Sharp Cuts, Crisp Passes, Solid Screens

Perhaps animated by the spirit of DJ, the Celtics FINALLY broke through on the road in Texas last night, and came back from 13 down to beat a short-handed Rockets team by a handful. Not that I was watching; I was finally back on the court again myself, tying to play myself back into "game shape" after a two-week lay-off due as much to weather, travel, and lingering winter puniness as any other reason. This was actually my second night back (since I also played last Wednesday), and it really showed on both ends of the floor -- had a tough time moving defensively to stay with my opponent, and my shooting...well, the less said about that the better. I did finally get into enough of a rhythm that I was able to make a few easy jump shots and a couple of lay-ups to finish fast breaks. But even just running the floor was an ordeal, my reactions were all a step slow, and every shot I put up seemed to roll off the side of my index finger rather than cleanly leaving my hand.

But all those personal shortcomings aside, the nice thing about this time of year is that, for the most part, we are ALL starting to play together a lot better. We're setting better screens, and playing good help defense, the cuts are sharper, the passes crisper, and the whole game just seems to flow a lot more smoothly than it did even just a few months ago. Baseball Spring Training has already begun in Florida and Arizona; the All-Star game and the NBA trading deadline have both passed; the High School and College seasons are all but over now, and it's Tournament time: the beginning of March Madness. Good teams are SUPPOSED to be peaking right now, and it's really a joy to watch. Especially at the High School level, where so much of a team's success is generated by their ability to learn and master certain aspects of the game more quickly than their opponents over the course of a season, the maturing of these young ballplayers is a joy to witness. It's like a metamorphosis: these young players come out of their cocoons and suddenly they can fly. They even move differently on the floor, more gracefully, more confidently, like basketball players. You can easily recongnize a well-coached team this time of year: they've mastered the fundamentals of passing, dribbling, shooting, rebounding, and defending; they've learned their offensive and defensive sets, figured out where they belong on the court in any given situation, and what their responsibilities are; they're running the floor, pressing after made shots, easily breaking their opponent's presses and transforming them into easy baskets, communicating effectively with one another and playing together like a single unit, like a TEAM. With all the emphasis on winning and losing in sport, it's easy to overlook the more fundamental teacher/student, master/disciple relationship which transforms losers into winners. Victory is simply one measure of excellence. But it is not necessarily excellence in its own right.

OK, that's enough of a sermon for today. Just one last word of benediction. Forget about the scoreboard, or the win/loss record. If you REALLY want to measure the excellence of a basketball team, watch them practice and try to notice the little things: how sharply they cut, how crisply they pass, how solidly they set their screens. Because these are the things that ultimately distinguish the real winners from the hopeless losers....

A great player and a wonderful person...

I guess the only thing that really upsets me more than hearing that some middle-aged man has dropped dead in his driveway while shoveling snow is hearing that a middle-aged, former professional basketball player has dropped dead of a heart attack for no apparent reason at all. One of the little fibs I like to tell myself is that I play basketball so that I WON'T drop dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow, so this sort of news sure puts a damper on that kind of wishful thinking big time. It's just not right. Especially when it's somebody like Dennis Johnson, who came into the league when I was still in college and helped lead the Seattle Supersonics (my hometown team) to their one and only NBA Championship.

I know here in Boston DJ is much better remembered for his Championships with the Celtics, his five All-Star appearances, and especially his slashing left-handed lay-up to beat the Pistons in the final seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Conference Finals, after Larry Bird's amazing steal of the inbounds pass. But I remember a tenacious defender who sat on the bench in High School, and then played Jr College ball before finally attending Pepperdine and then being drafted into the NBA. And although he's now part of that Beantown Pantheon which includes Larry Bird, Kevin McCale, Robert Parish and Danny Ainge, I'll always see him first in a Sonics uniform, alongside Gus Williams and "Downtown" Freddie Brown, Jack Sikma, Lonnie Shelton, Paul Silas and coach Lenny Wilkens -- MVP of that victory against the Bullets, when Washington Coach Dick Motta first coined that now famous phrase "the opera ain't over 'til the Fat Lady sings" after seeing the publicity for Wagner's Ring Series which was also being performed in Seattle at the time. DJ made the Fat Lady squeal with delight. Along with a few hundred thousand die-hard Sonics fans like myself.

Still, it was Larry Bird who said it best. "Dennis was a great player, one of the best teammates I ever had, and a wonderful person." It's hard to say it any clearer than that. We should all do so well by our friends.

A sigh of relief

OK, we can all stop holding our breath -- just before the All Star break, the Celtics break through and put an end to their eighteen-game losing streak. Of course, I couldn't bear to watch -- I was busy watching the Blue Devils dismantle Boston College on the other channel, after this winter's first real snowstorm cancelled my usual Wednesday evening pick-up game. And I'm not really sure I've got much more to add. The Celtics could use a long weekend off. Let's just hope the second half of the season goes a little better for them than the first....

A dagger in a broken heart

Ashamed to say I dozed off to sleep after a long weekend of church sometime in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter, so I actually missed the last-second shot by former Celtic Ricky Davis which sent his old teammates down to their eighteenth straight defeat. And I honestly don't know whether I'm disappointed or grateful. At least with the Truth back on the floor the Green have a chance to regain a little of their tarnished pride. I just thank God that Red wasn't here to see this either....

Magic in Garbage Time

Got home from the gym today, and flipped on the TV while I was changing my clothes...and what should I see on ESPN Classic but a replay of the 1992 NBA All-Star Game. This is perhaps my most favorite basketball game of all time, simply because it featured a ton (maybe more) of Dream Teamers, and was played just a few months after Magic Johnson was forced to retire from the Lakers because of his HIV infection. But he still led the West to a 40 point blowout, earned MVP honors, and...and this is the part that always makes my heart pump...sucessfully defended one-on-one against first Isiah Thomas and then Michael Jordon in the last two minutes of garbage time, while knocking down three straight treys himself at the other end. And I can still remember how I felt at the time, all the emotion of that moment at the end of the game -- a game that meant nothing and yet meant everything, a game that was already both won and lost, Magic's last game in the NBA against these guys he'd played against so often...it just meant so much, it brough tears to my eyes. And now, fifteen years later, I watch this same game with all the nostalgia of an old man remembering his own misspent youth, and...well, I feel grateful. And greatly filled with both a joy and a sadness I can hardly describe....

Super Bowl ex ell eye

OK, the big game is finally over, defined in my mind by two big plays: Deven Hester's 92 yard return of the opening kick-off for a touchdown, which put the Bears up 7-0 only 14 seconds into the game, and Kelvin Hayden's fourth quarter 56 yard run-back of an intercepted pass, which put the Colts out of reach and ended Chigago's come-back hopes. And in between? Well, it just goes to show that when you insist on playing in the pouring rain, people are going to drop the ball. The Colts showed a lot of character battling back after spotting the Bears a seven point lead, and really pretty much dominated the game from coin toss to gun, but a lot of the first half in particular reminded me of a greased pig contest. Anyway, that's enough about football. Congratulations Peyton Manning. Enjoy your trip to Disney World.

I've heard that the price of thirty-seconds worth of commercial airtime during yesterday's Super Bowl was $2.5 million, and that over $100 million is estimated to have been bet on the game. How much beer does Budweiser have to sell in order to justify all those ads? And is this really what we want to lift up as a worldwide celebration of traditional American Values: a public spectacle of Competition, Consumption, and Gambling? I think the homophobic Snickers ad was probably the most annoying, although I have to admit I wasn't really paying all that much attention. And the Budweiser "Rock, Paper, Scissors" spot. That's a helluva lesson to teach our children about the importance and value of fair play.

Meanwhile, once again I had the pleasure of listening to a spokesman from the current administration describe our "surge" in Iraq as a "long, fourth quarter drive" on which the ultimate outcome of the game depends. But I'm not too optimistic. This is a team that fumbles routinely and refuses to punt. So you can just imagine where the smart money is....

Humble in Victory, Proud in Defeat

And so it came to pass, in the winter of 2007, that Celtic pride reached a new low, while setting a new franchise record for consecutive losses. And from where I sit, the end appears nowhere in sight. This current losing streak is not quite so dramatic as Danny Ainge's 0-13 start with the Phoenix Suns a decade ago (which spawned the following joke: "Knock, Knock" "Who's there?" "Owen." "Owen who?" "Owen Thirteen....") But like a lot of fair-weather West Coast ex-pats, I've pretty much stopped even watching, since the Celtics can't even seem to figure out new ways to lose... preferring to falter in the old-fashioned way night after night after night. It's pretty pathetic, actually. And I find little comfort in the fact that the team will be better in the future, while for the time being at least it's easy to get tickets.

Meanwhile, saw two other games this past week, both of which left me feeling very inspired. The first was the Oregon/UCLA rematch in Pauley Pavilion Thursday night. Earlier this year the Ducks beat the Bruins in Mac Court by a bucket, in what was one of the most exciting college games I've seen all year. Thursday night, with John Wooden in the house, I had few doubts that sixth-ranked UCLA would be sufficiently motivated to insure a different outcome on their own home court, but even so it was gratifying to see the ninth-ranked Ducks hang with them, battling back and battling back but just never quite getting over the hump. The California kids were just a little quicker to the ball all night long, which caused the kids from Eugene to rush their shots just enough to turn normally routine baskets into near misses. Move quickly, but never hurry Coach Wooden used to say. But the Ducks had to hurry to keep up with the Bruins, and in the end they lost by a dozen.

The second game was between our local private High School and their traditional North Shore rival, a team now coached by our team's former coach. The opponents got up early 4-2, then the home team put on their press, reeled off seven straight points and never looked back. I try to watch these kids every chance I get, even though I don't have a kid on the team myself; and it's been lots of fun watching them develop and mature, both as individual players and as a team. Their execution Friday night was almost perfect, and they ended up beating a very good rival by a very wide margin. I'd almost forgotten how good a victory like that can feel. But then again, I haven't experienced that many of them.

One of the drawbacks of playing a lot of pick-up ball is that after awhile victory or defeat don't really seem to matter all that much. Sure, there may be a little playing time at stake in those games where the winners keep the court and the losers wait for "next," and pride of course is always a factor, but I've played in Junior Varsity practices that had more intensity than most of over-35 pick-up games I play in now, and I guess on some level at least I prefer it that way. Aerobics for Middle-Aged Men one of my buddies calls our game, and I guess that's an OK thing. Too much intensity and competitiveness is actually frowned upon; nobody wants to get hurt out there, and the bickering that generally seems to accompany too competitive an attitude just detracts from everyone's playing time... not to mention the enjoyment of the game.

But I also have to confess, I sometimes miss it. It sometimes pisses me off when guys don't D-up, when they basket-hang and don't share the ball, can't be bothered to fight over the top of screens, or don't step through after making a pass. Of course, it also sometimes bugs me when guys crash the offensive boards too aggressively, or make the hard foul in order to prevent an easy lay-up. And of course, I have also been guilty of both sets of infractions myself many times. So I guess I'm just a hoop hypocrite. But this slogan, "humble in victory, proud in defeat" really says a lot to me. It's good to win, but it's also good to be a good winner: to respect the skill and competitiveness of your opponent, and to recognize that "all glory is fleeting." And it's good as well to be able to hold your head high in defeat, knowing that you left it all out there on the floor, and have nothing to be ashamed of. Because at the end of the day, it really isn't about whether you win or lose. It's how you play the game....