(Never Too Much podcast: 2000-01 NBA League Pass, Monday’s games, soothing rain, occasional guitar.)
Whingeing over “points of emphasis” in the NBA’s first weeks is an annual tradition. One year the emphasis was on upsetting Rasheed Wallace and it went wonderfully. Lots of points.
The NBA cracks down on baited contact this year, they swear. You can’t feint into a cushion at the free throw line, can’t beguile your way toward a whistle. Lunging, out.
If James Harden shot only nine free throws in the first week of any other season we’d just assume it was for a trade demand, something we’re used to. We’re not used to players actually trying and not getting away with it.
James Harden, to his credit, really doesn’t want any attention over this right now, if you wouldn’t mind.
The problem is Steve Nash, first to the podium. His super-fine offense can’t get going until his MVP gets rad, so he’s going to lay in:
“No big deal,” says Harden, because it ain’t.
If James Harden fails against the Hornets in October it’s because October. James Harden will be washed, one day, and that day won’t be in October.
Here’s how our hero looked early Sunday evening:
I mean, yeah: Cody Martin balls. NBA sometimes happens.
You build to a shift. The 2004-05’s crackdown on hand-checking wasn’t opinion fodder straight off the bat, not with the Spurs and Pistons appearing in that season’s Finals. Bush was in office, people were cynical. The NBA tried to stop hand-checking before, 1994, nothing happened.
The 2004-05 season started with two teams — Phoenix, Seattle — scoring at obscene marks. The answer wasn’t pace, Seattle was the league’s fourth-slowest team, but the flexibility to express:
“The new rules have given players more freedom of movement. The fact that there are no illegal defenses has increased ball movement and increased man movement that make it hard to defend. And more coaches are relinquishing control.”
This is Dwane Casey, then a Seattle associate head coach, speaking to Howard Beck at the New York Times.
“You look at Phoenix, the coaches give up control of the offensive set. That's no disrespect to the coaches, but a lot of plays you just can't really design a defense for. That makes for more points. I think players today are better offense players. Shooting has improved. Ball-handling has improved.”
Pacer coach Rick Carlisle wanted to shout out the loosened zone defense restrictions from three years before, so, shout out to loosened zone defense restrictions from three years befooooorrrrrre:
“I think since the major rule changes of three and a half, four years ago, style-wise, we’ve become a better ball movement league. We’ve become a higher basketball I.Q. league.”
The league’s reigning Finals MVP was not impressed:
“I don’t understand,” Pistons guard Chauncey Billups said then. “I think you should reward hard work, not try to make it softer.”
Whatever Chauncey.
Anyway, Charlotte is it:
B*LLY SPORTS OPINION
Weren’t they the company that saved money and didn’t send MLB announcers to the road games the network was charged with (and charged for) covering?
Yeah, fuck those guys.
It’s getting worse. Several NBA radio announcers stay home at the behest of those who pay them, calling games off television feeds. Soon enough television crews won’t stray from the home city.
When announcers aren’t actually at the game, coverage suffers. The program turns into a talk radio show, nobody wins but the latest round of investors who saw televised sports and thought they could squeeze slightly more money out of it than the last pain in our ass.
And Mark Cuban sees the nickel and dime operation for what it is — real cheap, uninspired stuff — and I wish other NBA owners cared about their fans as much.
The same owners that won’t spring to pay for a hotel room for the lone radio announcer.
HALFTIME
Pre-Nash Amar’e Stoudemire giving it to the team that passed on him twice (Nene, Nikoloz Tskitishvili).
This was a month into Mike D’Antoni’s term as interim head coach and the contest was never in doubt.
Stoudemire finished with 28 points and eight rebounds and Nikoloz only played five minutes and missed all three shots but Denver got out to a big lead early and never looked back because say it with me “Voshon Lenard scored 32 points to lead all scorers.”
OH, NO
You want to know why I cover basketball?
Every year a new batch of players enters the NBA. Every year the previous season’s new batch grows a little. The constant repletion engages me, the NBA keeping its ground game groovy, its gunk gobbled up yearly via tectonic plates.
Also I get to quibble over dumb shit with Chris Mannix:
For those of us present as friends traded blows over rights to the Hornets selection in NBA Jam, this doesn’t scan.
The LJ-and-Zo Charlotte Hornets were absolutely must-see TV and were often scheduled nationally as such, like the time they were slotted as NBC’s Game of the Week in March 1995, before Jordan’s comeback bumped them to regional action.
Qualifying Chris’ claim for the League Pass era does him fewer favors, but happy Hornet teams are rare. The five-year history of Hornets Mk. II doesn’t bring a lot of heat. And the Charlotte Bobcats, such as they were, aren’t.
What does make the cut, however, is one of the top-five teams in the history of NBA League Pass: Baron Davis’ 2000-01 Charlotte Hornets.
Davis could not be kept out of the fray by year No. 2, his first as a starter. “I was gonna dunk on everyone,” he told Forgotten Seasons in August. “My second year is the year I was catching bodies.” Blindfolded or not.
League Pass denizens loved tuning in to watch the Hornets give the champion Lakers a push on a Friday night, or lose in Toronto on a Sunday afternoon while everyone else (Chris) watched the NFL conference championships. Your Hornets made TBS and TNT a few times, always against the Knicks, but it was on Channel 754 that we saw Charlotte score seven unanswered points in the final two minutes to overcome Allen Iverson’s 47 and beat the Finals-forward 76ers.
Philadelphia split the season series with Charlotte and was damn lucky not to meet the Hornets in the postseason.
Not with Hornet forward (and ex-and-future 76er) Derrick Coleman looming.
“He was like an X-factor for us,” Davis said in summer, with words that would not look great in print, “because people would not expect him to show up.”
Milwaukee beat the Hornets in the second round in 2001 but it took seven games, by then everyone on Charlotte’s roster was wearing a headband, it was very 2001. I think this is the month all of us decided to go with a shag haircut.
These Hornets made it past the opening round by upsetting the Miami Heat, Charlotte working with enough motivation to sweep a 15-game series, let alone a five-game quickie.
Miami didn’t shake hands with Charlotte before the series started, but it wasn’t like the sides were unfamiliar.
Eddie Jones and Anthony Mason (after much pining for Pat Riley) were dealt from Charlotte to Miami in training camp, earning the ire of David Wesley and other Hornet vets. Ex-Heat trade returnees P.J. Brown and Jamal Mashburn wanted to destroy their replacements and Hornet sixth man Eddie Robinson wanted to show off for whoever was picking up the tab that night in Miami.
Charlotte head coach Paul Silas had sterner motives up against Riley, whom Silas blamed for lousing the waters in Silas’ decades-long search for a head-coaching gig.
After the Hornets swept Miami (Davis: “punked them, from all angles”), Silas earned a victory lap:
“It was no contest,” Riley said on TV. “It’s a feeling of being outplayed, outcoached, out-everythinged.”
Outcoached? That admission sparked a grin from the 57-year-old Silas, whose relationship with Riley has been strained since 1991-92, when he worked for Riley as a New York Knicks assistant.
Silas felt that Riley didn’t give him enough responsibility that season and viewed him as lazy. Until Charlotte hired him late in the 1998-99 season, Silas hadn't held an NBA head coaching job for 16 years, and he believes that Riley disparaged his work ethic around the league.
“That always came out anonymously, but I know who started it,” says Silas. “I’m still so offended by that. I tried to erase that stigma for a lot of years.”
(Riley denies that he ever ripped Silas. “That’s absolutely untrue,” he says. “I have too much respect for the man.”)
For the record, the two didn’t shake hands after the series.
Must-see:
TOUGH GUY OVER COFFEE
I don’t drink coffee every day because in 2000-01 (while staying up all night BtB’ing for NBAtalk) I developed Huron-sized ulcers and was told to stop. Had a 21st birthday coming up, had to save that jejunum.
I still drink coffee occasionally, not much, less often than occasional partiers do with the professional night spent B/W powdery white. I drink coffee black because I enjoy the taste of coffee, I preferred the taste of mocha yogurt and coffee ice cream to all other options as a kid, it’s the bean that works for me and it is fun to make fun of people that put a bunch of shit in coffee when your veins do so wonderfully on just the base.
I’ve never had one of those tall ones, the squat ones, the pumps-full-of-oat-and-cedar spearmint white chocolate “coffees.” I have never enjoyed a mocha, not in my loca, never a latte, not even in my sadder days.
Because I am the stupid one.
Chocolate is delicious. So is dairy and so are dairy-ish products. “Pumps” of gooey, sugary goodness melting inside your steamy caffeine machine? Yes.
Yes and yes. They are right. I am wrong.
If people want to shove an éclair inside the coffee instead of paying for it separately, celebrate them. Especially those who figured out ways (again, oats) to emulate the taste of German chocolate cake in a coffee order without also ordering a horse’s bale’s worth of calories. You fucking champions.
You’re the ones that have done it right, not me, the guy whose tastiest taste of “coffee” flirts with a few freeze-dried crystals and the hottest water this hotel’s bathroom faucet could come up with.
Fancy coffee drinkers see the world differently, in brighter colors, and not just because of all that sugar. They are awake, and I am not.
DANCING FOR MONEY
This song has been in my head since Megan Koester’s Sunday email hit, you should subscribe to get her Sunday email.
I know that James Harden got a ton of free throws during his trade demand year I just didn’t want to use a footnote.
It is time for BtB:
Thank you for reading and listening!
James Harden misses that touch