Heisler: L.A. x 2 in Elite 8: Fun (yawn) while it lasted

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LOS ANGELES — L.A. uber alles….

As in days of yore, we are once more the center of the basketball universe with two (2) of the NBA’s remaining eight teams!

Actually, it only turned out to be one day of yore… from Sunday afternoon when the Clippers upended the Grizzlies in Game 7 to Monday night when the Lakers, who had just escaped the Nuggets in their Game 7, took the floor in Oklahoma City.

By Tuesday night when the Spurs wore down what remained of the Clips after the Thunder squashed the Lakes, we were down to being the city with the most endangered NBA teams (2).

Of course, it was (yawn) exciting while it lasted as Staples Center tried to figure out how to accommodate the Lakes, Clips and the NHL Kings this weekend.

Anyone for day-night NBA/NBA and NBA/NHL doubleheaders?

Thursday—Phoenix at Kings, 6 p.m.

Friday—Spurs at Lakers, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday—Spurs at Clippers, 12:30 p.m.; Thunder at Lakers, 7:30 p.m.

Sunday—Phoenix Coyotes at Kings, noon; Spurs at Clippers, 6 p.m.

To be honest, Southern Californians accepted their good fortune as their due, having been the center of the basketball world through this Millennium—all 11 1/2 years of it—as the Lakers won the most titles (five) and entertained/revolted fans everywhere with the most controversies (uncountable).

Of course, people here have yet to concede they’re no longer those Lakers, like Jim Buss, who insisted they were still contending for titles in this transition season.

Actually, they’ve been rolling and tumbling since mailing in another second half of the season before Dallas swept them last spring.

This season started with David Stern spiking their Chris Paul deal and continued amid signs of unrest as players adjusted to their new coach but somehow managed to keep it together—for which Kobe Bryant deserves a lot of credit–finishing strong after acquiring Ramon Session, their missing point guard.

Nevertheless, they were still Laker enough to pull a disaster out of thin air, blowing that 3-1 lead over Denver after Andrew Bynum informed the Nuggets it would be “kinda easy” to dispose of them in five.

Of course, winning Game 7 was a massive relief, after ESPN commentator/Laker VP Magic Johnson’s predicted that Andrew Bynum, Pau Gasol and Mike Brown would be “run out of town” if they lost.

Let’s hope the Lakers enjoyed their day of massive relief, because it’s over, too.

Magic’s prediction may well have been too dire, as the team suggested pointedly, announcing it remained “fully committed to and supportive of Mike Brown,” noting the guy whose statue stands in front of the arena “in no way [reflected] the position of team ownership or management.”

By the way, Mike Brown was Jim Buss’s hire.

Of course, three more like Game 1 in Oklahoma City and Brown will come back next season as an endangered species, assuming the team is still fully committed enough to let him return.

An unseemly end would make a lot of other things that were unthinkable two weeks ago thinkable.

Drew for Dwight Howard, anyone?

If Bynum is Jim Buss’s fave and the Magic had no intention of trading Howard for him, the Magic may not just want to get something more than Brook Lopez for Dwight.

For the sake of commerce as well as competitiveness, the Buss’s expectations are even higher than those of talk show hosts.

If Jerry Buss proved his acumen many times over, it was because he demanded excellence but let his professionals, Jerry West and Mitch Kupchak, run the show.

As far as basketball or reality, Dr. Buss, as the Lakers call him, erred on the naive side, as after their 34-48 season in the wake of Shaquille O’Neal’s departure, when he said he thought they’d be back in the West Finals in “a couple of years.”

That was the season they gave Rudy Tomjanovich six years at $30 million—as much as they had paid Phil Jackson to win them three titles. Rudy felt the expectations, looked at what he had to work with and lit out for Houston midway through his first season, leaving $24 mill on the table.

Only a year before, Laker telecasts had begun carrying the always-quotable Jackson’s pre-game press session.

Even if nice, soft-spoken Rudy T said nothing, they continued televising the sessions that season.

Watching the first one, I thought to myself, “Don’t they realize everything has changed?”

Nobody realized it. That’s part of the Busses’ genius. They don’t realize how bad things are, and won’t accept it if that’s how it turns out.

It doesn’t matter if the Thunder is big, tough, young, athletic and finished six games ahead of the Lakers. The Busses would regard a second-round loss as a disaster.

Nor will Brown, Gasol and Bynum be home free if the Lakes pull it together and beat the Thunder.

It doesn’t matter how great a job the Spurs have done of building yet another contender around Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan.

The Lakers passed the Spurs by a long time ago, as far as the Lakers are concerned.

If the Clippers aren’t as good as the Lakers—although the margin in the standings was only one game—they have the advantage of knowing it, and the ability of doing something about it.

The Clips have already lived their dream, winning the third playoff series in franchise history, going back to the Buffalo Braves’ 2-1 first-round victory over the 76ers in 1977.

Better yet, they’re not over the cap and won’t be if they get Blake Griffin to sign an extension, enabling them to pursue exception-level free agents like Ray Allen without worrying about the luxury tax.

If you missed it—and most have—the indomitable Paul, back at the level he reached before his knee injury two seasons ago, is a full peer of the best of the best like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.

Smurf or no smurf, CP3 is one of the game’s great finishers, explaining how the Clippers led the Grizzlies, 2-1, after being outscored, 285-260, aside from their closing bursts in Games 1 and 3.

Topping that, their bench, fifth-worst during the season, bailed them out with 25 points in the fourth quarter of Game 7.

As Magic could tell the Clips, your day will come, too.

Mark Heisler is a regular contributor to SheridanHoops, LakersNation and the Old Gray Lady. His power rankings appear Wednesday and his columns appear Thursday. Follow him on Twitter.

 

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Heisler: Still the Lakers after all these years

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LOS ANGELES – Still crazy after all these years….

There was a time when the Lakers were just a good NBA team, like their romantic underdogs in the ‘60s with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, and the Showtime teams that threw off the Celtics’ dominance in the ‘80s.

Then came Shaq, Kobe and, a few years later, Phil, and nothing was the same for years….

Besides the feud that broke up their dynasty with three titles when Shaq was shipped to Miami as Kobe turned 26, the Lakers had Phil, who could whip up a firestorm on a whim, like calling Sacramento fans “semi-civilized red-neck barbarians”–before going there to play the Kings–or zinging Shaq the year he vowed to come in at 300 and arrived closer to 400.

Then, of course, there were Kobe’s Days of Rage in 2007, going off on Jerry Buss, trying to get himself traded all summer, followed by….

Peace?

From the summer of 2007 to April 22, 2012, nothing bad happened except some unexplained phenomena, like Kobe being accused by three local columnists of “pouting” in a playoff loss, or Kwame Brown hitting a fan in the face with a birthday cake.

(The last wasn’t really a big deal. Kwame and teammates were celebrating Ronny Turiaf’s birthday when they ran into a fan carrying his own cake. As a joke, Kwame swiped at it, and wound up batting it into the fan’s face. As bad as Kwame’s hands were, it shouldn’t have even been a surprise.)

Welcome to the good/bad old days with the Drew-Metta Lakers.

Drew is Andrew Bynum, who became an All-Star starter at 24, but eclipsed even that with enough antics to become the Javale McGee of the star players.

Metta World Peace, of course, needs no introduction.

Both had already had their moments this season, with Metta pointing out Coach Mike Brown’s “video coordinator” background, and Drew not only expressing surprise at being yanked for shooting a three, but vowing to launch more.

It looked like part of a bumpy transition to the new coach by more players than them, including Derek Fisher and Bryant, pushing discreetly for a return to the triangle offense, even as they kept teammates in line behind Brown.

By April 22, the last home game, the Lakers were feeling good about themselves… so Metta was just being Metta when he elbowed James Harden, who got in his way as he celebrated his emergence after a slow start (or whatever you call it when a starting player averages 4.9 at the break).

This was nothing. As Ron Artest, he started the 2004 Auburn Hill riots, one of the worst moments in NBA history, charging into the stands after a fan threw a drink at him and punching the wrong one.

Hey, he’s Metta, nice as can be with a big, charitable heart off the floor, not only loco on it but strong enough to finish riots as well as start them.

Why he’s here in the first place is for the Lakers to explain.

With Trevor Ariza a perfect fit, it wasn’t a great idea to give him a deadline to sign in 2009, then give Artest, who wouldn’t fit at all, five years at $33 million, thinking it was a coup.

They wound up getting their money’s worth in one game—No. 7 of the 2010 Finals against Boston, Artest scoring 20 points to bail the Lakers out with Bryant going 6-for-24.

Click here for Heisler video commenting on the sensationalized media coverage of this year’s NBA playoffs.

Not that a 6-7, 260-pound small forward was a perfect fit as they got older and creakier, and with the adoption of an amnesty rule, Metta was favored to go on the Laker cut list, until they found they had no one else who could start there.

They’re getting along OK without him against the Nuggets. The Lakers went up 3-1 by pulling out a tight Game 4 in Denver, where Bynum, who had just been torched in the L.A. press for acknowledging he was “maybe not ready to play” in Game 3, was asked the usual question about the last, er, next game.

“Close-out games are actually kinda easy,” said Bynum, continuing to err on the brash, or dumb, side.

“Teams tend to fold if you come out and play hard.”

It’s true. I can say it. You can say it. Charles Barkley says it before every closeout game and some that aren’t.

But with Bynum saying it, the Nuggets came out on fire. It was the Lakers who folded, trailing by 15 in the last 6:15, so even Kobe’s four 3s in 3:46 couldn’t bring them all the way back.

So the not-as-old-as-they-were-but-not-young-either Lakers have to win Thursday in Denver… or Saturday in Los Angeles… and hope the Thunder gets rusty with eight days off, or forget how to play altogether in 10 days.

Well, it’s OK, or at least not a total disaster if Drew learns his lesson, isn’t it?

Well, in theory.

Rather than announce, “I’ll never do anything like that again,” Bynum noted his statement might have been correct but the team failed to play hard.

Possibly because it was distracted, with so many players who wanted to choke him.

(With a lethargic-looking 16 and 11, Drew was overshadowed by none other than JaVale McGee, who had been ranked ahead of Drew among knuckleheads.)

I’ve been Bynum’s biggest booster in the L.A. press corps since the days when fans and more Lakers than Kobe wanted to trade him for Jason Kidd.

If Drew did dumb things—parking in a handicapped zone, carrying a Playboy hostess on his shoulders at a party while supposedly rehabbing his injured knee, elbowing J.J. Barea—he kept getting better by leaps and bounds.

Wilt couldn’t make up for stuff like this. I saw Wilt, and Drew is no Wilt.

Of course, if there’s a Game 7, Metta can play in it!

He hasn’t exactly recanted either, telling Conan O’Brien, “I felt something, but I didn’t know it was an actual head. It could’ve been a shoulder. I knew somebody suffered something at that point but I didn’t know it was Harden until I got in the locker room.

“Actually, he does that a lot, not to me, he runs into people’s elbows and puts his chin out there.”

Metta may have been kidding, which would make it merely bad taste, but with him, how can you tell?

It remains to be seen if his return is good or bad news for the Lakers, who are still the Lakers after all these years.

Mark Heisler is a regular contributor to SheridanHoops, LakersNation and the Old Gray Lady. His power rankings appear Wednesday and his columns appear Thursday. Follow him on Twitter.

 

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Heisler on NBA Playoffs: “Somebody gets trashed every day”

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Check out this video of Jack Nicholson Mark Heisler, our Hall of Fame columnist, weighing in on the state of NBA basketball coverage in the day and age of social media, the 24/7 news cycle and the journalistic need to sensationalize coverage in order to engage eyeballs.

Give a close listen to what Mark has to say. It’ll be the topic of his column Wednesday.

It makes a lot of sense, and it comes from the perspective of a super-respected senior writer who has been covering the league for over 35 years (and who will wear shades and a golf cap on camera if he damn well pleases, I guess-CS).

There aren’t many like him, and he is a gem. Click here to read his column archive from SheridanHoops.com. He has been with the site since it’s start-up last Sept. 6.

(As always, the comments section is open. I will encourage Jack Mark to personally reply-CS).

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Heisler: Another way of saying ‘Dirty play’–’Playoff basketball’

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This BS has got to stop, all right.

Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle was right, noting “The dirty BS has to stop,” after losing Games 1-2 in Oklahoma City, not that a lot of tears were shed at seeing his defending world champions’ hair, and skeletal systems, mussed up.

The Mavs play as rough as anyone, as Carlisle all but conceded in his plea for humanity.

“Playoff basketball is physical,” said Carlisle. “We don’t like the cheap shots when they give them. They don’t like them if we give them.”

So it’s justice of a sort—Frontier Justice—with the Thunder targeting Dirk Nowitzki, highlighted by a sequence in which Serge Ibaka gets away with raking him across the face on one jumper, after which Kendrick Perkins does his Kendrick Perkins number.

Remember Malcolm McDowell and his Droogies, the malevolent gang from the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece “Clockwork Orange?”

Anyone who still has the Thunder mixed up with a Boy Scout troop, check out this.

Unfortunately, this won’t wind up being much rougher than the other series, unless the Knicks, Jazz and Nuggets, who are half-way to being swept, are too demoralized to resort to discreet violence.

There’s another term for “Dirty BS.” It’s “playoff basketball.”

In spite of all the rules, suspensions and fines aimed at stamping out violence, the game is getting rougher—and dirtier—all the time.

Here’s something you can depend on:

Whatever system the league puts in, the coaches will test it to its limits.

In an age in which cocking your fist can get you suspended, fighting ceased being a problem long ago.

I can’t remember the last time anyone landed a punch, as opposed to just running out on the floor (ka-ching!)…. unless you want to count Carmelo Anthony’s wild haymaker while backing up that grazed Mardy Collins in the 2006 Knick-Nugget incident when a great deal of milling around, one wrestling match that spilled into the courtside seats and Melo’s drive-by “punch” got seven players suspended for a total of 47 games.

Unfortunately, “hard fouls” haven’t gone anywhere. If they aren’t always dirty, they escalate hostilities as surely as arms lead to arms races.

With flagrant foul rules obliging players to make it look good, they’re no longer capable of acts as wanton as those in the Golden Age of Violence when Kevin McHale clotheslined Kurt Rambis in the 1983 Finals without even getting a technical foul.

That part of the game has changed.

“No layups” remains a fundamental coaching principle that’s dialed up along with everything else in post-season urgency. “Hard fouls” are still considered kosher, whether or not you’re actually making a play on the ball.

As opposed to eliminating “hard fouls” and the “dirty” excesses they lead to, network color commentators commonly explain the right way to do it:

Herewith, the rules for NBA mayhem:

–If you’re taking a hard foul, make sure the guy can’t get off the shot.

–Go for his arms. He shoots with those.

–If you can’t make sure that he doesn’t get the shot off, let him go, as opposed to letting him make it and send him to the line to make it a three-point play.

–For bonus points in this NBA version of the bounty system, step over the SOB while he’s laying there. This shows who the Alpha Males around here are.

Around here, the hits keep happening.

Take the Clippers Blake Griffin, or, as opponents look at it, take his legs out from under him.

With Griffin’s incredible strength and quickness, he’s impossible to guard if sagging off him and conceding him the outside shot doesn’t work.

What to do if you find yourself close enough to the basket for him to jump right over the top of you, even if you’re a seven-footer like Timofey Mozgov, or have a fearsome rep like Perkins?

Foul the living crap out of him.

This is so standard, the Lakers’ Matt Barnes shoved Griffin to the floor in an exhibition game.

The trend held up through April when the Suns’ Robin Lopez did a McHale imitation on Griffin’s neck.

Here’s the funny part, unless you’re Griffin:

Blake now has a bad rep as a crybaby among the referees, who don’t always catch the mayhem and don’t like it when he goes to them in disbelief.

Of course, what makes violence so appealing to coaches is, it’s available to all, not just the good teams.

Imagine you’re Utah Coach Ty Corbin, whose team was just blown away by the Spurs in Games 1 and 2, with the press asking, “Now, what?”

You check your options:

Get better?

Good idea but not likely.

Surrender?

Won’t look good in the papers, plus costs us the gate for two home games.

How about insisting you’re going to “keep fighting?”

That’s it!

Of course, if they ask what you mean by that….

“Fight may be the wrong word,” said Corbin, laughing. “Bump. Well, you can’t bump, either.”

It’s OK, his players understand, with Devin Harris giving out coy hints that Tony Parker, who burned them for 28 points, was due for “a hard foul or two.”

You know how those good teams are. If you hold Parker to 18 in Game 2, as Utah did, the Spurs may figure out another way to beat you even worse, 113-84.

There really is a way to end his BS:

Forget proscribing flagrant fouls, defined as those in which someone knocks the stuffing out of someone else.

Proscribe all intentional fouls.

If it’s not a legitimate play on the ball, it’s two shots and possession.

Then tell the refs to err on the side of protecting the shooter.

When hard fouls are no longer cost-effective, coaches will stop coaching them and players will stop committing them.
Unfortunately, that day hasn’t come and as far as the violence goes, this is just the first round.

Stick around, it only goes one way from here.

Mark Heisler is a regular contributor to SheridanHoops, LakersNation and the Old Gray Lady. His power rankings appear Wednesday and his columns appear Thursday. Follow him on Twitter.

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Heisler: On the bright side for lockout-shortened 2010-11 season, it’s over!

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I finally figured out the problem with the NBA’s lockout-shortened 2011-12 season …

They didn’t shorten it enough.

These days, all sports’ regular seasons seem like interminable waits for the real deal, even if they’re cut from 82 games to 66, crammed into 123 days that started on Christmas, fooling the veterans, most of whom apparently stopped working out at Thanksgiving.

If it was an inelegant rush to put this mess behind them, you could see the season as a triumph… if you fell for two years of rolling hype that held that the NBA, coming off two record revenue seasons, might not have a season.

It would be a shame for them to go through this—I’m hoping you understood this was their problem, not yours, and you could have cared less—without trying to figure out what happened, which would only reveal itself over time.

So, here’s mine:

After decades of union givebacks, with the economic balance still tipped toward the players and unprecedented militancy among the owners, Commissioner David Stern knew he had to get more than he had asked for since getting the first U.S. salary cap in 1983.

Like Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, Stern orchestrated a dire rising tide, noting the possibility of “nuclear winters” and the folding of entire franchises.

Of course, even if this is hard to believe, Stern had an ace up his sleeve!

First of all, nobody was folding.

There really was an owner about to go belly-up, prior to the lockout: New Orleans’ George Shinn.

However, instead of letting him dump the Hornets in a fire sale ahead of a looming work stoppage, Stern assessed the other owners $318 million–$11 mill each–to cash the long-time embarrassment out, taking over the Hornets until they got a labor deal and got a better price.

Unfortunately, this made Stern a de facto owner, as well as the owners’ impartial referee.

This became a bummer when Stern, the owner, rejected GM Dell Demps’ deal that would have sent Chris Paul to the Lakers.

It wasn’t just indefensible as the mother of conflict of interests, provoking a firestorm in New Orleans, which Stern was protecting, or, at least, keeping whole until he could sell it.

With the conflict unmasked, Stern, the impartial referee, realized he couldn’t let Stern, the owner, arbitrarily turn down all offers for CP3.

It was true enough. The deal three-way deal with the Lakers and Rockets was only arguably fair if you overlooked the fact the Hornets would rebuild around Lamar Odom, 32, Luis Scola, 31; Kevin Martin, 28, and Goran Dragic, 25.

The Clippers, on the other hand, could offer a bunch of young players—Eric Gordon, Al-Farouq-Aminu and Chris Kaman, as it turned out—plus Minnesota’s upcoming No. 1 pick, which looked like it could be 1-2-3.

Stern had no choice but to OK it, turning the balance of power on its head in Los Angeles, or, at least, creating one.

Unfortunately for the Hornets, not to mention the Lakers and Rockets, Gordon was hurt, Aminu was bad and the Timberwolves weren’t bad enough, locking the pick in at No. 10 unless the Hornets’ 4% chance of drawing one of the top three comes in.

Oh, and with Gordon out most of the season, Dragic wound up becoming the best player in either deal aside from CP3.

OK, so that didn’t turn out to well for anyone, except the Clippers.

Meanwhile, back in the long drawn-out labor talks …

Time was on Stern’s side, knowing as only he could that he could turn back the clock, recapturing millions the players and owners had already lost to sweeten his offer.

Nov. 1, the scheduled start of the season came and went.

Nov. 15, projected as the deadline for a Dec. 1 start, came and went.

Dec. 1 came and went.

Amid the wall-to-wall, 24/7 consternation, Stern started dropping hints about making up some of the games.

It still took some doing to get an agreement acceptable to his hawkish owners, who were led, oddly enough, by former luxury taxpayer king Paul Allen of Portland and Charlotte’s Michael Jordan, who, as a player, once told the Wizards’ Abe Pollin that if he could sustain his losses, he should sell his team.

The season started.

There were some surprises, if not shocking ones:

San Antonio wasn’t old any more, with a roster full of good, young players around its veteran core, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker.

Chicago was even good without Derrick Rose, which was lucky, because the Bulls were without him almost half the time.

The Clippers were no longer the Clippers.

Nevertheless, it still wasn’t good enough for the Clippers to overtake the Lakers, who were still a reasonable facsimile of the Lakers, without Phil Jackson, the triangle or Odom, despite starting 10-8, amid the players’ unease with their new coach, Mike Brown.

Miami was Miami, no more, no less, a surprise since the Heat looked like it needed only a mid-level-exception-type big man.

Oh, and Dwight Howard was completely out of his gourd.

Intent on not avoiding the mistake LeBron James made, leaving Cleveland, Howard turned in all directions, spinning like a top, and fell over where he was, asking to be traded to New Jersey, turning down a chance to go there months later when the Magic insisted it would pull the trigger, opting in for next season… and then, after proclaiming his loyalty, turned on the organization again, blaming it for reports he wanted coach Stan Van Gundy fired after years of publicly rolling his eyes at everything he had done.

For the maraschino cherry atop the sundae of the Magic’s woe, Howard then hurt his back and underwent surgery.

Now, the Magic, who by now ought to be getting the hint that continuing to spurn their extension offers means he still plans to leave, would have trouble trading him if they do figure out it’s the only way to go.

In things that weren’t surprises, but were fun nonetheless, the Trail Blazers went to hell in a handbasket.

The end loomed as Allen’s frustration with the career-stopping or ending injuries to Greg Oden and Brandon Roy, both princes, led to revolving GMs, with three in three years, and an ongoing search for No. 4.

Of course, this, and the Bobcats’ 7-58 record, explains why Allen and MJ took such hard lines.

They knew this was coming. For them, canceling the season was the best-case scenario.

The curtain falls, at least on the regular season, the prelude to the Real Season, to find Allen, whose tax bills once approached $50 million—annually–bleating about the money he’s losing now while running his team into the ground, and suggesting he might put it up for sale, again.

That roar you heard was Trail Blazer fans chanting, “Sell, please sell!”

Unfortunately for Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who knows something about the joy of oligopoly, even a socialist system like the NBA’s, which guarantees him 50% of everyone’s revenues, can’t make Portland fans buy tickets.

Oh, and Stern sold the Hornets!

The $366 million he got barely covers the $318 million purchase price plus the money the Hornets lost since.

On the bright side, it ties the 2011-12 season up with a neat bow. Not only did the NBA play one, after all, in the best news of all, it’s over.

Mark Heisler is a regular contributor to SheridanHoops, LakersNation and the Old Gray Lady. His power rankings appear Wednesday and his columns appear Thursday. Follow him on Twitter.

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