Magic moment ends with miss
By Johnny Ludden
LOS ANGELES – The pass left Hedo Turkoglu’s hands, and all Courtney Lee wanted was for the ball to hurry up and get to him. The clock was frozen at .6 seconds, and everything around Lee seemed to have also stopped in place. His Orlando Magic teammates. Kobe Bryant, whom he had just darted past, and the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers. The nearly 19,000 fans standing on their feet.
It was just Lee, the ball and the basket. The second game of the NBA Finals had come down to a rookie trying to catch his moment in time.
“I just had to finish,” Lee would later say.
He didn’t, and that’s the curse that has hung over these Magic for nearly a decade and a half. Fourteen years to the day after Nick Anderson hiccupped away Orlando’s championship hopes at the free-throw line, Lee was in perfect position to give the franchise its first Finals victory.
Like Anderson, he missed.
The pass reached Lee’s hands. Fate slipped through them. He caught Turkoglu’s lob, released a short bank shot in the same motion, then watched as the ball caromed off the backboard and glanced off the front of the rim. The buzzer sounded, and Lee put his hands on his head in disbelief.
The Magic still had overtime to right themselves, but their opportunity was gone. The Lakers quickly pushed past the Magic for a 101-96 victory that gave them a 2-0 lead in the series.
“By the time I caught it, and tried to make a play,” Lee said, “it was over.”
The Magic’s chances at winning these Finals might be done, too. They jetted home with the comfort of knowing the next three games will be played in Orlando, but history offers no comfort: Of the past 12 teams to lose Games 1 and 2 of the Finals on the road, only one has rallied to win the series.
The Magic have proven their resilience time and again during these playoffs. They trailed against the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round. They trailed the Boston Celtics in the second. They weathered LeBron James’ miracle shot in the East finals.
But down 2-0, against these Lakers? That might be asking too much, especially when the Magic also know they wasted a terrific chance to even the series.
“There was almost a moment of celebration,” Magic guard J.J. Re said.
Almost. After Turkoglu blocked Bryant’s shot with .6 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the Magic used a timeout to draw up their chance to win. Turkoglu initially tried to get a lob to Dwight Howard, but burned another timeout when the Magic center couldn’t free himself from Pau Gasol. Coach Stan Van Gundy changed the play during the huddle: Rashard Lewis, who had carried the Magic most of the night, would set a screen while Lee tried to separate from Bryant and bolt down the lane toward the basket.
The Magic had worked on the play a couple times in practice, but never used it in a game with Lee as the lob option. It was up to Turkoglu to read the defense, and he gave Lee two words of instruction: Be ready.
“If you can do it on your own guys in practice, you should be able to do it on different teams that have never seen it before,” Lee said.
Kobe later called the play “brilliant,” and that was because it worked perfectly. Lee got free of him, and, suddenly, was at the rim alone.
“It was kind of surreal for a second,” Re said, “because I couldn’t believe how open he was.”
Kobe thought the same. Asked what was going through his mind after he saw Lee head toward the rim, his answer wasn’t fit for FCC standards: “[Bleep]!”
Even Lee likely wondered: I can’t be this open.
“I got a good look at the backboard, tried to get it up there as quick as possible,” he said. “The ball rolled off the rim.”
Some Magic officials complained that Gasol’s hand might have touched the rim for a possible goal-tending violation. All Lee knows is he missed – again. He earlier rimmed out a floater that also would have given the Magic the lead with 33.5 seconds left.
“Both were just about equally good looks,” he said.
Lee played just 12 minutes, and was likely in the game late only because Mickael Pietrus fouled out. A rookie from Western Kentucky, he had become a productive member of the Magic’s starting lineup then missed three games earlier in the playoffs after Howard fractured his sinus with an errant elbow. He’s worn a mask since, and his primary duty in these Finals has been to help guard Bryant.
Lee spent much of the night on the bench as Van Gundy searched for someone, anyone, who could make a shot. Van Gundy even went without a point guard down the stretch, sitting both Rafer Alston and Jameer Nelson. Re , who totaled just 10 minutes in the East finals, played 27 on Sunday, making only two of his nine shots. All game, Van Gundy juggled his lineup, hoping to find a winning combination.
“What do they say, ‘Just keep throwing stuff at the wall, and hope something sticks?’ ” he joked.
The Magic didn’t lose because of Lee’s miss. Twenty turnovers did them in, along with the poor shooting of nearly everyone but Lewis and Turkoglu. But Lee did have the best chance to give them a win.
Afterward, he stood in front of his locker and politely answered question after question, replaying the shot in his head time and again. In the end, he could say only one thing: He missed.
Fourteen years earlier, Nick Anderson did the same. With the Magic leading the Houston Rockets late in Game 1 of the 1995 Finals, Anderson missed four consecutive free throws. The Rockets went on to win in overtime then swept the Magic. A year later, Shaquille O’Neal left Orlando for the Lakers. Among some fans, Anderson was forever known as “Nick the Brick.”
Lee was 9 years old at the time, but he knows the history. All the Magic do. They also know the lesson. Opportunities like this don’t come along often. Miss one, and who knows when you’ll get another?
Reminds me of a comment from a long ago pickup game in which one of my teammates said, after I blew a layup that resulted in the other team winning the game:
"If there was a ballplayer on the end of that pass, we would've won the game."
Weird, must have been 20+ years ago, and this article triggered that memory. Lee's never going to forget his mistake.
How is this Lee's fault. He was behind the freaking backboard when he caught the pass, it was a miracle he got something up.
You can't pin the entire loss on a 0.6 second prayer.
on the anniversary of nick anderson. looks like some things never change
Crazy attempt with Pau making the degree of difficulty....well....that much more difficult. Patrick Ewing's finger-roll hitting the backiron for a amssive brick heard round the tri-state against the Pacers was something hard to live down. Lee's layup was a prayer IMO, regardless of the distance.
pretty much choked but what do you expect from a rookie
Gasol defended the lob pretty well on the backend and Lee had to throw the shot up on an awkward angle by the time he caught it.
Brick by brick, Anderson’s misses tore down Magic
By Fran Blinebury
It was so close, they could see it, touch it, smell it, taste it. It was so real, they could hold it in the palms of their hands.
It hurt so much, they can close their eyes and still remember the searing pain as it ripped through their insides like a hot knife in the gut, and it still leaves some of them doubled over today.
Not Courtney Lee’s missed backdoor lob in the final moments of regulation in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, but the ancestral heartbreak that had preceded it by exactly 14 years.
One night, one game, one simple shot that changed a franchise and maybe the face of professional basketball in the 1990s and beyond.
Four times, Nick Anderson stood at the free-throw line in the last 10.5 seconds of Game 1 of the 1995 NBA Finals with a chance to clinch a win for the Orlando Magic over the Houston Rockets.
Four times, he missed.
Down through the years, the world of basketball has been populated by so many players with rhyming nicknames, colorful handles that have rolled off the tongue and described the individual with the same ease. Wilt the Stilt, Earl the Pearl, Chet the Jet, Hakeem the Dream, Clyde the Glide.
Nick the Brick.
“What can you do?” he asked in a conversation with Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel just last week. “I can’t change what people think or how they feel. I’m always going to be associated with those four free throws.”
While the lob pass from Hedo Turkoglu left the Staples Center crowd and a national TV audience swallowing its collective tongues for how wide open he was, Lee’s shot – leaning, spinning off the glass as he sailed beyond the backboard – there was a degree of difficulty involved.
All Anderson had to do was sling the ball through the hoop from 15 feet away, unimpeded, and you’d have thought they were asking him to drive a tractor through the eye of a needle.
Clink! Clank! Clunk! Crash!
The sound of somebody tripping inside the factory where they manufacture stainless steel pots.
If Anderson makes just one of those shots, how much of the ensuing history of the NBA changes?
For starters, Kenny Smith’s double-pumping, off-balance, ducking-under-the-arm-of-the-defense 3-point rainbow does not cap off a 20-point comeback and pull the Rockets into a heart-stopping tie at the end of regulation. If Anderson rattles in just one of those shots, Hakeem Olajuwon’s buzzer-beating tap-in at the end of overtime does not allow the Rockets to dance off the floor in Orlando with another improbable victory on the road to their second straight NBA championship.
Though it rarely makes the lists of infamy, it can be argued that Nick the Brick’s four pas was the biggest choke job in sports history, a hairball large enough to gag a Bengal tiger.
The ball that went through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series was moving off the bat of Mookie Wilson and may have hit a patch of bad grass on the Shea Stadium infield. When Scott Norwood pushed his field goal wide right in Super Bowl XXV, there were huge, angry New York Giants charging in his direction.
Nick the Brick tossed up four cinder blocks without a defender’s hand in his face. On his home court, before a supportive crowd.
“I still think about that game from time to time,” Magic power forward Horace Grant admitted 1½ years after the fact.
How could they not?
Going into the opener, the Orlando-Houston series was considered a toss-up by most observers long before the Rockets won in a sweep. But instead of a young Magic bunch taking a 1-0 lead on the defending champs and gaining confidence on their home floor, the challengers were never the same in the series.
What should have been – probably would have been – a long, hard-fought war, turned into the closest thing to surrender. Anderson’s confidence was shattered. The Magic vanished. The young team that had swaggered through the playoffs barely put up a fight the rest of the way.
“That game took something out of us,” Grant said. “We never got it back.”
Four shots that changed a series. Four bricks that turned the Orlando franchise on its head and maybe shifted the balance of power in the NBA.
If the Magic had won that series and the 1995 championship, would Shaquille O’Neal have fled Orlando for the free-agent dollars and the Lakers’ Hollywood lure barely a year later?
With a championship under their belts, is it as likely the rift between O’Neal and coach Brian Hill would have grown so wide just one year later when the Magic were swept in the Eastern Conference finals by Chicago? Before Penny Hardaway’s body began to break down, wouldn’t Shaq, with a ring already on his finger, have been inclined to stay?
If Shaq doesn’t bolt so quickly to the West Coast, that means he’s not on hand for the arrival that same season of the 18-year-old Kobe Bryant, and the world misses out on their Hollywood histrionics that produced three championships and many soap opera twists in their relationship. If he doesn’t flee and the Magic aren’t still searching for their first NBA Finals win, is Shaq spending his time nowadays jealously tweeting off insults toward Dwight Howard and Stan Van Gundy?
Anderson, who now works in the team’s community relations department, had been the Orlando expansion franchise’s first draft pick in 1989. He played for the Magic four more seasons, but was never whole again after that night.
“It affected the way I played,” he said. “It affected the way I lived. It played in my head like a recorder – over and over again.”
Courtney Lee surely knows the feeling to have his own personal DVR replaying inside his head. He’s been living with an agony for 24 hours that Anderson has carried for 14 years.
Just 15 feet away. Four free throws. Make one and it’s a whole different series. Maybe a whole different outcome. Maybe an entirely different NBA in the first decade of the 21st century.
“It’s there in the past, and you try not to dwell on it,” Grant said. “But in my mind, I can still see that night.”
And Nick Anderson standing at the line. How quickly things change.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote