Category Archives: nba basketball

Global hoops

With increasing frequency, the NBA is helping U.S. sports fans learn world geography. And reminding us that a long-held provincial belief of American basketball exceptionalism is a bit outdated.

The latest examples are the league’s recent draft, in which a young lad from France was chosen No. 1, and the masterful work of the Denver Nuggets’ Serbian headliner in the championship finals.

On the elite level, the game—invented in Massachusetts, yes; but by a Canadian—still is overwhelmingly dominated by Yanks. But two of the first seven players drafted this spring are from Europe. And though it took 31 years of NBA drafts before a non-American was picked No. 1, there now have been 14 players from outside the United States so honored—10 in this century.

In recent years, NBA teams have thrived with a wave of international stars: Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Cameroon’s Joel Embid, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis, France’s Rudy Gobert. Rosters have included top-notch Spaniards, Australians, Dominicans, Canadians, Chinese.

Really, anyone who has been paying attention to the sport could not have been shocked by Denver being led to its first title by the MVP performance of Serbian Nikola Jokic. In the peripatetic hoops cosmos, non-American efficiency began to become clear at least 30 years ago, back when former collegiate coach Fran Fraschilla, now a TV commentator, noticed that Europeans “took our game and made it more interesting. I fell in love with the way they played the game.”

Before Jokic was born—before, in fact, his native Serbia emerged as an independent nation during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ethnic wars of the early 1990s—those stomping grounds had become a pipeline of NBA talent.

Five members of the 1990 Yugoslavia team that won the world championship—most notably Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Tony Kukoc—excelled in the NBA. Four other Yugoslav stalwarts from that era—Dino Rada, Predrag Danilovic, Zarko Paspalj and Jure Zdovc—also were productive NBA regulars. That was about that time that basketball watchers quipped, “The Americans invented it; the Yugoslavs perfected it.”

Yugoslavia won an Olympic basketball gold in 1980 (when the U.S. boycotted Moscow) and silvers in 1968, ’76 and ’88, plus a bronze in ’84. Then, during the 1990 Seattle-based Goodwill Games, a now defunct Ted Turned event aimed at cutting through some of the Olympic politics of East-West boycotts, the U.S. team was humbled in back-to-back games by both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, mystifying the American players by eschewing a power, slam-dunk approach for passing, moving without the ball and deadeye shooting.

And though American basketball partisans, after the Yanks’ worst Olympic finish of third place at the 1988 Seoul Games, argued that they were being handicapped by international basketball federation rules banning NBA players, in fact U.S. hoops pooh-bahs had been blocking pros’ participation. Those Yankee officials figured our collegiate guys were good enough to win all the time and, more to the point, understood that the entrance of NBA talent also would bring NBA front-office types in to take their jobs.

So it was left to a Yugoslav from the Serbian region, international basketball federation secretary general and International Olympic Committee member Borislav Stankovic, to push for welcoming NBA players into the Games. That happened in 1992, just as the Balkans War was splintering Yugoslavia (and its national team) into what are now seven countries—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

In the confusion, Croatia competed as an independent nation in the ’92 Olympics, winning the basketball silver medal with former Yugo team members Petrovic and Kukoc. And Yugoslavia, allowed one more Olympic turn with athletes from Serbia and Montenegro, won the basketball silver in ’96. Divac and Paspalj were that team. In 2016, independent Serbia, with a 21-year-old Nikola Jokic aboard, took the Olympic silver—beating Croatia along the way before losing to the United States in the gold-medal final.

Before this month, the only time the Denver Nuggets played for a championship was in 1976, in their final season of the American Basketball Association before merging into the NBA, when their roster—like virtually all teams in the two rival leagues then—featured only fellows from American colleges: Kansas, North Carolina, UConn, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Colorado, Stanford, Michigan State.

Not anymore. Now, along with the always improving, entertaining NBA show, our horizons and geographical knowledge are expanding.

There is traveling in basketball. (Swallow the whistle, ref.)

Favor Curry

This week seemed like a good time to check out a Stephen Curry performance at Madison Square Garden. He recently had produced career-high scoring games of 62 and 57 points. And it was at this very stage of the NBA season in 2013—late February—that his 54-point outburst at the Garden prompted Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen to conclude that Curry became “singularly responsible for a fundamental shift in basketball strategy that filtered down to every level of the sport.”

Curry’s audacious utilization of the three-point shot that night was featured prominently in Cohen’s 2020 book, “The Hot Hand; the Mystery and the Science of Streaks.” Curry’s Golden State Warriors lost that game to the New York Knicks. But so riveting was the Curry show that the partisan Knicks crowd increasingly threw its emotional and vocal support his way.

Double-teamed, hounded off the dribble, cornered in far reaches beyond the three-point arc, Curry kept hurling his long-range thunderbolts, a lesson in the physics of the perfect parabola. Flawless arches, launched with a sudden flick of his wrists through considerable space, right to the bottom of the net.

I was working that evening as Newsday’s second-banana, tasked with coming up with some pertinent sidebar to go with our beat reporter’s game story and, by halftime, Curry obviously was my topic. He ultimately converted 18 of 28 field-goal attempts, including an impossible 11 of 13 three-pointers, some of those on which Knicks players swore Curry “couldn’t even see the basket.”

And it wasn’t just those sublime rainbows that were redefining an event as Garden-variety, the very antithesis of “commonplace.” Curry’s game was displaying all colors to the Knicks, lacking no imagination whatsoever. Deft passing, whirligig circumnavigation of defenders, soft floating layups.

The complete procedure resembled a basketball version of triple bypass surgery on the Knicks, giving them whiplash with his darting crossover dribbles. Only his height—6-3—was not outsized. He played all 48 minutes, had team highs in rebounds (six) and assists (seven.)

Afterwards, Curry compared the escalating perfection to a pitcher finishing a no-hitter, aware that “my teammates were jiving,” that there “was a lot of energy in that arena….Once I started to get some numbers, you could hear the crowd a little bit. It was electric. So I was kind of running off adrenaline down the stretch.

“When I get good looks and see the ball go in a couple of times, I was going to take it, no matter where I was on the floor.”

At the time, Curry was a fourth-year pro. His two league MVP honors, seven All-Star designations and three championship seasons still were in the future. But he had been a breakout college star for Davidson, and his Warriors coach in 2013, Mark Jackson, made it clear that the 54 points were not so surprising.

“To the viewing audience, that’s getting hot,” Jackson said. “To us, that’s Steph Curry. That’s who he is. He’s a knockdown shooter as good as anybody who’s played.”

Jackson had spent 11 years playing for St. John’s University and the Knicks at the Garden, the so-called basketball Mecca, and pointed out that “I’ve seen a lot of great performances in this building. But this goes up there. That shooting performance was a thing of beauty.”

And within four years of that night, Cohen wrote in “The Hot Hand,” Curry “was the most influential basketball player alive….the best shooter on the planet.”

So this week, seven years since Curry lowered the boom on his sport, he and the Warriors were back at the Garden after a fruitless pandemic-infested season—the Warriors finished in last place and Curry played only five games. And the Hot Hand sense was reviving, with Curry’s 62-point game on Jan 3 and 57 on Feb. 6.

For the first time since March, the Garden allowed some spectators to attend—2,500 rattling around the 19,000-capacity joint—and I was drawn to the small screen. It wasn’t the same as that rollicking 2013 affair, of course, but Curry was Curry, playing with the same deceiving nonchalance—no-look passes, sneaky steals, casually dispatched attempts from great distances.

He led all scorers with 37 points, 26 in the second half, including the go-ahead three-pointer with 3:38 to play. A lesser meteor strike, yes. But another pretty hot hand. Another first-chair virtuoso presentation. Bravo.

The Knicks as contenders? (Ask your parents.)

This is how long it’s been since the New York Knicks played for a championship: One early-season Knicks’ loss leading up to that most-recent NBA Final-round appearance was the result of a last-second three-point basket by a Milwaukee Bucks sharpshooter named Dell Curry.

Stephen Curry’s father.

Way back then, in 1999—20 years ago; a generation ago—I had volunteered to cover that season after Newsday’s designated Knicks beat reporter traded herself to the New York Times. I can report that the experience was akin to having a courtside seat at a Stephen King novel. Abundant horror. Relentless suspense. Imperfect, real-life ending.

Knicks fans, not as thoroughly despondent as during this—the worst season in the team’s 73-year existence—nevertheless were as restive as ever then, regularly in full grumbling mode during a disorienting season which had been downsized from the usual 82-game slog to a 50-game frenzy over 13 weeks.

Because of a protracted labor dispute, training camps weren’t opened until mid-January, almost four months later than originally planned, and immediately the sky seemed to be falling. Spectator favorites Charles Oakley and John Starks had been traded away and in their place were an (unfairly) perceived slacker, Marcus Camby, and the NBA’s Enemy No. 1, Latrell Sprewell, whose 68-game suspension for choking his Golden State coach a year earlier had just been lifted.

The first game wasn’t played until February 5 and on April 19, already down to the last eight games, the Knicks—their roster stocked with fabulously compensated but aging, injury-hobbled veterans—were adrift at 21-21. They likely were going to miss the playoffs for the first time in 12 years.

The condensed schedule, which cut significantly into practice time, exacerbated the Knicks’ health issues and the need to marshal a reconstituted roster. There was an ongoing sense of fitting square pegs into round holes, constant talk of seeking a “chemistry”—though backup point guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers. Not basketball players.”

Really, those Knicks were schizophrenic. And so were those Knicks. Beautiful music one night. Completely off-key the next.

Five days into the season, Sprewell suffered a stress fracture in his heel and missed 13 games. The theoretically indispensable Patrick Ewing, from the start, was nursing a bad knee, a deteriorating Achilles tendon—and, later, injured ribs. He was absent for 12 games and below par for many others. Larry Johnson, another past-his-prime former All-Star, was restricted by chronic knee tendinitis.

Holding on to late leads was a persistent problem, a recurrence noted one night in Phoenix by radio play-by-play man Gus Johnson as the clock—and the Knicks’ advantage—again were leaking away.

“Coach Jeff Van Gundy is pacing the sidelines,” Johnson reported to his listeners.

Van Gundy, three feet away, turned to Johnson. “Damn right,” he said.

As the Knicks’ new hired gun, Sprewell engaged in serious one-on-one practice duels with the team’s shooter-in-residence, Allan Houston, in attempts to establish a pecking order. Until, eventually—and just in time—the two came to the conclusion that there was room for both of them.

Sprewell bridled at being used as a sixth man most of the season and declared that he wouldn’t change his full-throttle style to fit Van Gundy’s half-court sets. Like Van Gundy, though, his intense persistence ultimately served the team well.

Somehow, despite their deficiencies, the Knicks never lost their fire, a trait embodied by Childs, all of 6-foot-3, who late in the season offered to rumble with Atlanta’s 7-2 Dikembe Mutombo after accusing Mutombo of an intentional elbow that knocked out Childs’ tooth.

“It’ll be a 12-round fight,” Childs promised. “I’m going to call Don King and get it set up. I may not be able to reach his mouth, but I’ll get him.”

As the Knicks continued to flail around the .500 mark, rumors persisted that general manager Ernie Grunfeld was about to fire Van Gundy, who hardly was surprised. (“What’s he supposed to be saying to me?” Van Gundy said, “‘Good job’? You know, like, ‘Keep it up’?”)

When the Knicks hit that 21-21 low point, three places out of a playoff spot, team president Dave Checketts instead fired Grunfeld. And word leaked that Checketts was talking to Phil Jackson, coach of the six-time NBA champion Chicago Bulls, about also replacing Van Gundy.

Then came the series of far-fetched happenings. Down 15 points with seven minutes to go in Miami against the first-place Heat, the Knicks wound up winning by two. The next night, they won in Charlotte in the process of taking six of their last eight and sneaking into the playoffs. Barely.

Whereupon Houston’s awkward, desperation last-second 14-foot jump shot, waffling on the rim and backboard before deciding to fall through, bushwhacked Miami in the last seconds of the decisive fifth game of the first round. That was the first—and still, only—time a No. 8 seed eliminated a No. 1.

A second-round sweep of Atlanta suddenly had Garden fans, those insatiable beasts, temporarily sated and chanting Van Gundy’s name—“I thought the next word would be ‘sucks,’” was Van Gundy’s sly reaction—and had Checketts admitting he had lied about denying contacts with Jackson.

Next, tied a game apiece against Indiana in the third round, the Knicks learned that Ewing’s Achilles tendon was torn. But while he watched from the bench in the third game, with 11.9 seconds to play and the Knicks down by three, another impossibility was conjured by Larry Johnson. He caught a deflected inbounds pass and drilled a three-point shot as he was fouled, and his subsequent free throw won the game. And the Knicks won the series in six.

That the Knicks, without Ewing and with Johnson’s bad knee acting up, then lost the Finals to a younger, healthier San Antonio team in five games was perfectly reasonable.

So, close but no cigar.

There is a tired old cliché in sports that “nobody remembers who came in second,” a contention that anything less than a championship is failure. Horsefeathers. Those Knicks were memorable. And they get better as the years pass.

Always a retiring fellow

IMG_0952

Only very briefly did I have a front-row seat to Tim Duncan’s masterful 19-year NBA career, and only in his earliest days with the San Antonio Spurs. Duncan was 22 years old at the time, in his second pro season. He was then, as he remained until his retirement this week at 40, the antithesis of the clamorous NBA culture. Amid the sport’s garish theatricality—raucous crowds, deafening music, enabling acoustics—Duncan’s game was one of muted perfection.

The occasion was the 1999 championship finals against the New York Knicks. Because a labor dispute had delayed the start of the 1998-99 season until January of ’99—and because my Newsday editors had failed to replace our departed Knicks beat writer during the NBA owners’ lockout—I became a last-second stand-in to chronicle that abbreviated Knicks campaign.

That the Knicks wound up in the finals against the Spurs and Duncan was a most unlikely development. Through 42 games of the truncated 50-game schedule, hurriedly pieced together with the labor cease-fire, the gyroscopically challenged Knicks barely were able to maintain any equilibrium, slogging along with a shaky 21-21 record.

But they evolved into a spunky outfit at just the right time, the first No. 8 seed to ascend to the finals by shocking top conference seed Miami, sweeping Atlanta and knocking off Indiana. Along the way, they lost perennial all-star Patrick Ewing with a torn Achilles and arrived in San Antonio—the two teams had not met during the season—with former all-star Larry Johnson hobbling on a sprained knee.

The Spurs, meanwhile, were at a full gallop, about to set an NBA record of 12 consecutive post-season victories during the Knicks series. Steve Kerr, the former Chicago Bulls sharpshooter who now coaches the 2015 champion Golden State Warriors, was a role player on that San Antonio team. Avery Johnson, who spent five years as an NBA coach and now coaches the University of Alabama, was a vital Spurs factor who scored the championship-clinching basket with 47 seconds to play in Game 5. Imposing 7-foot-1 all-star David Robinson, who was late in his 14-year-career, was the Spurs inside force.

But the primary motor for San Antonio was Duncan, the high tide who lifted all teammates’ boats. Against the Knicks, Duncan scored 33, 25, 20, 28 and 31 points in the series. He took 16, 15, 12, 18 and 9 rebounds. He blocked shots, delivered assists and was the obvious final-round MVP—the first of three such honors in the five championships he eventually won with the Spurs.

Seldom has one player made so much noise. Yet so quietly. Throughout his career, Duncan betrayed so little emotion, on and off the court, that The Onion, the satirical news source, once posted the farcical headline: “Tim Duncan Hams It Up for Crowd by Arching Left Eyebrow Slightly.”

His was not a false humility. Pressed during that Knicks series whether he could see himself as a 6-11 point guard, since he seemed to play every other position effortlessly, Duncan acknowledged that he would be happy to try. And that he believed he would have an impact in that little man’s role.

But he never indicated any desire whatsoever to seek the spotlight. Instead of narcissistic showboating and self-promotion, instead of angry slam dunks and demonstrative chest-beating, Duncan was restrained eloquence. Turn-around jump shots banked gently off the glass. Spinning layups. Rebounds. Shtick-less efficiency.

It was typical that Duncan skipped the kind of season-long farewell tour Kobe Bryant embarked upon this past season and left his retirement announcement (without comment) to a Spurs press release.

(San Antonio River Walk)

(San Antonio River Walk)

He came to be Old Man River Walk, as much a landmark in San Antonio as the network of restaurants, bars and shops along the city’s eponymous waterway. Yet, just as his basketball home was not the definition of glamour, his style was not the sort that spread his name beyond hard-core fandom. My own informal poll has concluded that, while casual sports observers easily can identify Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, they struggle to place this Tim Duncan fellow.

All those years ago, during the 1999 finals in which Duncan put the Knicks on the road to extinction (their last NBA finals appearance, by the way), his opponents and teammates offered reviews that never needed revising….

Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy: “Nobody on the planet can guard Duncan. [And on defense], he is the long arm of the law, does a great job of turning us into a jump-shooting team.”

Knicks forward Latrell Sprewell: “He is long, excellent with the ball, has a great touch for a big guy. We have to go back to the drawing board.”

Spurs teammate Mario Elie: “He just does his job, doesn’t complain, doesn’t bring attention to himself.”

duncan