| |
|
|
 Down and dirty In the playoffs, scoring takes a forearm to the head
Posted: Friday May 14, 1999 02:22 PM
By John Donovan, CNN/SI ATLANTA -- A pile-driving shoulder to the sternum. A stiff forearm to the kidney. An arm coiled tightly around an opponent's waist. A handful of jersey, a hack across the wrists. Back it in, back it in, back it in. Shoot. Have you seen the NBA Playoffs lately? The league's showcase, its postseason, never has been a place for the feint of heart or sleight of frame. Defenses clamp down. Offenses get conservative. Collars -- if the players actually had them -- get a little tighter. But in this postseason, coming as it is after the lockout-shortened regular season, the play seemingly has been particularly plodding and physical. And the games ... Well, if we really do still love this game, love is as undeniably as blind as an NBA referee in the final seconds of Game 7. "I still don't think it's as bad as everyone thinks it is," Detroit coach Alvin Gentry said of the play this season, after his team put up 70 points in its playoff opener against the Atlanta Hawks. To prove his point, Gentry's Pistons squeezed out 69 points the next game. "One of the things is guys just don't shoot like they used to. You have some good players," he said. "But you don't have a lot of guys who are consistently great shooters." The Pistons-Hawks series has been maybe the ugliest of any of the first-round beat-'em-ups, though that New York Knicks-Miami Heat lovefest is running a close second. As pathetic as the Pistons were in dual 20-point losses in Games 1 and 2, the Hawks -- not a great offensive team even on a good offensive night -- topped them with a 63-point non-effort in Game 3, the second-lowest total in NBA playoff history. No team in the series has scored more than 90 points in any of the three games. The Pistons are averaging a playoff-low 72.6 points a game. The Hawks are not much better, at 80.6. Misery, though, and miserable shooters have plenty of company in these playoffs.
Analysts have been trying to figure out reasons for the dearth of scoring all season long. Only one team this season averaged more than 100 points a game (the Sacramento Kings, at 100.1), and the average number of points scored in a game was 91.6, the lowest since the advent of the shot clock in 1954-55. Back in 1984-85, all 23 NBA teams scored better than 100 points a game, averaging 110.8 points. Flat-out poor fundamentals, as Gentry suggests, is a popular theory for the lack of scoring punch. The number of possessions a team gets a game is down about 25 percent from 15 years ago, thanks to better scouting that makes it harder to get off shots and coaches who like to milk the shot clock. And then there are those who attribute the low scoring to a host of problems caused by the shorter preseason and season.
Whatever, things don't seem to be getting much better in the playoffs, though three teams -- the Indiana Pacers, the Portland Trail Blazers and the Houston Rockets -- have averaged more than 100 points a game in the first round. The fact is, most teams just don't run anymore, or they get lulled or bullied out of it. Some teams try. The Rockets, with Pippen pushing the ball upcourt. The Phoenix Suns, with Jason Kidd at the point, though that did them a lot of good in their first-round sweep by the deepest team in the league, the Trail Blazers. And, of course, the surprising Kings, this season's postseason darlings. But even those team sputter. The Kings scored 84 points in one of their first-round wins -- and that was in overtime. The Rockets are more likely to have Charles Barkley butt his way into the lane or Hakeem Olajuwon go to his array of moves from the post. Then there are the Los Angeles Lakers, who run everything through their monstrous center, Shaquille O'Neal. Or the San Antonio Spurs, who do the same with twin towers David Robinson and Tim Duncan. And the Knicks and Heat, who have made art of the simple pure act of throwing an elbow, holding in the paint and knocking someone off the blocks. "It's not easy. It's a hard job out there," said Hawks forward Tyrone Corbin. The 14-year veteran was forced into the starting lineup for Game 3 when starter Chris Crawford sprained his shoulder and benchmate Alan Henderson suffered a scratched cornea in Game 2. "Especially in playoff games, guys want to ... bang more. You have to play physical. Especially in the East." The long-held tradition of the East as beasts and the West as finesse still holds, at least in most players' minds. There's no team in the Eastern Conference playoffs that runs anything close to what, say, Sacramento does in the West. It's a half-court game, and in the playoffs, it's a whole game worth of half-court. And it probably will get more physical as the playoffs progress. "It's hard for us to get in transition," said Pistons guard Jerry Stackhouse after Game 2, "and, until we do that, we're going to struggle. We can't fall into getting physical." Officials, too, are in on the mayhem. The Milwaukee Bucks averaged a playoff-high 30 fouls a game as they were swept out of the playoffs by the Pacers. But the general thinking is there are many more fouls that what are called. "What they want," Gentry said of the refs, "is they want to have the players decide the game." The lesson is a simple one: If you're not tough enough in the playoffs, you're soon in a heap of trouble. "The great athletes are those who come to play in the playoffs," said Dikembe Mutombo, the Hawks' center. "You have to be strong and tough, mentally and physically. You just can't let yourself get pushed around. You have to establish yourself."
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
