Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Saturday, August 04, 2007
My New Hero!
Whoa, who would have ever thought I'd find someone that shared my views about the "shenanigans" that go on in the NBA. Below are two great articles written from a fellow blogger at http://basketbawful.blogspot.com/.
Word of the Day: The Stern Button
The 1984 NBA Finals: David Stern's first conspiracy
Word of the Day: The Stern Button
The 1984 NBA Finals: David Stern's first conspiracy
Monday, July 23, 2007
My Hero
One man out, one league in trouble
By Bill Simmons
On Friday afternoon in southern California, you could hear the cacophony of frustrated screenwriters pounding their desks in disgust. The Tim Donaghy scandal doubled as the easiest movie pitch ever.
Imagine how simple it would have been to sell that script. A white NBA referee with a gambling problem (Matt Damon) loses too much money to a bookie (Timothy Olyphant) who's connected with a dangerous family of mobsters (led by head boss Alec Baldwin). One of their muscle guys (Turtle from "Entourage") threatens to beat up the ref unless he gives them inside information. Which he does. Now they have him. They tell him to start throwing a couple of games or they'll go after his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and daughter (the little girl from "Little Miss Sunshine"). He agrees to affect the over/under of games by whistling more fouls than usual, which should drive the scores above the over/under because everyone will be shooting more free throws. For a couple of games, it works. Eventually, they want more. Fearing for his life, he crosses the line and helps fix a few outcomes without realizing the mobsters will never say, "All right, we're good, nice working with you."
Meanwhile, a renegade FBI agent (Ryan Gosling) overhears the ref discussing one of the games on a tapped phone line, then gets tipped off by a mob informant (Joe Pantoliano) that they turned an NBA referee. They track the weasel for a solid year, gather all the evidence they need, then break the news to the NBA commissioner (Ron Silver) and his staff that their league has been compromised. It's too late. Too much damage has been done. The referee resigns, the feds swoop in and that's that. The movie ends with a sobbing Damon going to jail, Gosling getting promoted and Silver glumly watching the tape of a pivotal playoff game from the previous spring, a horribly officiated game that could have potentially affected the championship ... and the sight of that same compromised referee jogging down the court, ready to blow the whistle at a key moment.
The end.
That should have been a movie. Now, it allegedly looks to have happened in real life. If true, it's the rarest of sports scandals, a shocker that shocked absolutely nobody but might end up becoming more significant than anyone imagines. After the most damaging NBA season in three decades, after a series of deep-rooted problems -- almost entirely self-inflicted -- that already had everyone concerned about the league's immediate future, we reached the tipping point with Tim Donaghy.
Guilty or innocent, we will never watch an NBA game the same way. He's going to hang over everything -- every referee, every shaky outcome, every bad call -- in ways the average fan doesn't fully realize yet. Maybe they'll throw Donaghy in jail, maybe they won't, but he'll linger over every court like a black cloud. You'll hear his name more than you think. You and your buddies will make "that guy looks like he's pulling a Donaghy!" jokes every time a referee is making calls against your favorite team. Hecklers will gleefully play the Donaghy card after every bad call against the home team. For honest referees still working games, it doesn't matter what happens from this point on -- their collective integrity will always be questioned, their collective track record won't matter, and that will be that.
So that's one problem. The second problem is more complex. When news of the scandal broke on Friday, as J.A. Adande pointed out in his column that day, every diehard NBA fan had the same reaction. They weren't thinking, "I can't believe it!" or "Oh my God, how could this happen?" They were thinking, "Which one was it?" This was like finding out that your grandfather who smoked three packs a day for 50 years just came down with lung cancer. It was sad but inevitable. It was only a matter of time. These guys never made enough money (as we learned from the airplane ticket scandal) and struggled at their jobs consistently enough that there was no way to tell the difference between blowing a call and intentionally blowing a call.
More than any other professional league, an NBA referee can directly affect the outcome of every game. We've seen it happen time and time again, only we always assumed that the refs in question were working for the best interests of the league, that they were following orders like Luca Brasi (even if there was no definitive proof) -- like the guys who worked Game 6 of the Kings-Lakers series in 2002, or Game 7 of the Suns-Sonics series in 1993, or the infamous Hubert Davis Game in 1994. After Dwyane Wade and Miami received some Vince McMahon-level assistance in Games 3 and 4 of the 2006 Finals, I wrote an angry column about the "officiating crisis" (my words) that prompted Mavs owner Mark Cuban (tired of being fined) to post the link on his blog along with the sentence, "I never have to say a word again." After Dallas squandered that series, Cuban was so traumatized by the officiating that he nearly sold the Mavericks before family and friends talked him out of it.
For anyone who loves the NBA, the officiating has always been the proverbial "elephant in the room." No league has endured more jokes along the lines of "I'm not sure where the NBA ends and the WWE begins." Whether it's because of bad luck, poor training, measly pay or the thanklessness of the profession itself -- maybe it's all of those things -- the NBA employs a handful of good referees and an astonishing number of bad ones. In the playoffs, there never seems to be enough quality officials to go around. If that wasn't bad enough, the league displayed a nasty "habit" (note: I'm using quotation marks because you could never prove anything more than a series of coincidences) of assigning better referees if they needed road teams to prevail (like a marquee team trailing 2-1 and playing Game 4 on the road) and weaker referees if they needed home teams to prevail (because weak referees are more likely to have their calls prejudiced by a raucous home crowd). This "habit" was miraculously cured this past spring, one year after the fallout of the 2006 Finals, when the officiating assignments became noticeably more haphazard and we ended up with just one Game 7 in four rounds. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe not.
And that's before factoring in the public's perception (well-earned, by the way) that superstars receive more favorable calls than non-superstars. It's like Chris Rock's bit about dad getting the biggest chicken leg at the dinner table -- once you reach a certain level in the NBA, the whistles will come. This perpetual leeway allows gifted athletes like Wade, Gilbert Arenas and LeBron James to drive recklessly into traffic in crunch time, knowing they can either score or draw a foul. (Even when Michael Jordan won the '98 Finals on what everyone believed was his final shot ever, he famously shoved Utah's Bryon Russell to the ground before launching that jumper. No whistle.) If anything, LeBron's pre-2007 game depended on this leeway so much that he was completely ineffective in the 2006 World Championships; he kept bowling his way into the paint and waiting for calls that never came. The international refs almost seemed amused by him. The NBA refs would have been bailing him out.
So when news of the Donaghy scandal broke, everyone's reaction was the same: "Which one?"
That's why I had one group of friends frantically organizing a "Who was the crooked ref?" office pool on Friday morning instead of wondering, "How could this happen?" That's why Stern ignored the FBI's advice and used such harsh language in his official statement on Friday; nobody understands the gravity of this crisis more than someone who grew up in New York in the '50s during CCNY's famous point-shaving scandal. This was his worst nightmare, worse than a repeat of the Artest Melee, worse than a repeat of Kermit Washington's punch, worse than anything except a terrorist act during an NBA game. Over everything else, David Stern always wanted his fans to feel completely safe when they're attending games, and he always wanted them to believe that the integrity of the game was intact. Now, they don't feel that way. At all.
So that's two significant problems. Problem No. 1 will fade away over time, although it will never completely disappear. Problem No. 2 can be fixed, although it will take some major work. But Problem No. 3 can't be fixed. If the allegations are true, Tim Donaghy didn't just violate the integrity of the league and rig some games. There's a good chance he altered the course of the 2007 championship. Only three teams had a chance last year: Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. When Dallas choked against Golden State in the opening round, the NBA's refusal to fix a broken playoff system came back to haunt it in Round 2, thanks to a Spurs-Suns matchup that suddenly doubled as the NBA Finals. In Game 1, San Antonio stole home-court advantage with a convincing win that everyone remembers because Steve Nash busted his nose open. The Suns rallied back with a blowout win in Game 2. Here's what I wrote after the third game -- the Spurs were favored by four, with an over/under of 200.5 -- after San Antonio prevailed, 108-101, thanks to Amare Stoudemire playing just 21 minutes because of foul trouble:
Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.
Now ...
Before the Donaghy scandal broke, if you told me there was a compromised official working a 2007 playoff game and made me guess the game, I would have selected Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. There were some jaw-dropping calls throughout, specifically, the aforementioned Ginobili call and Bowen hacking Nash on a no-call drive that ABC replayed from its basket camera (leading to a technical from D'Antoni). Both times, Mike Breen felt obligated to break the unwritten code that play-by-play announcers -- don't challenge calls and openly questioned what had happened. The whole game was strange. Something seemed off about it.
At the time, I assumed the league had given us another "coincidence" where three subpar refs (and calling that crew "subpar" is being kind) were assigned to a Game 3 in which, for the interest of a long series, everyone was better off having the home team prevail ... just like I anticipated another "coincidence" in which one of the best referees would work Game 4 to give Phoenix a fair shake in a game that, statistically, they were more likely to win. After all, it's easier to win Game 4 on the road than Game 3, when the fans are pumped up and the home team is happy to be home.(Which is exactly how it played out. Steve Javie worked Game 4, a guy who Jeff Van Gundy deemed "the best ref in the league" during the Finals. Hmmmm.) Look, this could have been an elaborate series of connected flukes. I'm just telling you that none of it surprised me. Which is part of the problem.
But here's what I didn't expect: That a potentially crooked ref was working that game.
Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running towards their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.
Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?
If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. Hell, they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?
Stern promised us that "we would like to assure our fans that no amount of effort, time or personnel is being spared to assist in this investigation." And really, that's great. Thank you. But I'd rather see tapes of those games. I want to see all five playoff games that Donaghy worked last spring, as well as that Heat-Knicks game and any other contest that's relevant. Before we worry about justice, let's get some answers. Especially for Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. I left that series believing that the Spurs were better, that their offensive execution was unparalleled, that Tim Duncan was the best player on the court, that they would have figured out a way to win that series whether the suspensions happened or not. Now? I'm not so sure. What if an allegedly crooked referee hadn't been working Game 3? What if the Suns won that game? What then?
If you're a diehard Suns fan, this now becomes the toughest playoff loss in NBA history. You have a legitimate case that you were screwed.
If you're a diehard NBA fan, you're horrified but strangely hopeful, because we needed a tipping point to change a stagnant league that was headed in the wrong direction ... and maybe this was it.
Look, we already knew the officiating needed to be improved. We knew the NBA needed to solve the problem of non-playoff teams tanking down the stretch and shelving stars who could have played (and yet continuing to charge fans full price for these games). We knew the NBA needed to solve a lottery system that hasn't quite worked for 20 years. We knew the NBA needed to solve a screwed-up playoff system that only works when the conferences are perfectly balanced, and more importantly, we knew the league needed to start taking some chances. This is a league that hasn't swung for the fences with a major change since 1979, when it brought in the 3-point line from the old ABA. For nearly three decades, it has been making minor cosmetic changes here and there -- the draft lottery, zone defenses, hand-checks, the charging semicircle, improved rating systems for officials, flagrant fouls, the leaving-the-bench rule, the dress code -- while continually ignoring the bigger picture.
What's the big picture? Well, the regular season is effectively meaningless. Contenders can only improve to a point because of the luxury tax, so everyone searches for that same half-assed "we want to contend for a title, but we don't want to lose $20 million this season" competitive zone that leads to deals like Kurt Thomas and two first-round picks for a second-round pick and a 2006 trade deadline in which the biggest move involved Anthony Johnson. Fan interest peaks at three points -- at the start of the season, at the start of the first round of the playoffs, and right before the draft -- and dips at every other point. For seven of the past 10 seasons, the best two teams in the league played before the Finals -- which seems so incredibly shortsighted, I can't even begin to fathom how it's allowed to continue. And worst of all, when an NBA official was accused of fixing games, the prevailing reaction was "Which one?"
So yeah, they could make a movie about Tim Donaghy's story. And they probably will. Let's just hope we're not watching a documentary about the death of the NBA some day, because we're headed that way. Wake up, fellas. Rome is burning.
By Bill Simmons
On Friday afternoon in southern California, you could hear the cacophony of frustrated screenwriters pounding their desks in disgust. The Tim Donaghy scandal doubled as the easiest movie pitch ever.
Imagine how simple it would have been to sell that script. A white NBA referee with a gambling problem (Matt Damon) loses too much money to a bookie (Timothy Olyphant) who's connected with a dangerous family of mobsters (led by head boss Alec Baldwin). One of their muscle guys (Turtle from "Entourage") threatens to beat up the ref unless he gives them inside information. Which he does. Now they have him. They tell him to start throwing a couple of games or they'll go after his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and daughter (the little girl from "Little Miss Sunshine"). He agrees to affect the over/under of games by whistling more fouls than usual, which should drive the scores above the over/under because everyone will be shooting more free throws. For a couple of games, it works. Eventually, they want more. Fearing for his life, he crosses the line and helps fix a few outcomes without realizing the mobsters will never say, "All right, we're good, nice working with you."
Meanwhile, a renegade FBI agent (Ryan Gosling) overhears the ref discussing one of the games on a tapped phone line, then gets tipped off by a mob informant (Joe Pantoliano) that they turned an NBA referee. They track the weasel for a solid year, gather all the evidence they need, then break the news to the NBA commissioner (Ron Silver) and his staff that their league has been compromised. It's too late. Too much damage has been done. The referee resigns, the feds swoop in and that's that. The movie ends with a sobbing Damon going to jail, Gosling getting promoted and Silver glumly watching the tape of a pivotal playoff game from the previous spring, a horribly officiated game that could have potentially affected the championship ... and the sight of that same compromised referee jogging down the court, ready to blow the whistle at a key moment.
The end.
That should have been a movie. Now, it allegedly looks to have happened in real life. If true, it's the rarest of sports scandals, a shocker that shocked absolutely nobody but might end up becoming more significant than anyone imagines. After the most damaging NBA season in three decades, after a series of deep-rooted problems -- almost entirely self-inflicted -- that already had everyone concerned about the league's immediate future, we reached the tipping point with Tim Donaghy.
Guilty or innocent, we will never watch an NBA game the same way. He's going to hang over everything -- every referee, every shaky outcome, every bad call -- in ways the average fan doesn't fully realize yet. Maybe they'll throw Donaghy in jail, maybe they won't, but he'll linger over every court like a black cloud. You'll hear his name more than you think. You and your buddies will make "that guy looks like he's pulling a Donaghy!" jokes every time a referee is making calls against your favorite team. Hecklers will gleefully play the Donaghy card after every bad call against the home team. For honest referees still working games, it doesn't matter what happens from this point on -- their collective integrity will always be questioned, their collective track record won't matter, and that will be that.
So that's one problem. The second problem is more complex. When news of the scandal broke on Friday, as J.A. Adande pointed out in his column that day, every diehard NBA fan had the same reaction. They weren't thinking, "I can't believe it!" or "Oh my God, how could this happen?" They were thinking, "Which one was it?" This was like finding out that your grandfather who smoked three packs a day for 50 years just came down with lung cancer. It was sad but inevitable. It was only a matter of time. These guys never made enough money (as we learned from the airplane ticket scandal) and struggled at their jobs consistently enough that there was no way to tell the difference between blowing a call and intentionally blowing a call.
More than any other professional league, an NBA referee can directly affect the outcome of every game. We've seen it happen time and time again, only we always assumed that the refs in question were working for the best interests of the league, that they were following orders like Luca Brasi (even if there was no definitive proof) -- like the guys who worked Game 6 of the Kings-Lakers series in 2002, or Game 7 of the Suns-Sonics series in 1993, or the infamous Hubert Davis Game in 1994. After Dwyane Wade and Miami received some Vince McMahon-level assistance in Games 3 and 4 of the 2006 Finals, I wrote an angry column about the "officiating crisis" (my words) that prompted Mavs owner Mark Cuban (tired of being fined) to post the link on his blog along with the sentence, "I never have to say a word again." After Dallas squandered that series, Cuban was so traumatized by the officiating that he nearly sold the Mavericks before family and friends talked him out of it.
For anyone who loves the NBA, the officiating has always been the proverbial "elephant in the room." No league has endured more jokes along the lines of "I'm not sure where the NBA ends and the WWE begins." Whether it's because of bad luck, poor training, measly pay or the thanklessness of the profession itself -- maybe it's all of those things -- the NBA employs a handful of good referees and an astonishing number of bad ones. In the playoffs, there never seems to be enough quality officials to go around. If that wasn't bad enough, the league displayed a nasty "habit" (note: I'm using quotation marks because you could never prove anything more than a series of coincidences) of assigning better referees if they needed road teams to prevail (like a marquee team trailing 2-1 and playing Game 4 on the road) and weaker referees if they needed home teams to prevail (because weak referees are more likely to have their calls prejudiced by a raucous home crowd). This "habit" was miraculously cured this past spring, one year after the fallout of the 2006 Finals, when the officiating assignments became noticeably more haphazard and we ended up with just one Game 7 in four rounds. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe not.
And that's before factoring in the public's perception (well-earned, by the way) that superstars receive more favorable calls than non-superstars. It's like Chris Rock's bit about dad getting the biggest chicken leg at the dinner table -- once you reach a certain level in the NBA, the whistles will come. This perpetual leeway allows gifted athletes like Wade, Gilbert Arenas and LeBron James to drive recklessly into traffic in crunch time, knowing they can either score or draw a foul. (Even when Michael Jordan won the '98 Finals on what everyone believed was his final shot ever, he famously shoved Utah's Bryon Russell to the ground before launching that jumper. No whistle.) If anything, LeBron's pre-2007 game depended on this leeway so much that he was completely ineffective in the 2006 World Championships; he kept bowling his way into the paint and waiting for calls that never came. The international refs almost seemed amused by him. The NBA refs would have been bailing him out.
So when news of the Donaghy scandal broke, everyone's reaction was the same: "Which one?"
That's why I had one group of friends frantically organizing a "Who was the crooked ref?" office pool on Friday morning instead of wondering, "How could this happen?" That's why Stern ignored the FBI's advice and used such harsh language in his official statement on Friday; nobody understands the gravity of this crisis more than someone who grew up in New York in the '50s during CCNY's famous point-shaving scandal. This was his worst nightmare, worse than a repeat of the Artest Melee, worse than a repeat of Kermit Washington's punch, worse than anything except a terrorist act during an NBA game. Over everything else, David Stern always wanted his fans to feel completely safe when they're attending games, and he always wanted them to believe that the integrity of the game was intact. Now, they don't feel that way. At all.
So that's two significant problems. Problem No. 1 will fade away over time, although it will never completely disappear. Problem No. 2 can be fixed, although it will take some major work. But Problem No. 3 can't be fixed. If the allegations are true, Tim Donaghy didn't just violate the integrity of the league and rig some games. There's a good chance he altered the course of the 2007 championship. Only three teams had a chance last year: Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. When Dallas choked against Golden State in the opening round, the NBA's refusal to fix a broken playoff system came back to haunt it in Round 2, thanks to a Spurs-Suns matchup that suddenly doubled as the NBA Finals. In Game 1, San Antonio stole home-court advantage with a convincing win that everyone remembers because Steve Nash busted his nose open. The Suns rallied back with a blowout win in Game 2. Here's what I wrote after the third game -- the Spurs were favored by four, with an over/under of 200.5 -- after San Antonio prevailed, 108-101, thanks to Amare Stoudemire playing just 21 minutes because of foul trouble:
Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.
Now ...
Before the Donaghy scandal broke, if you told me there was a compromised official working a 2007 playoff game and made me guess the game, I would have selected Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. There were some jaw-dropping calls throughout, specifically, the aforementioned Ginobili call and Bowen hacking Nash on a no-call drive that ABC replayed from its basket camera (leading to a technical from D'Antoni). Both times, Mike Breen felt obligated to break the unwritten code that play-by-play announcers -- don't challenge calls and openly questioned what had happened. The whole game was strange. Something seemed off about it.
At the time, I assumed the league had given us another "coincidence" where three subpar refs (and calling that crew "subpar" is being kind) were assigned to a Game 3 in which, for the interest of a long series, everyone was better off having the home team prevail ... just like I anticipated another "coincidence" in which one of the best referees would work Game 4 to give Phoenix a fair shake in a game that, statistically, they were more likely to win. After all, it's easier to win Game 4 on the road than Game 3, when the fans are pumped up and the home team is happy to be home.(Which is exactly how it played out. Steve Javie worked Game 4, a guy who Jeff Van Gundy deemed "the best ref in the league" during the Finals. Hmmmm.) Look, this could have been an elaborate series of connected flukes. I'm just telling you that none of it surprised me. Which is part of the problem.
But here's what I didn't expect: That a potentially crooked ref was working that game.
Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running towards their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.
Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?
If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. Hell, they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?
Stern promised us that "we would like to assure our fans that no amount of effort, time or personnel is being spared to assist in this investigation." And really, that's great. Thank you. But I'd rather see tapes of those games. I want to see all five playoff games that Donaghy worked last spring, as well as that Heat-Knicks game and any other contest that's relevant. Before we worry about justice, let's get some answers. Especially for Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. I left that series believing that the Spurs were better, that their offensive execution was unparalleled, that Tim Duncan was the best player on the court, that they would have figured out a way to win that series whether the suspensions happened or not. Now? I'm not so sure. What if an allegedly crooked referee hadn't been working Game 3? What if the Suns won that game? What then?
If you're a diehard Suns fan, this now becomes the toughest playoff loss in NBA history. You have a legitimate case that you were screwed.
If you're a diehard NBA fan, you're horrified but strangely hopeful, because we needed a tipping point to change a stagnant league that was headed in the wrong direction ... and maybe this was it.
Look, we already knew the officiating needed to be improved. We knew the NBA needed to solve the problem of non-playoff teams tanking down the stretch and shelving stars who could have played (and yet continuing to charge fans full price for these games). We knew the NBA needed to solve a lottery system that hasn't quite worked for 20 years. We knew the NBA needed to solve a screwed-up playoff system that only works when the conferences are perfectly balanced, and more importantly, we knew the league needed to start taking some chances. This is a league that hasn't swung for the fences with a major change since 1979, when it brought in the 3-point line from the old ABA. For nearly three decades, it has been making minor cosmetic changes here and there -- the draft lottery, zone defenses, hand-checks, the charging semicircle, improved rating systems for officials, flagrant fouls, the leaving-the-bench rule, the dress code -- while continually ignoring the bigger picture.
What's the big picture? Well, the regular season is effectively meaningless. Contenders can only improve to a point because of the luxury tax, so everyone searches for that same half-assed "we want to contend for a title, but we don't want to lose $20 million this season" competitive zone that leads to deals like Kurt Thomas and two first-round picks for a second-round pick and a 2006 trade deadline in which the biggest move involved Anthony Johnson. Fan interest peaks at three points -- at the start of the season, at the start of the first round of the playoffs, and right before the draft -- and dips at every other point. For seven of the past 10 seasons, the best two teams in the league played before the Finals -- which seems so incredibly shortsighted, I can't even begin to fathom how it's allowed to continue. And worst of all, when an NBA official was accused of fixing games, the prevailing reaction was "Which one?"
So yeah, they could make a movie about Tim Donaghy's story. And they probably will. Let's just hope we're not watching a documentary about the death of the NBA some day, because we're headed that way. Wake up, fellas. Rome is burning.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Magic Make Headlines
Orlando waved millions of NBA dollars. Billy Donovan couldn't resist. But after winning the last two national titles at Florida, will Donovan work his Magic at the next level? History isn't on his side. Pat Forde
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Finally, Brian Hill has been FIRED!!!
In the long-awaited end of a complicated process, it simply came down to this for the Orlando Magic:Magic General Manager Otis Smith fired Brian Hill as coach on Wednesday because he didn't believe Hill would get the most out of the team with his style and strategy if he returned.
Some of the issues in deciding Hill's fate, according to those close to the situation, were Hill's inability to adjust during the Magic's midseason slump; his lack of offensive imagination; and whether he was developing young players Dwight Howard, Darko Milicic, Jameer Nelson, Trevor Ariza and rookie J.J. Redick to their potential.
One veteran player, requesting anonymity, said he didn't sense any of his teammates played a part in forcing out Hill. Hill's first stint with the Magic ended in 1997 with his firing after a player coup.
Magic officials are expected to meet with the media Thursday.
"Brian's contributions to the Orlando Magic have been tremendous," said President Bob Vander Weide said in a statement released by the Magic on Wednesday night. "We appreciate everything Brian did for us as a head coach in taking us to this point, and hope he decides to stay with the organization."
Vander Weide told the Sentinel on May 2 that the team would take "two to three weeks" to "go through the process" of evaluating his team's past season and the job that Hill did.
Twenty-one days later, Hill was out.
The Magic had said in early March when the team was struggling that they still had confidence in Hill. Smith told the Sentinel before the Magic faced the Houston Rockets on March 11 that he expected Hill to "fulfill his contractual obligations" through 2009.
Hill had even said he was not worried about "my job security."
But by the end of the season, Hill was receiving lukewarm endorsements from Vander Weide and Smith.
Vander Weide said after the Magic were ousted by the Detroit Pistons that he was "satisfied" with his team, and a day later, Smith said he "expected" Hill to return.
Then, just before Hill and the Magic decided to part, a club official said Hill was "frustrated" with the job.
Hill was hired for the second time by the Magic on May 24, 2005, taking over for interim coach Chris Jent. Jent had replaced Johnny Davis, who was fired as head coach.
Hill was fired the first time after a player revolt in 1997, ending a near four-year run in which Hill took Orlando to the NBA Finals in 1995.
In his first season back with the team in 2005-06, Hill led the Magic to a 36-46 record -- the same record they compiled under Davis and Jent the previous season.
Last season, the Magic jumped to a 13-4 start but faded badly before making a run to barely reach the playoffs. They were swept in four games in the first round by the Pistons.
Hill became a target of fan criticism on sports-radio talk shows. One fan started a FireBrianHill.org Web site.
There was speculation that Hill and Smith had some philosophical differences, most notably with the style of offense and Hill's use of certain players such as Redick and Milicic.
When told that Smith said the Magic's biggest need this offseason was a scorer, Hill said he was not comfortable giving his opinion, adding he would "defer" to the general manager.
Since Chuck Daly resigned in 1999, the Magic have had four head coaches -- Doc Rivers, Davis, Jent and Hill.
As far as replacements for Hill, veteran coaches Larry Brown, Lenny Wilkens, Stan Van Gundy and Mike Fratello could be available. Veteran Rick Carlisle was fired this season by the Indiana Pacers. Phoenix assistant Marc Iavaroni and Dallas assistant Sam Vincent are also possible candidates. The Indianapolis Star reported today that Stan Van Gundy has turned down an offer to coach the Pacers, and the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina reported that Vincent will be named the Bobcats' coach by Friday, barring unforeseen circumstances.
Florida Gators Coach Billy Donovan, who has led the Gators to back-to-back national championships, has expressed a desire to one day coach in the NBA. But Donovan apparently is waiting on a contract extension from the school. At a news conference Wednesday in New York, where he received the New York Athletic Club's Winged Foot Award, Donovan said he expected to complete an extension at UF.
"I'd like to get it done," Donovan told The Associated Press. "It's not me. People think, 'He's trying to hold this up.' I would have liked to have done it a couple of days after [the championship game.]"
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Soldier No More
D-Wade was literally crying on the bench last night when he hurt his shoulder. What a total puss. I thought he was the tough guy "who keeps getting up". Ironically, he didn't even fall when the injury occurred. I wonder if he'll lose some "street cred" after crying like a little girl, screaming like a bitch, and having to be taken off the court in a wheelchair? I know I won't miss him, as far as I'm concerned, anyone can do what he does; and watching a guy shoot free throws is boring anyway.Now the Heat team will be turned over to the once dominant aging fat ass Shaq. Maybe Wade's injury will finally expose to the world how done Shaq actually is? The guy has been falling fast since his last year in LA. I'm sick of hearing how it doesn't matter because he's still Shaq. In all actuality, it does matter, HE'S DONE. You can add Zo, The Glove, Walker, and Riley to that list.
Speaking of Riley, I sure he's wishing he waited a tad longer before his comeback from "hip replacement surgery". I bet if Wade's injury happened before Riley's return, Riley would have probably never recovered.
Regardless if they squeak into the playoffs, and Wade shots 25 free throws a night; the Heat are all but done.
Smith isn't finished fixing Magic
I decided to post Brian Schmitz's column. As today the trade deadline passed, and the Magic made no deals. So we're left with a talented mess, a clueless coach, and a questionable GM. What good can come out of the rest of this season? What should we be hoping for?
Smith isn't finished fixing Magic
The Magic might not be engineering a trade as they did last season --- a deal that sparked a late-season run --- but this team still needs pleny of tinkering.
If GM Otis Smith's goal is to build a championship, he need to unfold the blueprints again and roll up his sleeves.
Certainly, they need to make the playoffs or this season has been a waste of Dwight Howard's marvelous progression.
But they're looking at a No.6, 7 or 8 seed at best. That's far from a championship path.
The Magic need more consistent players. They need better defenders. And they need some guys who have a different mental make-p, players who get serious before desperation (missing playoffs) sinks in.
At a time Howard, in his third season, is putting things together, the Magic are wasting his efforts.
Sure, they've been injured.
But they've blown games agaisnt the Hawks and Hornets and Bobcats and suffered another loss to the Knicks on Tuesday night.
The shooting guard and small-forward positions are a mess, to put it bluntly.
SF Hedo Turkoglu, whether it's the mystery virus or not, has not had a season you'd expect from a veteran. Trevor Ariza is ready to return this weekend, and while he's a difference-maker, he's far from polished.
SG Grant Hill simply can't be counted on night in and night out. That's no revelation. How can the Magic go through another season, with Grant always a question mark?
Smith isn't finished fixing Magic
The Magic might not be engineering a trade as they did last season --- a deal that sparked a late-season run --- but this team still needs pleny of tinkering.
If GM Otis Smith's goal is to build a championship, he need to unfold the blueprints again and roll up his sleeves.
Certainly, they need to make the playoffs or this season has been a waste of Dwight Howard's marvelous progression.
But they're looking at a No.6, 7 or 8 seed at best. That's far from a championship path.
The Magic need more consistent players. They need better defenders. And they need some guys who have a different mental make-p, players who get serious before desperation (missing playoffs) sinks in.
At a time Howard, in his third season, is putting things together, the Magic are wasting his efforts.
Sure, they've been injured.
But they've blown games agaisnt the Hawks and Hornets and Bobcats and suffered another loss to the Knicks on Tuesday night.
The shooting guard and small-forward positions are a mess, to put it bluntly.
SF Hedo Turkoglu, whether it's the mystery virus or not, has not had a season you'd expect from a veteran. Trevor Ariza is ready to return this weekend, and while he's a difference-maker, he's far from polished.
SG Grant Hill simply can't be counted on night in and night out. That's no revelation. How can the Magic go through another season, with Grant always a question mark?
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Howard's sticker slam wins buzz but not contest
Twelve and a half feet is very high.
I walked down on the court after the dunk contest and looked up at the custom sticker Dwight Howard had stuck way up there. It was a little dizzying. Not to be gushy, but it was way up there. I suspect that if I stood on Dwight Howard's shoulders, I still wouldn't be able to even reach it. And I'd be scared to be up there.
I peered up at that sticker. Unfathomable, but apparently real -- as the whole thing was on international TV and exceedingly well documented. All the same, I urge you to look up at the top of the backboard from down below some time. Imagine a sticker a few inches shy of the top, and wonder: Could a human put that up there? Without divine intervention?
Yes.
Or no.
A photographer with a telephoto lens helped me get a good look at that sticker, and in addition to a pre-printed image of Howard's face, his initials, and his number, there was handwritten marker. Not too big. In fact, even with the lens it was very tough to read.
In this life, you always have to read the fine print. And the fine print on that sticker made clear that Howard, at least, doesn't believe he did it alone.
"All things through Christ" Howard had written in marker. Then "Phil 4:13." That's Philippians 4:13.
Asked about it, Howard recited in a heartbeat: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."
Strengtheneth indeed.
Remember, Dwight Howard's Plan A for this contest was to dunk on a 12-foot rim, but the league nixed the idea earlier in the week. So Howard needed an inventive way to demonstrate his singular advantage: combining his height, his reach, and his hops to get a hand up higher than anybody else.
It was so inventive that at first plenty of people here in the arena couldn't even understand it. This was an idea from Mars, or Lovetron, or wherever it is the good dunks come from. It stretched the mind. For a few seconds, nobody knew exactly what happened. He put a sticker up there? He had a sticker? In his hand? What?
ESPN.com contributor David Thorpe of Scouts Inc. text-messaged me seconds after it happened: "I hate dunk contests," he wrote. "But that was the coolest dunk I've ever seen."
Who can disagree?
No one I have talked to, except, apparently, the judges. Howard got a measly 42, the second-lowest score of any dunk in the first round. Julius Erving and Michael Jordan both gave it an 8. I don't know what criteria they were judging by, but whatever it was, I say inventiveness was undervalued.
Hats off to 2007 Slam-Dunk champ Gerald Green, a worthy champion, but a year from now that sticker dunk is the one we're all going to remember.
John Hollinger's scorecard
Gerald Green
Celtics
Major points for originality and some serious hops
Dwight Howard
Magic
Just a 42 for 12'6" sticker slap? Bigs get no respect
Nate Robinson
Knicks
If not for 2-minute rule we might still be watching him
Tyrus Thomas
Bulls
Judges too harsh on him (at least he got his check)
Gerald Green
Celtics
Major points for originality and some serious hops
Dwight Howard
Magic
Just a 42 for 12'6" sticker slap? Bigs get no respect
Nate Robinson
Knicks
If not for 2-minute rule we might still be watching him
Tyrus Thomas
Bulls
Judges too harsh on him (at least he got his check)
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