Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  Like players, coaches have tendencies. Gentry tends to conjure up remedies and theories from his rich past, having been a head coach of three teams and an assistant under men like Larry Brown, Kevin Loughery, and Doug Collins. Weber is a relentlessly upbeat clinician and an unshakeable positive thinker who has read over four hundred books with titles like Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior and written poems with lines like “So don’t wallow in doubt or be crippled by fear/Take positive action and watch both disappear.” He never has a bad day. Dan D’Antoni, Mike’s older brother who joined the staff this season, coached high school ball in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for thirty years. Dan’s default strategic position is: Never mind all the X’s and O’s, let’s just play harder than they do. Iavaroni calls Dan, affectionately, “The Old Ball Coach.”

  D’Antoni’s coaching instincts are closer to Dan’s than to Iavaroni’s. Early in the season D’Antoni had a dream in which he had to prepare an academic paper about the season. “But then I found out Marc had already finished his,” says D’Antoni, “and I got all worried because I knew mine wouldn’t be nearly as good.” During a coaches meeting in December, D’Antoni said: “We need to play this lineup—Nash, Bell, House, Marion, and Diaw. Against the Clippers it was real nice; against New York it was real nice. We gotta have people who can make shots.”

  “But, Mike,” said Iavaroni, “that lineup was only out there for a few minutes together.”

  “But if you watch the game,” said D’Antoni, “you just get a better feel about it.”

  It was a constant dialectic between the head coach and his lead assistant: Iavaroni relies on tape and stats, D’Antoni on feel and flow. Art versus science. Quite often, after he has grouped his players into a certain offensive alignment, D’Antoni will say, “All right, from here, we just play basketball.”

  At the same time, D’Antoni has been around long enough to know that “just playing basketball” or “just playing harder” than the other team isn’t enough. And so he relies heavily on Iavaroni’s stats and ability to construct a defensive game plan. In preparing for the Lakers, Iavaroni wants to play more traditionally, less like an NBA team, and keep one defender on Bryant so he will be likely to take a lot of shots and freeze out his teammates.

  “So the philosophy we use on Carmelo Anthony, Ray Allen, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant is, ‘The more involved the superstar, the less involved his teammates,’ ” says Iavaroni. (When the coaches talk specific strategy about a player or team, they almost always bring in examples from other players and other teams.) “I know it’s not real comfortable for us if Kobe is feeling it. But for every shot he makes, the other guys are saying, ‘Oh, shit, Kobe’s doing it all again.’ ”

  D’Antoni sees some logic to that, but it makes him nervous. “I don’t know why sometimes we just don’t trap Kobe on pick-and-rolls,” D’Antoni says. “Why give him a chance to really get off? Let’s say we’re going down the stretch and we’re two points up. And now you can’t turn Kobe off.”

  Iavaroni: “You can’t turn Kobe off down the stretch anyway.”

  D’Antoni: “Yeah, but what I’m saying is that we might be up ten going down the stretch instead of two if we didn’t let him get off. You lay back and let him score, which I understand at some level, but why not make him hit hard shots? I’ve never seen him get everyone involved whether you trap him or not.”

  Iavaroni: “I saw it on tape this year. A few times. He gets everyone involved and they create a team concept that has blossomed. If his teammates get the ball from him, they play with his balls.” Iavaroni is so lost in thought that he doesn’t even see the joke.

  D’Antoni shrugs. He still has forty-eight hours to make the decision. During the endless hours of discussion about Bryant, it comes up often that he can score fifty points and the Suns could still win, as was the case in that April game. This drives Dan D’Antoni to distraction. As a former high school coach, he can’t get his mind around the idea that an opponent, no matter how talented, can scorch you with fifty and everyone treats it as normal. “I don’t think we should ever just say, ‘Kobe can get fifty and we’ll be all right,’ ” says Dan. “We should just say, ‘We’re gonna play our ass off on him, make him work and get on his ass.’ ”

  Also worrisome are the inevitable defensive switches that will occur; good defenders like Bell and Shawn Marion have a hard enough time stopping Bryant without him running wild against the other Suns.

  “I think it’s death—death!—having Tim Thomas on Kobe,” says Gentry. All agree except for Dan.

  “We shouldn’t be afraid of that,” he says. “I expect Tim Thomas to play good defense. He’s an NBA player.”

  “Could you reiterate that?” says Iavaroni with mock seriousness. “You expect Tim Thomas to play good defense? You are a trusting soul.”

  One thing everyone agrees with—it’s not a good idea to show a bunch of video snippets of Bryant getting beneficial calls from the officials. “I don’t want to mess with Raja’s head, and I don’t want to mess with Shawn’s head,” concludes Iavaroni.

  The coaches are used to two sets of tapes anyway. They have a “coaches’ tape,” which contains lots of game footage and lots of mistakes made by the Suns, and a “players’ tape,” a heavily edited version that is shown at practice and almost never includes egregious errors by players. D’Antoni believes that embarrassment is a poor coaching tool. It is the job of video coordinator Noel Gillespie and his assistant, Jason March, to keep the tapes separate.

  One other minor—but irritating—concern is Amare’ Stoudemire. Back in October, before the season began, the Suns’ superstar-in-the-making had gone down with what was first presumed to be a minor injury to his left knee but subsequently required surgery. Throughout the season, Stoudemire’s physical condition had been the Subplot from Hell. He was supposed to come back in late February, but he didn’t come back until late March. He was lackadaisical in his rehabilitation even as the Suns tried to sell the idea that he was diligent. By the time his left knee was pronounced fit for duty, his right knee had started to hurt. He came back anyway and played one promising game, one mediocre game, and one disastrous game before the Suns decided to deactivate him again. Then he got arthroscopic surgery on his right knee.

  The knee injuries were one thing. But even when he was with the team, he wasn’t quite of the team. For example, he had left at half-time of the team’s April 17 game against the New Orleans Hornets, Fan Appreciation Night, which included a mandatory postgame flesh-press to thank the ticket buyers. (Similar blowoffs by Allen Iverson and Chris Webber in Philadelphia and Zach Randolph in Portland had produced headlines; Stoudemire got away with it.) D’Antoni had thought of telling Stoudemire to stay home during the postseason, or, at least, not having him travel with the team, but decided against it. None of Stoudemire’s teammates would’ve jumped up to protest that move. Now, with the playoffs here, he wasn’t always showing up when he should and wasn’t always there even when he was there, concentration and intensity being two of Stoudemire’s problems.

  D’Antoni and assistant general manager David Griffin had thought that they were on the same page with Stoudemire regarding his plans for rehabilitation. They had all decided that Stoudemire would work diligently with the Suns’ athletic trainers and try out the knee in the summer with the United States team that would meet for camp in Las Vegas in July, then travel to the Far East for an Olympic qualifier. Stoudemire seemed in accord with the plan, but then told reporters, “I don’t think I can play for Team U.S.A. this summer.”

  And so the Subplot from Hell continues.

  Chapter Two

  [The Second Season]

  April 23…………………….

  GAME 1 OF LAKERS SERIES

  “But it’s the playoffs now, so, shit, I got to get something ready.”

  Eddie House stares at the big white greaseboard in the locker room on which Iavaroni has filled almost every inch with tips, reminders,
slogans, and stratagems. One hour before tip-off, he is still writing. I ask House if this is the best board he’s ever seen.

  “Well, no disrespect because this is a good board,” says Eddie, gesturing toward Iavaroni, “but, being completely honest, Stan Van Gundy had one hot board.” House was with the Miami Heat when Van Gundy was Pat Riley’s top assistant. (Riley later resigned as coach and elevated Van Gundy to replace him, only to take back the job, in December 2005, in a sort of reverse palace coup.)

  Iavaroni, who had been a Heat assistant with Van Gundy under Riley from 1999 to 2002, agrees with House. He considers Van Gundy to be a board god, the Einstein and Picasso of marker. “Stan had a lot more to work with,” says Iavaroni. “He had two boards, really, the top one-third of both filled with offense, the second third with defense, and the bottom third with general stuff.” (Now that Van Gundy is gone, Riley has been known to erase and straighten characters that are slightly uneven.) “Someday,” Iavaroni jokes, “I hope to give as good a board as Stan.” The most important tip Iavaroni has written for this game is his instruction for low-post defense. Active. Leveraged. Unpredictable. “I hope we’re not too unpredictable,” says Dan D’Antoni, looking at the board, “or we’ll unpredict ourselves right out of this thing.”

  Mike D’Antoni, meanwhile, is in the players’ lounge challenging the old-school-style video game. Against all logic, the fifty-five-year-old D’Antoni has the high score on the machine. Mike “Cowboy” Elliott, the Suns’ assistant athletic trainer who is thirty years D’Antoni’s junior, claims that his higher score was removed by a machine malfunction. “I think Mike pulled the plug,” Cowboy says. (When pressed, D’Antoni will concede that Cowboy’s score was higher but denies responsibility for its erasure.) D’Antoni says he picked up his video-game chops when he came to Italy. “I was alone in a strange land, and I had absolutely nothing to do except play video games,” says D’Antoni. “And this machine is a lot like the one I played in Italy.”

  Phil Weber theorizes that the players feel relaxed that the head coach can often be found playing video games hours before a game. “It gives them a kind of ease,” says Weber, who pays much more attention to the psychological game than any of the other coaches. (In fact, more than any person I’ve ever known.) “They see the head guy doing it and think, ‘Maybe this game isn’t all that important. It relaxes them.’ ”

  Forty-three minutes before game time, two minutes after the press evacuated the locker room, the team breaks into two meetings. Iavaroni takes the centers and forwards (the “bigs”), and Weber, Gentry, and Dan D’Antoni talk to the guards and swingmen (the “wings”). D’Antoni remains in his office to fret alone and chew over what he’s going to say to the entire group before he sends them onto the floor. Mostly, though, he just chews on popcorn.

  The bigs meeting is invariably well organized, given the nature of centers and power forwards (stable and disciplined) and the purposeful bent of Iavaroni’s mind. He and D’Antoni arrived together in Phoenix as assistant coaches, but it was always understood that D’Antoni was a little higher, first among equals, the likely next in the line of succession. With eight years as a head coach in Italy (where Iavaroni even played under him for five weeks) and one lockout-shortened season as the head man in Denver, D’Antoni had a track record.

  In the off-season, Iavaroni had been a finalist for the head coaching position in Portland that the Trail Blazers eventually gave to Nate McMillan. He is generally considered head coaching timber. But he never acts, as far as I can see, like he’s in competition with D’Antoni. Any tension that exists between them relates purely to their stylistic differences, not to Iavaroni’s thought that he should be in charge. D’Antoni and Iavaroni (which sounds like a Milanese puppet show) have a bond, in fact, that none of the other coaches share. Both played in the NBA and both won championships, D’Antoni several times as a player and coach in Italy, Iavaroni with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1983. Both have been there at the highest levels of basketball, and that experience simply can’t be taught.

  Iavaroni plans each pregame bigs meeting down to the second, his minions sometimes moving from the video screen in the players’ lounge to the big board in the locker room to another section of the locker room where various individual tips written on orange paper are taped to the wall. The whole thing comes off like a small military operation.

  The wings meeting, by contrast, is a study in chaos, given the nature of guards and small forwards (squirrelly, hyperactive, independent). Weber does well to hold the players’ attention at all. While Boris Diaw and Kurt Thomas stare stoically at Iavaroni’s board and answer his snap-quiz questions, Nash, Bell, and House never stop moving. Bell grabs a cup of coffee. House leaves to use the restroom. Nash jiggles and jerks his body endlessly, wrapping a Thera-Band around his ankles and stutter-stepping across the floor, putting his hands on his hips and twisting his torso, lost in his own personal physiological voodoo. And the coaches can never be sure if Leandro Barbosa, the Brazilian-born speed demon who is being heavily counted on in the postseason, is comprehending anything. The highlight of the wings meetings comes at the end when they gather together, and, after Weber says, “One-two-three,” they all holler “WANGS!” stretching out the word for several seconds so it becomes “WAAAAAA-NGS.” Quentin Richardson, a swingman who was traded to the New York Knicks in the off-season, started that tradition the previous season.

  Exactly how much players get out of the board sessions and scouting reports varies, of course, from player to player. D’Antoni claims that, when he was an assistant, he would occasionally write, “If you get this far, come see me” as the fourth or fifth tip on a report. And no one ever came. Most of the players shrug and say there is too much detail, and even the coaches admit some of the board is what they call a CYA (Cover Your Ass) defense mechanism. Surprisingly, though, no player whom I asked about it says that it’s unnecessary.

  Shawn Marion is a swing attendee, sometimes going with the bigs, sometimes with the wings. The joke is that he usually picks the wrong meeting, listening in on Iavaroni when he’s playing small forward, chilling with the wings when his assignment is to guard the opposition’s power forward. Marion is at the wings meeting on this night even though he will be defending primarily against Lamar Odom, a power forward. But Odom can also play on the perimeter, and, in all likelihood, Marion will also have to guard Bryant for substantial minutes before the series is over. It is a tribute to Marion’s versatility that, on most nights, he needs both perimeter and interior intelligence, though how much he absorbs is a mystery. “Shawn, you have to work Odom at both ends,” says Weber. “He’ll get flustered if you do that.”

  D’Antoni’s pregame speech is straightforward and strategic, none of those this-is-the-first-step-on-

  a-long-journey proclamations. He doesn’t subscribe much to them. “On Bryant side pick-and-rolls, we’re going to trap them, okay?” says D’Antoni. The coaches have been talking about little else for the last forty-eight hours, and no doubt dreaming about how to defense Bryant while they toss and turn at night, but this is the first time the directive has really been formalized for the players. “Also, don’t go for pump fakes [a maneuver used with particular dexterity by Bryant],” says D’Antoni. “In the low post, do your work early and gold when you need to.” (“Gold” is the Suns’ term for fronting an offensive player, thus discouraging a pass from even being thrown.) D’Antoni’s instructions have all been sketched out, sometimes in great detail in the individual meetings, but it is important for the whole team to hear them together. Now there’s a plan; now there’s a team strategy.

  One thing I’m waiting for is the return of Eddie House’s pregame dance, which will take place right after the introduction of the starting lineup, the exclamation point on the Suns’ ritual of linking arms and rocking from side to side. “I been holding back in the last half of the season,” says House. “Didn’t want it to get stale. But it’s the playoffs now, so, shit, I got to get something re
ady.”

  D’Antoni sends the team out, the crowd goes crazy, the lights darken as the Suns’ starting lineup—Steve Nash and Raja Bell at guard, Boris Diaw at center, Shawn Marion and Tim Thomas at forward—is announced, the Suns link arms…and House finishes by squirming around on his belly, doing the Worm. Game time.

  The NBA has become a league of elaborate fraternization, every game beginning with expressions of affection for the opponent, usually in the form of “shugs,” those man-hugs that begin with a hand clasp and end with a chest bump or a real squeeze. With trades, free agency, myriad roster moves that have players changing jerseys at a dizzying rate, plus an AAU and elite-summer-camp system that throws players together at an early age, it is hard for a player not to have had some kind of connection with his opponent. And most feel compelled to demonstrate, tactilely, that brotherhood.

  There is no such love shown between Kobe Bryant and Raja Bell, however. They arrive at the scorer’s table together and walk onto the court without so much as a side glance at each other. This is the subplot to watch throughout the series. Bryant does not care much for Bell and certainly does not like the idea that Bell would be considered in any way, shape, or form a “Kobe stopper”; Bell, for his part, despises what he considers to be Bryant’s arrogance and perfunctory dismissal of him as an athlete.

  The Suns’ get-it-and-go offense operates the way it should in the first quarter, putting up thirty-nine points. The problem is, the Lakers get twenty-nine themselves. Bryant is being trapped and doubled and chased out of his spots, but he makes the right pass out of trouble most of the time, and, when he gets space, releases his deadly accurate jump shot. There had been some internal debate that Marion should cover Bryant for stretches, if only to give the Laker superstar a different look, but D’Antoni has decided that Bell will have the primary responsibility. The coach has Raja ready to start the second period, in fact, but, when he notices that Bryant is getting a rest, he orders Bell back to the bench in favor of Barbosa. When Bryant returns, so does Bell.