tlongII
04-29-2008, 12:09 PM
This is from the Sports Illustrated Vault website. Great website!
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1093313/index.htm
February 13, 1978
Going Like Blazers
Portland is not just running away from everybody in the NBA, it's mounting an assault on the record books as well
Curry Kirkpatrick
The theory is rapidly being advanced that nobody, not even Clint Eastwood, is going to make it through Multnomah County as long as the Portland Trail Blazers—otherwise known as The Gauntlet—stay alive and healthy and remember to keep their eyes averted from Coach Jack Ramsay's blinding array of multicolored pants. As Bill Walton fires his heavy ammo from the rooftops, as Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins heave their deadly mortars front and rear, as several other vaguely familiar and unfamiliar Blazers sneak-attack from all sides, how can ordinary basketball teams avoid being massacred when Ramsay breaks out yet another pair of those remarkable trousers. They can't. They just lose quietly and go away.
There is no real evidence that Ramsay's pants ("Pants?" says Guard Dave Twardzik. "I thought his legs were tattooed") have been responsible for a single Trail Blazer victory. But it was the same old show again last week in Portland's sold-out-forever Memorial Coliseum as well as across the river in the downtown Paramount, where the Blazer games are transmitted on closed circuit for an audience of thoroughly raving Blazermaniacs. The home team won two more games and sent historians scurrying out into the rain to speculate on just how long sport's newest wonder team can go on like this.
It is not merely that Portland is in the throes of Blazermania, Part II—7-month-old babies attend team practices; a truck driver named D. D. Albritton records a country-and-Western masterpiece entitled Blazer Mania. Nor is it just that the team is defending its NBA championship with a zeal seldom seen outside a college campus. It is the fairly outrageous numbers the champions have been compiling that have people leafing through the pages of the record books.
Before the All-Star Game, Portland won its last five games by margins of 23, 35, 35, 20 and 20 points. Last Friday night, after the Blazers had crushed Golden State 112-92, Rick Barry was approached warily by an interviewer. Barry had scored three baskets in the game, which was an improvement over the last time he played against Portland, when he scored, uh, one. Barry was asked were the Blazers good, better, or best?
"This team deserves any comparison anybody wants to make," Barry said. "The old Celtics, the Knicks, Philly with Wilt, L.A. with Wilt, anybody. It's a clinic whenever you play them. They get the ball out and ram it down your throat. Walton is a great center who does everything, and all the rest complement each other. The Blazers may be the most ideal team ever put together."
A few nights earlier, Milwaukee Coach Don Nelson had been equally adulatory. His talented young Bucks had exploded for 39 points in the first quarter, had shot 60% in the first half—and were trailing Portland 71-69. After the Blazers pulled ahead to win another laugher, 136-116, Nelson, who played on five championship Celtic teams, spoke of "situation basketball. Portland reacts to situations," he said. "Ninety percent of what they do is automatic, everyone picks it up. The Celtics had role-playing, defensive and offensive specialists. Here the attack is more general. Everybody on the Blazers can beat you at either end. They are a team for all time."
For all time. Ah, again some numbers. At the All-Star break, Walton and his merry men had won 40 games and lost eight. They were undefeated at home, with 26 straight victories this year and 44 over two seasons, including playoff games. They were unbeaten in their division—the Pacific, arguably the NBA's strongest—with nine straight. They led the league in defense (100.4 points per game allowed), not to mention in scoring margin (10.1) by nearly five points a game. Moreover, the Trail Blazers had already won as many games on the road as they had all of last year, and their road victory percentage of .636 (14-8) was higher than all but three NBA teams' overall percentage. Projected over a full season (see chart), what Portland could do would place the team among the NBA's finest ever.
The team itself will not be the last to admit this. "Lack of confidence has never been one of my problems," says Walton, the ringleader. "Maybe I'm just surprised we haven't won more." And as Larry Steele, the oldest Blazer in point of service—seven seasons—points out, "Teams are always aiming for periods of consistency—20 minutes of great ball, 25 minutes. Well, we're coming closer and closer to the perfect 48 minutes."
Last season, Ramsay could pinpoint the exact moment his club meshed, then erupted for all the world to see how good it was—a 146-104 November rout of the 76ers. The improvement this year has been more gradual. The signs could be seen last spring when the Blazers embarrassed Philadelphia by winning the last four games of the NBA finals.
"Now we are more poised," Ramsay said last week as he drove through the Oregon downpour, wearing a blue jacket, blue shoes, blue socks—and brown plaid pants. "We concentrate better. We have fewer dry spells on offense, fewer lapses on defense." Then the coach himself lapsed, taking leave of basic coaching rhetoric. "Our half-court offense is better than any of those Celtic teams'," Ramsay said. "We are really awesome."
Early on, it was refreshingly obvious that the Blazers had not become fat, happy, complacent or checkbook-conscious. Walton set the tone in training camp, arriving stronger and quicker, swigging huge gulps of hearts-of-artichoke juice or something and knocking off the required 300 jump ropes so fast a teammate said, "You couldn't even see the rope."
What is easier to see is the steady progression of Hollins toward becoming one of the three or four best all-round back-court men in the pros. Hollins' quick, ball-stealing defense always was of top quality, but now the Train has also learned to use his speed in moderation on the attack. Hollins' shooting is more consistent—42 of 64 in Portland's five-game winning streak—and his floor mistakes less blatant. "I thought I was playing well early," he says, "but in the last 20 games, I've been playing great. Everybody is just very confident. We want it all again."
Lucas, the Blazers' other star, vows, "We're staying hungry. All of us know what it's like to get blowed out. We want to keep doin' the blowin'."
At the risk of drawing Lucas' All-Pro glare, let it be noted that his assessment is not entirely correct. The Portland brass has assembled this remarkable team according to a theory based on winning as an inherited trait; all the Blazers have been big winners before. Only one member of the 11-man roster—Bob Gross—did not come from an NCAA tournament team, and that was because Gross' college, Long Beach State, was on probation. During his two years, Long Beach's record was 43-9.
The team's small forward, Gross is that prime example of an excellent player toiling for a more than excellent team. Simply, he "fills a role." While the Waltons, Lucases and Hollinses dominate the statistics and make the All-Star teams, Gross spends much of the time, as he says, "doing what's left over." This includes leading the team in offensive rebounds and, last week, turning in what amounted to a perfect game against Milwaukee—19 points, six assists, five steals.
Like Gross, the curly-haired Twardzik—"our Polish immigrant child," Assistant Coach Jack McKinney calls him—constantly is maligned as a journeyman living off his more gifted teammates. This is hardly fair to the man his teammates have named "Fudd" (something about a resemblance to Bugs Bunny's not-too-speedy old foe). As he was last season, Twardzik is the league's best in shooting percentage (.664) with a repertoire consisting exclusively of a twisting corkscrew layup from three inches and a unique item he calls the "springer." The springer is a jump shot in disguise because Twardzik plainly cannot jump.
"Who would Dave Twardzik be without the Trail Blazers?" asks Portland GM Stu Inman. "Who would K. C. Jones have been without the Celtics?"
If Fudd is K. C. Jones, then Portland's Lloyd Neal is the famous Celtic sixth man. Or Tom Owens is. Or Guard Johnny Davis. Or Steele. So deep and talented is the Trail Blazer bench that opponents have a hard time figuring out which poison to accept.
Lucas, the premier power forward in basketball, has missed six games, but the Trail Blazers have won them all. Walton has missed two others—one when he flew home to be with Susie Guth and their newborn son, Nathan—and the team won both of those as well. Five different Blazers have led Portland in rebounding in one game or another. Seven different men have led in assists. Nine separate players have led in scoring. The Portland bench averages more than 41 points a game.
"Being a sub doesn't bother me," says the 6'7" Neal. "Basically, you got to be a contributor. When you get in the game, the secret is to play so you don't apprehend the flow." What?
Heretofore, Neal's major notoriety had come from his altercations with Laker fan Jack Nicholson in the Los Angeles Forum ("Sit down, fool!" Neal yelled at the actor, who was blocking his view from the bench), but this season Neal's rescue missions are of spine-tingling stuff.
In the four games in which he has played more than 30 minutes, Neal has scored 31, 33, 21 and 10 points, the last coming in a victory at Boston he clinched with three overtime baskets. Last Friday Neal was in street clothes resting his sore knees when Lucas was thrown out of the game for flunking a vocabulary test with the referees. But wait! Neal into the dressing room. Neal into the game. Neal 13 points in 16 minutes.
Owens, too, has provided R and R for the front line both at forward and center. A skinny and much-traveled ABA veteran who once was labeled "the advance man for a famine," Owens has found a home in Portland, where he has used his intelligence as well as his passing and scoring ability (13 games in double figures) to blend into the Blazer system. "Playing 12 minutes here is like playing 20 anywhere else, the center participates so much," Owens says.
As any of the local woodchoppers would tell you, however, there is another center who must participate for the Blazers to continue devastating the NBA. Though he does not lead the league in rebounding or blocked shots, as he has before, Bill Walton is playing a more complete defensive game. With the metal pin having been removed from his left wrist, Walton is also varying his offensive game to a great extent, setting up on the right side, hooking both ways. "The difference is I have two hands now instead of one," he says. "Two hands for shooting, passing, carrying the groceries, everything."
Also for shielding his privacy from the dastardly designs of the horrible, prying media. The other day at the airport Walton put both hands over the lens of a TV camera when a national network tried to take a picture of older son Adam, who was there to meet the Blazers' plane.
Be that as it may, Walton seems more relaxed and comfortable with the opposition, which is to say anyone unacquainted with the Grateful Dead. Last week, between favoring a banquet audience with some self-mockery, smashing a journalist in the face with a marsh-mallow pie on McKinney's closed-circuit pregame show and admitting he was "happy and excited" to be going to the All-Star Game, Walton gave the impression that he has finally accepted more responsibility in the public sector.
Walton always has maintained a joyful spontaneity with coaches and teammates. No longer "the Chief," a moniker that seemed to hold contrary meanings he didn't appreciate, Walton has been renamed "Beaver" (by Twardzik)—not in tribute to his teeth but after his middle name, Theodore, which was Beaver Cleaver's real name on Leave ft to Beaver.
In practice last week Beaver and Fudd and the rest of the once and future champions interrupted their march toward immortality long enough to ridicule anew the vivid ensembles of "our bald-headed emperor," to play soccer against the scorer's table and to balance as many balls as they could on the basket rim. The Blazers piled 10 up there before all the balls came tumbling down.
"What is the purpose of this?" said Ramsay, who had wandered over to investigate the uproar.
"Guinness. Guinness," called out Walton, referring to the book of world records. Which was only fitting.
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1093313/index.htm
February 13, 1978
Going Like Blazers
Portland is not just running away from everybody in the NBA, it's mounting an assault on the record books as well
Curry Kirkpatrick
The theory is rapidly being advanced that nobody, not even Clint Eastwood, is going to make it through Multnomah County as long as the Portland Trail Blazers—otherwise known as The Gauntlet—stay alive and healthy and remember to keep their eyes averted from Coach Jack Ramsay's blinding array of multicolored pants. As Bill Walton fires his heavy ammo from the rooftops, as Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins heave their deadly mortars front and rear, as several other vaguely familiar and unfamiliar Blazers sneak-attack from all sides, how can ordinary basketball teams avoid being massacred when Ramsay breaks out yet another pair of those remarkable trousers. They can't. They just lose quietly and go away.
There is no real evidence that Ramsay's pants ("Pants?" says Guard Dave Twardzik. "I thought his legs were tattooed") have been responsible for a single Trail Blazer victory. But it was the same old show again last week in Portland's sold-out-forever Memorial Coliseum as well as across the river in the downtown Paramount, where the Blazer games are transmitted on closed circuit for an audience of thoroughly raving Blazermaniacs. The home team won two more games and sent historians scurrying out into the rain to speculate on just how long sport's newest wonder team can go on like this.
It is not merely that Portland is in the throes of Blazermania, Part II—7-month-old babies attend team practices; a truck driver named D. D. Albritton records a country-and-Western masterpiece entitled Blazer Mania. Nor is it just that the team is defending its NBA championship with a zeal seldom seen outside a college campus. It is the fairly outrageous numbers the champions have been compiling that have people leafing through the pages of the record books.
Before the All-Star Game, Portland won its last five games by margins of 23, 35, 35, 20 and 20 points. Last Friday night, after the Blazers had crushed Golden State 112-92, Rick Barry was approached warily by an interviewer. Barry had scored three baskets in the game, which was an improvement over the last time he played against Portland, when he scored, uh, one. Barry was asked were the Blazers good, better, or best?
"This team deserves any comparison anybody wants to make," Barry said. "The old Celtics, the Knicks, Philly with Wilt, L.A. with Wilt, anybody. It's a clinic whenever you play them. They get the ball out and ram it down your throat. Walton is a great center who does everything, and all the rest complement each other. The Blazers may be the most ideal team ever put together."
A few nights earlier, Milwaukee Coach Don Nelson had been equally adulatory. His talented young Bucks had exploded for 39 points in the first quarter, had shot 60% in the first half—and were trailing Portland 71-69. After the Blazers pulled ahead to win another laugher, 136-116, Nelson, who played on five championship Celtic teams, spoke of "situation basketball. Portland reacts to situations," he said. "Ninety percent of what they do is automatic, everyone picks it up. The Celtics had role-playing, defensive and offensive specialists. Here the attack is more general. Everybody on the Blazers can beat you at either end. They are a team for all time."
For all time. Ah, again some numbers. At the All-Star break, Walton and his merry men had won 40 games and lost eight. They were undefeated at home, with 26 straight victories this year and 44 over two seasons, including playoff games. They were unbeaten in their division—the Pacific, arguably the NBA's strongest—with nine straight. They led the league in defense (100.4 points per game allowed), not to mention in scoring margin (10.1) by nearly five points a game. Moreover, the Trail Blazers had already won as many games on the road as they had all of last year, and their road victory percentage of .636 (14-8) was higher than all but three NBA teams' overall percentage. Projected over a full season (see chart), what Portland could do would place the team among the NBA's finest ever.
The team itself will not be the last to admit this. "Lack of confidence has never been one of my problems," says Walton, the ringleader. "Maybe I'm just surprised we haven't won more." And as Larry Steele, the oldest Blazer in point of service—seven seasons—points out, "Teams are always aiming for periods of consistency—20 minutes of great ball, 25 minutes. Well, we're coming closer and closer to the perfect 48 minutes."
Last season, Ramsay could pinpoint the exact moment his club meshed, then erupted for all the world to see how good it was—a 146-104 November rout of the 76ers. The improvement this year has been more gradual. The signs could be seen last spring when the Blazers embarrassed Philadelphia by winning the last four games of the NBA finals.
"Now we are more poised," Ramsay said last week as he drove through the Oregon downpour, wearing a blue jacket, blue shoes, blue socks—and brown plaid pants. "We concentrate better. We have fewer dry spells on offense, fewer lapses on defense." Then the coach himself lapsed, taking leave of basic coaching rhetoric. "Our half-court offense is better than any of those Celtic teams'," Ramsay said. "We are really awesome."
Early on, it was refreshingly obvious that the Blazers had not become fat, happy, complacent or checkbook-conscious. Walton set the tone in training camp, arriving stronger and quicker, swigging huge gulps of hearts-of-artichoke juice or something and knocking off the required 300 jump ropes so fast a teammate said, "You couldn't even see the rope."
What is easier to see is the steady progression of Hollins toward becoming one of the three or four best all-round back-court men in the pros. Hollins' quick, ball-stealing defense always was of top quality, but now the Train has also learned to use his speed in moderation on the attack. Hollins' shooting is more consistent—42 of 64 in Portland's five-game winning streak—and his floor mistakes less blatant. "I thought I was playing well early," he says, "but in the last 20 games, I've been playing great. Everybody is just very confident. We want it all again."
Lucas, the Blazers' other star, vows, "We're staying hungry. All of us know what it's like to get blowed out. We want to keep doin' the blowin'."
At the risk of drawing Lucas' All-Pro glare, let it be noted that his assessment is not entirely correct. The Portland brass has assembled this remarkable team according to a theory based on winning as an inherited trait; all the Blazers have been big winners before. Only one member of the 11-man roster—Bob Gross—did not come from an NCAA tournament team, and that was because Gross' college, Long Beach State, was on probation. During his two years, Long Beach's record was 43-9.
The team's small forward, Gross is that prime example of an excellent player toiling for a more than excellent team. Simply, he "fills a role." While the Waltons, Lucases and Hollinses dominate the statistics and make the All-Star teams, Gross spends much of the time, as he says, "doing what's left over." This includes leading the team in offensive rebounds and, last week, turning in what amounted to a perfect game against Milwaukee—19 points, six assists, five steals.
Like Gross, the curly-haired Twardzik—"our Polish immigrant child," Assistant Coach Jack McKinney calls him—constantly is maligned as a journeyman living off his more gifted teammates. This is hardly fair to the man his teammates have named "Fudd" (something about a resemblance to Bugs Bunny's not-too-speedy old foe). As he was last season, Twardzik is the league's best in shooting percentage (.664) with a repertoire consisting exclusively of a twisting corkscrew layup from three inches and a unique item he calls the "springer." The springer is a jump shot in disguise because Twardzik plainly cannot jump.
"Who would Dave Twardzik be without the Trail Blazers?" asks Portland GM Stu Inman. "Who would K. C. Jones have been without the Celtics?"
If Fudd is K. C. Jones, then Portland's Lloyd Neal is the famous Celtic sixth man. Or Tom Owens is. Or Guard Johnny Davis. Or Steele. So deep and talented is the Trail Blazer bench that opponents have a hard time figuring out which poison to accept.
Lucas, the premier power forward in basketball, has missed six games, but the Trail Blazers have won them all. Walton has missed two others—one when he flew home to be with Susie Guth and their newborn son, Nathan—and the team won both of those as well. Five different Blazers have led Portland in rebounding in one game or another. Seven different men have led in assists. Nine separate players have led in scoring. The Portland bench averages more than 41 points a game.
"Being a sub doesn't bother me," says the 6'7" Neal. "Basically, you got to be a contributor. When you get in the game, the secret is to play so you don't apprehend the flow." What?
Heretofore, Neal's major notoriety had come from his altercations with Laker fan Jack Nicholson in the Los Angeles Forum ("Sit down, fool!" Neal yelled at the actor, who was blocking his view from the bench), but this season Neal's rescue missions are of spine-tingling stuff.
In the four games in which he has played more than 30 minutes, Neal has scored 31, 33, 21 and 10 points, the last coming in a victory at Boston he clinched with three overtime baskets. Last Friday Neal was in street clothes resting his sore knees when Lucas was thrown out of the game for flunking a vocabulary test with the referees. But wait! Neal into the dressing room. Neal into the game. Neal 13 points in 16 minutes.
Owens, too, has provided R and R for the front line both at forward and center. A skinny and much-traveled ABA veteran who once was labeled "the advance man for a famine," Owens has found a home in Portland, where he has used his intelligence as well as his passing and scoring ability (13 games in double figures) to blend into the Blazer system. "Playing 12 minutes here is like playing 20 anywhere else, the center participates so much," Owens says.
As any of the local woodchoppers would tell you, however, there is another center who must participate for the Blazers to continue devastating the NBA. Though he does not lead the league in rebounding or blocked shots, as he has before, Bill Walton is playing a more complete defensive game. With the metal pin having been removed from his left wrist, Walton is also varying his offensive game to a great extent, setting up on the right side, hooking both ways. "The difference is I have two hands now instead of one," he says. "Two hands for shooting, passing, carrying the groceries, everything."
Also for shielding his privacy from the dastardly designs of the horrible, prying media. The other day at the airport Walton put both hands over the lens of a TV camera when a national network tried to take a picture of older son Adam, who was there to meet the Blazers' plane.
Be that as it may, Walton seems more relaxed and comfortable with the opposition, which is to say anyone unacquainted with the Grateful Dead. Last week, between favoring a banquet audience with some self-mockery, smashing a journalist in the face with a marsh-mallow pie on McKinney's closed-circuit pregame show and admitting he was "happy and excited" to be going to the All-Star Game, Walton gave the impression that he has finally accepted more responsibility in the public sector.
Walton always has maintained a joyful spontaneity with coaches and teammates. No longer "the Chief," a moniker that seemed to hold contrary meanings he didn't appreciate, Walton has been renamed "Beaver" (by Twardzik)—not in tribute to his teeth but after his middle name, Theodore, which was Beaver Cleaver's real name on Leave ft to Beaver.
In practice last week Beaver and Fudd and the rest of the once and future champions interrupted their march toward immortality long enough to ridicule anew the vivid ensembles of "our bald-headed emperor," to play soccer against the scorer's table and to balance as many balls as they could on the basket rim. The Blazers piled 10 up there before all the balls came tumbling down.
"What is the purpose of this?" said Ramsay, who had wandered over to investigate the uproar.
"Guinness. Guinness," called out Walton, referring to the book of world records. Which was only fitting.