Before I delve too deeply into the issues that everyone has been obsessing over since the end of the NBA finals last Sunday, I must give credit where credit is due.
I offer my sincere congratulations to owner Mark Cuban, head coach Rick Carlisle, and team and finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki. I counted the Mavericks out several times and believed what I read when some analysts picked Portland as the team most likely to beat a higher seeded team in the first round. Even after that, I wasn’t sure that they’d be able to beat the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers. After that, I wasn’t sure how they’d be able to handle a team with two budding stars that could jump out of the gym and over the geriatric crows wearing Mavs uniforms. After that, I was sure that they would not be able to hang with a group of three young stars (I’m not going to distinguish between “stars” and “superstars”) who seemed to be playing their best basketball and were peaking at the right time.
What happened? 4-2, 4-0, 4-1, 4-2.
Don’t I look stupid?
So how did they do it? The easy answer is that they scored more points than the Heat in 4 of their 6 games but that’s not really anything new. As long as Dirk has been playing for the Mavericks, they have been one of the most efficient offensive teams in the league. The problem was always at the defensive end and this year they changed all of that. The additions of Brendan Haywood and Tyson Chandler are probably the reason that they hoisted the trophy over the weekend because now, Dirk doesn’t have to play the five. He can play the four where he is taller and longer than just about anyone he’ll match up with. At the five, he had to match up against Shaquille O’Neal. At times in the Finals, he was matched up against Dwayne Wade.
No offense intended but if you’re Nowitzki and it’s the fourth quarter of an important game of the NBA finals, which match-up would you rather have? D-Wade is a great player and if he was guarding Dirk, it was because of a switch but it still illustrates my point. Dirk has never been the bang down low, grab 15 rebounds and control the paint kind of guy. He’s much better roaming the perimeter and sometimes going into the post to take advantage of a mismatch and the additions of Haywood and Chandler allowed him to do that.
So the Mavericks were better offensively and they were better defensively. Another aspect which is ever more important than either of those is that the Mavericks were better mentally. Why should a 15 point deficit late in game 2 (already trailing one game to none) faze them when they faced similar circumstances against the Thunder? Why should that bother them when everyone… and I mean everyone… wrote them off after coughing up a 24 point lead late to Portland in a win for the Trailblazers that tied the series.
Interestingly, I would normally say that there are two ways to handle adversity; wilt under the added pressure or stare it down and resolve not to go down without a fight. However, I’m adding a third category that is a subset of the second and this is where the Mavericks incredible run falls; they didn’t change a thing.
I’m sure there were minor tweaks here and there by Rick Carlisle (who might finally get his appreciation amongst fans) and some guys shot better or made better decisions but they were the same team that made it this far. They never tried to reinvent the wheel. They knew that Portland overcoming a 24 point lead was an aberration and if they played their game they would prevail (they did). They knew that the Thunder having a big lead late didn’t matter because Dirk was already in the zone of a lifetime and all they had to do was feed him the ball and they’d prevail (they did). They knew that Miami’s cockiness was on display after D-Wade’s potential series changing three pointer gave the Heat a 15 point lead late in game 2 and they knew that the Heat would expect the Mavs to clench up the rest of the way. They knew they just had to do the same thing they always had and the shots would start to fall and they would prevail (they did).
What I’m really going for here is the difference between confidence and cockiness. The Heat were cocky; the Mavericks were confident. If you need any more evidence, look at Nowitzki’s game 6. He finished the game 9-27 from the field but if you just saw that, you would miss a lot of key information. He was 1-13 in the first half from the field (1-13!!!) and in the second half he shot a much more Dirk-like 8-14. What changed at halftime (or the end of the third quarter when he was still just 4-20) that made him superhuman once again in the fourth quarter? In my opinion, nothing changed. Many of his shots were in-and-out type misses and he knew eventually those would start falling and sure enough, they did and the Mavericks prevailed once again.
The difference is that when athletes are put under pressure, some believe that it will require a superhuman effort to get passed the obstacle in front of them and that is the clenching that I saw from the Miami Heat (with the exception of LeBron who I will get to later). What the Mavericks taught us this postseason is they knew they were capable of getting past anything; all they had to do was keep going, keep grinding and they would eventually prevail…
…and they did.
LEBRON
So much has been said about LeBron James in the few days since the season ended that to repeat them here would be nothing short of ludicrous. Basically, what all the talk has boiled down to is this:
LeBron James is not better than Michael Jordan.
All that I wonder about that statement is what took us so long to figure it out? For the past 13 seasons the media has obsessing combed over college basketball as well as the NBA looking at tomorrow’s bright young players and whenever they’ve found one sufficiently dazzling, they have asked the question…
Is
First it was Allen Iverson, or “The Answer” (presumably to the question I just posed) and then when we realized that he was going to struggle to shoot even 45% from the floor (which he did twice in 14 seasons while Jordan shot better than 45% all 12 of his full time seasons in Chicago) we moved on to Kobe Bryant. Here we might have found a decent player to compare to Michael Jordan. In a lot of ways, their career arcs are very similar from enormously physically gifted 2 guard to more of a jump shooter as their career took a toll on their legs.
Now, we’re onto LeBron James.
Yes, I’m sure there have been others that have borne the mantle of the “Next Michael Jordan” but frankly, I don’t care because I’m here to say this. Nobody has ever put the entire package of physical skill, basketball skill, and a downright ridiculous will to win in the same body the way Jordan has. Nobody. To claim that anyone has achieved a truly Jordan-esque level is unfair to that player as well as to Jordan himself. Many people have had the first one or the second one or even both of the first two and James belongs in that category. But nobody has ever matched that skill with the will to win the way Jordan did and the only others that might be able to say they had that will to win were not as basketball blessed as Jordan was. To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying that Jordan didn’t have to do one day of work and was just that good to begin with. I feel very comfortable saying that nobody worked harder on those Chicago teams than Jordan did and everyone else worked that hard because they saw their superstar working that hard.
So if LeBron James is not the next Michael Jordan, where does he fit in the pantheon of greatness? For the answer to this, I’m going to defer to Charles Barkley, a guy I always loved to watch play and never liked to watch comment on a basketball game. I don’t know why, he’s always grated on me. Anyways, Barkley said that a better comparison for James would be Magic Johnson and he hit the nail so precisely on the head, it’s scary.
When Magic was drafted number one overall following the 1978-1979 season, he went to a team that had gone 47-35 the year before and had a young(er) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who still had 787 games and 16,246 points left on his tires. The onus was not on Magic to save that franchise. On top of that, two years later the Lakers would draft James Worthy (#1 overall after a 57-25 season and their second title in three years) and the three of them would form the core of that run which included 9 Finals appearances in 12 years.
When Larry Bird was drafted, the Celtics were not nearly so well off. However, two years after the Celtics drafted Bird, they drafted another future Hall of Famer in Kevin McHale and then acquired a 26 year old Robert Parish from Golden State and a 29 year old Dennis Johnson from Phoenix. There you have the core of a team that played in the Finals five times and won three.
The seven players drafted since LeBron James have COMBINED for 7,045 points and 2,560 rebounds in 940 games. For comparison’s sake, James has played in 627 games and has 17,362 points and 4,451 rebounds.
I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for James; not one bit. All I’m saying is this; if James had been drafted to a good team with several good players and there had been other scoring options, I think he would have preferred to play the role of more of a point forward as opposed to the primary scoring option. When he kept deferring to Wade and Bosh in the Finals, I don’t think his only fault was being overwhelmed by the moment. I think part of it is he doesn’t want to carry the scoring burden and I think that might have been part of the reason he went to Miami; he would be playing alongside two legitimate scorers who could carry the load while he did what he always wanted to do; distribute.
Do I think this is a character flaw? Not at all. On the court, James is a very unselfish player and asserted himself in the playoffs more out of necessity (due to Wade’s struggles and Bosh’s inconsistency) than out of a will to take over. The problem is that people saw the scoring he was doing in Cleveland and immediately put him up in the realm of Jordan and they never really thought about whether or not he wants to be remembered as a scorer or a passer.
Do I consider the Heat’s season a failure? No, I don’t. It’s not a success either but this group of guys hadn’t experienced adversity together yet (now they have) and didn’t know how to react. I foresee a far more relaxed and comfortable group next year and I don’t see anyone stopping them.
That’s all for now but soon I’ll be writing something that has been stewing since November… open arrogance amongst the best athletes of today and how my respect for them would grow if their open arrogance did too…
