, and the One and Only Antoine Walker, who has found a team that can maximize his strengths while living with his weaknesses.

Defensively, they are an evolving work, perhaps not as great as they looked against a troubled Detroit squad, but a unit that has enough toughness to make Dallas work for everything.

Riley has matured a lot from the guy who coached the Lakers during the “Showtime” era, but he still has that recognizable slicked-back hair that helped to polarize the NBA community during the Lakers’ rivalry with the Boston Celtics. He has adjusted with the times, taking advantage of the changing winds of the NBA’s officiating and generally getting the most out of his players. The Heat are his team , culled together over the past few seasons with only goal being a NBA championship. The last phase of his quest starts tonight.

The Sporting News published an interesting article about how Avery Johnson took over for Don Nelson as the head coach of the Dallas Mavericks.

Credit Nelson and the organization for helping Johnson, 41, make a seamless transition from the end of the bench to the head of it. Three years ago, Johnson was a backup point guard with the Mavericks. When he did not make the playoff roster, Nelson had him sit in on game-planning sessions during the team’s run to the conference finals.

“He was running training camp from Day 1 (in 2004),” says [Devin] Harris, a second-year point guard. “I’ve never seen him as anything but a coach.”

Before long, Johnson — if you want to know why he’s called “Little General,” watch him during practice — was offering opinions in meetings. By midseason, he had been the substitute head coach in a number of games. Last March Nelson felt it was the time for a change, and Johnson took over.

“The players already were used to hearing his voice,” Mavs assistant head coach Del Harris says. “He was used to being in charge virtually, so it worked out very smoothly. This really has been the ideal situation for a young coach.”

In less than a year, Johnson did something with the Mavs that Nelson was never able to do – he got them to play defense. That, along with Dirk Nowitzki’s newfound determination to go to the hole, has them playing in the Finals instead of sitting at home watching the Spurs represent the West.

When Shaquille O’Neal asked the Los Angeles Lakers to be traded, one of the teams he targeted was Dallas. Although there are rumors floating around that Dirk Nowitzki was involved in those trade talks, Mark Cuban said things never got that involved.

‘It was something we certainly tried to do. We had a lot of players and draft picks [to offer], and we tried to sell [the Lakers] on the perspective that yeah, maybe you have a down year, but then in a couple of years out, you have cap room. They weren’t buying it, and the response was, `There’s nothing on your roster that we want.’ . . . It was about a two-minute conversation.”

I find it hard to believe that the Lakers would have turned down a trade involving Nowitzki, but I doubt he was ever on the table. Shaq is a great center, but in his stint in Miami he has been far from dominant. It would have been unwise for the Mavericks to part ways with their franchise player just to get a few of O’Neal’s twilight years.

ESPN’s Pat Forde wrote an interesting article about how Dirk Nowitzki is doing something no other international player has ever done – be the star player on a team playing in the Finals. Sure, Tim Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon were born outside the U.S., but they played college ball in the U.S., while Nowitzki bypassed the American system completely.

While youth basketball rotted from the inside out in the States, it blossomed overseas. Unscarred by the American shoe wars, unpolluted by the travel-team circuit, unspoiled by the human barnacles who attach themselves to young stars, the kids in Europe and elsewhere actually learned how to play the game.

While players in the States obsessed from adolescence about getting paid, Europeans just played. Creatively. Fundamentally.

The results first came home to roost in international competition. The U.S. has been serially embarrassed, and not just in the Athens Olympics. The list includes a sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis, where a fellow named Nowitzki was the MVP.

Rick Pitino, who was coaching the Boston Celtics the year that Nowitzki was drafted, worked him out in a tennis bubble outside of Rome.

“He put on a 45-minute display unlike anything I’d seen before,” Pitino said. “He was the most impressive workout I’ve had since I’ve been a coach. I said to myself, ‘I found the next Larry Bird.’ ”

Over lunch, Pitino convinced Nowitzki’s agent to play coy, telling teams that his client might do one more year in the German military instead of coming to the United States to play. In return, Pitino guaranteed that he’d take Nowitzki with the 10th pick in the draft.

Only problem is, Dallas got there first.

The success that Nowitzki’s versatile, fundamental game is having in the NBA is a reflection of how far the sport has fallen in the States. Sure, the league is bigger than ever, but it’s partly due to all the international players and how they excel at just about every aspect of the game. Look at Nowitzki, Manu Ginobili, Yao Ming, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker and Andrei Kirilenko – they do it all. Offense, defense, ball handling, free throws – you name it, these guys are at least decent at it.

It’s ironic that two American players – Dwayne Wade and Shaquille O’Neal – stand in the way of Nowitzki taking his foreign-bred game to the ultimate level, a NBA championship. Regardless of who wins, let’s hope that the success of Nowitzki, along with the other international players, has an effect on American youth, who should be working on their jumpers instead of their highlight-reel dunks.