Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  Now, one could subject this to endless statistical deconstruction. The Suns as a team don’t get to the line often because (a) they shoot quickly and (b) they shoot often from the perimeter rather than taking it to the basket, where contact most often takes place. Last season Phoenix was a middle-of-the-pack eighteenth in free throw attempts as a team, but that is misleading because Stoudemire (with 795 attempts) led the league. But, in Nash’s case, logic says he should get more free throws because he has the ball so often and he is a driver who gets into the lane.

  At any rate, instead of a probable three-point play and an eight-point lead, the Suns get the ball on the side, and, Nash, visibly shaken by the call, misses a wide-open jumper. And over the next couple of minutes, Nash can’t seem to get his bearings, slipping, losing the ball, failing to find open teammates. This is a dream come true for an obnoxious fan who sits behind the press table and gives endless grief to Paul Coro of the Arizona Republic. The fan is convinced that Nash is overrated and that Coro, along with most every other reporter in America, protects Nash. He used to sit right behind D’Antoni, but the coach arranged to have his seat moved because he couldn’t stand listening to him.

  The game stays tight, and, finally, with the Suns leading 101–98, Cassell darts behind a hard pick set by Brand on Barbosa and drains a three-pointer from the corner to tie the score. Nash makes a brilliant long-distance pass to Marion but, as he is fouled by Brand, he can’t convert the layup. With thirty-nine seconds left, Marion has a chance to win it from the line, from where he had converted 91 percent of his free throws in the first two rounds and 81 percent during the season. But after being the Suns’ rock through three periods, Marion has faltered badly in the fourth, missing seven of his eight shots. Visibly nervous and shaken by the collision, he misses both of these. The Suns still have a chance to get a final shot, but Tim Thomas, instead of calling time-out, unleashes a wild pass downcourt, mistakenly thinking there was no time to set up a play. The game goes into overtime.

  Once D’Antoni elects not to club Thomas over the head with his clipboard, his biggest decision is whether to start Barbosa or Diaw in the overtime period. Diaw was so routinely brilliant at times during the Laker series that it’s easy to forget he is a young player in a new position, literally and figuratively. For the last two seasons he was a backup point guard in Atlanta, defending against players like five-foot-five-inch Earl Boykins of Denver, and his year ended with the Hawks’ eighty-second game. Now he’s an inside player going against an All-Star power forward, Elton Brand, and a scary-looking seven-foot center, Chris Kaman, in the second round of a pressure-packed postseason. (It will be a small miracle if Kaman, a stringy-haired, pasty-complexioned seven-footer, is not one day cast in some B slasher movie in which he plays the crazed school janitor who hangs out near the girls’ locker room.) Diaw isn’t soft by any means. He and his close friend, Tony Parker, the Spurs’ point guard, developed their basketball chops by playing against men as fifteen-year-olds in France. But Game 5, at last, seems to have overwhelmed Diaw. It happens.

  “Gimme two reasons you can help us in overtime,” Iavaroni says to Diaw. Diaw doesn’t respond.

  “Okay, one reason,” says Iavaroni. Still, Diaw is speechless.

  “Okay, you gave me my answer,” says Iavaroni.

  “What do you mean?” asks Diaw.

  “Your body language,” says Iavaroni. “It tells me you don’t want to play.”

  Iavaroni said it all gently. He didn’t mean to put the player on the spot. But he had to find out if Diaw was ready to play. He wasn’t. So D’Antoni goes with Barbosa.

  Nash’s problems continue in overtime, and, when Nash has problems, so generally do the Suns. With 3.6 seconds left, Cassell makes two free throws to give the Clippers a 111–108 lead. The Suns call time-out. The arena is all but silent. Phoenix had gotten by L.A.’s better-known team, but a defeat in Game 5 at home would all but guarantee extinction. Was the Suns’ supply of miracles finally gone?

  As D’Antoni huddles with his assistants out on the floor, Bell says, “If it goes to me, I’m going to make it.” At about that time, D’Antoni decides that Bell should be the first option. As late as February, the Suns were mildly concerned about the number of times that Bell tended to shoot from just inside the three-point line—Weber called him “Mr. Long-Two”—but were loath to bring it to his attention. There is no play more distasteful than a shooter looking down to check his feet, then stepping back over the three-point line to release.

  But at this point in the season Bell’s three-point stroke is as reliable as anyone’s, including that of a tired Nash. Anyway, the point guard will no doubt be smothered with defensive attention. D’Antoni comes into the huddle and sketches the play. Bell is to start on the baseline, come forward as if he were setting a pick for Marion, then veer toward the corner, catch the pass, and get his shot. Diaw, who had gone back in minutes earlier when Thomas fouled out, is given the assignment of throwing the ball in. Next to Nash, he is the team’s best decision-maker. House, Bell’s opponent in postpractice shooting games, peppers him with optimism as the huddle breaks. “You’re going to make it,” House says. “I know you’re going to make it.”

  Dunleavy inserts little-used Daniel Ewing into the game to defend against Bell. No one is sure why. As the play begins, Ewing bodies Bell the wrong way, and Bell is able to head toward the corner. Diaw finds him with ease. Teams in that situation always have the option to give a quick foul to obviate the three-point shot. Some do; some don’t. Dunleavy chooses not to foul. Bell gets a good look, shoots, and the ball goes in. Tie game. The fan who had brought the sign that read BELL TOLLS FOR THREE had been prescient. It is Bell’s twenty-second three-pointer of the series, already surpassing by one Derek Fisher’s record for a six-game series.

  The shot seems to break the will of the Clippers. Phoenix dominates the second overtime, the decisive points coming from Marion (on a seven-foot bank shot off a pass from Nash) and two Barbosa free throws. The final is 125–118.

  Fans flood the court like it’s a championship victory. Robert Sarver runs from his seat to hug Nash. “Do you realize,” says Phil Weber as he watches the scene, “that the two guys who saved our season weren’t even with us last year?” He means Bell and Thomas, whose Game 6 jumper kept the Laker series alive. The Clippers file off the court, almost in a daze. “The most disappointing loss I’ve ever been involved in,” says Brand, who finished with thirty-three points. Cassell says that, “We should’ve put him [Bell] in the fifth row with the popcorn man.”

  There is utter jubilation in the Suns’ locker room. The game had started at 7:30, Phoenix time, and now it’s 11:30. “A game like this just might kill Dad,” D’Antoni says to his brother. “Ninety-four-

  year-old men are not supposed to be up this late.” Lewis D’Antoni watches every game back in Mullens, West Virginia, which is on Eastern standard.

  “I’m glad we won,” says Gentry, “but I’m about to pay for my babysitter’s college education.”

  Bell, for his part, is headed home to call his parents (Roger Bell always gives him the critique), then watch the TiVo replay of CSI: Miami with his happily pregnant wife. Marion, who finished with thirty-six points and twenty rebounds, a monster game even if he did miss those two free throws, heads out the door wearing a wide smile. “Shawn Marion gets very tired,” Marion once said, “but the Matrix never gets tired.” The Matrix showed up tonight. Marion still has the stitched-eye look going and he is limping slightly. He got taken down hard by Brand on the breakaway that preceded his two missed free throws and, later, in overtime, he had tweaked his ankle again. “I’m okay,” he says.

  A very long and eventful evening had belonged to the father-to-be and, as Griffin promised, the one with the bad-motherfucker look.

  As for Barbosa, who had a terrific game with fifteen points and five assists, he walks out happily with his mother, who just arrived from Brazil. The last few weeks have been agony for Barbosa. Widesprea
d violence had rocked his native city of São Paulo, the attacks on police stations and public buildings reportedly carried out by a criminal gang known in Brazil as the First Capital Command. Barbosa had hired security guards for his many relatives (brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews) but he was most worried about his mother, who is a kidnap target because of his fame. Ivete Barbosa has also been battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, after having lost her husband and Leandro’s father, Vincente, to stomach cancer several years ago.

  Barbosa is ecstatic that Ivete is safe and he also believes that she has turned the corner on her cancer treatment. He is closer to her than any person in the world. It was to his mother that Barbosa said, many years ago in Brazil, “Mama, I have a dream. I am going to play basketball in the NBA.” That night, Ivete sleeps in her son’s arms.

  Chapter Seventeen

  [The Second Season]

  Phoenix, May 17……………….

  SUNS LEAD SERIES 3–2

  “We’ve been through a lot of saying, ‘Shawn this’ and ‘Shawn that.’ But you know what? We’ve come a helluva long way. There’s a helluva lot of ways you could screw it up by looking elsewhere for another player.”

  For months now, D’Antoni has been bothered by a giant photograph of Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan from the 1993 Finals that hangs in the fourth-floor hallway leading to the coaches office. He realizes that Barkley was important to the franchise, but that was over a decade ago, and there are other players the Phoenix Suns might want to highlight, guys with names like Nash and Marion. Anyway, Barkley has just been killing the Suns on TNT. “Every day I come in here,” says D’Antoni, “and the first thing I see is Charles. I’m getting tired of it.”

  D’Antoni had mentioned it once offhandedly to Robert Sarver, and the next thing he knew the owner was out in the hallway trying, unsuccessfully, to yank it down. D’Antoni decides this is the day of departure for Messieurs Barkley and Jordan, and, a few minutes later, Noel Gillespie and Jason March are wrestling the photo off the wall.

  “Where should we put it?” asks Gillespie.

  “Put it in the Barkley Room,” says Debbie Villa, the coaches’ secretary. Around the corner is a large conference room that is also filled with photos of Sir Charles. “We’ll work on that next year,” says D’Antoni.

  About an hour before practice, Marion calls and says he has “personal problems” that will prevent him from getting there. D’Antoni doesn’t press him, though he does wonder what could’ve happened between one of the greatest victories in franchise history, one in which the Matrix played a big part, and 10 a.m. the following morning. But as D’Antoni sees it, the absence is excusable, even at this stage of the season, maybe especially at this stage of the season when pressure is at the highest. Practice will be light, and, besides, during Marion’s seven seasons with the franchise, he has been reliable and diligent. After that horrible game against the Nets on March 27, part of the atrocious play was blamed on what Gentry called “New York–itis the night before.” But Marion had been in his room, chowing down on room service, at 11 p.m. “The one guy I never worry about,” says Kevin Tucker, who is responsible for monitoring players’ off-court activities and trying to keep them out of trouble, “is Shawn Marion.”

  With the college draft six weeks away and the auditioning of prospects taking place, this is the time of year when trade rumors start to proliferate, and Marion’s name has surfaced, not for the first time in his career. All that has to happen is for a player to be speculated about once—which in Marion’s case happened in the Chicago Tribune—and it will be endlessly repeated. Shawn Marion has been mentioned in trade talks.

  His All-Star status notwithstanding, it is not surprising that Marion’s name is bandied about. Within the organization, his weaknesses are recognized—ballhandling in the open floor, a dearth of creative instincts as a passer, the absence of a back-to-the-basket post-up game—not to mention a sometimes lackadaisical attitude. The Suns also believe Marion is too quick to point out the faults of others and won’t accept blame himself. This was Marion after a 113–106 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in late January, a game which Bell missed due to a strained right calf and Marion had to play LeBron James most of the night. “I didn’t get no breathers,” said Marion after James scored forty-four points. “I didn’t get no help either…I was trying to guard him as much as I can. I had him pretty much. When you’re hitting pick-and-rolls all day, there ain’t nothing I can do about it because the big man is setting the screens and then I’m trying to go over or under, and I wasn’t getting any help and that’s what happens.”

  LeBron James can get forty-four on anybody in the world. Nobody even indicated that Marion was at fault, and, indeed, Marion’s analysis is not flawed. He didn’t get enough help. But why throw everybody else under the bus? During the season, the Arizona Republic’s Dan Bickley (who bet D’Antoni a dinner that his team wouldn’t win fifty games; they won fifty-four), did a column on the coach. Here are Nash’s comments: “Mike has a great demeanor, a great personality. He’s bright. He’s creative. He’s competitive. He holds us accountable. He’s fair and he makes it fun for us. He deserves all the praise he’s getting and more.” And here are Marion’s: “One of the biggest things is, he realizes that we [the players] make the coaches. When we’re winning, he’s winning.” Marion’s knee-jerk defense of himself is, of course, built upon the foundation that he believes he will be held at fault for almost everything that happens.

  On the other hand, Marion’s strengths—the athleticism, the crowd-pleasing brilliance, and, most of all, the versatility—are eminently tradable. From time to time David Dupree of USA Today calculates a “divergent skills” index, in which he adds up dunks, three-pointers made, blocks, and steals and subtracts fouls; this season Marion blew away the competition, LeBron included.

  Trades are a touchy subject, and a franchise, obviously, desires to keep speculation out of the media; just as obviously, trades are always a juicy subject, even outlandish trades that will never be made. Relationships have been irreparably harmed when a player learns he is on the block. The Suns are by no means “shopping” Marion, the term referring to a team actively making calls to get rid of a player, and the subject of a Marion trade rarely comes up in conversation. But it does surface from time to time, and is more liable to now without Bryan Colangelo around.

  Trade speculation is a no-win situation for the franchise. Tell the player he’s not being mentioned in trade rumors, and you could be exposed down the road as a liar. Tell the player he is being shopped, and, understandably, he gets pissed off and maybe stops giving his all. Earlier in the season Spurs’ coach Gregg Popovich told Brent Barry that he was going to be traded, but the deal fell through and Barry remained. (Barry, one of the most down-to-earth guys in the league, played hard and well the rest of the year.) Marion was miffed that he had to come to D’Antoni to ask if there was any credibility to the trade rumors. D’Antoni told him no. But what if the Minnesota Timberwolves want to deal Kevin Garnett for Marion? The Suns would sure as hell take that call.

  Rare, in fact, is the player who is a true untouchable. Nash is one at the moment, unless, as D’Antoni says, “The Spurs suddenly decide they want to give us Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili.” Stoudemire might be an untouchable, but that is partly because he just signed his new deal and the Suns have to give him a chance to make good on it. Anyway, trading him after knee surgery might not work. LeBron James is an untouchable, and the Lakers, having dealt away Shaquille O’Neal two summers ago, are not going to trade Bryant. The Heat wouldn’t part with Dwyane Wade, and the Spurs wouldn’t let Duncan go. But it’s a safe bet that, no matter what their public denials, the Philadelphia 76ers talk about trading Allen Iverson, the Minnesota Timberwolves talk about trading Garnett, and the Boston Celtics talk about trading Paul Pierce. It’s just part of the eternal challenge to improve. Carmelo Anthony is a brilliant young scorer who is expected to sign a contract extension with Denver, but it’s a goo
d bet that somewhere down the road ’Melo will be traded. Even great players get dealt. It’s the nature of the biz.

  But there is an unsettling aspect about the idea of unloading Marion, even if the return prize were someone as good as, say, Garnett. Just as some of Marion’s weaknesses are sometimes undetectable to all but the most trained eye, so are some of his strengths. Back in early December, the Suns were engaged in a tight game at home with the Denver Nuggets. Marcus Camby had been killing them all night (he finished with thirty-three points and twenty rebounds), but, during a crucial possession late in the game, Marion, playing active help defense, brilliantly denied a pass to Camby (who is four inches taller) and the Nuggets were forced to accept Andre Miller’s bad shot. Suns win 102–97. After the game, all the coaches could talk about was Marion’s subtle defensive work, and there probably wasn’t a fan in the building who picked up on it.

  Plus, Marion was a big part of the Suns’ renaissance last season, the fifth point in a star that would include Nash the point guard, Stoudemire the finisher, D’Antoni the architect, and Colangelo the brains behind the scenes. Marion is the Swiss Army knife, the all-everything. Trading Marion would nibble away at the essence of the Suns. What is amazing about Marion is the sudden and startling release of his athleticism, his kinetic energy. In practice one day, Marion was reclining against a wall, waiting to take his turn in a drill, when he suddenly sprang onto the court and tipped away a shot that Tim Thomas had released from the corner, his hand a good foot above the rim. Marion estimates his vertical leap at thirty-eight inches but says it was several inches higher years ago when he could almost reach the top of the backboard.

  When you have that kind of natural ability, assumptions of greatness follow, and, as infuriated as the coaches get with Marion from time to time, they concede that it comes partly from their elevated expectations of him.