Category Archives: basketball

Global hoops

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With increasing frequency, the NBA is helping U.S. sports fans learn world geography. And reminding us that a long-held provincial belief of American basketball exceptionalism is a bit outdated.

The latest examples are the league’s recent draft, in which a young lad from France was chosen No. 1, and the masterful work of the Denver Nuggets’ Serbian headliner in the championship finals.

On the elite level, the game—invented in Massachusetts, yes; but by a Canadian—still is overwhelmingly dominated by Yanks. But two of the first seven players drafted this spring are from Europe. And though it took 31 years of NBA drafts before a non-American was picked No. 1, there now have been 14 players from outside the United States so honored—10 in this century.

In recent years, NBA teams have thrived with a wave of international stars: Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Cameroon’s Joel Embid, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis, France’s Rudy Gobert. Rosters have included top-notch Spaniards, Australians, Dominicans, Canadians, Chinese.

Really, anyone who has been paying attention to the sport could not have been shocked by Denver being led to its first title by the MVP performance of Serbian Nikola Jokic. In the peripatetic hoops cosmos, non-American efficiency began to become clear at least 30 years ago, back when former collegiate coach Fran Fraschilla, now a TV commentator, noticed that Europeans “took our game and made it more interesting. I fell in love with the way they played the game.”

Before Jokic was born—before, in fact, his native Serbia emerged as an independent nation during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ethnic wars of the early 1990s—those stomping grounds had become a pipeline of NBA talent.

Five members of the 1990 Yugoslavia team that won the world championship—most notably Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Tony Kukoc—excelled in the NBA. Four other Yugoslav stalwarts from that era—Dino Rada, Predrag Danilovic, Zarko Paspalj and Jure Zdovc—also were productive NBA regulars. That was about that time that basketball watchers quipped, “The Americans invented it; the Yugoslavs perfected it.”

Yugoslavia won an Olympic basketball gold in 1980 (when the U.S. boycotted Moscow) and silvers in 1968, ’76 and ’88, plus a bronze in ’84. Then, during the 1990 Seattle-based Goodwill Games, a now defunct Ted Turned event aimed at cutting through some of the Olympic politics of East-West boycotts, the U.S. team was humbled in back-to-back games by both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, mystifying the American players by eschewing a power, slam-dunk approach for passing, moving without the ball and deadeye shooting.

And though American basketball partisans, after the Yanks’ worst Olympic finish of third place at the 1988 Seoul Games, argued that they were being handicapped by international basketball federation rules banning NBA players, in fact U.S. hoops pooh-bahs had been blocking pros’ participation. Those Yankee officials figured our collegiate guys were good enough to win all the time and, more to the point, understood that the entrance of NBA talent also would bring NBA front-office types in to take their jobs.

So it was left to a Yugoslav from the Serbian region, international basketball federation secretary general and International Olympic Committee member Borislav Stankovic, to push for welcoming NBA players into the Games. That happened in 1992, just as the Balkans War was splintering Yugoslavia (and its national team) into what are now seven countries—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

In the confusion, Croatia competed as an independent nation in the ’92 Olympics, winning the basketball silver medal with former Yugo team members Petrovic and Kukoc. And Yugoslavia, allowed one more Olympic turn with athletes from Serbia and Montenegro, won the basketball silver in ’96. Divac and Paspalj were that team. In 2016, independent Serbia, with a 21-year-old Nikola Jokic aboard, took the Olympic silver—beating Croatia along the way before losing to the United States in the gold-medal final.

Before this month, the only time the Denver Nuggets played for a championship was in 1976, in their final season of the American Basketball Association before merging into the NBA, when their roster—like virtually all teams in the two rival leagues then—featured only fellows from American colleges: Kansas, North Carolina, UConn, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Colorado, Stanford, Michigan State.

Not anymore. Now, along with the always improving, entertaining NBA show, our horizons and geographical knowledge are expanding.

There is traveling in basketball. (Swallow the whistle, ref.)

Can nobody be like Mike?

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A primary manifestation of the “The Last Dance” documentary—but hardly news—was the glorification of Michael Jordan’s ferocious competitiveness. All the subplots aside—Jordan’s soaring dominance, the Chicago Bulls team dynamics, the spoils of victory—front and center was Jordan’s embodiment of the historical romanticizing of every sport’s success obsession: The zero-sum I-gain-by-your-loss addiction.

Over and over, we saw Jordan as the “hypercompetitive weirdo,” as labeled in a New York Magazine review; as what The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner found to be “borderline pathological” in contests of any nature. Slate’s Joel Anderson reasonably judged that Jordan was “portrayed as a distant, win-at-all-costs guy, abusive to teammates.”

Chicago reporter Sam Smith had established as much with his 1992 book, “The Jordan Rules.”  So, no surprise there. It in fact is a cliché in all sports: Doing anything—anything—to win is admirable. And, by contrast, losers lose because they don’t care enough; don’t give their all; are not “competitors.” As if sheer ability wasn’t the essential ingredient. As if the runner-up hadn’t lent just as much commitment to the struggle.

“When people see this,” Jordan says during “The Last Dance,” “they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ But that’s you. Because you’ve never won anything.”

That Jordan was a basketball wizard, plenty worthy of spectator awe, is immune to overstatement. His hoops contemporary Larry Bird once called him “God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Jerry West, among the previous generation’s stars, said Jordan was “the modern-day Babe Ruth.”

There were revelatory NBA performers before Jordan—Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving, just to cite two with similar styles of suspended-animation flights and fluid creativity; singular talents such as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar—but Jordan’s mesmerizing skill unquestionably ascended to another level.

And he certainly filled record books: Six league championships. Ten times the NBA’s leading scorer. Five times regular-season MVP. Records for the highest career scoring averages in the regular season (30.12 points per game) and playoffs (33.45). And on and on.

Yet “The Last Dance,” beyond providing some timely nostalgia for a golden NBA era while the current world plague holds live sports in abeyance, felt a lot like Jordan’s need to insist that he could—and would—get the better of any man. Any time. And that such athletic superiority is supremely important to him.

Several commentators have raised an eyebrow over the appearance of “The Last Dance” just when barstool arguments have been put forward for LeBron James’ candidacy as history’s best player. Before the coronavirus pandemic brought this season to a screeching halt, James appeared on his way to the NBA finals for a 10th time. Four more than Jordan had.

Such comparisons dealing with different eras are a fool’s errand. Still, “The Last Dance” deification of Jordan came across as his reminder that he is the sport’s rightful king. NBA fans in an ESPN poll at the documentary’s conclusion agreed—73 percent picked him over James.

That kind of public regard is how Jordan long ago made Nike a global superpower and supplied, along with Bird and Magic Johnson, the glitz that moved Olympic officials to finally welcome NBA pros. It caused Harvard historian and intellectual Henry Louis Gates to proclaim Jordan “the greatest corporate pitchman of all time.”

“The Last Dance,” two decades since Jordan’s retirement as a player, demonstrated that Jordan not only retains the marketing Midas touch, but that the thing he markets best is himself. The competition goes on.

A brush with a basketball master

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(Ralph Tasker)

Another six-degrees-of-separation moment: The celebrated Maryland high school basketball coach Morgan Wootten has died at 88. Never met the man. But there is a decided connection here, in a “he knew a guy who knew a guy” kind of way, because Wootten for years could be found in the same laudatory sentence as Ralph Tasker.

Tasker coached at my high school in Hobbs, N.M. and, by the end of his career, had won more games than any other prep coach in America besides Wootten. (Three others have since passed him.) At one point before Tasker retired in 1997, at 79, he briefly led Wootten in total victories on the way to 1,122 over 51 seasons. Wootten coached four years beyond that and wound up with 1,274.

Legendary stuff. The two hoops masters once coached against each other in a special mini-tournament (covered by Sports Illustrated). The national basketball Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award, named for Wootten, was presented posthumously to Tasker a decade ago. And there was this singular occasion when Coach Tasker, in a moment of kindness not to be confused with objective existence, informed me that I appeared to be material for his forever-dominant varsity.

Tasker’s teams were like nothing I’d ever seen before my family arrived for my sophomore year in Hobbs, an oil patch town minutes from the Texas border. Tasker had his lads operate in a constant frenzy—all-court press and fast-break offense at all times. They regularly scored 100 points per 32-minute game; in the 1969-70 season, they averaged a still-record 114.6 points—in the days before there was a three-point shot. Their trapping, suffocating defenses were a human version of swarming locusts. And every bit as destructive.

After facing Tasker’s Hobbs boys while still a high-school coach in El Paso, Hall of Famer Nolan Richardson was inspired to implement what he called the “Forty Minutes of Hell” defense he used to win the 1994 NCAA championship at Arkansas.

I was properly introduced to the Tasker approach months before ever meeting the man or enrolling in my new school. I had played freshman ball in suburban Los Angeles the previous season and figured I was fully capable of handling myself in Hobbs’ vigorous all-comers summer league. (Tasker, I learned years later, had taken the coaching job in 1949 on the condition that he have his own key to the gym—so it always was open.)

Seconds into my first pick-up game, I came face-to-face with Hobbs’ elevated basketball metabolism that rendered opponents as helpless as a leaf in a gale. Every kid in town seemed to surround me the instant I touched the ball. Stripped, embarrassed, left to watch an instant basket scored at the other end of the floor.

I subsequently played a year of B-team ball, mostly as a third-stringer, and never caught up. But my high school years afforded me a front-row seat to the Tasker phenomenon. Our 3,200-seat gym—always packed for a home game—had not yet been renamed Ralph Tasker Arena. But the man already was so central to the basketball operation that the school’s pep band, an essential piece to a night of hoops, was named Taskervitch. Still is.

The story regarding his commitment to up-tempo play was that, a half-dozen years into Tasker’s coaching run, a player named Kim Nash suggested expanding the occasional use of a full-court press—why not go from opening tap to final buzzer?—and Tasker responded that no team was in good enough shape to do that. “So,” Nash reportedly said, “get us in shape.”

That led to a week of the team practicing in the heavy, steel-toed boots worn by the region’s oil-field workers. (Six degrees again: I worked my high school summers in the oil fields. In those boots.) From then on, Tasker’s always pressing, always fast-breaking heat put rivals in the microwave.

Tasker himself was the antithesis of that wild and woolly playing style. He wore these thick coke-bottle lenses, spoke softly and seldom, seemed far older (at least to us teenagers) than he was then—mid ‘40s. His demeanor fit his other job, teaching government and economics, rather than a hard-charging coach. While the other fellows with whistles and clipboards barked instructions and oozed passion, Tasker quietly offered bits of praise.

Personal example: As an assistant coach of our JV football team, he once made a point of publicly commending my blocking success in front of the entire squad. I was a scrub and everybody knew it, but Tasker made a point of encouraging the least of us.

Okay: About that one-time evaluation of my hoop skills.

That came following a summer-league game shortly after my graduation. I had been recruited to join a rag-tag team of friends, some of us who were working days in the oil fields and seeking a little evening fun at the gym. I may have been averaging two points a game until, one night, against a collection of guys who would make up the next year’s varsity, I went for 22 points.

Highlight of my limited athletic life. By far. It included sinking one 20-footer after faking out Larnell Lipscomb, one of the members of the following season’s state championship team. Tasker, who always was around to watch those surprisingly formal informal tilts, sauntered up after the game and offered something like, “You could have made a good Hobbs Eagle.”

Doubt it. But what would Morgan Wootten have thought about that?

International incident: The Ball sons in Lithuania

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If all that matters to the Ball brothers is basketball, then packing 19-year-old LiAngelo and 16-year-old LaMelo Ball off to the small Baltic nation of Lithuania isn’t so far-fetched.

Basketball is the most popular sport in Lithuania. A country of only 2.8 million (roughly the population of Chicago), Lithuania has produced 12 NBA players, with two currently in the league. The last time the former Soviet Union won an Olympic basketball gold medal, in 1988, four of the team’s five starters were Lithuanian. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, independent Lithuania has qualified for all seven Olympic basketball tournaments, three times winning the bronze medal and twice finishing fourth.

From a distance, the paternal decision by LaVar Ball to pull his two younger sons—a high school junior and college freshman—out of school and sign them to one-year contracts in Lithuania’s professional league falls somewhere between puzzling and foolish. Especially when one considers that LiAngelo so recently demonstrated an inability to comprehend proper behavior while abroad.

It was LiAngelo’s arrest for shoplifting in China, while on an exhibition tour with the UCLA basketball team in November, that briefly landed him in jail, brought his suspension from the UCLA team and led his father to scuttle his college career before it started.

In an interview on the “Today” show shortly after the Chinese released him to return home, LiAngelo described the “horrible” incident in which he sat in a “cement jail” where the officers “don’t speak English.” Though English is widely spoken in Lithuania, there also is no evidence that the Balls speak Lithuanian. The potential of an international incident appears possible.

But, if this is strictly about basketball, and not an attempt to learn another language or another culture, the Balls and Lithuanians have plenty in common. Start with the fact that a young Lithuanian journalist was so tuned into U.S. basketball doings, and the free agency LaVar Ball had just established for his sons, that he initiated the contact to bring the Balls to his hometown team in Prienai, a burg of just 10,000.

And, if the Balls don’t already know it, perhaps they soon will learn Lithuania’s historic connection to UCLA, where the oldest Ball lad, Lonzo, played one season before he was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers last spring.

In 1936, it was UCLA grad Frank Lubin who was hired as Lithuania’s first coach of its national basketball team, based on the fact that the American-born and -raised Lubin was the son of Lithuanian immigrants and had demonstrated his hoops bona fides that year as a member of the United States’ Olympic champions. That was prior to the USSR’s annexation of Lithuania and the other two Baltic republics in the early 1940s.

(Frank Lubin)

Lubin—his name in Lithuanian was Pranas Lubinas—began by using American-born players of Lithuanian heritage to win the European championships in 1937 and ’39 (for a while, he was the team’s player-coach). For his contributions to that nation in his sport, Lubin, who died in 1999, has been called the “grandfather of Lithuanian basketball.”

Could it be that UCLA’s loss—all three Ball sons had committed to play for the school at one point, though the last two haven’t followed through—again is Lithuania’s gain? Or does LaVar Ball, with such blind ambition for his sons, consider the brief Lithuania project merely a Seeing Eye Dog for their basketball future?

Jim Boeheim’s values and college sport’s big bucks

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Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim’s recent putdown of Greensboro, N.C., for having “no value” as a conference tournament site really was just the latest episode in college sports hypocrisy. Boeheim was reminding that his sport, on the Division I level, has nothing to do with proximity to campus life. Nothing to do with education. Nothing to do with the NCAA’s claim to be an amateur operation.

His typically prickly demeanor aside, Boeheim merely was verbalizing the state of affairs in his chosen racket. Just as conference realignments have severed schools’ geographical connections to chase bigger and better paydays, so do post-season tournaments increasingly gravitate toward the largest cities.

Because, as Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”

So the Atlantic Coast Conference, founded as a Carolina-centric league in the early 1950s, abandoned its traditional home in the burg that calls itself “Tournament Town” to play in New York’s Brooklyn borough this year. With Jim Boeheim’s hardy approval.

“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming to New York City?” Boeheim said of next year’s deal to bring that conference tournament from its Midwestern roots to Madison Square Garden. “It’s a good business decision. Everyone says this is all about business. The media centers, the recruiting centers, are Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. How many players do their have in Greensboro?”

Boeheim, of course, is the crotchety fellow being paid roughly $2 million a year who has dismissed as “idiotic” any thought of sharing the wealth with college athletes. He is the guy who was suspended for nine games a year ago for failing to promote compliance of NCAA rules within his team for nearly a decade. He—and Syracuse basketball—are the embodiment of a gold-digging approach.

He noted that “Madison Square Garden made the Big East Conference” in the early 1980s, when Syracuse was a charter member of the league formed primarily to tap into the largest East Coast TV markets—$$$$: New York (St. John’s), D.C. (Georgetown), Boston (Boston College), Philadelphia (Villanova). The conference, in fact, mandated that its teams play the majority of their games in large public arenas, away from their campuses, to maximize ticket sales.

Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, it was the ACC which concocted a post-season tournament to determine its league champion—and sole NCAA tournament participant. That was 1954, when only 22 teams made up the NCAA field. Between 1978 and 1980, the Big Dance grew from 32 to 48 teams, just when the Big East embraced the idea of a post-season tournament as a significant revenue stream. With as many as four of its original seven teams already guaranteed NCAA berths, its tournament essentially amounted to a series of exhibition games. But with large crowds paying top dollar at the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena.”

As long ago as 1985, St. John’s Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca admitted that the Big East tournament “means nothing. It’s nice for the league, to put a little money in the sack, to get the alumni together to discuss who’s better. It’s good because it makes a lot of noise…”

So isn’t it a bit ironic that none other than Jim Boeheim was grumbling back then that “any coach who feels he’s [already] qualified for the NCAA would rather not play a postseason tournament”?

Soon enough, he came around to the comforts of greed, until the Big East’s pursuit of further riches through a disorienting expansion of adding schools with a football emphasis led to its virtual demise. The conference eventually was forced to retreat to its old basketball model and Syracuse, meanwhile, ran away to the ACC’s greenbacks.

In Greensboro, many see justice in the fact that Boeheim and his Syracuse lads were immediately ousted by Miami from the ACC’s new Brooklyn stage in the first round, ending any hope of an NCAA bid. And that Syracuse subsequently was matched, in the consolation NIT’s first round, against the team from the University of North Carolina’s campus in Greensboro.

Surely there’s some value in that.

Always a retiring fellow

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IMG_0952

Only very briefly did I have a front-row seat to Tim Duncan’s masterful 19-year NBA career, and only in his earliest days with the San Antonio Spurs. Duncan was 22 years old at the time, in his second pro season. He was then, as he remained until his retirement this week at 40, the antithesis of the clamorous NBA culture. Amid the sport’s garish theatricality—raucous crowds, deafening music, enabling acoustics—Duncan’s game was one of muted perfection.

The occasion was the 1999 championship finals against the New York Knicks. Because a labor dispute had delayed the start of the 1998-99 season until January of ’99—and because my Newsday editors had failed to replace our departed Knicks beat writer during the NBA owners’ lockout—I became a last-second stand-in to chronicle that abbreviated Knicks campaign.

That the Knicks wound up in the finals against the Spurs and Duncan was a most unlikely development. Through 42 games of the truncated 50-game schedule, hurriedly pieced together with the labor cease-fire, the gyroscopically challenged Knicks barely were able to maintain any equilibrium, slogging along with a shaky 21-21 record.

But they evolved into a spunky outfit at just the right time, the first No. 8 seed to ascend to the finals by shocking top conference seed Miami, sweeping Atlanta and knocking off Indiana. Along the way, they lost perennial all-star Patrick Ewing with a torn Achilles and arrived in San Antonio—the two teams had not met during the season—with former all-star Larry Johnson hobbling on a sprained knee.

The Spurs, meanwhile, were at a full gallop, about to set an NBA record of 12 consecutive post-season victories during the Knicks series. Steve Kerr, the former Chicago Bulls sharpshooter who now coaches the 2015 champion Golden State Warriors, was a role player on that San Antonio team. Avery Johnson, who spent five years as an NBA coach and now coaches the University of Alabama, was a vital Spurs factor who scored the championship-clinching basket with 47 seconds to play in Game 5. Imposing 7-foot-1 all-star David Robinson, who was late in his 14-year-career, was the Spurs inside force.

But the primary motor for San Antonio was Duncan, the high tide who lifted all teammates’ boats. Against the Knicks, Duncan scored 33, 25, 20, 28 and 31 points in the series. He took 16, 15, 12, 18 and 9 rebounds. He blocked shots, delivered assists and was the obvious final-round MVP—the first of three such honors in the five championships he eventually won with the Spurs.

Seldom has one player made so much noise. Yet so quietly. Throughout his career, Duncan betrayed so little emotion, on and off the court, that The Onion, the satirical news source, once posted the farcical headline: “Tim Duncan Hams It Up for Crowd by Arching Left Eyebrow Slightly.”

His was not a false humility. Pressed during that Knicks series whether he could see himself as a 6-11 point guard, since he seemed to play every other position effortlessly, Duncan acknowledged that he would be happy to try. And that he believed he would have an impact in that little man’s role.

But he never indicated any desire whatsoever to seek the spotlight. Instead of narcissistic showboating and self-promotion, instead of angry slam dunks and demonstrative chest-beating, Duncan was restrained eloquence. Turn-around jump shots banked gently off the glass. Spinning layups. Rebounds. Shtick-less efficiency.

It was typical that Duncan skipped the kind of season-long farewell tour Kobe Bryant embarked upon this past season and left his retirement announcement (without comment) to a Spurs press release.

(San Antonio River Walk)

(San Antonio River Walk)

He came to be Old Man River Walk, as much a landmark in San Antonio as the network of restaurants, bars and shops along the city’s eponymous waterway. Yet, just as his basketball home was not the definition of glamour, his style was not the sort that spread his name beyond hard-core fandom. My own informal poll has concluded that, while casual sports observers easily can identify Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, they struggle to place this Tim Duncan fellow.

All those years ago, during the 1999 finals in which Duncan put the Knicks on the road to extinction (their last NBA finals appearance, by the way), his opponents and teammates offered reviews that never needed revising….

Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy: “Nobody on the planet can guard Duncan. [And on defense], he is the long arm of the law, does a great job of turning us into a jump-shooting team.”

Knicks forward Latrell Sprewell: “He is long, excellent with the ball, has a great touch for a big guy. We have to go back to the drawing board.”

Spurs teammate Mario Elie: “He just does his job, doesn’t complain, doesn’t bring attention to himself.”

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