May 13, 2012

NBA put its thumb on the scale for the Lakers

By Dave Krieger

From the beginning, it was a strange suspension.

For one thing, former players who often take players’ side in these things were surprised it wasn’t longer.

“I think he deserved more . . . maybe ten games,” said TNT’s Shaquille O’Neal.

For another, the number was an odd one, and not just in retrospect. When NBA commissioner David Stern announced on April 24 that Metta World Peace, formerly known as Ron Artest, would serve a seven-game suspension for a vicious elbow to the head of Oklahoma City’s James Harden, the Lakers had one regular-season game remaining. You didn’t have to be Albert Einstein to do the math.

“I knew it was going to be the first round of the playoffs,” TNT’s Charles Barkley said that night. “I don’t think that’s a fair or unfair suspension. If it was ten games, that would’ve been fair. I knew it was going to be between five and ten, but I’m surprised they didn’t make it just the first round of the playoffs because he could come back for a Game 7.”

My memory is by no means comprehensive, but I’ve been covering the NBA since 1988 and cannot remember a previous instance when a disciplinary edict from the league office suddenly injected a significant player into a playoff series that was even through six games.

And make no mistake: Artest’s return Saturday night tipped the balance of this first-round series the Lakers’ way. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to his coach.

“We all played well, but I’d be remiss if I did not talk about Metta,” Mike Brown said after the Lakers’ 96-87 victory dashed the Nuggets’ hopes of a first-round upset.

“He was huge tonight. We put him on (Danilo) Gallinari, we put him on Andre Miller, we put him back on Gallinari, we put him back on Andre Miller, and his presence helped out a lot. I didn’t realize that Andre Miller and Gallinari were a combined 2-for-19.

“He’s long, he’s physical. He knows how to play different positions defensively, whether it’s the pick-and-roll, post-up, pin-down game. But he made some plays tonight. He went in for a steal or something like that, he was out of position, and then he sunk back into the paint and tipped the ball away. I mean, he made plays tonight that won’t show up in the stat sheet that were absolutely freaking amazing for us defensively. Just his presence alone helped us out. And that’s what we missed the first six games.

“Having said that, you’ve got to give our guys credit because they stepped up and found a way to win those games without him. But he was monstrous for us tonight. Monstrous, on both ends of the floor.”

Monstrous. Interesting choice of words. Imagine how history might have changed if Stern had done what Barkley and many others expected, ruling Artest out for the first round of the playoffs. The Nuggets had won Games 5 and 6. The momentum seemed to be flowing their way.

Even without Brown’s testimony, Artest’s influence on the outcome of Game 7 was unmistakeable. In the forty-three minutes, forty-one seconds he played, the Lakers beat the Nuggets by eighteen points, meaning that in the four minutes, nineteen seconds he didn’t play, the Nuggets won by nine. Artest’s plus 18 was the best plus/minus number for any player on either team.

So the question demands to be asked: Did Stern purposely make the suspension seven games, not the first round of the playoffs, in order to give one of the league’s marquee teams, in one of its largest television markets, an insurance policy in case it was forced to a critical Game 7 in the first round?

Barkley wasn’t the only one who noticed the subtle difference between a seven-game punishment with one regular-season game remaining and simply ruling Artest out of the first round, however long it lasted. About ninety minutes before Game 7, Nuggets coach George Karl was asked whether the suspension that allowed Artest to jump into the series at its most critical moment was appropriate.

“I don’t know what the appropriate one is, but I just don’t understand seven,” Karl said. “Why seven? Why not the end of the series? Why seven? It really feels uncomfortable in the last thirty-six hours, twenty-four hours. We’ve spent so much time on ‘what if.’ What are they going to do? I’m not sure they know what they’re going to do with him. I know we’re going to be the reactor, which is something I’m not thinking is necessarily making me happy right now.”

For those who tend toward conspiracy theories, the officiating in the series will provide more encouragement. And frankly, the complaints are difficult to refute. The Nuggets led the NBA in free throw attempts during the regular season at 26.7 per game. The Lakers ranked ninth at 24.1.

In their playoff series, it was the Lakers who led in free throw attempts. They got 158 in seven games, or 22.6 per. The Nuggets got 142, or 20.3. That put the Lakers 1.5 below their season average; the Nuggets were 6.4 below theirs. That’s a reduction in Nuggets free throw attempts of nearly 24 percent from regular season to playoffs.

Is this because the Nuggets suddenly got less aggressive against the Lakers? Not at all. In fact, there was a strange pattern to the free throw attempts. Through the first three games, the Nuggets led, as their reliance on penetration suggested they would. They had 72 free throw attempts through three games, or 24 per game.

From there, the foul shots awarded to Denver suddenly fell precipitously. They got 70 in the final four games, an average of just 17.5, or a remarkable 9.2 fewer than their regular season average. The Lakers, by contrast, got 61 through the first three, or 20.3 per, and then 97 in the final four, an average of 24.3, which was slightly greater than their regular season average.

This difference was most noticeable in the final two games of the series, when the Lakers were awarded 53 free throws to the Nuggets’ 31. That’s an amazing differential considering the two teams split these games and the Nuggets’ aggressive style produced the most foul shots in the association during the regular season.

Karl tried not to dwell on it, but following Game 7, when the Nuggets shot just 14 free throws to the Lakers’ 23, he seemed clearly exasperated.

“The game was so physical,” he said. “I mean, it was so, bang, push, shove, grab, hold, that I think their size won over our speed.”

Do you really have to be a conspiracy nut to observe that the statistics suggest the league’s representatives on the floor tilted increasingly toward the Lakers as the series went along?

Maybe so. Call me a homer if you like. I’ve never been fond of reflexive complaints about bias in officiating. I tend to believe incompetence is a more likely explanation than conspiracy for poor officiating. In fact, I used to publish an annual list of the NBA’s ten worst referees — alongside the ten best — in the Rocky Mountain News.

But among the factors that contribute to bad officiating in the NBA is the tendency to favor stars — the Lakers have three; the Nuggets, none — as well as a subconscious tendency to favor historically successful teams over historically unsuccessful ones. You don’t have to believe in an explicit conspiracy to believe that referees subconsciously favored the Lakers, and that this tendency increased as the series went along.

Call it sour grapes if you like. I know Lakers fans will. But when you combine the strange term of Artest’s suspension with the inexplicable turnaround in the pattern of foul calls, I’m telling you, there are folks in Denver who will be wondering what happened here for quite some time.

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May 12, 2012

A generation later, George Karl switches sides

By Dave Krieger

It was the most surprising, inspiring victory in the long and not particularly accomplished history of the Denver Nuggets. And it completed one of the great postseason upsets in the NBA to that point — the first No. 8 seed to beat a No. 1 seed in the first round of the playoffs.

On the other hand, George Karl, who was coaching the No. 1 seed that day, calls it “the worst loss of my life,” which is saying something.

I was there that Sunday afternoon, at the old Seattle Coliseum, so I went down to the basement and dug out the original game book. It is a little more than eighteen years old now. The officials were Jess Kersey, Dick Bavetta and Jack Nies. Bavetta, unbelievably, is still officiating at the age of seventy-two.

Karl remembers it as “Mutombo beating us in Seattle,” perhaps because the iconic image is the Nuggets center lying on the hardwood when the overtime was done, holding the basketball above his head with both hands, a delighted grin on his face. With fifteen rebounds and eight blocked shots, Dikembe Mutombo did, indeed, play a major role.

But the stars for the Nuggets that afternoon were reserves. Point guard Robert Pack came off the bench to replace an ineffective Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and led them with twenty-three points on eight-for-fifteen shooting, including three of five three-pointers.

The late Brian Williams, who would change his name to Bison Dele before being murdered by his brother eight years later, put up seventeen points and nineteen rebounds in thirty-four minutes off the bench, the most inspired performance of his career. When I asked him afterward what had gotten into him, he looked at me as if astonished it wasn’t obvious: “That was desire!” he said.

Eighteen years later, the Nuggets have a chance to add another improbable first-round upset to their resume, this time with Karl coaching for them instead of against them. His syntax was somewhat twisted as he reflected on that Thursday night after the Nuggets beat the Lakers to even their series at three games apiece, but his sentiment was not:

“I’m just hoping to become Denver Nugget history, (from) the worst loss of my life to hopefully the best win in Denver Nugget history. The worst loss is Mutombo beating us in Seattle, and maybe I can put another one up on the board that rocks history a little bit.”

To do it, the Nuggets will need exactly what they brought to the Seattle Coliseum that day a generation ago: Desire. They will need to want it more. They will need to play with the audacity of conviction and make the Lakers, like the Sonics on May 7, 1994, struggle with the weight of expectations and gathering gloom.

“You’ve got two histories against you,” Karl said. “You’ve got Game 7 and you’ve got 3-1 series. You’ve got both of them working against you. I think we might be too young to understand all that, so I might keep it away from them. I’m not sure we’re going to talk a lot about anything except the energy of the game and how important it is to us.”

Historically, the road team wins Game 7 about twenty percent of the time. The last time a team came from a three-games-to-one series deficit to win was six years ago, when the Suns did it . . . to the Lakers. In ten tries, the Nuggets have never done it.

Since frittering away their series lead, the Lakers have engaged in some finger-pointing. Coach Mike Brown and star Kobe Bryant have blamed big men Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol. For Game 7, L.A. gets back the former Ron Artest, who changed his name to Metta World Peace in an Orwellian response to his history of violence, most recently enhanced by a vicious elbow to the head of Oklahoma City Thunder guard James Harden. His seven-game suspension ended with Game 6.

“We’ve got to continue to get to the paint, we’ve got to hopefully fall into the three ball a little bit more than it has been in the first five games and defend them better than we did (in Game 6),” said Karl, who turns sixty-one today. “And if we do all that stuff, I think it’ll be a fourth-quarter game and we’ll figure out how to beat that closer system that you guys have said we can’t win because we don’t have a closer.”

That’s a reference to the knock on the Nuggets at the end of close games since trading Carmelo Anthony in the middle of last season. Playing with a deep ensemble cast, they have demonstrated the unpredictable virtues of true team basketball. At the same time, it’s never quite clear who they want to take the big shot at the end of games. If Ty Lawson is hot, as he was in Game 6, it would surely be him. If Danilo Gallinari is on, it might be him. Just as likely, it’s whoever’s open.

The last time the Nuggets played a Game 7 was also eighteen years ago, in the series that followed their upset of Karl’s Sonics. The Utah Jazz won the first three games of their best-of-seven, second-round series, then the Nuggets roared back to win three straight, just as they had come back from a two-games-to-none deficit to tie the Sonics series.

Game 7 was in Salt Lake City on May 21, 1994. The Nuggets shot poorly and fell behind early, trailing by seven after one quarter, by eight at halftime and by fifteen after three quarters. They did their best to narrow the gap in the fourth, but Utah prevailed, 91-81. Karl Malone had thirty-one points, fourteen rebounds and six assists, playing all but two minutes of the game.

Eighteen years later, Karl hopes to improve his record to 1-1 in memorable Nuggets playoff upsets.

“I just want to help them,” he said. “My whole goal in Game 7 is coach ’em up and help ’em have a chance to kick somebody and make history. It’d be fun. It’d be fun for me. It’ll be a great opportunity. It’s been a great challenge.”

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May 11, 2012

Lakers play the blame game

By Dave Krieger

It’s in the nature of athletes to cover for one another. From the earliest age, they are taught it’s one of the obligations that comes with being a member of a team.

But after consecutive losses to the Nuggets turned a comfortable series lead in the first round of the NBA playoffs into a loser-go-home Game 7 on Saturday, the Lakers decided playing nice isn’t working. Their two leading spokesmen, coach Mike Brown and star Kobe Bryant, laid the blame squarely at the feet of Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol.

Exhausted after a day spent fighting both gastroenteritis and the Nuggets, Bryant said the Lakers’ big men would need a new “mind state” for the club to advance.

“Kobe, being dehydrated and all that, and sick as a dog, coming out and trying to will us to a win, it’s disappointing to watch him give that type of effort, trying on both ends of the floor, getting on the floor after loose balls, and we don’t get it from everybody,” Brown said late Thursday night, after the Nuggets blew out the Lakers in Game 6, 113-96.

“Our second- and third-best players are Drew and Pau, and the reality of it is both those guys have got to play better in order for us to win. We’re going to have a tough time winning if we get the same type of production, not just offensively, but on the defensive end of the floor, too. For the first time, we were really, really bad with our pick-and-roll coverage. (The Nuggets) got what they wanted.

“Especially in the third quarter, we maybe did the pick-and-roll coverage correctly eight percent of the time, if that. We’ve got to do a better job. It has to matter for us. We’re going to have to work harder. And we’re going to have to want to get the job done to protect your teammates. If we get the same type of effort, it’s going to be a long night for us on Saturday.”

Asked if he agreed with Brown’s assessment of the Lakers’ big men, Bryant didn’t mince words.

“Of course I agree with that,” he said. “I talked with Pau a little bit after the game. I’ll speak with Andrew as well. It’s one of those things where psychologically you have to put yourself in a predicament, in a position, where you have no other option but to perform. You have to emotionally put yourself with your back against the wall and kind of trick yourself, so to speak, to feel that there’s no other option but to perform and to battle.

“When you put yourself in that mindset, your performance shines through and your talent shines through. It doesn’t matter what the defense does, it doesn’t matter if you get fouled; it doesn’t matter because you’re emotionally at a level that is above that. That’s the mind state that they have to put themselves in.”

This may be the best articulation I’ve heard of Bryant’s competitive mindset, and why he is generally so dismissive of questions about the defensive effort against him, as he was when I asked him about Danilo Gallinari’s length after Game 3.

Bynum’s statistics in Game 6 weren’t awful — eleven points, sixteen rebounds, four blocked shots, three assists, no turnovers. Gasol’s were — three points on one-for-ten shooting, three rebounds, one block, one assist and one steal in twenty-nine minutes. But Brown emphasized he was talking mostly about aspects of the game that are not measured by the stats.

“Their bigs in transition are just beating our bigs down the floor, and our bigs aren’t running hard enough to stay with them,” the Lakers coach said. “In the beginning of the series, they were. They were running with them and you could see there was a sense of urgency to get back.

“They’ve been getting beat down the floor and so our guards are helping out with their bigs at the rim. And then, while our guards are helping out with their bigs at the rim, their guards are trailing and getting open threes and our bigs aren’t helping our guards. So it’s like a snowball effect.

“We showed two clips at halftime where Pau stayed in the paint not guarding anybody and somebody was guarding his man because he was one of the last guys down the floor, and Andre Miller hits a wide-open three. Same with Drew, he’s supposed to be guarding Gallinari because Steve Blake picked up his guy at the rim, and Gallinari hits a wide-open three. That’s just one of the things that we’re not getting from our bigs. So our bigs are going to have to step up. They’re going to have to produce, and not just points-wise; on both ends of the floor.”

Bryant, who said his hotel room “resembled a scene from The Exorcist” after a day of doing battle with his digestive system, agreed Bynum and Gasol let down their teammates, but also pointed out such playoff stumbles aren’t unprecedented.

“We let each other down, for sure,” he said. “We didn’t step up and meet their energy. (Bynum and Gasol) know that and I expect them to come out in Game 7 and play with a sense of urgency and a sense of desperation that wasn’t there the last two games.

“I can speak from experience that I’ve been in series in our first championship run, 2000, where we wind up going to five games, at the time the first round was five games, against a Sacramento team. We got pushed to the brink against Houston in our championship runs. So these sorts of things do happen. In 2008, we met a Boston team in the Finals that got pushed to a Game 7 against an up-and-coming, young Atlanta team. So these sorts of things do happen. And you just have to respond.”

Bryant also said he’s looking forward to getting back teammate Ron Artest — a.k.a. Metta World Peace — in Game 7. Artest’s suspension for elbowing Oklahoma City’s James Harden ended with Game 6.

“I expect him to come out and play with the tenacity that he’s known for,” Bryant said. “He’s the one guy that I can rely on, night in and night out, to compete and play hard and play with that sense of urgency and play with no fear. So I look forward to having that by my side again.”

Nuggets coach George Karl expects all these fighting words to have a predictable effect in L.A.

“The Lakers, I have no doubt they’re going to come out with the best game they’ve played all series,” he said. “We’ve just got to be better.”

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May 9, 2012

Karl Mecklenburg: “I have good days and bad days.”

By Dave Krieger

From NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s press conference on Feb. 1, 2008, the Friday before Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona:

Me: As you may know, in a forthcoming book, a forensic pathologist who did brain autopsies on Mike Webster, Terry Long and Andre Waters suggests that there is a syndrome that some football players suffer from that is similar to the syndrome that some boxers suffer from in terms of brain damage from repeated head trauma. He urges that the league and the union pay for continued medical follow-up for all retired NFL players to determine just how serious of a problem this is. My question is: Do you acknowledge that this is an issue, and would you support that sort of comprehensive follow-up for all retired players?

Goodell: Two points: I think we’ve been very clear about concussions and the importance of dealing with concussions as a medical issue, making sure that we take a very conservative approach that would make sure that we are doing everything to benefit the players’ health and safety. I don’t think any of those claims are backed up by scientific or medical facts. That’s what we’re trying to deal with. We have a committee that has been dealing with concussions for twelve or thirteen years now, which has done ground-breaking research. Certainly, I think we will continue to do this and focus on this. In fact, they are doing a study on former players to make sure they understand, from a scientific and medical standpoint, what is the long-term effect of concussions. I don’t think any of us has an answer to that, and we would like to get that answer, but we’d like to get it on a factual basis, rather than making a lot of charges that can’t be supported medically.”

If he had it to do over again with the benefit of more than four years of hindsight, my guess is Goodell would change that answer quite substantially. The NFL committee on brain injuries to which he referred was subsequently so discredited as an apologist for the league that its co-chairmen, Dr. Ira Casson and Dr. David Viano, resigned in November 2009.

The book to which I referred in my 2008 question, Play Hard, Die Young: Football, Dementia, Depression and Death, by forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu, has only gained credibility as more former NFL players have acknowledged suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and/or taken their lives since its publication in 2008, among them Shane Dronett (2009), Dave Duerson (2011) and Junior Seau just last week.

Former Broncos linebacker Karl Mecklenburg is one of sixty plaintiffs in one of the numerous lawsuits against the NFL for its treatment of head injuries over the years. More than 1,200 former players are now named in over fifty separate cases. Former Broncos safety Dennis Smith is a plaintiff alongside Mecklenburg in the action filed in Pennsylvania. Former quarterback Jeff Hostetler is the lead plaintiff in that case.

“I have good days and bad days,” Mecklenburg said this week on the Dave Logan Show. “I have days I have a tough time remembering people’s names. I travel all the time as a motivational speaker and I’ve got to park on the same side of the airport, same level, same row, so I know exactly where my car is when I get back, because I have no idea otherwise. Stuff like that.

“When I go into the hotel room on the road I take out my cell phone and take a picture of the room number and then I know where it is. It’s one of those things you adjust to. And I can’t tell you how much of that is who I am and how much of that is football-related. But I think it’s a little unusual for someone fifty-one years old to be having those kind of issues.”

Like a lot of his fellow plaintiffs, Mecklenburg wonders whether the NFL knew of the potentially devastating effects of head injuries even as its in-house committee was insisting for more than a dozen years that the research was inconclusive.

“If you look historically at what has happened in the NFL and what change has happened, it’s when there’s legal pressure brought on the league,” Mecklenburg said.

“Individually, a guy like (Broncos owner) Pat Bowlen is a wonderful human being, a guy that I’d do anything for. But collectively, the league is in business to make money. They’re not going to do anything that kills the golden goose if they can possibly help it. It’s a contact game, it’s a dangerous game, but you can limit the amount of injuries, especially head injuries, if you legislate for that.

“Since things have come to light, or since they’ve decided that it’s OK for things to come to light, there’s all kinds of rules against going after the head and causing those kind of injuries. And when it happens, it’s taken seriously, where ten years ago I don’t know that the league didn’t already understand that there were long-term effects to head injuries, and the players were told over and over again that that’s not true.

“So, to me, to force the league to say, ‘You know what, the best interest of the players is also in our best interest,’ is really what I’m looking for, and what I’m hoping the other guys are looking for, too.”

As the death toll among former players by their own hands has mounted, there’s been more conversation within the medical community as to whether CTE is the result of major head trauma, what we think of as concussions, or might also be the cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of minor traumatic incidents that go largely unnoticed, the sort of head-banging that goes on in football practices at every level every day.

“I don’t know,” Mecklenburg said. “That hasn’t been proven one way or another yet. What we do know is that there is a disease called CTE that mimics Alzheimer’s Disease. They’ve identified kind of a rogue protein, the tau protein, that they’ve found in autopsies of guys with this disease, and it’s connected to head blows. And they don’t know whether it’s the one big head blow or a whole bunch of little head blows. They don’t know.

“They realize some people are more susceptible to it than others. But a lot more information has to come in. And hopefully they’re going to be able to find ways to mitigate this thing before it’s an autopsy situation, before forty-three-year-old guys are killing themselves.”

When I mentioned some of the game’s well-known suicide victims, including former Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, former Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long and Duerson, the former Bears defensive back, Mecklenburg mentioned Dronett, the Broncos’ second-round draft pick in 1992 and Mecklenburg’s teammate for three years. Dronett, a defensive lineman from the University of Texas, went on to play six seasons for the Falcons after four with the Broncos. He shot himself to death in 2009, nine days after his thirty-eighth birthday.

“Great guy, a fun-loving guy,” Mecklenburg said. “That’s the thing. When you think about these guys and you have first-hand knowledge of them, you realize what wonderful human beings they were, and the last thing you would think that would happen, because every single one of them is outgoing, fun-loving, seemingly very well-balanced emotionally, guys. And then they get this disease and part of the disease is depression. That’s what, I think, separates it from Alzheimer’s. Depression is part of it and when that hits, in my mind, the guys have got to keep track of each other. I don’t think the NFL can do that for us. I don’t think the union can do that for us.

“I really think we’ve got to get some sort of a system going where people are in contact with each other daily and making sure everybody’s OK. I know players who played golf with Junior Seau a week before he killed himself and said he was in great spirits, having a blast messing around with the guys, and . . . and . . . boom. So it’s a scary thing. It’s this time bomb and we don’t know who’s got it, who doesn’t have it. There’s really no way to test for it at this point, and hopefully that’s going to change.”

Note: I’ll be one of the guests tonight (Wednesday, May 9) on Studio 12 (KBDI-Channel 12) from 8-9 p.m. The show, hosted by Steffan Tubbs of 850 KOA, will examine the issue of brain injuries in football.

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May 7, 2012

The Nuggets’ playoff paradox

By Dave Krieger

Danilo Gallinari was lying on the floor when the Lakers took the lead for good in Game 4 of their first-round playoff series with the Nuggets.

Depending on whom you believe, he had either just been stunned by a blow to his throat delivered by Pau Gasol’s shoulder — “I felt, like, a click, and, I don’t know, I just touched it a little bit and I felt it click back,” Gallo said afterward, waving two fingers over his Adam’s apple — or he was trying to buy a foul call by overreacting to a hard but legal screen.

The referees apparently thought it was the latter because no foul was called, which left the Nuggets in a tough spot — four players defending five in the final minute of a tie game. Normally, when one of your own goes down on a basketball court and there’s no call, you’re supposed to foul to stop the action. The Nuggets didn’t. Moments later, Lakers guard Ramon Sessions hit an open three-pointer to give them an 89-86 lead with forty-eight seconds remaining.

The Nuggets never got closer. The play may end up the turning point in the series. With the game tied at 86, the Nuggets had a chance to even the series at two games apiece. When they lost, it gave the Lakers a prohibitive lead of three games to one. The Nuggets have trailed a playoff series by that margin ten previous times and never come back to win it.

“He’s a big guy, man,” Lakers guard Kobe Bryant said of the six foot, ten-inch Gallinari. “He can’t flop like that on the screen-and-roll. Pau is not necessarily the strongest guy in the world.”

On the game telecast, analyst Steve Kerr suggested Gallinari did not get the benefit of the call from the referees because European players have a reputation for acting.

“It was just a tough pick,” Gallinari said. “You’ve got to expect that in the playoffs. So myself, I’ve got to be more ready in those situations to get those hits and still be able to play defense. Unfortunately, they had a big shot out of that play. So it was a tough one. We’ve got to rest now and think about Game 5.”

The temptation to blame Gallinari for the outcome should be resisted, however, for two reasons.

First, without him the Nuggets wouldn’t even have been in the game. He was Denver’s best player in Game 4, leading them with twenty points despite being the only player on either side to get into foul trouble.

Second, in the last sixteen playoff games in which they’ve scored fewer than ninety-nine points, the Nuggets’ record is 0-16. Sunday night they finished with eighty-eight, sixteen below their league-leading season average.

This is the Nuggets’ postseason paradox. The team that led the NBA in scoring doesn’t have enough offensive weapons.

For much of the regular season, their speed and athleticism were enough. When you’re outrunning your opponents, anybody who can dunk or make a layup is an offensive weapon, and that’s the whole roster. The Nuggets led the NBA in fast break points, assists and points in the paint.

But in the postseason, when the games slow down and transition buckets are hard to come by, you need players with the offensive skills to score into the teeth of a half-court defensive set with intimidating big men guarding the basket. This is where the Nuggets struggle.

The Lakers have three players — Bryant, Gasol and Andrew Bynum — the Nuggets must assign two defenders, at least some of the time. This creates open shots for role players like the daggers from Sessions and Steve Blake on Sunday night.

Post-Carmelo, the Nuggets have no one like that. The Lakers switch defensive assignments on the Nuggets’ pick-and-roll to try to contain guard Ty Lawson’s quickness, but there’s no one player they feel they have to double-team.

That’s why the Nuggets finished with only eighty-eight points. They got some open looks down the stretch. They just couldn’t knock them down. They don’t have great shooters. And they couldn’t get out and run often enough to get the easy baskets to which they grew accustomed during the regular season.

“Probably there were a couple of stretches during the game where we didn’t run as much as we did in Game 3, and our intensity went down for a couple of stretches,” Gallinari said. “We know that against them we cannot allow ourselves to do that.”

Following their Game 3 victory, coach George Karl said energy, which is reflected in pace and aggressiveness, is the key to the Nuggets’ success. Lawson had twenty-five points and seven assists in Game 3. He had eleven and six in Game 4. I asked Karl if Lawson was as aggressive Sunday as he’d been two nights before.

“I probably never feel Ty is aggressive enough,” Karl said. “I think he should be more aggressive almost every night. I don’t know how crowded it was in there on his decisions on not attacking a little bit more to the rim. The film will show that. My thing is I like to see Ty drive the ball in the paint thirty to forty times a game. I think he’s that good and I think he’s that important to us.”

The Lakers made more of an effort to get back on defense and foil Lawson’s penetration in Game 4. They also made more of an effort to rebound the ball. After losing the battle of the glass by ten Friday night, they won it by ten Sunday. Nuggets center JaVale McGee went from sixteen points and fifteen rebounds to eight and four. Power forward Kenneth Faried went from twelve and fifteen to six and seven.

“Us guards had to get in there and rebound,” said the Lakers’ Bryant, who had more boards (eight) than any Nuggets player. “A lot of times our bigs are out of position because of the rotations in the pick-and-roll coverages. McGee and Faried have been doing a great job coming in on top of them and crashing the glass. So we had to get in there with the big guys and mix it up, put some bodies on them and try to control the glass ourselves.”

“Basically, JaVale and Kenneth outworked their big guys in Game 3 and they outworked us in Game 4,” Karl said. “Sometimes the luck of the flow of the game comes your way and I think it came their way in Game 3. (Sunday) we didn’t have the extra effort, energy, luck that sometimes comes by playing hard. I think we gave some things back a little bit and I think we were maybe surprised by their pushing and shoving and powering the game.”

Karl was clearly frustrated by the referees, who called nineteen fouls on the Nuggets and thirteen on the Lakers, even though the Nuggets had more points in the paint and more fast break points, generally the measuring sticks of aggressiveness. Still, both teams struggled to make free throws, so the scoring difference at the line ended up being just two points.

“We shoot twelve free throws, six of them by McGee and none by our guards,” Karl said. Actually, he meant starting guards. Reserve guard Andre Miller shot two. Bryant was not called for a single personal foul all night while Gallinari was called for five, forcing him to the bench for a time in the fourth quarter.

“There were some tough calls, but the referees are there to do their best job and I’m on the court doing the best job I can, so I’m not thinking about the calls,” said Gallo. He did kick a door on his way to the locker room after the game, but that might have been general frustration. “We have to think as a team about the mistakes and the things that we didn’t do as well as we did in Game 3 and try to do those things even better in Game 5 because I think especially in L.A. it’s going to be even more intense.”

Bryant, who reacted sarcastically to my question about Gallo’s defense on him following the Lakers’ Game 3 loss, was more gracious in victory.

“Gallo plays hard, man,” he said. “I gave him some (grief) the other night, but he plays really hard, man. He competes and he steps up to the plate and doesn’t back down, so I appreciate that.”

With one day to travel and prepare for Game 5 on Tuesday, the Nuggets have two choices: They can rediscover their energy and extend the series or they can end their season in L.A.

“Losing’s no fun,” Karl said. “I’m not unhappy with my team. I’m not unhappy with where we’re at. I wish it was 2-2, but I still think we’ve got a series to play and it’s going to be fun on Tuesday night. I think it’s a powerful challenge to us. And I don’t think it’s an impossible challenge. I think it’s a great challenge for this young team.”

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May 6, 2012

Rockies’ pitching staff in disarray

By Dave Krieger

Actually, disarray may be too mild a word for the state of the Rockies’ pitching staff after it blew early leads of 5-0 and 6-0 on consecutive nights against the Braves, scoring seventeen runs in two games and losing them both.

“That’s the worst game of the year for us,” manager Jim Tracy said after the second, Saturday night’s 13-9 throwback to the early days of baseball at altitude.

By the time it was over, the Rocks’ team earned-run average had ballooned to 5.06, worst in the National League. Esmil Rogers, who allowed five earned runs in an inning and a third, saw his ERA soar to 8.36. Edgmer Escalona is at 8.53.

“Our pitching, as I mentioned last night, it’s got to be better than what we’re seeing right now,” Tracy said in the understatement of the soggy evening at Coors Field. “It’s unacceptable. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

Generally inclined to defend his players to a fault, Tracy was critical of Rogers and Rex Brothers for lack of consistency out of the bullpen, just as he had torched Jhoulys Chacin and Guillermo Moscoso recently for short, ineffective starts.

And it’s not as though all this trouble is in the rear view. Before Saturday night’s debacle, the club was forced to abandon plans to bring Jeremy Guthrie off the disabled list for Tuesday’s game in San Diego, meaning Tracy had to tell reporters he didn’t know who would start either Tuesday’s or Wednesday’s game there. At the moment, he has three healthy starters, one of whom is 49 years old and couldn’t hold leads of 6-0 and 8-3 on Saturday.

That, of course, would be Jamie Moyer, who became the oldest player to get a hit in a big league game Saturday since 50-year-old Minnie Minoso got one for the White Sox in 1976. Heartwarming as this tale is, Moyer is trying to get batters out at Coors Field with a “fastball” clocked at 77 miles per hour, which is slower than most major league changeups. Saturday, he managed to do it for four innings before everything unraveled.

“The wheels fell off,” he said afterward. “Solo home runs usually don’t beat you, but they just chipped away, chipped away. I couldn’t get an out in the sixth. I don’t have an answer for you right now.”

After giving up two solo homers and a single to open the sixth, Moyer departed with an 8-5 lead and one runner aboard. By the time Rogers was finished pouring kerosene on the brush fire, the score was tied and the bases were loaded. By the time Brothers departed two outs later, the Braves led 12-8.

The fact that the Rocks are counting on Moyer at all is evidence of the implosion of their plans for this year’s pitching staff. Coming off Tommy John surgery and old enough to be most of his teammates’ father, Moyer was a non-roster invitee to spring training, the longest of long shots. The Rockies had nine starters ahead of him when pitchers and catchers reported in February.

After trading Ubaldo Jimenez for three pitchers from Cleveland, Seth Smith for two pitchers from Oakland and Chris Iannetta for a pitcher from the L.A. Angels, it looked as though they’d have enough starters to staff both the big league club and the Triple-A affiliate in Colorado Springs. Instead, it’s as if they all caught some awful, contagious disease.

Josh Outman, one of the pitchers from Oakland, got hurt. Guillermo Moscoso, the other pitcher from Oakland, was ineffective. So were Tyler Chatwood, the pitcher from the Angels, and Alex White, one of the pitchers from Cleveland. Only one of these four had to pitch well enough to bump Moyer from consideration. None of them did.

Jhoulys Chacin, the Rockies’ winningest pitcher last year, showed up out of shape and pitched to an ERA of 7.30 before being shipped out. Guthrie, the fitness freak obtained from Baltimore who rides a bicycle to the ballpark, had some sort of chain problem that crashed his bike, leaving him with a shoulder injury and a trip to the disabled list.

So here they are, with two healthy starters under the age of forty-nine — Juan Nicasio and rookie Drew Pomeranz — and just nine quality starts in twenty-six games, fewest in the National League. The bullpen, which started well, has been called upon way too much and is already fried. There are no quick fixes, either. If there were, you can bet the Yankees and Red Sox would have bought them up already.

The good news is Nicasio and Pomeranz pitch the next two. Each went at least six innings in his last start, which makes them marathon men in comparison to the rest of the Rockies’ staff.

The bad news is nobody is quite sure what happens after that. Christian Friedrich, the Rocks’ first-round draft pick in 2008, last pitched at Triple-A on Friday, which would make the timing right for Wednesday’s start in San Diego. He wasn’t exactly lights out, giving up five runs, three earned, in five and two-thirds innings, but the Rocks don’t have a lot of options. His overall ERA of 3.00 in thirty innings isn’t bad, particularly for the Pacific Coast League.

White last pitched for the Sky Sox on Tuesday, managing just four and two-thirds innings. Outman is on his way back from an oblique injury and a long way from being ready to go deep into a game as a starter. Chacin and Moscoso were just recently banished to Colorado Springs because they pitched so poorly.

So while Tracy declined to speculate, the options include Carlos Torres, recently called up from Triple-A to be a long relief man, and Friedrich. But stay tuned. Television analyst George Frazier and his son, Parker, now at Double-A Tulsa, might be options by the time the team arrives in San Diego.

All of this is having the depressing effect you might expect on the rest of the clubhouse. The Rocks are tied for second in the National League in runs, but when you score eight and nine in consecutive games and lose them both, that’s not much consolation.

“It’s hard when you go down like this after scoring six runs early in the game and feeling excited when things are going well early in the game,” said Carlos Gonzalez, who had four hits Saturday to raise his team-leading batting average to .323.

“Everything just blew up in the middle of the game. We just have to hold the other team and continue to score runs if we need to. It’s difficult. It’s a tough loss and I’m really tired of saying the same things over and over. We need to figure it out and just try to get that ‘W’.”

Rockies management might be forgiven if this were an isolated run of bad luck. After all, Moscoso made twenty-one starts for Oakland last season and pitched to an ERA of 3.38. Outman made nine more. Chatwood made twenty-five for the Angels. The Rockies have gotten two forgettable starts from Moscoso and none from the others.

But this organization has been struggling to assemble a competent pitching staff for years, and it has made some whopper mistakes with pitchers early in the the draft, most notably selecting Greg Reynolds with the second overall pick in 2006, in the process passing on Clayton Kershaw and Tim Lincecum, now the aces of two of their rivals in the National League West. At some point, you have to ask whether the existing management is capable of judging pitching talent, whether in the draft or the trade and free agent markets. Pitching at altitude poses unique difficulties, but you can’t do worse than last in the league.

Of course, those organizational questions are not Tracy’s concern at the moment. He just needs to find somebody — anybody — who can get people out. Preferably this week.

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May 5, 2012

How to irritate Kobe Bryant (It’s not that hard)

By Dave Krieger

You take your thrills where they come in this business, and one of them is annoying Kobe Bryant. It’s easy to do. You just have to suggest someone shut him down on a basketball court. That does the trick every time.

This is because Kobe considers himself unguardable. Or, at least, he has yet to meet the human capable of doing it. So if he has a bad game — as he did Friday night, missing sixteen of twenty-three shots as the Nuggets beat the Lakers for the first time in their playoff series — there is always some reason other than whoever was guarding him. He was off, his teammates didn’t do enough, he was unaccountably shooting from the wrong spots. Something.

So I took my turn in Kobe’s wheelhouse when he showed up in the Pepsi Center interview room as Friday prepared to give way to Saturday.

First, I asked if JaVale McGee’s offense had surprised him. McGee was the Nuggets’ second-leading scorer in Game 3, behind Ty Lawson, after not being much of an offensive factor in the first two games in Los Angeles. McGee’s teammates credited his big night — sixteen points, fifteen rebounds, three blocks, two steals, two assists and just one turnover — with a major role in the Nuggets’ victory.

“No,” said Bryant, who admits to being surprised only slightly more often than he admits to being well defended. “He did what I know he can do — running hooks, big spin moves, scoop shots with his left hand. Those are things he’s capable of.”

Thus encouraged, I trod deeper into the unthinkable, asking if Danilo Gallinari’s length had bothered him. Nuggets coach George Karl deployed the 23-year-old, 6-foot-10-inch forward on Bryant for much of the second half, during which Kobe took eleven shots and made two.

Bryant smirked. Was I serious? Yes, I said. That’s a real question.

“Sure,” Bryant said, still smirking, sounding at least as sincere as Dr. House. “Somewhat real answer.”

Just in case his opinion of the question, and perhaps of Gallinari, wasn’t clear enough, he added a sardonic postscript to his final response of the night, in which he attributed the Lakers’ first defeat of the postseason to a single statistic:

“We shot six for twenty-five from the three-point line. We can’t do that,” he said. And then, in his best deadpan:

“And Gallo’s defense was exceptional.”

It should come as no surprise that Bryant would never admit being bothered, certainly not by a player with as brief an NBA resume as Gallinari, whether or not he was. In response to a similar question earlier, Karl suggested Gallo had been the Nuggets’ best defensive matchup on Bryant, owing chiefly to his length. Bryant can shoot over anyone, Karl said, but it’s a little harder over Gallinari.

The Italian forward is likely to continue to get the most minutes checking Bryant, Karl said, although Arron Afflalo and Corey Brewer will share the duty.

“I don’t think you want to go one way on Kobe Bryant,” Karl said.

Kobe’s explanation for his offensive struggles credited the Nuggets’ scheme, but no individual defenders.

“I wasn’t on my sweet spots,” he said. “They tried to do some things defensively. They tried to keep me more on the perimeter. I wasn’t in the post a lot. I lived at the elbow the first two games and we got away from that a little bit in the second half. Pau (Gasol) as well, we saw him on the perimeter way too much. We can’t do that. We have to stick to our ground and pound game.”

Bryant has described this season’s Lakers as a championship-caliber squad, and he seemed to view their first playoff loss as a minor bump in the road, calling it “a good learning experience” for the team’s younger players.

For the Nuggets, the formula for success was the usual — outhustling their opponent.

“The game for us is all about our energy and our enthusiasm to play,” Karl said. “It’s not complicated for us. When we play poorly, it’s because we don’t play with enough energy, we don’t push the pace and we shoot too many jump shots.”

He credited the “intensity and guts of JaVale and Kenneth (Faried) and all our bigs” as well as Lawson’s thirteen-point first quarter, which helped the Nuggets build a 30-14 lead after one. The Lakers fought their way back, but by the time they got within striking distance, they were out of gas. The Nuggets took the fourth quarter 27-19 to win going away, 99-84, before a raucous full house.

Like everything else the Nuggets did well, Karl attributed McGee’s big night to aggressiveness. “I think he was working underneath the defense,” he said. “With all the penetration we put in the game, their big guys are always helping uphill and helping out of position a bit.”

Lakers coach Mike Brown also credited the Nuggets’ energy:

“Denver played a great game,” he said. “I thought Ty Lawson came out being very aggressive. We’ve been talking to our guys about him coming out and being aggressive the last couple of days. I thought he was very impactful to start the game to help them get out by however many they got out. I thought that Denver’s two bigs, Faried and McGee, brought a lot of energy to the table for their team. The twelve offensive rebounds for the two, the thirty overall, plus the double-double in points with them also bringing twenty-eight points to the table between the two was a very, very good game for those guys.”

Karl tweaked his starting lineup for Game 3, replacing Kosta Koufos with Timofey Mozgov as the starting center. Mozgov played fourteen minutes and failed to score, but he did establish a more physical tone than Koufos had, banging willingly with Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who was shut out in the first half before putting up eighteen points after intermission. Still, McGee came off the bench to play most of the minutes at center.

Can the Nuggets repeat the feat Sunday to even the series at two games apiece and turn it into a best-of-three, or was this their token win in the usual five-game first-round elimination?

“Every game we’ve played we’ve been down to the Lakers,” Lawson said. “We’ve been down big and always trying to fight back. We wanted to make it a point to come out early and see how they did with a deficit, and they reacted well to it, but we held on.

“We dealt with having a big lead. We dealt with them coming back and making it a game. Nobody got nervous, so we learned a lot today and it’s probably going to help us out throughout the series.”

If Kobe responds to his poor shooting night with a big game Sunday, as he often does, I wouldn’t be surprised if he revisits the question of Gallinari’s defense, just to pound home how stupid he considered the question. Bryant enjoys few things more than the “I told you so” moment.

In Kobe’s world, the only one who can stop Kobe is Kobe. The great ones generally feel that way. The difference with Kobe is he makes no attempt to disguise it with false modesty or humility. He oozes arrogance. The only way to wipe the smirk off his face is to end his season prematurely, which remains a decidedly uphill battle for the Nuggets.

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May 3, 2012

Rockies hitters still covering for lousy pitching

By Dave Krieger

Jason Giambi’s 429th career home run won the Rockies both a game and a series in dramatic walk-off fashion Wednesday, but the team is still struggling to get a disappointing pitching staff together.

“I knew I hit it good when I got it,” Giambi said on the Dave Logan Show just minutes after his three-run bomb in the bottom of the ninth gave the Rocks an 8-5 win in the rubber match of their first series of the season against the Dodgers.

“It’s kind of a like a warm butter knife through butter. It’s just nice and easy and free. I was just excited to get it up in the air because I knew that’s what we needed in that situation. It’s always exciting when it goes out of the park and you get met at home plate. That’s what keeps you coming back every year. You can’t get that feeling anywhere else on the planet. That’s what keeps me training and working out and coming back.”

The Rocks got a rare quality start Wednesday, just their ninth in twenty-four games, which is tied for worst in the National League. Rookie Drew Pomeranz gave them their first look at the dominance general manager Dan O’Dowd was betting on when he made Pomeranz the centerpiece of last summer’s Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

Still, with the bullpen taxed from so many short starts, setup men Matt Belisle and Rex Brothers couldn’t hold a 2-1 lead in the eighth and closer Rafael Betancourt couldn’t hold a 5-3 lead in the ninth.

On the bright side, the lineup kept bouncing back. After the Dodgers went up 3-2 in the eighth, Carlos Gonzalez hit his second homer of the game off Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw. After L.A. tied it in the ninth, Giambi delivered the game-winner with CarGo waiting on deck. All three homers by the left-handed hitters came off left-handed pitchers.

“The exciting part is last year I think we would have gave away that game,” Giambi said. “But this year it’s been a lot of these games where we’ve kept fighting and not let it get us down offensively when they’ve come back and tied the game or even went ahead. We’re starting to grow as a ball club. The maturity level of the younger players is starting to come through. Hopefully this is the win that jump starts us to start playing a lot better baseball.”

Obviously, that can’t happen until the pitching improves. Manager Jim Tracy finally got fed up Tuesday when Jhoulys Chacin put his team in a 7-0 hole, allowing four runs before an out was recorded. The Rocks battled back but lost 7-6. Tracy called the starting effort “awful,” and Chacin, the team’s winningest pitcher last season, was optioned to Triple-A Colorado Springs the next day. The Rockies are last in the National League in opponent batting average (.287), tied for last in quality starts and next to last in earned-run average (4.69). Yet they’re 12-12.

“We’re playing good baseball, but we haven’t played great, and I think our best baseball is yet to come,” Giambi said. “We’re starting to cinch up a few things. Our defense is getting better. Our bats are getting better. We’re starting to figure it out on the mound. Unfortunately, we just need to get some of these starters to go a little bit deeper in the game because our bullpen’s tired. Skipper’s having to give a lot of guys days off in the bullpen just because we’re not getting the length that we need. And I think that’s going to happen. They’re working on it and that’s the best you can do.”

There are hopeful signs. Pomeranz threw 6 2/3 innings Wednesday, giving up just one run, his longest outing of the season so far. Juan Nicasio threw six in Colorado’s 6-2 victory over the Dodgers in the series opener. Jamie Moyer has been better than anyone had a right to expect from a 49-year-old coming off Tommy John surgery. Jorge De La Rosa has begun a series of minor league rehab starts following his own Tommy John surgery. Barring setbacks, he could be back in the big leagues by the end of the month. And while Jeremy Guthrie had a lousy start, once he recovers from his bicycle crash he should revert to his own history as a reliable innings eater.

In the meantime, CarGo is red-hot and basically carrying the team. He has fourteen runs batted in over the past six games.

“He just oozes with talent,” Giambi said. “You could always tell that he was a phenomenal player. I know he kind of went around the league a little bit, but you could tell the talent was always there. We would always say in New York when he was with Oakland, like, ‘Who’s this CarGo kid?’ He would play one day and hit a few bullets and the next couple days he wouldn’t play. We were like, ‘Why isn’t that guy in the lineup?’

“I think he was just trying to find his way and he’s finally starting to come into his own. This kid is going to be as good as he wants to be. He’s one of those guys, you look at the A-Rods, the Jeters, the Rickey Hendersons that I’ve played with, he’s going to be as good as he wants to be. He’s putting in the work and he’s trying to learn and he asks a lot of questions because he wants to better.”

So the Rocks are keeping their heads above water while sorting out the pitching. Guillermo Moscoso has already been called up to fill in for Guthrie while he’s on the disabled list. The Rocks called up right-hander Carlos Torrez on Thursday but it’s not clear whether he’ll take Chacin’s turn on Monday or the club will make another move before that. Torrez, who pitched for the White Sox in 2009 and 2010 and in Japan last season, was starting for the Sky Sox, but averaging only five innings per outing. Alex White and Christian Friedrich are also possibilities to be recalled from the Springs to make Chacin’s next start.

In the meantime, Giambi likes the fight he’s seen in the early going and credits the addition of veterans to the roster — Marco Scutaro, Ramon Hernandex, Michael Cuddyer — with providing some of the resilience.

“We’ve had some meetings and I’ve had a lot of meetings with the younger kids saying that I’m proud of them this year, where before we would take a lead and if the other team came back or went ahead, we kind of went in shut-down mode and didn’t keep pushing,” Giambi said.

“We’ve really turned the corner this year of doing that. It’s exciting to watch. I think it’s helped out to have a few more veterans around to help these younger kids get through it, and they’re responding.”

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May 1, 2012

Frank Deford on the state of sportswriting

By Dave Krieger

Frank Deford is one of the most celebrated sportswriters in American history, but he admits to some concern about the present state of the trade that made him famous.

“The trouble is that people are not doing enough reporting today,” Deford said on the Dave Logan Show in advance of a trip to Denver later this week. To be fair, I had sort of led the witness, suggesting that amid the cacophony of voices in cyberspace these days, many sportswriters seem more inclined to self-promotion than journalism.

“They’re just offering their opinions,” Deford said. “And if somebody doesn’t do the reporting in the first place, then there’s nothing to offer opinions about, because you don’t know anything. That’s what scares me, not just about sportswriting, but journalism in general. If newspapers or whoever are not going to pay people to spend time really digging up facts, then we’re all going to suffer because we’re not going to get information, we’re just going to get people shooting their mouths off. And unfortunately, that happens all too often.”

Deford has been plying his trade at the highest level for fifty years, since joining Sports Illustrated straight out of Princeton in 1962. His career will be celebrated Friday night when the Denver Press Club presents him with its Damon Runyon Award, named for another legendary American sportswriter. The most recent of Deford’s eighteen books is a history of the craft: Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. He will sign copies of the book at the Tattered Cover on East Colfax beginning at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

“The best break I ever got was I went to Sports Illustrated at the lowest level, as a researcher out of college,” he said. “But I had been at Princeton. As a senior, a freshman on the team, and in those days a freshman could not play on the varsity, (was) a guy named Bill Bradley. And nobody had ever heard of him. So I go to Sports Illustrated and I say, ‘You guys aren’t going to believe this, but the best sophomore in the country this coming year is a guy at Princeton.’ And they all laughed and said, ‘You’re just an old (Princeton) Tiger there.’

“Of course, I turned out to be right, and it made me look very, very smart. They gave me a chance to write a story on Bill, and he turned out to be even better than I had boasted. That was really my start. They paid attention to me after that. I’ve told Bill often that he’s responsible for my career.”

Among the changes to sportswriting over the half-century he’s practiced it is a dramatic reduction in the access to players writers enjoy.

“I was really lucky I came along when I did,” Deford said. “It was a long time ago, this was back in the 1960s, but I think it extended into the seventies and maybe even into the eighties, in which you could get to know athletes.

“First of all, there just weren’t as many journalists around, and secondly, the athletes, I think, were a little more willing to talk to you. They didn’t make as much money and they weren’t all hidden behind gated communities. They held real jobs in the offseason and they were like you; they weren’t making a whole lot more money than you, the writer. So there was a facility on their part to sit down and talk. They treated us like human beings. And I know there’s a lot of that that still goes around, but by the same token I think players now are a lot more wary of the press because they don’t know when they’re going to get burned. They don’t trust the press as much as they used to, and a lot of them have a real reason not to.”

Among a younger generation of sports fans, Deford may be better known these days as a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, where he’s been a regular since 1995.

“Being a TV journalist, the producers do all the work,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not supposed to say that. Scott Pelley and Steve Kroft and those guys of60 Minutes, everybody thinks they do everything, and you don’t. You get an awful lot of help. Whereas being a writer, you pretty much do everything yourself, (starting with) making your own plane reservations and getting places. You do get a lot more help and it’s a lot more collegial, being in television.

“I think the other thing is, as a writer, you have your opinion, which you can express much more. I think television, the visual, shows you and doesn’t give you the chance to expand the way that I did as a writer. I would not only write a story, but I would let people know how I felt about the person that I was writing about. I think you have a lot more leeway as a writer. And the guys who are doing it still do. So there’s no question there’s a difference. Both of them have their strengths.”

Unlike most TV work, where a two-and-a-half minute story is considered in-depth reporting. Real Sports allows Deford to be about as expansive as he was as a back-of-the-book takeout writer at SI.

“Writing’s still my first love,” he said. “But Real Sports does give you the opportunity that’s so seldom there on television. I mean, a segment on Real Sports is like a Dostoevsky novel compared to what you usually get on television. You have a real chance to do some stuff. I’ll always be a writer first, but I very much enjoy the time I spend on Real Sports, working with some very good people and doing the same thing, essentially. I’m telling stories. That’s it. That’s what people love and they have going back to the caveman days.”

Still, Deford is not altogether happy about the evolution of his original trade. I asked if he thought sportswriters today render athletes as completely as they once did, considering their more limited access.

“No, I don’t think so at all,” he said. “Back when I was doing it, and even as recently as maybe twenty-five years ago, you walk up to a guy and say, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a story on you.’ (And he’d say,) ‘Sure, let’s go.’  And have a cup of coffee, go out to dinner, whatever. You had the chance to talk to them, get to know them and really get to feel them.

“The players come along now, and let’s be honest, they sort of are born almost by the time they get to the major leagues, to know how to handle writers. It’s all very standardized. They’ve seen how athletes treat writers and treat guys on television. They give very, very standard answers, very careful answers. They don’t really let themselves be natural. And so it isn’t the writer’s fault so much. You’re so restricted.

“I can’t remember the first time that a P.R. guy ever sat down with me when I was interviewing an athlete, but it sure wasn’t the case for a long, long time. It was usually, sit on a plane, chat, have dinner, have a drink, chat, and really get to know somebody as a human being. And I think when that’s the case you feel so much more comfortable writing about someone because you have the confidence that you really know this guy. And if you don’t, you’re going to write a standard story with standard quotes. It’s a shame.”

You can find more information about Friday’s Damon Runyon Award banquethere. You can find more information on his book signing at the Tattered Coverhere.

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April 30, 2012

Against the Lakers, Nuggets need a Plan B

By Dave Krieger

On the bright side, the Nuggets were the only professional basketball team — in fact, the only professional sports team — to be mentioned at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington.

Jimmy Kimmel, the evening’s entertainment, noted the one-year anniversary of the secret mission to get Osama bin Laden, then speculated who might be next:

“Right now, Navy SEAL Team six is outside the Kardashian compound in Beverly Hills disguised as the Denver Nuggets so they can sneak in undetected,” he said. It was not his biggest laugh line of the night.

Anonymous as they may be to fashionable Angelinos such as Kimmel, the Nuggets, alas, were detected all too readily when they arrived at the Staples Center, just down the road from Beverly Hills, on Sunday afternoon to begin their first-round playoff series. The Lakers were ready and waiting. They blocked an astonishing fifteen of Denver’s ninety shots, including a playoff record-tying ten by center Andrew Bynum. Even the final score, 103-88, understated the Lakers’ dominance. Bynum finished with a triple double (ten points, ten blocks, thirteen rebounds) and his fellow seven-footer, forward Pau Gasol, was two rebounds and two assists short of matching the feat.

The Nuggets do two things extremely well, and the Lakers were ready for both of them. They run and they get to the rim. On Sunday, when they ran they found the Lakers waiting for them. And when they got to the rim, their shot attempts were swatted away with annoying regularity.

“We’ve got to adjust a little bit for the second game,” said Nuggets forward Danilo Gallinari, who led the visitors with nineteen points. “We’ve got to change something.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. The Nuggets are now facing approximately the same problem they face almost every year at this time: The tactics that work so well for them during the regular season, outrunning and outscoring opponents, suddenly stop working. Given time to prepare, their playoff opponents emphasize getting back on defense and limiting the Nuggets’ opportunities to play in the open court. After leading the league in scoring at 104.1 points per game this season, the Nuggets were held to sixteen points below their average in Game 1.

They also permitted the Lakers to make half their shots, meaning they were taking the ball out of the basket half the time, which is not a good way to start the fast break. Point guard Ty Lawson, their leading scorer during the regular season with an average of 16.4 points per game, had just seven.

A week ago, when coach George Karl appeared on the Dave Logan Show, I asked him about the Lakers as a potential playoff opponent.

“The Lakers give everybody in the West a different matchup than every other team,” Karl said then. “They’re big. They play a power game, they play an inside game, which is so unusual in our game today, with Bynum and Gasol and Kobe (Bryant) on the perimeter. That would be a fun challenge. It would make us probably a better basketball team if we played the Lakers and figured out how to beat them because our big guys have come a long way this year, but giving them the test to beat the Lakers in the playoffs would be a tremendous final exam.”

It’s a good thing Game 1 didn’t determine the final grade.

The Nuggets are one of the few teams in the NBA capable of matching up with the Lakers’ size. They have three seven-footers of their own in Kosta Koufos, JaVale McGee and Timofey Mozgov. The problem is the Nuggets’ big men are not anywhere near as skilled as Bynum and Gasol. Sunday, Karl didn’t even try to match the Lakers’ size. The three Nuggets seven-footers played a combined thirty-seven minutes. Bynum and Gasol played seventy.

Rookie Kenneth Faried, listed generously at 6-8, got the lion’s share of Denver’s minutes at power forward, meaning the Nuggets looked very small against L.A.’s twin towers. Lakers coach Mike Brown deployed basically a zone defense down low, with Bynum retreating to the paint whether the player he was nominally guarding was there or not. Karl claimed he should have been called for about thirty illegal defenses. In theory, defensive three seconds should be called when a defender is in the paint at least that long without actually guarding anyone. In practice, it’s seldom called more than once or twice a game.

Informed afterward that Karl had made the complaint, Bryant smirked. “Of course he did,” he said.

“We’ve got to find a way to score the ball before (Bynum) gets to the paint because once he gets to the paint, he’s a big presence inside,” Gallinari said.

There is a tendency after the first game of a playoff series to believe that absent major changes in strategy, every game will go the way that one did, which is seldom the case. Lawson is bound to play better than he did Sunday, and the Lakers’ role players — Jordan Hill, Steve Blake, Devin Ebanks and Ramon Sessions — are unlikely to play as well.

Still, the Nuggets would do well not to serve up their shots to Bynum on a silver tray the way they did Sunday. If the Lakers’ center continues to frustrate their efforts to get to the rim, they’ll need a Plan B. Their shooters are not good enough to win the series from long distance. Generally, the best way to neutralize a shot-blocker is to go right at his chest, getting him into foul trouble, or drive toward him and and kick the ball to open teammates.

“I’m not going to criticize my team, but the start was disappointing,” said Karl, whose squad was outscored by thirteen points in the first quarter and by only two the rest of the way. “The start was too NBA regular season-oriented and not NBA playoff-oriented. We were kind of in cruise control trying to pick and choose, figure out what we’re going to do instead of just going at people. I thought we gave them seven, eight minutes of basketball where we weren’t aggressive and assertive. But there’s a lot of guys that haven’t been out there before, haven’t played a lot of playoff games.”

The second-youngest team in the postseason tournament, maybe the Nuggets will grow into the series. Maybe their young big men will give the Lakers’ bigs more competition. Maybe Lawson will rediscover the elusiveness that frustrated NBA defenses for much of the regular season.

This much we learned from Game 1: If the Nuggets hope to make the series competitive, they will have to do a better job of avoiding the Lakers’ goaltender.

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