Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  “Your scoreboard taunts the opponents, you inflame your fans, and you have a negative atmosphere here,” says Sarver. “Then you go crazy when something happens in another arena.” That is an exaggeration since the Mavs did not “go crazy” about the Cassandra Johnson incident. But Sarver did what he thought was correct, and he did it without going to the media.

  Mark Cuban, meanwhile, is planning to complain to the league office about an elbow that was thrown by that notorious enforcer, Shawn Marion.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  [The Second Season]

  June 2………………………

  PHOENIX, MAVS LEAD SERIES 3–2

  “Our guys fought as hard as they could. They just ran out of steam.”

  Discussions of next season, subconscious or not, have started to dominate the conversation in the morning meetings. How could they not? Analyzing weaknesses that have been exposed during the Dallas series inevitably lead to discussions about how to solve those weaknesses. The assistant coaches have been regularly working out prospects after practice, and Dave Griffin and Vinny Del Negro talk about little else except the upcoming draft.

  Then, too, the coaches desperately need another topic besides Dallas. Talking about next year leavens the burden of strategizing for tomorrow’s Game 6. Hours of that lie ahead anyway. There have been so many defensive theories propounded over the last two weeks—since the playoffs began forty days ago, in fact—that the coaches are becoming confused themselves. “I’ll be honest with you guys,” says Gentry, “if you asked me right now what we’re supposed to do if Jason Terry and somebody screen-and-roll, I wouldn’t know if we’re doubling, trapping, or doing nothing. I just think we’re getting too may things going on.”

  Gentry blows his nose. “Plus, I’m miserable with this damn summer cold.”

  Unless the Suns manage to trade up, their draft picks at twenty-one and twenty-four won’t furnish much help. In essence, the Suns’ “draft” could amount to trading away the picks for money and getting back a (hopefully) healthy and motivated Stoudemire, re-signing Tim Thomas, extending Diaw and Barbosa, and maybe picking up one other stray piece. The Suns’ brass had gone back and forth on pursuing Thomas. A few weeks before the end of the regular season, D’Antoni said that he was going to have a conversation with Thomas, urge him to give everything he had the rest of the way so he could “fool somebody and get another big contract. It just won’t be from us.” But, given his big-game heroics and the fact that he is easygoing in the locker room, Thomas does now figure in their plans, provided he can be locked up for somewhere around $4 million a year. The Suns’ prevailing philosophy is, he’ll break your heart if you pay him any more than that.

  The idea of a stand-pat scenario make sense, the reasoning being: Look how far we got without Stoudemire, so imagine him coming back to join Marion, Nash, and an improved Boris Diaw, and if Kurt Thomas is healthy and Tim Thomas can keep hitting big shots…But putting together an NBA team is like building a sand castle at the beach. Add something here, but over there, where you can’t see it, something else is crumbling.

  The essential question is: Can Marion, Diaw, and Stoudemire coexist at the frontcourt positions? And who plays where? Nomenclature isn’t that important—list either Diaw or Stoudemire as the center and the other as the power forward—but they both like to post up at the left block. Plus, neither of them is adept at guarding big people, Diaw because of his limited size, Stoudemire because he’s an execrable fundamental defender. One answer would be to start a (hopefully) healthy Kurt Thomas, but then who would go to the bench? Diaw is the likely answer, but he’s played so well that cutting his minutes is an undesirable option.

  Also, with Stoudemire and Diaw in the starting lineup, that puts Marion at small forward, and the coaches are insistent—even if Marion believes otherwise—that he is better off at power forward, where his superior quickness turns him from mediocre to Matrix. “When you move him from 4 to 3,” says Gentry, repeating a point on which all of the coaches agree, “he becomes a much more average player.” (Were Marion present, he would say, “You guys are crazy.”)

  The coaches muse, as they often do, about players on other teams who would be a good fit for their system. Everyone likes Orlando’s Hedo Turkoglu, a big and athletic forward. Dan D’Antoni likes another Magic player, Darko Milicic, the much-maligned Yugoslav who in the 2003 draft was picked ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade. (Dan takes no end of grief for this.) Gentry likes Eric Piatkowski (whom he coached when he was with the Clippers), a role player for most of his career but a deadly outside shooter and a good team guy.

  “Well, I guess we can’t sign anybody before tomorrow,” says D’Antoni. “So let’s get to work.”

  Despite the pressure, practice looks pretty much the same, as always. Not a lot of video, not a lot of strategizing. That will come tomorrow. The fact that this could be the last full practice session of the year isn’t mentioned. And when it’s over, it could be a post-practice scene before a meaningless game in February. D’Antoni, backed against the wall with a sea of reporters in front of him, is cracking jokes. Asked about the report that Cuban has contacted the league about Marion’s allegedly throwing an elbow, D’Antoni says, “Jeez, get the guy a desk in New York. Enough’s enough.” Tim Thomas describes the poker game that took place on the plane ride back home after the agonizing Game 5 loss. Burke, Grant, Stoudemire, Kurt Thomas, and Tskitishvili engage in a spirited three-point shooting game.

  “On how many teams would you see the practice before a Game 6, conference finals ending with seven-footers in a three-point shooting contest?” says Del Negro.

  Iavaroni is down there conducting it, sweating profusely as he throws back the balls to five players who won’t even be getting in tomorrow night’s game.

  “It’s therapy,” says Iavaroni. “I’d only be up looking at more video.”

  In the locker room, meanwhile, Raja Bell is exercising his role as trip coordinator. He approaches Eddie House and asks, “Quisieras llevar las esposas en el viaje?” A Miamian, Bell is almost as likely to be heard speaking Spanish as En glish. He and Dave Griffin, who latched on to the speech patterns of Yamil Benitez, an Arizona Diamondback outfielder from Puerto Rico, communicate almost totally in a kind of pidgin En glish-Spanish with a thick Cubano accent.

  House looks blankly at him for a moment, then says, “You want to know if I’m taking my wife to Dallas, right?”

  “You’re the man, Eddie,” says Bell. “You’re picking up this shit.”

  “I don’t care,” House says. “Whatever you guys think.” Nash has come over to join the conversation.

  “Well, we’re just trying to get an idea of what everyone wants,” says Bell.

  “I’d say yes, because I just want my little one [his son, Jaelen, 4] to experience it,” says House.

  “That’s a very nice thought, Eddie,” says Nash, “especially since he won’t remember a damn thing about it.”

  “Fuck you, Nash,” says House.

  “It’s agreed, then,” says Bell.

  The word if is never spoken. There will be a Game 7 back in Dallas and the families will go on the trip.

  June 3

  GAME 6 TONIGHT

  Review of game films has revealed, according to the coaches, at least a half dozen occasions when Josh Howard has deliberately stuck out his foot and tripped a Suns’ player. D’Antoni had called Stu Jackson yesterday to complain, and Jackson said, “We’re looking at it.” Today Jackson called back and said, “We did call it once. And we’ll keep looking for it.”

  “I guess we should be happy with that,” says D’Antoni.

  If there is one consistent criticism of D’Antoni, it’s that he complains too much to the referees. On his influential ESPN.com blog, Bill Simmons writes this morning that “nobody works themselves into a foot-stomping, squinting, aghast frenzy like the Suns’ coach.” D’Antoni frequently masks it with a quip, as he does sometimes with Violet Palm
er, the NBA’s only female ref.

  “Violet,” D’Antoni will say, “I can’t believe some of that stuff that’s being called out there.”

  “We’re doing our best, Mike,” she’ll answer.

  “Oh, I’m not talking about you,” D’Antoni will say with a smile. “You’re fine. It’s those other two knuckleheads.”

  “Come on now, Mike,” she’ll say.

  But those sitting near courtside know that D’Antoni does make his grievances heard. The Arizona Republic’s Paul Coro has a theory that D’Antoni would get many more technical fouls except that before and after the game he’s such a nice guy that referees don’t always take his griping seriously. His protests are mostly, of course, partisan-based, as are those of every coach. (And every player, GM, owner, and fan.) But often they are about overly physical play, to which he has a legitimate aversion. D’Antoni’s teams are not constructed to play a banger’s game—especially not with Kurt Thomas on the shelf—and it’s not the kind of style he likes.

  D’Antoni does not suggest that Avery Johnson is coaching hard fouls. But the Dallas series fits seamlessly into the pattern of the two that preceded it—the opposition does most of the attacking, and Phoenix, except for Bell, does most of the recoiling.

  “I think Raja ought to go up to Howard before the game and say, ‘If you trip one guy, we’re coming after your ass,’ ” suggests Dan D’Antoni, half-seriously.

  “Well, it would be better if we could do it with three guys,” says Mike, “Kurt Thomas being one of them.”

  The loop of Nowitzki getting fifty on them plays endlessly. It’s like a horror film, and there is nothing to do except watch it, wince, and rewind. Over and over. Watch, wince, rewind. On a switch, they see Bell all over Nowitzki, “getting into his legs,” as Iavaroni puts it, forcing Nowitzki to take a horrible off-balance shot. Which goes in.

  “You know what?” says Iavaroni. “There’s no defense in the world that can keep a seven-footer from fading away and making a shot.”

  “But is there a defense out there that keeps Nowitzki from getting that shot and we just haven’t figured it out yet,” wonders D’Antoni. (It really isn’t a question because he knows what the answer is—probably not.) “Maybe we run at him. I don’t know if I’m comfortable having Steve Nash right there at the foul line with Dirk Nowitzki shooting a jump shot at the end of the game.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” says Iavaroni. “And you know what? If we don’t, they’re a better fucking team than we are.”

  “It’ll come down to that look in our eye when we walk out,” says Dan. “Do we have it or not?” This is the older D’Antoni’s default position: Don’t worry so much about the technical part of the game—work on the mental and the motivational.

  On the screen, Nowitzki makes another seemingly impossible fallaway. Gentry lets out a powerful sneeze.

  “Bless you,” says Weber.

  “I know you don’t mean it,” says Gentry, “but thanks.”

  The tape rolls on. No answers, only endless questions.

  “I know what we have to do,” Gentry says finally. “We have to get them to keep Keith Van Horn in the game.”

  “I’ll make a call to Avery,” says D’Antoni.

  There seems to be no sense of urgency in the dressing room, no sign that this is anything but a normal game. Barbosa gets his shots in early with Dan—REMEMBER THE BACKYARD is the last item on Dan’s tip sheet. Nash warms up in the practice gym with Jay Gaspar. Bell and House trade quips, as they normally do. Stoudemire, in street clothes, drifts in, drifts out, drifts back in. The bigs meet, the wings meet, then D’Antoni takes over.

  “Even in Game 5,” he says, “they only shot forty-seven percent, so we did pretty good, guys. It’s still about second-chance points. It’s still about closing out and not putting people on the foul line. Don’t panic. Don’t overreact. The keys are activity, energy, keeping them off-balance. We just have to go forty-eight minutes.

  “And one last thing—this team has a lot of fake tough guys, and they’re starting to piss everybody off. All the shit they do, the tripping and stuff. You know what? Get in their face and bust the horseshit out of them. I don’t want you to disrespect them, but there are some punks on that team. They want to win it here. Let’s just be sure it doesn’t happen.”

  D’Antoni sends them out. Back in the coaches office, I ask Dan, “Well, do they have that look in their eye?”

  He considers it. “I’m not sure,” he says.

  The Howard-tripping story has been widely circulated, and TNT did a pregame piece on it. Sarver, wearing a Shawn Marion jersey, approaches Howard during the pregame warm-ups and makes a comment about it.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Howard tells the owner, “but in two hours we’re going to be celebrating on your court.”

  Howard’s confidence notwithstanding, the Mavericks come out as if they are content with playing a Game 7 back at home. Devin Harris and Jason Terry get in early foul trouble, and Nowitzki has come back to Earth. The Suns are in position to get ahead by as much as twenty-five points, and would have if everyone were playing like Boris Diaw. Over the last forty-eight hours the coaches had been concerned about Diaw’s play, particularly his tendency to force shots, which is out of character for him. “He just wants to win so badly,” says Gentry. They debated on whether to show him video of instances when he should’ve passed instead of shot, but D’Antoni ultimately decided against it. “Sometimes you try to coach more out of a guy—make the right play, take shots at the right time, all that—and you get less,” D’Antoni said. “Boris’s frame of mind is much more important than anything we can teach him on the fly.”

  The decision was a wise one, for Diaw is playing with a computer-perfect mind. He finishes the first half with twenty points and eight rebounds and the Suns lead 51–39.

  The cloud on the horizon is foul trouble—Diaw, Bell, and Barbosa, who played only nine minutes—all have three. “All in all, though, I’ll take whistles like this,” says D’Antoni. He means that a game that isn’t rough-and-tumble favors the Suns. The flip side of that is that a lot of fouls exploits Phoenix’s lack of depth and also slows down the tempo of the game.

  “Okay, guys, we stay out of foul trouble and move our feet, we’re going to be fine,” D’Antoni tells the team. “Also, contest jump shots, but pack it in, and know that you can take some more liberties on certain guys, like [Devin] Harris and [Darrell] Armstrong.

  “You’re doing a helluva job on Nowitzki [who has missed seven of nine shots], keeping him in front. Now, you know they’re going to come in and try to make a push the first five or six minutes. So we gotta come out of this dressing room fired up and ready to go. Anybody got anything?”

  Nash adds his warning: “Let’s get out there early.”

  The inevitable Dallas push doesn’t come early. But it comes midway through the third quarter after Phoenix takes a 60–45 lead. Nowitzki gets hot, then Terry, then Nowitzki again. Thomas commits a turnover, Bell misses a three-pointer, Marion loses the ball, Nash misses a short jumper. The Phoenix lead is cut to ten, then eight, then six, then four at the end of the period.

  Is there collective weight, one wonders, in all of those struggles the Suns have been through? Does the sheer burden of overcoming so much—the injuries, the intrigue, the suspension, the enervating seven-game series that preceded this one—inevitably take its toll? As the lead slips away, do the Suns, unconsciously, start to think about the others that got away (Games 3 and 4 of the Laker series, or this last game in the Maverick series) or even the ones that almost got away, like Game 6 of the Laker series and Game 5 of the Clipper series?

  The Mavs tie the game on a Josh Howard layup, then take their first lead since the opening seconds on a dunk by seven-footer Diop, who is left wide-open. Nash gets Diaw a dunk to tie it back up, but now Stackhouse is into it and Josh Howard is all over the court.

  Nash can’t get free. Has the burden of carrying the
team through a hundred games—dribbling and probing, dribbling and probing—simply caught up to him? Tim Thomas misses a couple of shots. Has the Rental, who had saved the season a month ago in Game 6 against the Lakers, run out of gas? Marion can’t get open for a good shot. Has he been missed too often on cuts and has stopped cutting? Or has the smorgasbord of defenders the Mavs have to throw at him—Howard, Stackhouse, Griffin—simply worn him down?

  The Dallas lead reaches seven points, 84–77, after Howard makes two free throws with 3:46 left. Over the next minute and a half, Nash makes a driving layup, loses the ball, makes another driving layup, then loses the ball again. He is playing himself into exhaustion and that’s what happens when you do that—one frantic moment up, one frantic moment down. Nowitzki makes two free throws with 2:45 remaining. Nash makes another driving layup with 1:49 left, but Howard more than matches it with a three-pointer that puts the lead back to ten. Tim Thomas fouls out, followed by Barbosa. It’s all but over.

  Even in the final seconds, D’Antoni keeps coaching.

  “Who can we foul?” he asks.

  “They’re all pretty good shooters,” answers Gentry.

  In short, there are no more good answers.

  Nash and Nowitzki, who back in 1998 were introduced together at a Maverick press conference—Nash having arrived from Phoenix by trade, Nowitzki by the draft—happen to be together near the Suns’ basket as the final seconds tick away. They embrace just as Adrian Griffin dunks at the other end, finalizing a 102–93 victory that sends the Mavericks to their first-ever championship series and puts an end to the Suns’ semi-miracle of a season. Nash and Nowitzki talk for a few seconds, Nash wishing his buddy good luck as he goes on to play the Miami Heat in the Finals, and then they part company. D’Antoni waves to the crowd as he walks off. Diaw does the same, tears dotting the corner of his eyes. Marion, too, is crying. Barbosa is wide-eyed, as if in shock.