“Rebounds. Blocks shots,” says Stoudemire, who plucked a few words from the air. They could’ve just as easily been “eats buffalo wings, drives car.”
“Well, not really a shot blocker,” says Iavaroni. “He does rebound.”
“He’s dirty,” offers Kurt Thomas, who is still out with a foot injury.
“All right, dirty,” says Iavaroni. “Takes charges. Dirty screener. If you’re not talking, one of our guys is going to get their heads knocked off. The main thing is, don’t fall into their pace. Come out with the mentality that I’m going to run him until he breaks.”
D’Antoni gives the same message before he sends the Suns onto the floor. “We gotta run the hell out of them,” he says, “and their bigs don’t run real well anyway.” Clearly, against a team with a lumbering center, this is a chance for Stoudemire to show that he’s back.
But from the beginning Stoudemire’s only gear is glacial. The Suns foul continually, stopping the clock and wrecking their plans to run. Jason Kidd, who three years ago was the consensus best point guard in the league, shuts down Nash, the consensus best point guard in the league right now. And so the Suns’ seven-second offense sputters, then clogs, when no one comes up to offer pressure release, and it’s more like a twenty-three-second offense.
Between the first and second period, Stoudemire pedals a stationary bike next to the bench. When the action resumes, he misses an easy layup, barely getting off the ground. D’Antoni looks at Nelson. Nelson shakes his head. D’Antoni looks down the bench at Marion, who was getting a rest, and says, “Shawn, get Amare’.”
“It looks like one of those nights,” says Dan D’Antoni from the bench. He is dressed in brown suit and black T-shirt, “the Sopranos look in honor of being in New Jersey,” he says.
“If Amare’ doesn’t start playing better,” says Gentry, “it could be one of those weeks.”
“We don’t beat Eastern teams by walking the basketball,” D’Antoni says at halftime, which ends with New Jersey on top, 50–31. “And every time we foul or commit a turnover, the clock stops and they get to walk it up. The other thing is, we’re passing up shots and we’re not making the ones we have. We’re, like, one for eighty thousand. Don’t forget who we are and what we do.”
But who they are and what they do, to this point in the season, has not included Stoudemire. The Suns are doing the reverse of what they normally do, which is live off of Nash’s energy; tonight, they are dying off of Stoudemire’s torpor. That includes Nash, who is getting blitzed by Kidd. Perhaps Kidd is tired of hearing about Nash, who, eight years earlier, had been traded away by Phoenix because the Suns felt so secure with Kidd running the show.
Is Stoudemire hurt? Is he out of shape? Is he not trying? Some combination of all of them? Nobody really knows for sure, except, perhaps, Stoudemire. About the most he says is that the right knee, not the surgically repaired left, feels stiff and is giving him “some pain.” Well, does it feel stiff because he’s not expending enough energy to loosen it? Does he have to play through some pain? Or, as is often the case with athletic injuries, is he truly in pain and no one outside of his body can tell him he’s not?
“We’re getting to a Catch-22 with Amare’,” says Iavaroni, coming out of the locker room. “Does he have to play to get into shape? Or is playing making it worse?”
“Well, we gotta go one way or the other,” says Gentry. “Either commit to him for twelve minutes or sit him down.”
Midway through the third period, after missing all six of his shots, sitting him down becomes the only viable option. Stoudemire comes to the bench and pounds the back of his chair in anger, but he doesn’t disagree that he had to come out of the game. On the court, Kidd banks in a three-pointer and the Nets lead 74–38. You had to look twice at the scoreboard to believe it’s true. Even D’Antoni can’t pretend there is a chance of coming back. At the beginning of the fourth period, Nash says to D’Antoni, with a sad smile, “I’m getting my ass kicked.”
As the clock runs down on the worst loss of the season, the Suns continue to display their pleasant personality on the bench. Stoudemire tosses wristbands to some kids sitting behind him, and Marion responds to an autograph request during a time-out by leaning over and signing a ticket stub. The final is 110–72, the Suns’ total nearly forty points below their league-leading average. Nash finishes with zero points for the first time in his career.
“I got a headache,” says D’Antoni, putting his head between his hands.
His postgame remarks are brief and unmemorable. James Jones stands and says, “We didn’t show toughness. San Antonio would’ve found a way to win.” It rings hollow because Junior is hardly considered a bastion of toughness himself. But anything would’ve sounded hollow after that effort.
Ninety minutes later, on the team plane bound for Milwaukee, D’Antoni paces relentlessly, trying to decide what to do about his injured stud. He talks briefly with Stoudemire, trying to get a gauge on how he’s feeling, then talks to Nelson and Nash. D’Antoni vacillates between being pissed off at Stoudemire or feeling genuine contrition for him. He is injured…but he didn’t work hard enough to get better. He had surgery…but that knee has been declared fine. “He has to get his pop back” is the expression everyone uses. But what does that mean? Is getting his “pop” back a matter of time? Or hard work? Or enduring pain?
D’Antoni has the team to think about, first and foremost. If Phoenix puts Stoudemire on the shelf, he will once again, in all probability, lose touch, kind of float through the locker room, which is what he has been doing for the better part of five months. That often happens with injured players even if they are the best of teammates, which Stoudemire is not. Further, if the Suns put him on the shelf, are they in effect declaring that they can’t win the championship?
On the other hand, if Stoudemire plays, D’Antoni can see the team getting dragged down by him; if tonight is any indication, the Suns would be playing four against five until Stoudemire finds himself or his lost “pop.” “Everybody was just watching everybody,” Marion had said about Stoudemire’s return. “The ball just stopped.” In the Suns’ system, being a “ball stopper” is the ultimate pejorative.
Finally, sometime after midnight, thirty minutes before the plane lands in Milwaukee, D’Antoni makes his decision: He will shut Stoudemire down. Everyone within the organization knows that it is almost certainly for the entire season, but, publicly, a Stoudemire return will be listed as a possibility.
What finally made the decision for D’Antoni, one that was unanimously supported by the players and the coaches, was factoring in the kind of player Stoudemire is. He is not someone who will help a team when he’s not at his physical best. He doesn’t give up his body setting picks, he doesn’t pass well, and he is a weak defender. If he can’t get up and down the court, he is semi-worthless in a half-court offense other than to put back offensive rebounds.
I ask D’Antoni if he is giving up on a championship this season in favor of making an all-out run next season with a healthy Stoudemire?
“Hell, no,” he says. “We can still win it. And, with Amare’ in there, was that a championship team you saw out there tonight?”
March 28
At the morning breakfast meeting, which will substitute for a shootaround for tonight’s game against the Bucks, D’Antoni tells the team what most of them suspected.
“We’re shutting Amare’ down, guys. So that means we have to turn it up one more notch. Playoffs are right around the bend. We got thirteen games, starting with tonight. We have to understand what we need to be better at. It’s gotta be a concentrated effort of taking in what we say. Not everything we say is going to ring true all the time, but let’s just try to get better as a team.” That is D’Antoni’s way of saying: It’s time to rally ’round.
As Stoudemire leaves the meeting, Weber approaches him. As the rah-rah, let’s-get-it-done guy, Weber will have a part in Stoudemire’s on-court rehab, which, as the Suns see it, mu
st continue apace. Plus, Stoudemire trusts him—Weber had made several trips to Stoudemire’s off-season home in Florida last summer to supervise individual workouts.
“You wanna go over early tonight?” Weber asks Stoudemire. “Maybe get in a high-intensity workout?”
“P-Web,” says Stoudemire, “are you crazy?”
Later, even the optimistic Weber concedes, “This isn’t going to be easy.”
Chapter Sixteen
[The Second Season]
Phoenix, May 16……………….
SERIES TIED 2–2
“If it goes to me, I’m going to make it.”
Raja Bell arrives at morning shootaround to find a bunch of blue congratulatory balloons hanging in his cubicle. “B.G., I bet,” says Bell. Brian Grant has indeed gotten the news that Cindi Bell is pregnant. The couple had been trying for quite a while and Raja is overjoyed. Eddie House had asked Bell a few days ago if he was planning on getting Cindi something for Mother’s Day and Bell said, “A baby, I think.” Now it’s official. They already know it’s a boy.
Tim Thomas offers his congratulations. “Same thing happened to me,” says Thomas, who already has two young daughters. “My wife complains that every year I get in the playoffs, she gets pregnant.”
Marion comes in, still looking like he had been in a bar brawl. Dave Griffin studies him during the short pro forma shootaround. “Shawn’s going to be a monster tonight,” says Griffin. “He has the I’m-a-bad-motherfucker factor going for him.”
At this point in the series, the Suns have tried so many defensive tactics that they’re not sure what is working and what isn’t. If Elton Brand was not a good baseline driver before the series, he has sure figured out how to become one during the series, and he is now hurting the Suns no matter how they play him. The book on Cassell is to force him right, but he always manages to get left. Some players are like that. Lenny Wilkens, a southpaw, could only go left, and he went in that direction into the Hall of Fame. As a rookie playing for the Kansas City–Omaha Kings, D’Antoni remembers an assistant coach delivering a pregame scouting report about Jerry West: “Okay, guys, West can only go right. But don’t concern yourself with that because you can’t stop him anyway. He’s been going right for twenty years.” Plus, the Clippers can throw so many different lineups out there that advance defensive planning has been rendered almost meaningless.
Aaron Nelson, the trainer—“call us athletic trainers,” he’s always careful to admonish, half-joking, half-serious—stops into the coaches office. The trainer is, in many ways, the second most important person behind the head coach in the daily affairs of the team. On many teams, including this one, he is responsible for making the travel arrangements, scheduling practices and shootarounds on the road, all the mundane details of moving around men and equipment. (Nelson is particularly fond of telling me, right before a trip, “There’s no room on the main plane for you. Would you mind riding in baggage?”) You know the trainer is important because, on the team bus, he invariably occupies the other front seat directly across from the head coach. No matter how crowded the bus gets, the head coach sits alone and the trainer sits alone, a canon that is inviolate unless their significant others are along—in that case they have to squeeze over and suck it up.
Nelson and the three men under him—strength and conditioning coach Erik Phillips, assistant trainer Mike Elliott, and equipment man Jay Gaspar—are often put in awkward positions. They are close to the players (you tend to build a relationship with a man when you slap and knead his body every day; plus, in the case of Elliott, he is a fixture in every poker game) yet they are considered management, at least Nelson is. Nobody knows more than Nelson does, for example, about how hard Stoudemire is really working to rehab his knee. But he has to figure out when to keep something between he and a player secret, and when D’Antoni or Griffin or some other member of the hierarchy should be informed. Nelson does it well and seems to have the trust of executives, coaches, and players. For the most part, D’Antoni leaves him alone to do his job, checking in only when he has to, usually with the comment, “You get anybody well this week, or are they all worse?”
Nelson is sometimes referred to as “N.G.” for No Game, a nickname bestowed on him by Charles Barkley when, during a bachelor trip to Las Vegas years ago, Nelson came up empty. Every once in a while, usually when the team bus pulls into the parking lot after a road trip, a spirited chant of “N.G., T.Y.T! N.G., T.Y.T! will break out. “No Game, Touch Your Toes,” the latter phrase a boys-will-be-
boys reference to bending over.
“You give everybody a shot of adrenaline?” Jerry Colangelo asks Nelson.
“I just hit ’em in the heart,” says Nelson.
“Anything going on?” D’Antoni asks breezily. He hopes the answer is uncomplicated.
“I think Steve will be ready,” says Nelson. That is mostly why he stopped in.
“That’s good to hear,” says D’Antoni.
“He slept two-and-a-half hours this afternoon,” says Nelson. “He needed it. He says it’s nothing physical. He just hasn’t been sleeping, and he says he’s tired.”
“I know what I feel like,” says D’Antoni, “so I can imagine what he feels like.”
The second-round playoff game between the Miami Heat and the New Jersey Nets streams along, soundless. The Nets’ Vince Carter is heaving up more than his share of shots, most of which are errant. Dan D’Antoni watches for a while and delivers his verdict: “When it’s nut-cutting time, Vince Carter supplies the nuts.”
The Suns are painfully thin on celebrity fans. Sen. John McCain is a semi-regular, who, to his credit, rarely trolls for votes and seems to be there to enjoy the game. Once in a while Phil Mickelson occupies a courtside seat—his wife, Amy, was a Suns’ dancer years ago—and on other occasions, Jimmy Walker, a well-heeled Arizona insurance man who handles investments and long-term planning for a slew of big names, will have someone from the glitterati sitting next to him. Often, though, they are there to root for the other team, as is the case on this evening when Billy Crystal sits down next to Walker.
But the big celebrity news of the evening is the arrival of Jack Nicholson, who, wearing his trademark dark shades, takes a seat behind the Clippers’ bench. The Lakers’ Alpha Dog Fan doesn’t attend Clipper games in L.A., but, hey, a road trip is a road trip. He is accompanied by director James Brooks, who invited Nicholson to come along. Almost no one recognizes Brooks, but he was the one who helped Jack win Best Actor Oscars for Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets, and, Brooks’s true hall-of-fame achievement, exec-producing The Simpsons.
Marion, true to Griffin’s prediction, comes out smoking, hitting five of his first seven shots and finishing the first quarter with twelve points. Alas, his teammates don’t add much, especially Nash, who, despite his nap, looks tired. The Clippers, per usual, dominate the boards, get several put-back baskets and take a 31–26 lead after one quarter. Nash finally comes alive in the second, hoisting up seven shots (he makes four) and pushes Phoenix to a 58–52 lead at halftime. Using a combination of Marion and Bell, the Suns appear to have gotten Cassell under control—he has made only one of six shots, and Dunleavy even turns the offense over to the youngster, Shaun Livingston, for long stretches.
There is a great sense of unease in the locker room, however. Six points, given the Suns’ penchant for blowing leads, is no cushion at all. The coaches hope that Nash is back on track, and they’re pleased with Marion, who has sixteen points and eight rebounds. They’re shooting 50 percent and everybody except for James Jones seems to be in a groove. But, at root, it’s not about the offense—the Suns are almost always able to score at home. There worrisome things are the things they can’t do much about no matter how well they’re playing—the size differential, the rebounds, the physical play inside. D’Antoni’s remarks are brief, the real strategy handled by a series of individual meetings. Gentry talks to Nash, Iavaroni to Tim Thomas, and Dan to Barbosa (of course).
/> It appears to be working. In the first six minutes of the third quarter, the Suns outscore the Clippers 20–7. Some fans give it to Nicholson, and he just lifts up his shades and smiles; he rather likes the Suns’ full-throttle offense, as he told D’Antoni during the Laker series. But, suddenly, as quickly as it came, it starts to go. Nash misses a layup; Tim Thomas loses the ball. Nash misses a three-point jumper, and Thomas, trying to get it back right away, misses almost the same shot. Then he misses a dunk. The Clippers keep whittling away, whittling away, and, by the end of the third, they’re within six at 84–78. Marion was, again, great; everyone else was mediocre.
The Suns cling to their single-digit advantage through most of the fourth and lead 96–91 when, with 3:07 left, Nash drives to the basket, converts a layup, and draws a foul on Cassell. But Joe DeRosa, a veteran ref, waves off the play and says the foul was committed before the shot, a call that wouldn’t have been made in a high school jayvee game. Nash appeals to DeRosa and finally throws up his hands in exasperation.
Nash is not a major-league whiner or complainer, but he is convinced that he gets fewer calls than any of the league’s stars and certainly doesn’t get them commensurate with being a two-time MVP. “The officials referee people, not plays,” he says, “except for me.” Nash is not alone in that respect, of course—to date, there is no record of an NBA player saying, “You know, they officiate me pretty fair.” But the numbers do tell a tale. Nash finished the season as the league’s thirty-third leading scorer with 18.8 points per game, averaging only 3.5 free throws per game. No one above him shot fewer free throws on a per-game basis, though Marion (who finished seventeenth at 21.8) was close, with 3.7 attempts per game. Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson averaged 11.5 attempts. The league’s other top five scorers—Kobe Bryant, Cleveland’s LeBron James, Washington’s Gilbert Arenas, Miami’s Dwyane Wade, and Boston’s Paul Pierce—were also in double figures in attempts.
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