Wise/WP: Message to the Mavs: Quit Whining and Play

[boutons_]

Message to the Mavs: Quit Whining and Play
By Mike Wise
Sunday, June 18, 2006; E05


MIAMI

The conscience of the Dallas Mavericks used his time behind the microphone this afternoon to whimper about poor, little Jerry Stackhouse getting docked a game for running into a human cement mixer. The pitch in Avery Johnson's nasally drawl went higher: "Because the league comes down with a certain ruling, what are we supposed to do as coaches? Say amen?"

Shaq, not Stack, is the real perpetrator in this series, he said. Johnson kept going, unable to stop himself: "So now because I'm supposed to be a religious man, I'm supposed to come in here today and have a prayer meeting."

( AJ is classless, juvenile smart-ass, way too young emotionally to be an professional sports coach )

He moved his team from Miami to Fort Lauderdale the other day to eliminate the devilish temptations of South Beach. He is also making his millionaire ballplayers room together for the first time since many were in college. Full-grown adults who do not have to work until 9 p.m. tonight are not allowed to leave the hotel grounds.

In less than a week, the man has gone from this hilarious, Energizer Bunny character to Gunnery Sgt. Foley riding Ensign Mayo in "An Officer and a Gentleman." He hasn't asked Dirk Nowitzki to spit-shine his sneakers yet, but he's making him room with Darrell Armstrong.

Worse, his response to the league's decision to suspend Stackhouse for Game 5 makes conspiratorial fans everywhere think David Stern and his henchmen have it out for Mark Cuban and his Mavericks.

No other league has to deal with cloak-and-dagger theories the way the NBA has for the past 20 years. You never hear how Paul Tagliabue wanted Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in the Super Bowl and that's why New England's corners are allowed to bump receivers beyond five yards. Or how Bud Selig wanted the Yankees and Red Sox to meet for the American League pennant, and that's why Selig prevented Baltimore and Toronto from swapping sluggers in December.

But the NBA hears this every postseason, a continued drumbeat from fans, players, coaches and owners who believe the league wants stars such as Shaq, Dwyane Wade and Pat Riley to shine bright and long.

Just because Dallas is in meltdown mode, Johnson and his team shouldn't make this out to be, "We're the persecuted team from the Western Conference that gets no respect." Or the outdated standby: "We know the league and ABC want a Game 7; that's what these calls against us are about."

Come on, Dallas, you're better than that.

( Come on, Mike, no, they're not )

It's insulting to those who want to watch and concentrate on competitive basketball. It's disrespectful to Stu Jackson, the NBA's dean of discipline, who has been very consistent in meting out fines and suspensions this postseason.

Stackhouse did not make a play on the ball against O'Neal on Thursday night in Game 4; he came up high with a forearm that caught Shaq in the face and sent him hard to the floor.

The debate keeps percolating leading up to Sunday night about the legitimacy of Stackhouse getting suspended a game for that flagrant foul on O'Neal in Game 4. No, it was not Kevin McHale clotheslining Kurt Rambis in 1984, which remains the measuring stick for a take-a-guy-out foul in the Finals. The argument against suspending Stackhouse will hinge on the premise that a game of this magnitude should be decided on the court.

The let-'em-play crowd is correct; this is about the playoffs, the very time of year the NBA does not want thuggish behavior mucking up its new, high-octane game. The casual fan is paying attention to a product he became disinterested in 12 years ago, the moment he saw Anthony Mason and Charles Oakley mug Hakeem Olajuwon instead of guarding him. Whatever the intent of Stackhouse's flagrant foul -- and I think he wanted to put some hurt on a man that caused him pain earlier in the series -- the Mavericks should know that cleaning up the league is a fairness decision and, indirectly, an economic decision.

Stackhouse's foul wasn't James Posey throwing a crack-back block on Kirk Hinrich in the open floor during the Heat's first-round series against Chicago, for which Posey got a game. It wasn't Raja Bell losing a game for taking down Kobe Bryant in the first round, because Bell was fed up with taking Kobe's elbows to his chops and he was determined to get some payback. It certainly wasn't the Clippers' Chris Kamen appearing to have his genital area grabbed by Denver's Reggie Evans in the first round, for which Evans was not suspended. But it was still malicious enough to warrant a game.

Stackhouse also has a past, having taken out Phoenix's Joe Johnson a year ago in the playoffs, a very hard foul that did not draw a suspension.

( oops, we all know JJ caused his own injury hanging on the rim, not Stack)

You better believe it was filed away by a league that takes your past into account. Ask Ron Artest. His margin of error for catching an opponent with a 'bow in the throat is much slimmer than Wade's.

For Johnson to go off on the league's alleged inconsistency smacks of hypocrisy. This new, no-contact NBA, in which every hand check is whistled, is the reason why a lithe, quick and skilled team such as Dallas got to the Finals. Players such as San Antonio's Bruce Bowen cannot play as aggressively on the perimeter as they once did, which enables offensive-minded guards and forwards to get the space they need to release jump shots they never could get off before -- players such as the Mavericks' Jason Terry, Josh Howard and Dirk Nowitzki. You can't have it both ways.

Johnson needs to give up the Sgt. Foley act and tell his team to play. Body-up Wade. Get in the Miami guard's grill before he completely demoralizes your team. Make a big shot. Retake control of the series.

For goodness sake, quit whining. It makes Johnson and his team look more desperate than determined.


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[nbascribe]

i like that

[dirk4mvp]

But you also like the Spurs, so it's neutralized.

[boutons_]

June 18, 2006

Sports of The Times

Tugging on Superman's Cape

By HARVEY ARATON

Miami

WHILE Shaquille O'Neal is no longer considered an athletic immortal, it is comforting to know that he can still shrug off a flagrant foul and, with his X-ray vision, identify an overreaction when he sees it.

He can still lend a comic touch to a touchy situation.

His daughters hit harder than Dallas's Jerry Stackhouse, O'Neal said, sounding offended by the suggestion that Stackhouse's much-discussed foul, which sent him sprawling in Game 4 of the N.B.A. finals and landed Stackhouse suspended for tonight's fifth game, was anything more than a tug on the cape of the "son of Jor-El, Superman."

But seriously, what else was Stackhouse supposed to do to stop O'Neal — out on the fast break, more powerful than a speeding locomotive — from dunking the ball and himself from becoming a fly on the windshield?

If Stackhouse had backed off, the play would have been one more piece of evidence in the indictment of the Mavericks as being criminally passive Thursday night, when they lost by 24 and found themselves in a deadlocked series they were on the verge of turning into a blowout two nights earlier.

That O'Neal fell into the photographers was more a result of what happens when a 7-foot-1, 325-pound man, no ballerina, meets resistance in full stride.

If the victim had been the Mavericks' Erick Dampier and the perpetrator Dwyane Wade, would the fans at American Airlines Arena have howled with delight, the reporters have scribbled another Pat Riley quotation about the championship imperatives of encountering force with force, and the league office have agreed that the flagrant foul call was punishment aplenty?

O'Neal has become the pope of unwarranted pity this playoff season, the beneficiary of the Save Shaq Society, when he is plainly alive, kicking, kidding and sagely deferring to the younger and more potent member of the Miami Justice League.

That would be Wade, dubbed affectionately by O'Neal upon Shaq's arrival here last season as Flash.

"When I came here, I just decided to put him in the front, let him go, rather than me trying to be in the front at 34," O'Neal said. "He's a guy that's very humble, very talented, very unselfish.

"Actually, I tested him out one game. I told him, 'Hey, I need you to score 60.' He said he didn't want to score 60. Most people would have said O.K."

The implicit message being that his former sidekick in Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant, would probably have responded, "Why not 80?"

Remember back in the first round how Bryant supporters were practically parading outside Staples Center to celebrate his apparent return to playoff prominence, while Shaq couldn't stay out of foul trouble against the Bulls and the Heat was locked in a series much too steamy for its liking?

His many friends in the news media who relish the cuddly giant's charms and ignore — as was the case with Charles Barkley — the occasional socially incorrect slur were as aghast as Riley that such calls could be made against a superstar long used to getting the benefit of the referees' doubt.

Riley, his coach, is paid to howl but obviously knows better. He has presided over the athletic deterioration of a once extraordinarily gifted center, the passing of the ball and the torch from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Magic Johnson, the game's grooviest guard. Riley pinpointed the transfer to 1986, when his Lakers lost to Houston in the Western Conference finals.

"The very next year, there was a great swing," Riley said. "Kareem, you know, understood and accepted that. So he was able to play from '87 until he retired, with other guys supporting him. I think it's just beginning for Shaquille. He's going to have to improve in certain areas that are more of a finesse game, not always a power game.

"He's going through that process right now, and even though I think he's fighting it a little bit, he's starting to change and accept it mentally because that's just the way it is."

Time marches on, but O'Neal needs nobody's sympathy. Kareem always had the sky hook and Shaq has the jump hook, the growing recognition of spacing and passing out of the post and, in Wade, a respectful and unselfish partner who is going to help him age with the utmost grace. Shaq's time as the N.B.A.'s most dominant player is over, but here, as Riley said, he will remain a most valuable presence.

He may no longer be larger than life, but he is still a very big man, with the strength to bloody the face of the very same Stackhouse in Game 1 by merely lifting his arms. Stackhouse took three stitches after their collision, but his suspension for tonight wounds the Mavericks at a point when they are still trying to recover from their calamitous finish in Game 3, which made this a series.

Dallas Coach Avery Johnson called the league's decision sickening and ridiculous, a reaction that was strong but understandable, even justifiable. The league lost its head after Shaq kept his cool and his sense of humor — he thanked Stackhouse yesterday for saving him a trip to the chiropractor — in the heat of the moment.

Why wouldn't he? As Wade's sidekick in South Beach, earning millions of dollars, in the finals for the sixth time on three different teams, two victories from his fourth title, who needs X-ray vision to see that life is good for the aging son of Jor-El?

E-mail: [email protected]

[Shank]

Yay! Another Mavs thread. It's good to have you guys on the bandwagon.