Colangelo’s place in the Suns’ hierarchy is now tenuous. His son, Bryan, left his job as general manager after a midseason dispute with Sarver, and now Sarver and Colangelo circle each other warily, like two panthers angling for space in the same small cage. But Jerry is still the top figure on the franchise flow chart (his contract as chairman/ CEO runs until June of 2007), and, when Jerry speaks, Suns Nation listens. And it was decided immediately after Game 5 that Jerry should make the call to Stu Jackson to plead the case for Raja Bell.
“Here’s how I laid it out,” Colangelo tells D’Antoni. “I told him he kind of owes us one. Three miscues [no foul call, no time-out call, Walton out-of-
bounds] cost us Game 4. ‘Do you think that was important, Stu? Losing a game we should’ve won and going down 3–1?’ Then there was the technical not called on Kwame Brown when he stood over our guy and glared at him. The stray elbows. The Kobe theatrics with pulling the jersey over his head when a technical wasn’t called either.” As a last resort, Colangelo also suggested to Jackson: “If you have to suspend Bell, why not make it for two games at the beginning of next season?”
Even with Colangelo at bat, everyone in the Suns’ organization knows this: There is positively, absolutely no chance that Raja Bell—a marked man even before the playoffs started—won’t be suspended. “Johnnie Cochran couldn’t get him off,” concludes Alvin Gentry at the morning coaches meeting.
“Johnnie’s dead,” says Phil Weber.
“So’s Raja,” says Gentry.
Though no one will concede the point, Colangelo’s preemptive lobbying is as much about discouraging Jackson from suspending Bell for two games, a distinct possibility. The coaches study the photo of the clotheslining that appears on page one of the Arizona Republic. There is no abundance of love for Kobe Bryant within the Suns’ franchise, but everyone admits there are legitimate grounds for indictment. “I tell you guys, Kobe could have gotten really hurt there,” says Gentry. “The league can’t allow that.”
At 9 a.m., athletic trainer Aaron Nelson calls up to the coaches room. “NBA security just asked for Raja’s number,” reports Nelson. The hammer will be coming down soon.
“What I worry about is from this one angle it just looks like Raja is rearing back and throwing the forearm, like a punch,” says Dave Griffin.
“Maybe because he kind of was?” I add helpfully.
“And then they put it on page one for all the world to see,” says Gentry.
I feel obligated to speak up for my newspaper brethren. “Any newspaper that didn’t put that photo on page one wouldn’t be doing its job.”
“Oh, I’m not saying that,” says Gentry. “I would’ve put it on page one, too, if I was the editor.”
The task now is to strategize with the assumption that Leandro Barbosa will be starting in place of Bell. Having Barbosa in the starting lineup makes the Suns even more, well, Suns-like. Barbosa is perhaps the fastest player in the league with the ball, Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson and Dallas’s Devin Harris being his only competitors. Despite an orthodox, almost two-handed release on his jump shot, he is an excellent three-point shooter, having finished the season with a .444 percentage on three-point shots, best on the team and third best in the league. He has a six-foot-ten-inch wingspan that enables him to get off shots in heavy traffic. In short, he is a better offensive player than Bell.
But L.B. is not nearly as good a defender. Bell has been a rock defensively, fundamentally sound, and, above all, tough. The Suns use part of their accrued fine money to pay fifty bucks for every charging foul drawn, and Bell had picked up $3,650 during the season for drawing seventy-three, best in the league. There’s a saying around the league that “the more money you make, the less you take a charge,” but that doesn’t apply to Bell. After finally getting a good contract—the Suns gave him $23.8 million over five years, a free-agent deal that at least one pundit termed the worst of the summer—Bell threw his body around like a Hollywood stuntman. Oddly, he became known as both a tough guy and a flopper, i.e., a player who exaggerates contact and falls backward or down with the exuberance of a stage actor. As to the latter, Bell prefers to say that he is merely “emphasizing a call that should be made.”
Barbosa, slightly built at six-foot-three and 188 pounds, gets pushed around. He has much to learn about positioning and plays too much with his hands, reaching out and grabbing, a personal foul waiting to happen. Barbosa is not a bad defender by any means—he is quick, willing, and tough-minded—but in Game 6, another elimination challenge, he will be asked to check the game’s best player.
There is really no alternative plan, though. Marion could guard Bryant, but that would force Diaw into guarding Marion’s man, Lamar Odom, and the Suns don’t like that matchup. The biggest worry for the coaches is that Barbosa will be unable to gold Bryant, i.e., front him to discourage an entry pass, a stratagem that Bell has been using effectively. The Suns know that their double-teams on Bryant have to be more forceful than they were with Bell on the court.
“L.B.’s got to know when he can deny him and when he can’t,” says Dan D’Antoni, “but most of all he has to realize that it’s not the end of the world when he does score.”
There is no doubt that Barbosa will take the challenge, for no one works more diligently at improving. That fact, his boyish innocence, his occasional torturing of the English language (“Nobody was believing myself at that time” is his way of saying that he surprised a lot of people around the NBA), his sincere love for his family back in Brazil, and about a dozen other things make Barbosa the most beloved player on the team.
In one of the golden school-trip moments, I can still see Barbosa in the back of the bus as it headed for the airport in Toronto on the morning of April 1 after a win over the Raptors the night before. A spontaneous chorus of “O Canada” broke out, and Barbosa, with a big smile on his face, waved his arms like a conductor. He wasn’t singing, probably because he had no idea what the words were—he was just smiling and conducting. He had grown up a poor kid in São Paulo, Brazil, learning the game from his older brother, Arturo, a task-master who used to whack him with a stick when he made the wrong move during ball-handling drills. A small scar runs along the base of Barbosa’s left thumb bears memory to their workouts. And there he was conducting “O Canada” in an NBA bus.
“If you don’t like L.B.,” says Dan D’Antoni, who has become Barbosa’s personal coach, assigned by his brother to that task early in the season, “there’s something wrong with you.”
Nash is out shooting early on the practice court when Bell, somewhat sheepishly, walks in. “There he is!” shouts Nash, as if announcing the appearance of a rock star. Bell waves and smiles, though he is a little embarrassed. By any logical reckoning, Bell’s flagrant foul on Bryant was a brainless act. It occurred when the outcome was still in the balance, Bell was not retaliating to contact (indeed, Bryant was alone in the middle of the court; it was akin to a mugging), and, moreover, he was jeopardizing the entire series. Yet there is universal support for Bell within the team. The coaches love Bell not just for his competitiveness but also for his loyalty. Shortly after he signed his free-agent contract, the Suns went after another free agent, Michael Finley, and, though signing Finley would’ve meant less playing time for Bell, he was among those who went on Finley’s “recruiting trip.” (Finley eventually signed with San Antonio.)
The support for Bell is predictable on one level: He who does not stand up for a teammate in time of need is a traitor. But there is also the fact that throughout the season and in this series, the Suns are always the team that is considered soft, always the team that gets pushed around. Bell himself had noted that weeks earlier, during half-time of a game in Sacramento on April 11, one of the more memorable nights of the year. The Suns trailed the Kings by 68–51 and appeared to be mailing it in at every position. Including coach. D’Antoni had been down on himself for failing to ignite his team, which, having all but mathematically clinched second place
in the Western Conference, seemed to be drifting along, content with the world, failing to build playoff momentum. At the break, D’Antoni went at the team, but then Bell asked to speak, and his words, delivered calmly but forcefully, were the ones that made the difference.
“Right now they think we’re their ’hos,” Bell said. “And I want to tell you something: I ain’t nobody’s ’ho. There comes a time when we gotta go out there and change what people think of us because, right now, people think of us as pussies. I’m going to do it right now. This half.”
And the Suns responded with their best concentrated play of the season. Eight of them scored at least nine points apiece. They made 71 percent of their shots. They scored seventy-two points. They weren’t nobody’s ’ho. They won going away, 123–110, against a home team that had won six of its previous seven games. That game helped reposition the Suns, in their own minds, as a championship contender.
I wander over to Bell and ask if he has heard from the league.
“Not yet,” he says, “but I expect I will.”
Then I ask, with all due care, “So, um, why did you do it?” It seems better than, What the hell were you thinking?
Bell shakes his head. “It’s like it happened in slow motion,” he says. “ ‘All right, Rah-Rah, don’t do it. Don’t…you’re going to do it…you’re going to do it…SHIT! You did it.’ ” Bell says he was also angered because Phil Jackson said to him, “You fuckin’ deserve it,” when he protested about a noncall on Bryant.
Bell admits to a history that includes more than a few scuffles on and off the court. During his sophomore year at Boston University a coach sent him to a sports psychologist to discuss anger management. Bell attended a couple of sessions but nothing much came of it. “I didn’t dig it,” he says. “I never thought I had an anger problem. I just thought I was trying to find out who I was, trying to figure out how I fit in. In retrospect, yeah, maybe I could’ve talked to somebody. It might’ve helped me out a little bit.”
Like, say, when it was time for Bell to take his league-mandated urine test a month earlier. He just couldn’t produce under pressure and became so incensed that he almost tossed away his cup and walked out, which would result in an automatic suspension. “Raja, you can’t get mad at a urine test,” Dave Griffin told him. Bell stuck around and finally came through in the clutch. On numerous occasions during the season, Bell would go into a mini tantrum, walking off the court and talking to himself, after missing three straight jumpers in practice. The assistant throwing him the ball, usually Gentry or Weber, would calmly wait for Bell to settle himself, and the warm-up would begin anew.
Bell’s temper caused him and D’Antoni—mutual admirers—to get into it after the San Antonio Spurs drubbed the Suns 117–93 in Phoenix on March 9. It was a miserable night all around. Nash was out with a badly sprained right ankle. Barbosa had shown up for the game with a painful groin injury from one of his testicles having gotten twisted in its sack—“That’s some Third World shit right there,” said Iavaroni—and didn’t play either. Marion and Tim Thomas were both recovering from the flu. The Spurs dominated for forty-eight minutes, and Bell, like almost everyone else, played poorly. Bell had snapped at Diaw during the game. “Pass the damn ball!” he said, an unfair criticism since Diaw had played unselfishly. Later, Bell angered D’Antoni when, in the coach’s mind, he had pretended not to hear a play call that he had actually heard. So D’Antoni had snapped at him during a time-out.
After the game, D’Antoni decided to extend an olive branch to Bell. “All right, I shouldn’t have done that with Raja,” he says. “Raja, I apologize. We cool?” Bell didn’t say anything or even look up. So D’Antoni repeated it. “Raja, we cool?” Finally, Bell sullenly nodded. That was not the Yalta moment D’Antoni had been looking for, and he lectured the team for ten minutes, after which Bell still looked angry. Coach and player then conferred behind closed doors, but the matter didn’t get cleared up until two nights later when, before a game against Minnesota, Bell apologized to the team for snapping at Diaw.
“Raja will go off from time to time,” says D’Antoni, “but if I had twelve guys like him, I’d feel pretty good.”
Bell comes by his temper naturally. Presented with the Kobe challenge, Bell’s father, Roger, an athletic administrator at the University of Miami, would’ve possibly done something worse than a horse collar. Roger Bell has twice been kicked out of fifty-and-over basketball tournaments for overaggressiveness, one time breaking an opponent’s nose. Raja, his mother, and his sister, Tombi, who was an outstanding college player, were there to enjoy the spectacle.
“I mean, damn, fifty-and-over, you’d think you’d be able to chill by that time,” says Bell. “But I understand it because my dad and I have the same temperament. We lose it, then, by the time we get back in the car, it’s ‘Oops, we shouldn’t have done that.’ Some people who don’t know me think I’m a complete asshole. I understand that. I know I’m not. I’m not like that at home at all. But, when I get on that court and people try to take something from me or get over on me, I will fight.”
Though they are different types of players, Bell’s career parallels that of Eddie House. They have both battled, convinced they have the talent to make it but looking for a coach to confirm it. They have to find a way to stay on the court, a way to get an identity. With House, it’s shooting. With Bell, it’s pit-bull defense and mid range competence.
Bell is convinced, or he is trying to convince himself, that his team will be just fine without him in Game 6. “Either Kobe’s going to be passive and it won’t matter,” he says, “or he’ll try to take over and dominate L.B. and mess everything else up.”
When D’Antoni gathers the team together, he doesn’t begin with the let’s-get-fired-up-and-win-it-
for-Raja speech. He wants to make it seem like any other game (though clearly it is not) so he goes over matchups and the importance of being as active on defense as they were in Game 5. Almost off-handedly, he says, “We’ll get word about Raja soon. Whatever happens, I don’t have any doubt we’ll handle it. As the games go on, the Lakers are getting a little tighter. Trust me on that. It’s going to be a great atmosphere. This is fun. This is what it’s about.”
After practice, Bell, obviously, is the big story. The press contingent is large, and everyone wants Raja. Julie Fie is nervous about letting him speak, but, in keeping with the Suns’ policy, she makes Bell available after practice, an open target. He answers a few harmless questions, and then Fie, hovering around the outside of the group, hears the words “no respect for him,” “pompous,” and “arrogant.” She swoops in and puts her hand gently on Bell’s back, just to let him know she’s there. But Bell is rolling, and Fie, with more than two decades in the business, recognizes a lost cause when she sees it.
“I think a lot of people let him get away with things and he feels like he’s supposed to get away with them and I don’t agree with that,” Bell says of Bryant. “If you’re going to keep hitting me in my face and then talking like you’re not doing it on purpose…there’s a reason both of my cheeks are bruised right now and I can barely open my jaw. Every time you stick your butt out [he means when Bryant posts him up by the foul line] and try to hit me in my genitals [he really says “genitals”], you’re doing it on purpose. That’s something you don’t do inadvertently and it was enough.”
Last night, after the game, Bryant had jokingly said maybe he and Bell should take their battle into the Octagon, the venue for Ultimate Fighting. Bell sniffs when someone brings that up. “We don’t need an Octagon. There’s plenty of space and opportunity right out on the court, man. When I get hit in the face multiple times, you’ve stepped across a line with me. It’s not basketball anymore.”
Bell also revealed the exchange he had had with Jackson during the game. “I thought that was kind of bush league from such a good coach,” says Bell.
Out in Los Angeles, Jackson confirms that he and Bell did have words, though he obviously ha
s a different take on it. “I told him, ‘You’re leaning in there all the time, so you deserve it,’ ” says Jackson. The coach says he did not use the F-word. And Jackson also pooh-poohs the notion that the series is physical. “Fifteen years ago guys were thrown up into the seats, and it was really rough,” says the coach. “I think they’re much more on edge than is necessary in this series. My guys are pussycats, and Phoenix has a bunch of pussycats, too.”
Word has spread about Bell’s comments, and Bryant is ready, returning to the I-am-king-and-I’m-
not-sure-who-he-is theme. “Does he know me?” says Bryant. “Do I know this guy? I don’t know this guy. I might’ve said one word to this guy. I don’t know this kid. I think he overreacts to stuff. We go out there, we play and when we play during the season, we play each other. That’s it. I don’t know this kid. I don’t need to know this kid. I don’t want to. We go out there, we play the game and we leave it at that. Maybe he wasn’t hugged enough as a kid. I look at him a little bit, he gets a little insecure or something.”
If you’re scoring at home, that’s four “kids” and three “guys.”
Kobe also says that Bell has “a glass jaw,” and denies deliberately attacking Bell’s genitals. “Whoa, I’m nowhere near doing something like that. We’re out there playing basketball. He’s a good defender. He’s a good basketball player. Just go out there and play the game. There’s no need to whine about it.”
NBA Commissioner David Stern also weighs in on the Bell flagrant. He calls it “unmanly.”
The one-hour flight to Los Angeles is quiet. It was decided among the players—in effect, by Bell, Nash, and Brian Grant, who are more or less the travel counselors, their wives being more or less the wives-in-chief—that significant others should not come along on the trip. It will be short and all business, and, superstitiously, no one had to bring up the fact that the Suns lost both games in L.A. when families were in tow. Jason March, the assistant video coordinator (whom Nash calls “Raef LaFrentz” because he bears a strong resemblance to that NBA player), was along on the Game 3 and 4 trip, too, and he took a lot of heat for being a jinx. So he’s back in Phoenix.
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