duncan228
05-22-2007, 11:07 AM
It's a long one. Some nice stuff on Duncan
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/jack_mccallum/05/22/westconf0528/index.html
How The West Will Be Won
Even with a latter-day Stockton and Malone and the same coach who guided the originals, the Cinderella Jazz will be hard-pressed to stop a Spurs team gunning for its fourth title since 1999
Posted: Tuesday May 22, 2007 10:19AM; Updated: Tuesday May 22, 2007 10:25AM
No, the Utah Jazz has not disbanded since John Stockton and Karl Malone took their short shorts and their pick-and-roll precision into retirement. Quite the contrary. The Jazz has reached the Western Conference finals, its furthest incursion into the postseason since 1998, when S&M lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the Finals.
Utah is still coached by that ultimate NBA old-schooler, Jerry Sloan, who collects tractors ("I haven't really counted, but around 65 sounds right," he says) and is still eminently capable of peppering his team with f bombs, as he did at halftime of Sunday's Game 1, which ended in a 108-100 loss to the San Antonio Spurs. It has a couple of lunch-pail veterans in the Sloan-Stockton-Malone tradition: Guard Derek Fisher, the owner of three championship rings from his days with the Los Angeles Lakers, and forward Matt Harpring, the owner of countless battle scars from a combative career with four teams. And it once again has a hard-nosed, steely-eyed quarterback in Deron Williams, a kind of 21st-century Stockton -- only with lots of skin ink.
Williams scored 34 points and had only one turnover in Game 1 against a defense that had frustrated Phoenix Suns All-Star point guard Steve Nash in the previous series.
The immediate problem for the Jazz, however, is that the Spurs are a version of their old selves, too, and that version won a championship just two years ago, and two years before that, and four years before that. Having emerged from a classic six-gamer against Phoenix, San Antonio has clearly become the favorite (if it wasn't already) in a final four long on pedigree -- the West's Spurs and the East's Detroit Pistons each have three championships -- but short on star power. In recent weeks Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash have been shown the postseason door. Sure, Cleveland's LeBron James lives on in the East, but in the West we will discover if the viewing public can invest in a duel between the relentlessly efficient Spurs ("a slow, positional team," as Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko says) and the Cinderellas from Utah, who were supposed to be eliminated by now, first by the Houston Rockets and then by the Golden State Warriors.
Plus, it's hard not to pine for more of San Antonio-Phoenix, one of the best playoff series in recent memory, one that featured, besides lots of great basketball, a Kafkaesque decision by the NBA that both mistreated the Suns and tainted the Spurs' victory.
Phoenix had wrapped up a Game 4 win and a 2-2 series tie in San Antonio when Spurs forward Robert Horry hip-checked Nash into the scorer's table with 18 seconds left in the game. Two of Nash's teammates, center Amaré Stoudemire and forward Boris Diaw, rose from the bench in protest, an eminently human reaction considering that their leader had been treated like a piñata (bloodied nose in Game 1, knee to the crotch by Bruce Bowen in Game 2) to that point. Stoudemire advanced about 20 feet toward the action before being restrained, Diaw maybe 15 feet before turning around himself. An NBA rule against "leaving the vicinity of the bench area" during an altercation resulted in both players being suspended for Game 5. So the net result of a flagrant act by one team (Horry was suspended for two games) was that the other team paid the price.
Stu Jackson, the NBA's rules czar, was asked if that was fair. "It's not about fairness," answered Jackson, "it's about correctness." The absurdity of that statement boggles the mind, as does commissioner David Stern's churlish defense of the decision on a national radio show. "To listen to the palaver that Robert Horry changed the series is just silly," Stern told ESPN's Dan Patrick. Well, a lot of Spurs fans who don't know what palaver means were among those giving Horry a 30-second standing ovation when he checked into Game 1 on Sunday, his first appearance since the hip check; apparently, they thought he changed the series.
Anyway, without their top scorer (Stoudemire, a first-team All-NBA pick) and their No. 2 playmaker (Diaw), behind Nash, the Suns dropped Game 5 at home, 88-85, and went into San Antonio for Game 6 at a severe psychological disadvantage. Phoenix eventually succumbed 114-106, leaving the Suns with a 6-15 record against the Spurs since Nash arrived three years ago, not to mention an off-season full of question marks.
While Phoenix's Big Three can be defined by flaws (Nash gets worn down, forward Shawn Marion is inconsistent, Stoudemire is a sieve on defense), San Antonio's Big Three is defined by a seeming imperviousness to pressure. Forward Tim Duncan averaged 26.8 points and 13.7 rebounds in the series and played remarkable help defense, point guard Tony Parker consistently drilled open jumpers when the Suns doubled down on Duncan, and shooting guard Manu Ginóbili scored 26 and 33 points in the final two games.
"Nothing any of them did surprised us," said Phoenix coach Mike D'Antoni, "but when all three are doing the right things at the same time, you're in big trouble."
The Jazz found that out in Game 1 when the Spurs' Big Three made 26 of 44 shots and combined for 71 points. Duncan, in particular, has been so routinely excellent in the postseason that were awards voting taking place now, he most likely would win both MVP (he finished fourth) and Defensive Player of the Year (he finished second).
One thing to keep an eye on as the series with Utah progresses (Game 2 was scheduled for Tuesday in San Antonio) is Duncan's mastery of a rather obscure statistical category -- ratio of blocked shots to personal fouls, the big man's equivalent of the assists-to-turnovers ratio used to evaluate point guards. Duncan had five fouls and only two blocks against the Jazz on Sunday, but in the Phoenix series he finished with 25 blocks and only 21 personal fouls, an astounding plus-minus. In the decisive Game 6 win he blocked nine shots and committed only three fouls. The Suns are not shy about complaining to the refs, but even they conceded that Duncan has the ability to block or alter shots while keeping his body and hands off his man. "Tim has a great knowledge of spatial relationships" is the way Spurs coach Gregg Popovich explains it.
Duncan is true to his team's philosophy of staying away from fouling. "There's a simple way we get the point across," says assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo. "We yell and scream like hell when somebody does foul."
Ask Duncan about "spatial relationships" and you'll get that blank stare that he offers in response to most basketball-related questions. About the only time Duncan will elaborate on anything is on the "Ask Tim" segment that runs on a San Antonio television station from time to time. Host Don Harris takes e-mail questions from viewers as long as they have nothing to do with basketball. Duncan has discussed the Chicago Bears (his favorite NFL team), poker (his favorite card game), the Iceman (his favorite Ultimate Fighter), the '68 Camaro (his favorite restored car) and his preference for big-block Chevys over small-block Chevys. "Small blocks are probably better," said Duncan, "but I'm a big-block guy." He wasn't talking about defense.
That last subject might pique the interest of Sloan, who can't seem to stop buying tractors, new and ancient. He stores them on his farm in McLeansboro, Ill. "I just piddle around with 'em whenever I can," says Sloan, who can usually be found wearing a John Deere cap away from the court. "I should take better care of them, but I know they're there."
The old master, who has coached Utah since 1988 and is the longest tenured coach in NBA history, has by and large taken good care of this team, though it hasn't always been easy getting the Jazz to follow his lead. After Game 1 he talked bluntly about his players' not accepting responsibility for mistakes and playing scared, subjects he had addressed even more directly behind closed doors at halftime, which ended with Utah trailing 54-36. "If you are intimidated and don't want to go out there and compete," Sloan told his players, "then stay in the locker room."
Fisher, Harpring and Williams notwithstanding, there is a softer, international sensibility to this team, owing to starters Mehmet Okur (Turkey) and Kirilenko (Russia) and backup swingman Gordan Giricek (Croatia). Even the Jazz's interior stud with the bruising name, power forward Carlos Boozer, is a finesse player, gently laying in righty and lefty soft serves around the basket, though he did too little of that in Game 1 (20 points, but only four in the first half) against a Spurs defense that, as Duncan put it, made Boozer take shots "outside his arsenal."
There have even been tears: Witness Kirilenko's salty breakdown the day after Game 1 of Utah's first-round series against the Rockets over his frustration at playing only 16 minutes in an 84-75 loss. It's pretty clear that Sloan thinks there's no crying in basketball. "I have to try to play somebody who can keep us in the ball game" was his answer to Kirilenko.
But there are signs that the Jazz, while not nearly as good as the '98 Finals team, will not go quietly in this series. Utah put up 38 points in the fourth quarter on Sunday, a jaw-dropping total against a club that allowed the fewest points in the league. Then, too, the Jazz lost the first two games of its series against Houston and came back to win, and it eliminated the Warriors in a Game 6 on the road.
It is a resilient team, rather a poor man's version of the Spurs. Both are coached by veteran defensive specialists who demand precision on offense. (As for significant differences, Popovich is an oenophile and Sloan is a ... tractor-phile?) Both have one strong back-to-the-basket presence (Duncan and Boozer). Both have versatile and unorthodox international players (Ginóbili and Kirilenko). Both have giant-sized perimeter shooters (6'10" Horry and 6'11" Okur). Both have combative, linebacker-type swingmen (Bowen and Harpring). And though both teams are often classified as plodders, they can play at an up-tempo pace, with the caveat that they can't screw up -- if they do, both Popovich and Sloan will demand that the brakes be applied.
But the Jazz don't have a Big Three as good as San Antonio's or a Big One as good as Duncan, who had 27 points on only 15 shots on Sunday. Third-year center Rafael Araújo did a respectable job of defending against Duncan in his nine minutes of action but afterward sounded as though he wanted Duncan to sign his yearbook. "To face Tim Duncan is a great experience," said Araújo, who is from Brazil. "He is a great player and a great role model who I actually watched when I was in college."
If Utah is to pull an upset, it will need continued confident point-guard play from Williams, better perimeter shooting from Okur (who made only three of his 15 shots on Sunday), a smorgasbord of defensive approaches on role-model Duncan, an all-out assault on the glass (the Jazz did out-rebound San Antonio 48-33 in Game 1), and the belief that it is a team of destiny capable of repeating its triumphs of the early rounds. After all, as Kirilenko described Utah's early-round successes: "It wasn't like a plate of cheese -- nobody gave it to us." A strange metaphor that conjures up mice and big cats lying in wait. After Game 1, it's clear which is which.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/jack_mccallum/05/22/westconf0528/index.html
How The West Will Be Won
Even with a latter-day Stockton and Malone and the same coach who guided the originals, the Cinderella Jazz will be hard-pressed to stop a Spurs team gunning for its fourth title since 1999
Posted: Tuesday May 22, 2007 10:19AM; Updated: Tuesday May 22, 2007 10:25AM
No, the Utah Jazz has not disbanded since John Stockton and Karl Malone took their short shorts and their pick-and-roll precision into retirement. Quite the contrary. The Jazz has reached the Western Conference finals, its furthest incursion into the postseason since 1998, when S&M lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the Finals.
Utah is still coached by that ultimate NBA old-schooler, Jerry Sloan, who collects tractors ("I haven't really counted, but around 65 sounds right," he says) and is still eminently capable of peppering his team with f bombs, as he did at halftime of Sunday's Game 1, which ended in a 108-100 loss to the San Antonio Spurs. It has a couple of lunch-pail veterans in the Sloan-Stockton-Malone tradition: Guard Derek Fisher, the owner of three championship rings from his days with the Los Angeles Lakers, and forward Matt Harpring, the owner of countless battle scars from a combative career with four teams. And it once again has a hard-nosed, steely-eyed quarterback in Deron Williams, a kind of 21st-century Stockton -- only with lots of skin ink.
Williams scored 34 points and had only one turnover in Game 1 against a defense that had frustrated Phoenix Suns All-Star point guard Steve Nash in the previous series.
The immediate problem for the Jazz, however, is that the Spurs are a version of their old selves, too, and that version won a championship just two years ago, and two years before that, and four years before that. Having emerged from a classic six-gamer against Phoenix, San Antonio has clearly become the favorite (if it wasn't already) in a final four long on pedigree -- the West's Spurs and the East's Detroit Pistons each have three championships -- but short on star power. In recent weeks Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash have been shown the postseason door. Sure, Cleveland's LeBron James lives on in the East, but in the West we will discover if the viewing public can invest in a duel between the relentlessly efficient Spurs ("a slow, positional team," as Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko says) and the Cinderellas from Utah, who were supposed to be eliminated by now, first by the Houston Rockets and then by the Golden State Warriors.
Plus, it's hard not to pine for more of San Antonio-Phoenix, one of the best playoff series in recent memory, one that featured, besides lots of great basketball, a Kafkaesque decision by the NBA that both mistreated the Suns and tainted the Spurs' victory.
Phoenix had wrapped up a Game 4 win and a 2-2 series tie in San Antonio when Spurs forward Robert Horry hip-checked Nash into the scorer's table with 18 seconds left in the game. Two of Nash's teammates, center Amaré Stoudemire and forward Boris Diaw, rose from the bench in protest, an eminently human reaction considering that their leader had been treated like a piñata (bloodied nose in Game 1, knee to the crotch by Bruce Bowen in Game 2) to that point. Stoudemire advanced about 20 feet toward the action before being restrained, Diaw maybe 15 feet before turning around himself. An NBA rule against "leaving the vicinity of the bench area" during an altercation resulted in both players being suspended for Game 5. So the net result of a flagrant act by one team (Horry was suspended for two games) was that the other team paid the price.
Stu Jackson, the NBA's rules czar, was asked if that was fair. "It's not about fairness," answered Jackson, "it's about correctness." The absurdity of that statement boggles the mind, as does commissioner David Stern's churlish defense of the decision on a national radio show. "To listen to the palaver that Robert Horry changed the series is just silly," Stern told ESPN's Dan Patrick. Well, a lot of Spurs fans who don't know what palaver means were among those giving Horry a 30-second standing ovation when he checked into Game 1 on Sunday, his first appearance since the hip check; apparently, they thought he changed the series.
Anyway, without their top scorer (Stoudemire, a first-team All-NBA pick) and their No. 2 playmaker (Diaw), behind Nash, the Suns dropped Game 5 at home, 88-85, and went into San Antonio for Game 6 at a severe psychological disadvantage. Phoenix eventually succumbed 114-106, leaving the Suns with a 6-15 record against the Spurs since Nash arrived three years ago, not to mention an off-season full of question marks.
While Phoenix's Big Three can be defined by flaws (Nash gets worn down, forward Shawn Marion is inconsistent, Stoudemire is a sieve on defense), San Antonio's Big Three is defined by a seeming imperviousness to pressure. Forward Tim Duncan averaged 26.8 points and 13.7 rebounds in the series and played remarkable help defense, point guard Tony Parker consistently drilled open jumpers when the Suns doubled down on Duncan, and shooting guard Manu Ginóbili scored 26 and 33 points in the final two games.
"Nothing any of them did surprised us," said Phoenix coach Mike D'Antoni, "but when all three are doing the right things at the same time, you're in big trouble."
The Jazz found that out in Game 1 when the Spurs' Big Three made 26 of 44 shots and combined for 71 points. Duncan, in particular, has been so routinely excellent in the postseason that were awards voting taking place now, he most likely would win both MVP (he finished fourth) and Defensive Player of the Year (he finished second).
One thing to keep an eye on as the series with Utah progresses (Game 2 was scheduled for Tuesday in San Antonio) is Duncan's mastery of a rather obscure statistical category -- ratio of blocked shots to personal fouls, the big man's equivalent of the assists-to-turnovers ratio used to evaluate point guards. Duncan had five fouls and only two blocks against the Jazz on Sunday, but in the Phoenix series he finished with 25 blocks and only 21 personal fouls, an astounding plus-minus. In the decisive Game 6 win he blocked nine shots and committed only three fouls. The Suns are not shy about complaining to the refs, but even they conceded that Duncan has the ability to block or alter shots while keeping his body and hands off his man. "Tim has a great knowledge of spatial relationships" is the way Spurs coach Gregg Popovich explains it.
Duncan is true to his team's philosophy of staying away from fouling. "There's a simple way we get the point across," says assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo. "We yell and scream like hell when somebody does foul."
Ask Duncan about "spatial relationships" and you'll get that blank stare that he offers in response to most basketball-related questions. About the only time Duncan will elaborate on anything is on the "Ask Tim" segment that runs on a San Antonio television station from time to time. Host Don Harris takes e-mail questions from viewers as long as they have nothing to do with basketball. Duncan has discussed the Chicago Bears (his favorite NFL team), poker (his favorite card game), the Iceman (his favorite Ultimate Fighter), the '68 Camaro (his favorite restored car) and his preference for big-block Chevys over small-block Chevys. "Small blocks are probably better," said Duncan, "but I'm a big-block guy." He wasn't talking about defense.
That last subject might pique the interest of Sloan, who can't seem to stop buying tractors, new and ancient. He stores them on his farm in McLeansboro, Ill. "I just piddle around with 'em whenever I can," says Sloan, who can usually be found wearing a John Deere cap away from the court. "I should take better care of them, but I know they're there."
The old master, who has coached Utah since 1988 and is the longest tenured coach in NBA history, has by and large taken good care of this team, though it hasn't always been easy getting the Jazz to follow his lead. After Game 1 he talked bluntly about his players' not accepting responsibility for mistakes and playing scared, subjects he had addressed even more directly behind closed doors at halftime, which ended with Utah trailing 54-36. "If you are intimidated and don't want to go out there and compete," Sloan told his players, "then stay in the locker room."
Fisher, Harpring and Williams notwithstanding, there is a softer, international sensibility to this team, owing to starters Mehmet Okur (Turkey) and Kirilenko (Russia) and backup swingman Gordan Giricek (Croatia). Even the Jazz's interior stud with the bruising name, power forward Carlos Boozer, is a finesse player, gently laying in righty and lefty soft serves around the basket, though he did too little of that in Game 1 (20 points, but only four in the first half) against a Spurs defense that, as Duncan put it, made Boozer take shots "outside his arsenal."
There have even been tears: Witness Kirilenko's salty breakdown the day after Game 1 of Utah's first-round series against the Rockets over his frustration at playing only 16 minutes in an 84-75 loss. It's pretty clear that Sloan thinks there's no crying in basketball. "I have to try to play somebody who can keep us in the ball game" was his answer to Kirilenko.
But there are signs that the Jazz, while not nearly as good as the '98 Finals team, will not go quietly in this series. Utah put up 38 points in the fourth quarter on Sunday, a jaw-dropping total against a club that allowed the fewest points in the league. Then, too, the Jazz lost the first two games of its series against Houston and came back to win, and it eliminated the Warriors in a Game 6 on the road.
It is a resilient team, rather a poor man's version of the Spurs. Both are coached by veteran defensive specialists who demand precision on offense. (As for significant differences, Popovich is an oenophile and Sloan is a ... tractor-phile?) Both have one strong back-to-the-basket presence (Duncan and Boozer). Both have versatile and unorthodox international players (Ginóbili and Kirilenko). Both have giant-sized perimeter shooters (6'10" Horry and 6'11" Okur). Both have combative, linebacker-type swingmen (Bowen and Harpring). And though both teams are often classified as plodders, they can play at an up-tempo pace, with the caveat that they can't screw up -- if they do, both Popovich and Sloan will demand that the brakes be applied.
But the Jazz don't have a Big Three as good as San Antonio's or a Big One as good as Duncan, who had 27 points on only 15 shots on Sunday. Third-year center Rafael Araújo did a respectable job of defending against Duncan in his nine minutes of action but afterward sounded as though he wanted Duncan to sign his yearbook. "To face Tim Duncan is a great experience," said Araújo, who is from Brazil. "He is a great player and a great role model who I actually watched when I was in college."
If Utah is to pull an upset, it will need continued confident point-guard play from Williams, better perimeter shooting from Okur (who made only three of his 15 shots on Sunday), a smorgasbord of defensive approaches on role-model Duncan, an all-out assault on the glass (the Jazz did out-rebound San Antonio 48-33 in Game 1), and the belief that it is a team of destiny capable of repeating its triumphs of the early rounds. After all, as Kirilenko described Utah's early-round successes: "It wasn't like a plate of cheese -- nobody gave it to us." A strange metaphor that conjures up mice and big cats lying in wait. After Game 1, it's clear which is which.