Coach's Corner

I'm pleased many cared. I'm flattered that some of you asked. It's my fervent hope and wish that many, many more of you wondered. Wondered where, that is, the old Coach, absent from his usual space, was last week. Some e-mail was tinged with a hint of annoyance. Though I'm not at all above lying (well, let's say rearranging a fact here and there to push along a dull story), truth was, I was nowhere. Doing nothing. Fact is, I begged for the week off at the last minute. I was cooked out and fried like an apple fritter. The 12-ring circus shrouding the UT athletic program for the preceding month had left me feeling sullen, empty, and pissed off - at whom, I wasn't quite certain. For me, the hiring of Rick Barnes was anti-climactic. I have nothing against the guy. Of course, if things don't work out, we'll be looking back at his rigid rules on whiskers, Walkmans, and pre-dawn workouts as the first rumble of a distant thunderstorm. But, hey, I think, all things considered, Barnes will be a good coach. The kind of coach, really, everybody has been bitching that Penders wasn't. Anyway, the real climax was the disingenuous, slimy "press conference" where Penders, Dodds, and The Lawyer sat up on a podium and insulted every fan in the state with an IQ higher than a russet potato, spewing out, for a national audience, one arrogant lie after another. A 10-year relationship had ended, badly. I want to use a nice Nineties kind of term... closure. I got none. I skipped the grieving faze and went right into anger. Now, I've completed the cycle. I've come to accept. Don't you wish real relationships ended that easily? So, I'm back. Ready for the NBA playoffs.

I used to write - and was I ever proud - these complex, statistical/jargon-laden tomes about as fun to read, looking back, as the Torah, filled with arcane terms like point differential, offensive and defensive rebounding percentages, and SPG (that's steals per game). Oh boy, I felt so smart. But this was hard work. Hubie Brown might have found them amusing. Bill Walton wouldn't have understood them. This season, I'll revert to something more customary: basically uninformed, satellite-watching opinions offered here and there. No research needed. I'll divide the playoff field into five categories: Get Real, Wannabes, Contenders, Real Threats, and The Bulls.

Get Real: If you believe, for example, that the once-proud Rockets have any chance whatsoever to get near another title, well, you need help. Houston isn't as good as the Nets, their eighth-seed counterparts in the East. That, sportsfans, is a very long fall. Into this despairing place I put Portland, New Jersey, Cleveland, Atlanta, and for spite and for damn good measure, the Knicks. Yes, the Knicks. If the great Pat Riley loses to this crap-ass, Ewingless bunch of elderly gangsters, thugs, and hacks, he needs to hang up the clipboard and work instead organizing social events on Caribbean cruises.

The Wannabes are decent teams (Portland's decent, but has no chance at all against L.A.) who might get into the conference semi-finals. My Wannabes are Minnesota (really a "get real," here only by virtue of the Sonics' past shaky performance in first round matches), Phoenix, and Charlotte. If any of these teams gets past its first round series, they have zero, none, zippo chance of going any further.

My Contenders are teams who think they can win a title, but can't. Here, I have Miami, Indiana, and the heavily hyped Lakers. The Heat and Pacers, should one of them beat Chicago, will get smoked by whoever's left in the West. L.A. will fall, ultimately, because they want, badly, to run. The set offense is to toss it to Shaq. Then, the other team fouls Shaq. NBA playoff games are played at, maybe, 75% of the speed of regular season. L.A. doesn't want to play this way. It's why they'll lose.

Which brings me to the Real Things, teams with a true shot at winning a title. The obvious, Utah and Seattle, plus my darkhorse, San Antonio. The Spurs have undergone a radical metamorphosis, mostly unnoticed. They've transformed themselves from a classic, Western, run-and-gun team, to an Eastern-style half-court power. The Spurs, with Duncan, Big Will, and The Admiral, play a dangerous, effective, half-court game - custom-made for playoff time - combined with the tightest defense in the league. Like Utah, they do it because they want to. Watch out for the Spurs. Utah's the obvious pick, but not for me. I saw Karl Malone, a seriously bad-ass dude, doing a Rogaine commercial today. My God. My fucking God! Malone makes what, five or six million smackers, and he has to stoop to a Rogaine commercial? Forget it, they're dead. In my twisted way, this leaves Seattle, which is a better team without Kemp.

And then there's The Bulls: Chicago reminds me of Muhammad Ali in his later years. Lots of fighters should have and could have beaten him. Nobody did... until Larry Holmes almost murdered him, that is. Sure, they look ready for the hook. I said that last year too. My attitude is, until someone twists the neck off of this magnificent team, puts the body down a commercial disposal, and burns the remains, they still live.