Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  “You’re an asshole,” says Pattiz dismissively.

  “I may be an asshole,” says Sarver, “but you better understand—you’ll have me to deal with.”

  The game is even through most of the first half, which ends in a 41–41 tie. But it’s the kind of even that favors the Lakers—the slow tempo, the shaky shooting, the physical play, and, most of all, the fact that Bryant missed eleven minutes of action after getting his third foul. That was the time to capitalize, and the Suns couldn’t do it, having been outscored 16–15. It was like getting beat by just the Pips at a talent show.

  But the Suns finally wake up in the second half, Marion in particular. They battle for loose balls, turn Parker and Luke Walton into nonfactors, and no longer seem intimidated by Kwame Brown. Nash goes out for his prescribed rest late in the third period, but his problematic back tightens up and he sits out the first couple minutes of the fourth quarter. Still, the Suns stay in control. A trio of dagger three-point shots by Devean George, a perennial Laker underachiever; some emotional play by Sasha Vujacic, who looks like he’s going to burst into tears at every call that goes against him (“You suck,” Bell calmly informed Vujacic during Game 2); and the overall brilliance of Bryant keep the Lakers close. But with 5:41 left, Bryant forces a shot between two defenders, and, in the ensuing time-out, Lamar Odom remains on the court, pouting, staring at Kobe. The Suns lead 81–73. This is the Iavaroni model: Kobe is trying to take over the game and his supporting cast is angry at him. The Good Ship Laker has been turned into Family Feud.

  But then two straight atrocious calls go against the Suns. Marion cleanly blocks a Bryant shot, but referee Sean Corbin calls a foul. On the previous play, Bryant had “mother-fucked” Corbin, complaining about a noncall—the F-word in some form will usually get you a technical—and the Suns view this as a makeup. On the Lakers’ next possession, Odom, in a post-up position, gets the ball and simply barrels over Marion, makes the basket, and, incredibly, gets a foul call, too. He completes the three-point play and, worse, the foul is Marion’s sixth, sending him to the bench. He had been the one who had held the Suns together in the second half with fourteen points and seven rebounds.

  The one-two punch puts the Lakers back in the game, but, still, the Suns show fortitude and reseize control. With twelve seconds left they lead 90–85. John Black, the Lakers’ director of public relations, asks me if I’ll be back in L.A. for Game 6; this one is essentially over. I leave my press seat and squeeze in between Dan D’Antoni and Todd Quinter on the Suns’ bench. Walking in with the team is the only way I can get access to the locker room before the rest of the press corps.

  “This is okay, right?” I ask them.

  They look at me nervously but don’t say anything.

  At that moment, the Lakers inbound the ball, and Smush Parker, the third option on the play, an erratic marksman who had missed his first twelve shots of the game, hits a three-pointer with Nash right in his face to cut the lead to 90–88. D’Antoni and Quinter look at me as if I’d brought with me a case of the Black Plague. The Suns take time-out to plan an inbounds play, D’Antoni giving responsibility for Diaw to get it to Nash. A statistic that has haunted the Suns all season must be in the minds of a few of them: In regular-season games decided by seven points or fewer, the Suns are 0-7. It is hopeless to figure out the logic of that, given the reality of Nash, the ultimate heady quarterback and one of the best foul-shooters in the league.

  This play goes badly right away. The Lakers swarm Nash, and Diaw looks anxious. Nash keeps moving toward the pass, trying to shake Parker, and slips just as he receives the pass. Parker is right on top of him and steals the ball. Parker taps it to George, who gets it to Bryant, who takes a few high-speed dribbles and puts up a high-arcing, high-degree-of-difficult layup over the outstretched arm of Diaw. It goes in. Tie game 90–90. I return to my press seat without a word, taking the Plague with me.

  D’Antoni designs a brilliant inbounds play that all but frees James Jones for a layup, but he is held by at least two Laker defenders—in those situations, fouls are rarely called—and can’t get off a clean shot. Overtime.

  Momentum had clearly switched to the Lakers, but the Suns play with guts in the extra period, and when Nash, gritting his teeth in pain (his back had started to hurt him), hits a three-pointer, they lead 98–95 with forty-nine seconds left. The Suns get the ball back but, with the shot clock going down, Bell shoots an air ball. What Phoenix needed was something that would’ve at least drawn iron, bounced around, killed some clock. But it gives the Lakers a dead-ball situation.

  Afraid to foul, the Suns allow Bryant an open lane to the hoop and he scores a layup with 11.7 seconds left to draw the Lakers within one, 98–97. The Suns’ plan is obvious: Get it to Nash, one of the surest dribblers and free-throw shooters on the planet. They elect not to take a time-out and inbound from under the Lakers’ basket. Probably better that way. More room for Nash to operate.

  Nash begins dribbling under pressure and heads toward midcourt, veering left all the while. As it becomes evident he’s going to run into a crowd, Diaw calls and motions for a time-out. Nash hollers for one, too, but can’t make a hand gesture because he’s concentrating too much on his dribble. He gets jostled as Lamar Odom and Luke Walton close in on him. Referees Bennett Salvatore and Kenny Mauer peer in at the play but don’t call anything until, finally, Salvatore motions for a jump ball. Walton against Nash.

  Brian Grant insists that he heard Diaw calling for a time-out from the bench, which is across the court. The coaches are incensed that the Suns weren’t given the time-out or a foul wasn’t called. Of the three possible calls in that situation, a jump ball is by far the rarest.

  But jump ball it is. The six-foot-eight-inch Walton has the edge on the six-foot-two-inch Nash, and, predictably, taps it back to Bryant with about six seconds to go. It is so predictable that even the press corps wonders why more Phoenix defenders are not grouped around Bryant. He dribbles toward the Laker basket and even then is not as swarmed as he should be. Diaw is closest to him, just as he was on the layup, and, as Bryant goes up for a jumper, I can hear Alvin Gentry’s words from the Friday night postgame video review: I tell you, we better have enough edge that it doesn’t come down to one shot and number 8 has the ball in his hands.

  With perfect rotation, the ball goes in, and the home crowd goes nuts. Lakers win 99–98. The moment is instantly sanctified as one of the greatest in Staples Center history, right up there with the Robert Horry jumper that beat the Sacramento Kings in Game 6 of the 2002 Western finals. The Randy Newman song blares: I love L.A.! I love L.A.!

  The Lakers and their fans are still in wild celebration as the Suns troop funereally to their dressing room. The coaches gather outside, as they always do, but no one has anything substantive to offer. D’Antoni stands with his head down for a full two minutes, and, when it’s time to address the team, he has almost nothing to say. “We’re going home, guys. We’ll get ’em there. A lot of stuff happened. Try to forget about it.”

  Leandro Barbosa emerges from the shower, a stricken look on his boyish, open face. “Did…you…ever…see…anything…like…that?” he asks, almost as if he’s in shock.

  “Can’t say that I have, L.B,” I say.

  Dan D’Antoni switches off his cell phone as he walks slowly from the dressing room to the tunnel, where the team bus is waiting to take them to the airport and on to Phoenix. “I feel like a hundred years old,” he says, limping, a badly swollen Achilles tendon turning every step into agony. “I’m smart enough to tune out all the experts,” he says. “See, Mike’s gotta deal with them all.” His brother leans against the bus, cell phone to his ear.

  The plane ride back to Phoenix would be more forlorn if not for the presence of the wives and children. The normal suspects—Marion, Bell, Kurt Thomas, House, Tucker, and Mike “Cowboy” Elliott, the assistant trainer—play poker. Nash feels like a line from “Old Man River”—body all achin’ and racked with pain—but he
entertains his twins. He thinks he was fouled and he believes he should’ve gotten a time-out, but he knows he should not have dribbled toward the midcourt sideline, either. That’s the Dead Zone. The coaches vent about the referee calls—it seems they got nothing but a solid diet of bad whistles in L.A.—but they also know that the turnover on the Diaw-to-Nash inbounds play was the result of sloppy execution, and that the defense should’ve done a smarter job of blanketing Bryant on the tip play.

  The plane ride is short and nobody even bothers turning on his video machine to review the game. Too painful. Eight months together and this is absolutely the lowest point. A television replay streams, with no audio, across the two screens in the front of the play, at one point flashing a stark graphic: Of the 160 teams that have been behind 3-1 in a playoff series, only seven have come back to win the series.

  Back home, before D’Antoni turns in, he fields two phone calls. The first is from Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, under whom D’Antoni will be an assistant this summer on the United States Olympic team. They had gotten together late in the season and hit it off.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Krzyzewski said. Jerry Colangelo, the executive director of USA Basketball, has scheduled meetings for the Olympic coaches in Phoenix beginning on May 7, the following Saturday, also the date of a Game 7 should there be one.

  “I just hope we’re still playing,” says D’Antoni.

  Then Sarver calls with a simple message. “Kiss your wife, forget about the game, and get some sleep.” D’Antoni accomplishes the first, fails miserably on the last two.

  Chapter Seven

  [The Second Season]

  Phoenix, May 1……………….

  LAKERS LEAD SERIES 3–1

  “We’re gonna have to come back here, play as hard as hell, beat their ass, and then watch the pressure go back on them. This ain’t even close to being over.”

  Nash is the first one in the practice gym, which is not unusual. I ask him if he watched a replay of the game.

  “I never do,” he says. “I just went home and beat myself up. I got to sleep okay, but I woke up at 4 and couldn’t get back. I got up and played with my daughters.”

  “Now that it’s past, what bothered you the most about the jump-ball play?” I ask.

  “That they didn’t call the time-out,” he says. “They could’ve called a foul. But, the time-out, I mean, Boris was screaming it. I was saying it, too, but I was concentrating on the dribble. But the refs had to have heard Boris.”

  Bell, meanwhile, has come down and is shooting with Weber at another basket. He is fixated on Bryant.

  “What gets me is that, all of a sudden, everybody loves him again,” says Bell. “And he is just not a great guy.”

  The remarks resonate. When Bryant scored eighty-one points against the Toronto Raptors in January, I wrote a story about it and subsequently received a couple dozen e-mails and letters criticizing me for celebrating him. They referred to Bryant’s notorious rape case in Colorado (the charges were dropped), his arrogant on-court manner, or both. I didn’t make any value judgments about Bryant in the story; I was writing about an athlete who had done something transcendent, which is part of my job. But when an athlete earns headlines for his exploits, there is the perception that he is being canonized as a human being. And that perception sticks in the craw of those who don’t like the athlete in question.

  The 3–1 deficit notwithstanding, Bell feels good about the defensive work he has done on Bryant. The Game 4 buzzer beater wasn’t Bell’s fault, and Bell has held Bryant in check to a greater degree than the Suns could’ve hoped for.

  “I’m not sure I can play him any better,” Bell says.

  “Yes, you can,” says Weber. “You’re gonna play him even better in Game 5.” Weber, Mr. Positive Thinker, says it with emphasis. And Bell smiles.

  “Good, Phil,” says Bell, “I’m glad to hear you say that. I’m gonna keep that in my mind.”

  The challenge for everyone, players and coaches, is to forget the horror of yesterday’s game, the reality of the 3–1 deficit and the seeming mountain of calls that have gone against them and figure out what has to be done to get back in the series. The Suns just haven’t played well against a team they consider to be inferior. Nash’s dribble toward the corner of midcourt was un-Nash-like—he should’ve kept it in the middle of the floor. Iavaroni wonders, half-kiddingly, if the Suns shouldn’t have tried to beat the Lakers in that late regular-season game, and maybe taken it easy in a game six days earlier against the Sacramento Kings, so that the Lakers and Kings would’ve flip-flopped positions. “Well, right now,” says Gentry, “the Kings would be beating the dogshit out of us worse.”

  The feeling of malaise comes also from a general distaste for the Lakers. During a morning trip to Starbucks, at least a dozen people approached D’Antoni and told him they appreciated how the Suns had reacted to the unfortunate chain of events in Games 3 and 4. “They saw it,” says D’Antoni. “Kobe’s lifting up his jersey and showing his chest and doing all that stuff, and Steve is just saying, ‘Well, we blew it.’ At least, we’re taking the high road anyway.”

  As the Suns see it, the Lakers trek along the low road. Bryant is arrogant. Brown is just a big body with nothing behind it. Smush Parker was a Sun for a couple of weeks last season, and no one rued his departure. Lamar Odom is just too damn big and long. Luke Walton seems like a nice guy, and his father, Bill, is a humorous announcer, but he laid out Thomas in Game 3 and triggered a miserable chain of L.A. events that ended with the nightmarish jump-ball call and the Kobe jumper. Sasha Vujacic (pronounced VU-ja-seech) is an all-universe whiner with an unpronounceable surname. Over the last week Dan D’Antoni has variously tortured it as “Vooasick,” “Voojacheech,” and, finally “Vooacheck.” “Apparently,” says Mike, “Danny thinks he’s John Havlicek’s younger brother.” It is comparable to Dan’s fused pronunciations of the surnames of Cleveland center Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Philadelphia forward Andrew Iguodala as “Inkadacus,” “Ingadalis” or “Iladala.” Whenever he becomes tongue-tied on a nickname, Weber says, “First day with a new mouth, Danny?”

  Plus, Phil Jackson sits on a throne.

  Plus, who the hell likes purple and gold?

  Plus, the Lakers are kicking their ass.

  There is concern among the coaches about Tim Thomas, who, after his terrific Game 1 performance, has not been much of a factor. Thomas is what is known around the league as “a ball stopper,” a player who, having received a pass, holds it or dribbles it, looking for his own shot and killing a lot of clock in the process. If Thomas’s shot is on, or if he can break down or successfully post up his defender, as he was able to do in Game 1, he’s a valuable asset; if not, he suffocates the offense. Ball stoppers are less of a problem in standard NBA attacks that call for isolation plays, but they are disastrous to a ball-moving team such as the Suns.

  When the Suns contacted Thomas, one of those ultra-talented players who in eight previous NBA seasons had never come close to fulfilling his golden promise, he was sitting back in his home in suburban Philadelphia. Thomas had been traded from the New York Knicks to the Chicago Bulls in the preseason, but, when he arrived in Chicago, he and coach Scott Skiles were at immediate loggerheads. Skiles is one of those no-nonsense run-the-stairs-for-

  me type of guys; Thomas is one of those I’d-rather-take-the-elevator-and-maybe-stop-and-get-a-frappucino-along-the-way type of guys. So Skiles, in a move that was strange even by the standards of disciplinarian coaches, told him to pack up, go home and take his $13.5 million salary with him. Thomas spent the winter working out at Villanova and said he enjoyed being with his family for all the major winter holidays. Honest, that’s what he said.

  When Thomas came out of Patterson Catholic High School in New Jersey in 1996, he and a kid from Lower Merion, name of Kobe Bryant, were the top scholastic players in the country. Bryant opted for the NBA. Thomas, recruited by virtually every school in the country, enrolled at Villanova, which had
added the carrot of hiring his uncle as an assistant coach. Thomas stayed on the Main Line for just one year—that was pretty much the understanding going in—after which the New Jersey Nets made him the seventh pick in the 1997 draft. It is astonishing how top universities make such deals and no one calls them on it. And with the NBA having raised the draft-eligibility age, there will be even more one-year college attendees. Thomas was one of the first.

  Thomas said that Skiles never gave him a chance. Skiles said that Thomas was out of shape and had an attitude problem. Thomas’s demeanor is not the problem for D’Antoni, but he does wonder if he has become a bad fit for the offense. “Maybe I fell into the trap of having to get bigger and stronger and loused up our offense a little bit,” says D’Antoni. But the bottom line for the Suns in acquiring Thomas was the bottom line: They are stuck for only $290,000, the prorated veteran minimum, while the Bulls are paying the rest of his comically extravagant contract. Phoenix almost couldn’t afford not to get him, particularly with the injuries to Stoudemire and Kurt Thomas. “Pretty good rental, huh?” Iavaroni would say after Thomas had a good game. Perhaps he can be one again.

  Earlier in the day, at the coaches meeting, D’Antoni had asked suddenly. “What’s that porno actress’s name? Del Rio? What’s her first name?” It was a strange question coming from a man who had shown no previous interest in the bone-and-moan industry. Plus, he named an actress who was popular more than a decade ago.

  “You gotta do better than that,” says Gentry. “Go with Jenna Jameson. More recognizable. Local connection. And I guaran-damn-tee you most of our guys have seen her work.”