Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  And Burke does have his supporters around the arena. On most mornings when Dan D’Antoni arrives, he’s immediately collared by a woman who works in security.

  “Why doesn’t your brother use Pat Burke more?” she demands.

  Dan always plays along, nodding his head as if he totally understands where she’s coming from. “I don’t know why Mike does a lot of the things he does, Barbara,” Dan will tell her.

  Burke is a truly delightful man, a skilled mimic who took a couple of theater courses during his four years at Auburn. Before games he can sometimes be heard goofing on his bench-sitting buddy, Skita, in a thick Eastern European accent. “My Georgian friend here,” Burke will say, pointing to Tskitishvili, “he give me the F.U. look. So, for that reason, I will assume right now Georgian comfort position.” And he would fold his arms and pull his legs into his chest. His performance in the “Pat Burke’s Hair Restoration Formula” video was flawless and hilarious. He and his wife, Peyton, have two-year-old sons, Graceson and Sadler. One day before Christmas, Burke came to practice and reported that one of the twins had picked up the Baby Jesus from the nativity set, and, wielding him like a weapon, held him above one of the Wise Men, yelling, “You want a piece of me! You want a piece of me!”

  But Burke is not happy with his nonexistent role. After he made a three-pointer during garbage time in the final stages of Game 7 against the Lakers, he looked infuriated when the crowd gave him a resounding ovation. The way Burke saw it, the response was tantamount to fans applauding the handicapped high school kid when he finally scores a basket in his last game. D’Antoni didn’t notice Burke’s sour reaction when it happened but a few people told him about it the next day. He decided against saying anything to Burke. “Either I won’t like what he says and I’ll feel bad,” says D’Antoni, “or he already feels bad and I’ll make him feel worse by bringing it up. I suspect it’s the latter anyway.”

  When anyone gets too down on Burke, though, another coach is liable to speak up in his behalf. As Gentry put it one day: “You don’t really want a lot of guys on your team who think they’re not supposed to be good enough to be playing.”

  The lack of bench spirit is just part of a larger problem, though—Laker hangover. The enervating seven-game series is just now starting to take its toll on players and coaches. “I tell you, I’ve never been so tired,” says D’Antoni as he wearily picks up his bags and gets off the team plane when it lands in Los Angeles. “But I better not tell the team that. Look, all we gotta do is win one here.”

  “And it would be nice,” says Iavaroni, “if it was Game 3.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  [The Second Season]

  Los Angeles, May 12…………….

  SERIES TIED 1–1

  “Now, everybody knows our character, right? We win one, we kinda take the next one off. We can’t do that this time, guys.”

  In the category of mismanaged franchises, the Los Angeles Clippers should take a backseat to no one. No sooner would the beleaguered general manager (Laker legend Elgin Baylor) and one in a long succession of head coaches (there have been thirteen in the last twenty years, including Alvin Gentry) put together a unit that appears to be on the way up than owner Donald Sterling would refuse to spend the requisite money to keep the core together. Quick cut to Sterling laughing all the way to the bank: He bought the franchise for $12.5 million in 1981 (when it was the San Diego Clippers), and it’s worth an estimated twenty times that now.

  Making money has never been a problem for Sterling, ne’ Donald Tokowitz, who is one of the largest real-estate tycoons in southern California and a recognized benefactor. He is best known for being, however, a trifle odd, still another example of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unassailable truth that “the very rich are different from you and me.” Sterling rarely agrees to interviews, and, Gatsby-like, conveys an air of mystery and sometimes confusion. Before Game 1 in Phoenix Sterling insisted that someone was sitting in his courtside seats at US Airways Center. It turned out to be Penny Sarver, wife of the Suns’ owner. Sterling had missed by a section or two.

  Though he is elusive to the press, people in Sterling’s company find him to be a close talker and serial toucher. At restaurants, he generally insists on ordering for everyone at the table and feels no compunction about reaching over and snatching food from a fellow diner’s plate.

  In the summer of 2003, the details of a deposition Sterling (who is married) gave in a lawsuit he filed against a woman he admitted having sex with over a three-year period became public. They were, to say the least, fascinating. An excerpt: “When a woman excites you, sometimes that part of your body controls your mind. I knew from the day she came in she was a total freak and a piece of trash. How did I know? The girl immediately told me she lived with Mike Tyson.”

  It appears that this Clippers team is, at last, the one that Sterling is committed to keep together, witness his signing of Brand to a big deal through 2009. (The owner even seems to know the first and last names of most of his players.) Brand is no Kobe Bryant. But he has better teammates and, clearly, this challenge is a far more formidable one than the Lakers presented. And it took seven games to beat them.

  The Clippers’ 119–105 victory in Phoenix a month earlier represented one of the Suns’ lowest moments of the season. It was somewhat of a showdown game at the time since the Suns were trying to hold on to the second seed in the West and the Clippers still had an outside chance of getting it. D’Antoni was incensed at the effort expended in the first half—“They’re shooting fifty-eight fucking percent, and they got three guys who can’t shoot”—and downright discouraged after the game. “It’s not like you get ten chances in your career to win it all. We got one chance—this one—at making a real good run, and, with the playoffs coming, we go out there and play like we don’t give a shit.” Ironically, the Lakers came to town two nights later, and the Suns’ 107–96 victory did a lot to reright the ship.

  The Clippers’ coach, Mike Dunleavy, got by as an NBA player for ten years on smarts, determination, and, like Nash, an ability to hit shots when seemingly blanketed by the defense. (In contrast to D’Antoni, who never takes a practice shot, Dunleavy loves to challenge his players to shooting games and delights in reporting how he beat this player with a twenty-foot left-handed hook shot or that player with a twenty-five-foot over-the-head set shot.) In a pinstriped suit, Dunleavy bears a slight resemblance to Ed Sullivan, the old TV host, and when he appears on a clip, one of the Suns coaches is more than likely to remark, “Really beeg shoe tonight,” Sullivan’s catch phrase. But they respect what Dunleavy has done with the team.

  The atmosphere at Staples Center for a Clippers game is completely different than it is for a Lakers game. There are fewer media types and fewer celebs, though about the same number of wannabe celebs. (Dr. Phil, for example.) There are no mystifying pregame words from Phil Jackson to be deconstructed. There is no sense of championship history, no collective air of hauteur, no Kobe, no magic, no Magic. “It’s amazing,” says D’Antoni. “Same building. Better team. Deeper into the playoffs. But there just isn’t the buzz there is for a Laker game.”

  The Clippers have a different home locker room from the Lakers, but the visitors’ is the same. It’s hot and cramped, an afterthought by design. Weber remembers that Scott Skiles, when he was the head man in Phoenix, would take a chair and a desk and set up temporary shop in the shower room so he would have room to prepare before games in locker rooms such as L.A.’s. “Pat [Riley] would do better than that,” says Iavaroni. “He would find space somewhere and put up yellow tape all around, like a crime scene, to give himself privacy.”

  When the bigs congregate, Iavaroni is clearly miffed by the atmosphere. Bell and House talk loudly and obliviously in the background, and Marion, who will be guarding Cassell, does not attend. The wings cram themselves into the small training room, where Weber goes over the game plan as Aaron Nelson and Mike Elliott tape ankles and Marion runs a small muscle stimulator o
ver his body, its hum as pervasive as a vacuum cleaner.

  It is reminiscent of the atrocious visitors’ locker room at the Palace of Auburn Hills, home of the Detroit Pistons. Before a late-season game, Weber, desperate for a venue for the wings meeting, decided to send his charges back to the toilet area.

  “Somebody is back there taking a shit,” said Eddie House, “so you may want to rethink that.” Weber did.

  Digestion issues, to put it delicately, are never far from the surface. Forty minutes before a game, House will more than likely be chomping on a hot dog, and James Jones will be dipping into greasy chicken fingers. Nash, who loads up on fruit, even for his postgame meal, will look at House, smile and shake his head. Boris Diaw, who favors a nice magret de canard when he can get his hands on one, doesn’t get it at all. To a French player, diet is crucial. On most European teams, players eat their meals together, lots of pasta and fish, all carefully planned by the team trainer. “Hot dogs in the locker room,” he says, “is something I would not do.”

  Athletic trainers such as Aaron Nelson talk about nutrition, but in the American system they figure that players will get it eventually. In general, the older players do eat wiser, but Nelson knows he has to take care of both sides. So in the Suns’ training room at home there are presorted containers of multiple vitamins, power bars, and other healthy snacks, as well as a few boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts.

  “The human body really needs four hours to adequately digest food,” says Nelson. “Players have to get to know their own bodies, they have to know whether it’s really hurting them or not, and I guess these guys feel it isn’t. Where you notice it is with all the farting and burping.” Indeed, the locker room and team bus often smell like a sixth-grade gym class.

  James Jones is an intelligent and friendly young man, the product of a stable home life. He is immensely proud of his father, who runs a nonprofit foundation in California. But there are other concerns about Jones (whom everyone calls Junior, a family nickname) besides the pregame noshing. He doesn’t work out in the weight room, believing that shooters can get too muscular, but his lack of strength is a problem. The Suns want him to do two things—catch and pass or catch and shoot—but too often he catches and dribbles, a skill at which he is not adept. Every time D’Antoni tells him he’s doing well, his play slacks off. And while he is a quiet and generally polite young man, he also has the knack of speaking up when he should remain silent. After a few losses during the season, Junior interrupted D’Antoni’s postgame speech to offer up a few words of motivation. “We gotta get after it harder…” he began one night, and D’Antoni cut him off. “James,” said the coach, “I got this, okay?” The coaches can never be sure what they are going to get out of him from one game to the next, partly because they consider him, as Iavaroni puts it, “a poor preparation guy.” Which is borne out when Nash screams, “SEVENTEEN! LET’S GO!” and Junior is still putting on his sneakers.

  WELCOME TO CLIPPER NATION reads the message on the scoreboard. If there is less of that ineffable something known as buzz in Staples Center, there is more team noise and more team colors. Laker fans are too hip to wear purple and gold, but thousands of Clipper acolytes have put on their blue and red in recognition of a team that has already gone where no Clipper team has gone before.

  The game is played with intensity, though not precision. It is tied at halftime, 48–48. The first three Marion shots of the second half are a hastily released layup that clangs off the glass, an air-balled three-pointer from the corner, and a swat-back by the Clips’ giant center Chris Kaman. Not promising. But then the Matrix shows up. He darts around and through the Clippers, and the Suns take a 74–63 lead early in the fourth quarter. Guarding the smaller Cassell, against whom he is doing a terrific job, has had a salubrious effect on Marion. From his position on the bench, Dunleavy is so intent on stopping Marion that he almost jumps in front of him when the Matrix zooms by en route to a layup. Frank Johnson, who coached the Suns before D’Antoni, once leaped out at Manu Ginobili during a game against the San Antonio Spurs and drew a warning phone call from the league office the next day.

  But, then, things turn all Rad for the Clippers. With Cassell out of the game, Marion has been switched on to Vladimir Radmanovic, a six-foot-

  nine-inch outside sniper, and he quickly hits three three-pointers and a layup. D’Antoni is so angry with Marion that he almost runs out and tackles him. Radmanovic’s shots were, to be sure, released with uncanny quickness. But Marion was late getting to him and the game plan was clear on this matter: Stay attached to Radmanovic like gum to a bedpost. The Clippers take a 79–76 lead.

  During a time-out, Bell lobbies with D’Antoni that he should check Radmanovic, but the coach wants to keep him on Mobley. Bell feels that while Marion’s quickness and length are ideal in some situations, he, Bell, is the superior “clamp” defender who just doggedly stays on his man come hell or high pick-and-rolls. Soon after, Bell and Marion get cross-switched in transition, and Bell says to Marion, “I’ll stay on Radmanovic.” As much as defensive technique, Bell’s wanting to play Radmanovic is a product of his mind-set. He is an outstanding one-on-one defender (he got two first-team votes for all-defense, a monumental achievement for a Sun) but not a great help defender because, as Iavaroni sees it, “He’s so competitive that all he wants to do is stop his own guy. A guy makes a basket on him, and all Raja wants to do is fuck the guy up.”

  During a game in Washington in late December, for example, the coaches considered Bell to be the obvious choice to defend Gilbert Arenas, the Wizards’ high-scoring guard. But they put Nash on Arenas most of the time because they feared Bell’s I’ll-get-you-back mentality wasn’t right for Arenas. Arenas would blow by him, and Bell would get up on him even closer on the next play. But by the end of the season, Bell had been able to curtail that mentality and play more fundamental lock-down D; ergo, his terrific job on Bryant in the previous series.

  Whether or not Raja’s playing Radmo is a factor, or whether the law of averages kicks in, the bomber does cool off. But the Clippers still lead 86–85 with 2:35 to play when Bell fouls out. If the Suns’ situation is not dire, it is certainly desperate and reminiscent of Game 3 of the Laker series in this very building. But Nash and Thomas make four consecutive free throws, Marion scores on a driving finger roll off a pass from Nash, and the lead is a secure-looking 92–86 with forty-nine seconds left. Bell is so psyched that he charges off the bench to congratulate his mates, and the ice pack which he has on his swollen ankle bursts apart, sending water all over the floor. The Suns players peer up into the stands, pretending that someone threw something to deflect attention away from Bell.

  D’Antoni, meanwhile, sidles over to Bennett Salvatore, the referee who worked the ill-fated Game 4 of the Laker series. “If Steve has the ball and it’s a close game, we want a time-out,” he says. “All of us are going to be screaming it, okay?” D’Antoni is smiling when he says it and Salvatore smiles back. But, really, it wasn’t intended to be a joke, and Salvatore doesn’t think it’s all that funny.

  At this point, I approach the bench and look hopefully at Quinter. It would seem like a safe time to try to get close to the bench to gain immediate locker room access. But Quinter, like a stern teacher, shakes his head no. I dutifully squeeze into the space next to Jerry Colangelo. Sure enough, Brand scores on a three-point play, and, after a Thomas miss, Ross makes two free throws to pull the Clippers to within 92–91 with 28.4 seconds left.

  The Suns’ theory in this situation is obvious: Keep the ball in Nash’s hands for as long as possible with the hopes that he will get fouled and drain his all-but-automatic free throws. It didn’t work in Game 4 of the Laker series, but it is still the soundest idea. But the Clips, with just enough time to get the ball back and get a good shot should the Suns miss, play tough and smart. The shot clock is almost expired when Nash lets fly with a running jumper, only his ninth shot of the game. It goes in. The bench erupts. And when Radmanovic misses a despe
ration three-pointer at the other end, the Suns have an important 94–91 win and a 2–1 series lead.

  The locker room is ecstatic, reminiscent of the Game 6 overtime win over the Lakers. The subtext of the victory is almost as important as the victory itself. It was the Suns’ first playoff triumph when they didn’t score 100 points. They had only been outrebounded by one. They had played a gritty and determined game, the kind of game they are supposed to lose. They played with guts. They won ugly. Thomas had held Brand to twenty points and scored nineteen himself. Marion had been the Matrix, putting together a thirty-two-point, nineteen-rebound, four-steal game.

  D’Antoni looks like a man who got a reprieve from the governor, but he tries to bring an admonishing tone to his postgame remarks.

  “Hey guys, real quick. That’s obviously a helluva job. Defensively, rebounding, all those things. Sometimes in the playoffs it doesn’t come down to playing great. It comes down to playing hard. And you guys did that and made big shots.”

  Then his tone changes. He gets a sly smile on his face. “Now, everybody knows our character, right? We win one, we kinda take the next one off. We can’t do that this time, guys. We can’t come out on Sunday and, say, ‘Well, we’re going back home, we can take care of business there.’ Get your bodies ready, get your minds ready, and come out Sunday and bust these guys up. We win Sunday, we know it’s over…no, I don’t want to say that. But we need this one.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, the sounds of a jungle bird (impossible to replicate on the written page) emanate from the shower room.

  “What exactly is that?” I ask Nash.

  “It’s called immaturity,” he says.

  Barbosa started it, and I wonder if it’s some kind of bird native to Brazil.