Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  “Offensively, they haven’t had an answer for a lot of things,” says D’Antoni. “Our speed, what to do with us in the open floor. So do your dribbleats, move the ball, it will open up, and we do not have to settle [for perimeter jumpers]. They haven’t had an answer for our pick-and-rolls over the last two years, so I don’t know how they’ll be able to do it over a halftime.”

  “The more jump shoots they shoot,” chimes in Nash, “the better chance we have to win.”

  But an old problem haunts the Suns in the second half—giving up offensive rebounds. Harris stays hot and the Mavs pound them inside and take a 114–105 lead with 3:43 left. By that time Bell has left the game with a strained left calf muscle that came on suddenly, one of those bizarre noncontact injuries. Even the coaches can’t escape injury. As Barbosa battles for a ball near the sidelines, he bats a ball directly down into Iavaroni’s face, like a volleyball spike. For Iavaroni, who once wore a mask on the court after suffering a horrific eye injury, it brings back bad memories.

  Out on the court, it is time for Nash. Spurred on by the first mass booing he ever received in Dallas—the Dallas Morning News had declared that it was time to stop loving Nash and start booing him, a decision Cuban applauded—Nash hits two three-pointers and a circus layup in between to put the Suns ahead. But Harris makes a jump shot with four seconds left, his twenty-ninth and thirtieth points of the game, and Dallas leads 118–117 as Phoenix takes a time-out with just four seconds left.

  “They’re going to run a play called ‘Charlotte,’ ” I say to my seatmate, Marc Stein, from ESPN.com. “Everyone thinks Nash is going backcourt to get it and go one-on-one from there, but they’re going to pass it in to Diaw and Nash is going to go backdoor off him for a layup.” It’s actually a play that D’Antoni stole from Scott Skiles. When he sent the Suns out to run it in a December 31 game in Chicago, he said to Iavaroni, “You think Scott will recognize it?” Whether Skiles did or not, the play worked to perfection.

  For once, I’m right. But if I know something, surely the Mavs know it, too, and, as Phoenix lines up, the Dallas players are all hollering, “Nash is going to get it! Don’t let him go backdoor!” Tim Thomas inbounds to Diaw, but the warnings pay off—Nash isn’t in position to get a return pass. So Nash yells, “Go, Boris!” Diaw begins backing Stackhouse in toward the baseline, and, when he gets there, pump-fakes and goes up for a jumper that nestles softly into the basket. Suns lead 119–118.

  I watch the final seconds from the tunnel that leads to the dressing room. Bell is out there by now, balancing on crutches.

  “I hope it’s broken,” a fan yells down at him. A section of the crowd can see Bell if it looks down.

  Bell smiles and flashes him the finger.

  The Mavs lose the ball, and Tim Thomas stands at the free-throw line for two foul shots that will ice the game. He makes the first, the “swish” audible even in the noisy arena because of the microphones placed around the basket.

  “Ooh, I love that sound,” Bell shouts to the fans, pointing to them with one of his crutches. “Can you all hear it?”

  Thomas makes the second.

  “Ooh, I hear it again,” says Bell, pumping his crutch in the air. “Did you all hear it, too? Time to go home now. Drive safe, everyone.”

  The Suns come charging through the tunnel, Bell there to greet them, the 121–118 victory now history.

  “If they don’t think that little motherfucker is the MVP now,” says Gentry, speaking of Nash, who finished with twenty-seven points and sixteen assists, “they can kiss my black ass.”

  “Guys, obviously, a helluva job,” says D’Antoni in the animated locker room. “We’re gonna get Raja well as soon as we can, but we gotta take up the slack. We came here to get two, guys, and we can get two. We’re better than this team, and it’ll be a disappointment if we don’t get two. Let’s get our rest, get with Aaron, and we’re gonna bust their ass on Friday night, too.”

  Nash, in the role of camp counselor, steps in, ever the voice of reason. “Hey, guys, we got one more to get here,” he says. “We can do it.” The roar indicates they believe it.

  As the coaches review a replay of the final satisfying seconds, they see Barbosa, during the time-out huddle that follows Diaw’s basket, stroll up to the Frenchman and plant a kiss right on his cheek. Diaw looks surprised. Barbosa is beaming like a little kid. The coaches can’t stop laughing.

  “It took a while,” says Dan D’Antoni finally, “but it’s Brokeback Playoffs time.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  [The Second Season]

  Dallas, May 25…………………

  SUNS LEAD SERIES 1–0

  “Zone the little fucker.”

  The Suns had won by the thinnest of margins, getting a basket on a broken play, yet their world couldn’t be brighter. Had they lost, had the Frenchman not been able to back in Stackhouse and release that croissant-sweet baseline jumper, they would be miserable, nagging at each other as they searched for answers.

  “Dallas is going through that right now,” says Iavaroni at the morning meeting in D’Antoni’s suite, “What’s wrong with us? What do we have to do different? Can we turn it around? All that and look how close that game was.”

  “We all know exactly what they’re going through,” says D’Antoni, “but better them than us.”

  The unexpected thirty-point performance by Devin Harris brings up a classic dilemma: Revamp the defensive game plan to contain him? Or treat it like the anomaly it might’ve been? The problem is exacerbated, of course, by the injury to Bell, who is definitely out for Games 2 and 3. And there is quiet concern that he could miss the rest of the series. Before Game 1, the percentage of time the Suns spent dealing with Harris as opposed to Dirk Nowitzki would’ve broken down to about 95 to 5, Dirk. But at the very least, general answers must be found in this morning meeting to curtail Harris’s penetration. “We can let Dirk have thirty,” says Alvin Gentry, “but we can’t let Devin Harris have twelve layups.” But how to stop it? Switch Nash onto Terry and let Barbosa play Harris?

  “Who’s the better guy one-on-one against Harris?” wonders Iavaroni. “I would think L.B. would be a little better.”

  “Why?” asks D’Antoni.

  “Because at this point Steve isn’t very good,” answers Iavaroni.

  Nash has done well for most of the season defending against quick point guards. But it’s been a long season, and in Game 1 there were far too many of what Iavaroni calls “blow-bys.”

  “So, knowing we’re going to trap Terry anyway, why don’t we put Steve on Terry?” continues Iavaroni.

  Gentry favors picking up Terry earlier and making him stop his dribble out front. Dan would rather keep Nash on him but tell him to play way back in the lane—“Zone the little fucker” is the way he puts it—and dare him to shoot outside. Then he wonders that if the Suns put Nash on Terry, would the Mavs respond by moving Terry to the point and taking Harris off the ball.

  “I think they’ll just keep having Harris handle it until he gets wild,” says Todd Quinter.

  “Well, is L.B. a better defender than Steve?” asks Dan. “I’m just throwing it out there.”

  Again, the question. No one offers an answer because it’s not an easy one. Both Nash and Barbosa have what the coaches call “happy feet” on defense, the former because he is always going away from his man and looking to help, the latter because he jumps around so much trying to get in the proper position. To a certain extent, as Gentry suggests, the solution comes down to worrying about only one of the guards, Harris or Terry. “If Jason Terry gets out of the box with thirty or so,” says Gentry, “I can guaran-damn-tee you that Devin Harris is not going to get to thirty. So they’ll just flip-flop. We’ll weather it.”

  The conversation goes on for more than thirty minutes before Iavaroni says: “Okay, pack it in on Harris and trap Terry. Let’s move on. We’ve had meetings that have lasted twenty minutes and this one has gone forty on the same situation.” />
  “Good thing we won, huh?” says Dan.

  As the coaches review the tape, Quinter shakes his head at the repeated glimpses of the Dallas owner in the stands, usually berating a referee or demonstrating some other form of irritation that his team is being vastly mistreated by the authorities. “Jeez, they show Cuban every play,” complains Quinter.

  “They’re teaching hate here,” says Weber. There’s a general distaste for Cuban’s aggressive, rub-it-in brand of advocacy.

  “Remember November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three?” says Iavaroni. “They got hate down here.”

  “Hey, speaking of Kennedy,” says Gentry, “we should have a moment of silence for our boy, the senator from Texas.”

  “Yes, good old Lloyd Bentsen,” says Iavaroni. Bentsen, Michael Dukakis’s running mate in 1988, died yesterday.

  “ ‘I knew Jack Kennedy, sir,’ ” says Gentry, going into Bentsen’s famed retort to Dan Quayle at a debate, “ ‘and you are no Jack Kennedy.’ ”

  “Alvin, is there any useless information you don’t have rolling around in that head?” asks Dan D’Antoni.

  “In other Kennedy news,” says Iavaroni, “they’re erecting an NBA conspiracy museum in New York City.”

  “It’d be nice if we won this thing before seven games,” says D’Antoni. “Help take away the conspiracy theories.”

  The Game 1 win notwithstanding, it won’t be easy. A major reason the Mavs are difficult to prepare for is that the Suns can’t even be sure which of a variety of lineups they will use. Like the Clippers, Dallas is deep. The Mavs have two big men to choose from in Erich Dampier and DeSagana Diop. Three reserves, Jerry Stackhouse, Adrian Griffin, and Keith Van Horn, are potential starters; Stackhouse finished third in the voting for the NBA’s top sixth man this season. Marquis Daniels seems to be in Avery Johnson’s doghouse, but he is an all-court player to be feared, too.

  “If they’re concerned about running with Shawn, based on what happened last night, they could start Stackhouse instead of Dampier, put Josh Howard on Shawn, and have Nowitzki on Boris,” says Gentry. “That leaves them Jason Terry, Devin Harris, and Stackhouse to guard Steve, Raja, and Tim. To me, that’s their best lineup.”

  “But you’re forgetting the NBA rule,” says Dan. “You can’t start your best five guys.”

  “I think they’ll start Dampier,” says Mike, “because it’s also a rule that if you pay a bad player seventy million you have to start him.”

  One of the things all coaching staffs do is try to compare players they are scouting with other players they have just seen. They find similarities to the Clippers’ Corey Maggette, for example, in Stackhouse, an aggressive off-the-bench scorer who doesn’t like to pass and who, if hot, can kill you. Stackhouse is also one of Gentry’s all-time favorite players, having spent three seasons with him in Detroit.

  “I tell you right now,” says Gentry, “nobody’s tougher than that boy right there. Remember when he got into it with Kirk Snyder, that young player from Utah last year? Here’s what happened. Stackhouse tells the kid, ‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ but the kid doesn’t think anything about it. Game’s over, Stackhouse, who dresses all GQ, goes to the equipment manager and asks for a warm-up suit, puts that on, goes out into the tunnel, sees Snyder, kicks his ass with a couple of punches, goes back in the locker room, returns the warm-up and puts on a nice blue suit. All in a day’s work.”

  For all the joy he felt after the game, Gentry confesses to having an unsettling dream just hours after the big win.

  “I dreamed that Mike traded the entire coaching staff to the Nets for Jason Collins,” he says. “So I kept going up to Dan and asking, ‘How could your brother do that? Why would he get rid of us?’ Can you believe that? Why would I dream that after one of the biggest wins of the season?”

  “The reflexive insecurity of being a coach?” I suggest.

  “No,” says Mike. “That wasn’t a dream. I made the offer and they wouldn’t do it. They don’t love Collins all that much, but they said they had to get a lot more than that.”

  Raja Bell didn’t have any bad dreams, but his nightmare came anyway, as he explains at practice. In the early morning hours he needed to use the bathroom, so he reached for his crutches and took a few steps. “Hey, it feels pretty good,” he said to himself, so, like a pilgrim at Lourdes, he threw down the crutches. And promptly collapsed on the floor.

  “What are you doing!” screamed his wife, who helped him back into bed.

  With the kind of injury Bell has—small tears in his calf muscle, or, officially, “microtrauma”—the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours are the worst. The injury isn’t really dangerous, but it is time-dependent. Aaron Nelson is treating him with manual therapy and a mix of modality treatments (ice and electrical stimulation). The Suns insist on calling the injury “day-to-day” but, privately, they have ruled him out for tomorrow night. So, as he did before Game 6 of the Lakers series, which he missed due to suspension, Bell waxes philosophical about how the Suns can fare well without him.

  “Obviously I want to play,” says Bell, “but remember they were trying to hide Dirk on me. A lot of times I just found myself standing in the corner. Now, I had plans to change that in Game 2. I was going to start diving and making him move. But they can’t do that with L.B. He’ll slash them to death.”

  Conceding that the opponent more or less hid a weak defender on him is an astoundingly humble admission for an NBA shooting guard to make. Bell has a lot of pride and is ecstatic at both the progress he’s made as an offensive player and the fact that D’Antoni, the league’s most offensive-minded coach, has confidence in him. Further, he sometimes gets defensive when his overall athleticism is questioned. He used to be, as he says, “one of those guys who played up around the rim,” and was even capable of winning a dunk contest. During a game against the Knicks in New York on January 2, Nash passed him up on a fast break and instead shoveled a pass to Marion. “Somebody tell Steve I can dunk,” Bell hollered to the bench.

  But circumstances have turned Bell into a defensive stopper and a capable but not spectacular offensive player. And he is honest enough to concede that, in the short run, Barbosa is the greater burden for a defense.

  Eddie House is paging through USA Today, meanwhile, reading about the upcoming Antonio Tarver-Bernard Hopkins light heavyweight match.

  “I thought it was in Vegas,” says House. “It’s in Atlantic City.”

  Amare’ Stoudemire looks up. “Where’s Atlantic City?” he asks.

  I’m not sure if he’s kidding. He isn’t. “South Jersey,” I say. “I was born there.” He nods, no doubt thinking that the fact it’s my birthplace is the only reason I have that bit of arcane knowledge at my disposal.

  Later, as Stoudemire watches practice, his gaze settles on Iavaroni, who is working with the big men. It’s hard to figure out whether Stoudemire wants to be on the floor. Certainly he wants to be out there tomorrow night, tearing down the rim with twenty thousand people in the stands. But practice is another matter. Suddenly Stoudemire smiles, and, like a kid reciting a nursery rhyme, says: “Iavaroni. Andrew Toney. No baloney.” He doesn’t know where Atlantic City is, but he can spout off a line from a Philadelphia 76ers video about their 1983 championship team, of which Iavaroni (and Andrew Toney) were members.

  “Coach Iavaroni’s got a ring, right?” Stoudemire asks. He says “Iavaroni” quickly, like it’s three syllables instead of four. I’ve-rone-ee.

  “Yep,” I say. “From nineteen eighty-three.”

  “Damn,” he says. “I was one year old when that shit happened.”

  Stoudemire gives no outward sign that anything is different about his life. But tomorrow morning, in a courtroom back in Maricopa County, Arizona, Carrie Stoudemire is scheduled to stand before a Superior Court judge and officially accept a plea deal over her DUI crash into a freeway barrier in October of 2005. Amare’ is staying with the team and will not be attending. It’s a pro forma hearing—C
arrie has already agreed to a three-year prison sentence (including credit for one hundred and sixty-two days already served) that helped her avoid a possible four-year sentence had she been found guilty at trial. But some in the Suns’ camp think it’s significant that her son is not returning to Arizona to be with her, a sign, perhaps, that he’s breaking away from her. Stoudemire doesn’t talk about his mother except in the most general of terms. I love her. I’m still behind her.

  Though there is absolutely no chance that D’Antoni is going to play him in this series, the press is full of speculation about it. Stoudemire feeds it. He takes shots before and after practice, and, unless Iavaroni is monitoring the drill, never once do I see him feed the ball back to a teammate. That is what he should be doing. Shawn Marion’s jumper is, at this moment in the season, infinitely more important to the Phoenix Suns than Stoudemire’s jumper. But ATM just keeps putting them up, putting them up, never rebounding, never seeing himself as part of a whole, a spoke in the wheel. Small things often reveal big deficiencies.

  Not a day goes by that the Suns coaches don’t study the whole Stoudemire package—the two surgically repaired knees; the tendency to work on the fun part of rehab (out on the court) and skip over the private part of rehab (stretching and strength drills); the increasing distance he puts between himself and his teammates—and worry that he won’t return as the same force he was next season when he averaged thirty-seven against the San Antonio Spurs, the eventual NBA champions, in five conference finals games.

  But for a variety of reasons, I get a smile on my face whenever I see Stoudemire. As Gentry often says, “Amare’ just cracks me up.” Stoudemire is friendly and open (except on the subject of his mother, which is understandable), never failing to give me a cheery “Whassup, Jack?” He would probably be the player voted least likely to discuss books, yet he is one of the few who has questioned me about the project.