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 Putting in the time Star players work a lot of minutes during NBA Finals
Posted: Friday June 25, 1999 12:22 PM
By John Donovan, CNN/SI NEW YORK -- It’s difficult to find a player in the NBA Finals -- any NBA Finals, really -- who would flat-out admit to being tired. Well, other than Mario Elie, maybe. Elie, the San Antonio Spurs guard assigned the tongue-dragging task of staying close to New York Knicks shooter Allan Houston in the 1999 NBA Finals, is the first to admit that he’s dragging after four games in the Finals. But he says the extended time being played this year in the Finals is getting to others, too. Whether they ‘fess up or not. “It has to,” said Elie, resting courtside at Madison Square Garden with an ice pack on a bruised knee after an off-day practice. “I’m 35. I know I’m feeling it. “The Knicks are a great team, but they run a lot, and sometimes in the fourth quarter you can see, their shots might be a little off. But they need those guys out there.”
That’s been the problem for both the Knicks and the Spurs this series. Neither team has much choice but to use their best players for extended minutes. On a good night, the Knicks go about eight deep. But few of those eight are scorers. The Knicks’ points come mainly from Houston and Latrell Sprewell. The Spurs go about nine deep. But they have two main scorers, too -- David Robinson and Tim Duncan -- who are putting in overtime, too. “I don’t know. I don’t see people falling down or doing things ‘cause they’re tired,” said Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. “I really want them to play. That’s just the way it is.” Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy’s situation has been dire from the start. With center Patrick Ewing out with an injury, he has only Houston and Sprewell to depend on, so he’s been forced to play them huge minutes. Through the first four games of the ’99 Finals, Sprewell was averaging 44.5 minutes a game, and Houston 44.3. That’s more than seven minutes more per game than anyone else on the team. The Spurs, too, have ridden Duncan. He’s averaging a whopping 45.8 minutes per game. Point guard Avery Johnson is next, with 38.3 minutes per game. Three other players -- Robinson, Sean Elliott and Elie -- are averaging 35 minutes or more a game in the Finals. You’d think all the minutes under some of the best defensive pressure in the game -- the Spurs were first in field-goal defense this season, the Knicks second -- would take its toll. Well, it depends who you ask. “I think, certainly, fatigue is a factor,” Van Gundy said. “To sit here and say we are not tired and not tired within the game and not less than what we’d like to be, health-wise ...” It’s not always easy to tell when a player, or a team, is tired. The Knicks, for instance, scored 26 points in the fourth quarter of Game 4. But they scored only six points in the last four minutes. And neither Sprewell nor Houston scored in the last 5:40. Did that mean they were tired? “I think guys are in pretty good shape,” Sprewell said. “As a player, you know you’re body. You know if you’re tired. For the most part, guys are fine.” The Spurs have an older team, with Robinson, Elie, Johnson and Sean Elliott all with at least nine years in the league. But they’ve been solid in the fourth quarter, and their defensive pressure late in the game -- especially in Game 4 -- has increased. The fact is, long minutes and the NBA Finals go together. In the 1995 Finals, which the Houston Rockets swept over the Orlando Magic, Houston’s Robert Horry put in 187 minutes, the most ever in a four-game set. That’s 46.8 minutes a game. In 1973, Wilt Chamberlain played every minute in a five-game Finals. Bill Russell, John Havlicek and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar all are in the NBA record books for putting in more than 48 minutes a game over the course of Finals that went six and seven games and had overtimes. In the end, the reason players put in so much time during the Finals is simple. “Win or lose,” Popovich said, “you want your best players out on the court.”
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