Beaneball

The NBA coaching carousel is looking really interesting right now. Avery Johnson is out in Dallas, Mike D'Antoni could be out in Phoenix, and New York and Chicago are looking for coaches. The Miami Heat job looked like it was going to be open, but Pat Riley has promoted Erik Spoelstra from within to replace him. Larry Brown has already replaced Sam Vincent in Charlotte, and Sam Mitchell might be out in Toronto. Oh, and George Karl is in trouble in Denver as well. Milwaukee's job is also open, for what it's worth, with Kelvin Sampson apparently headed there. Not that anyone cares. Do they still play basketball there?

Do any of these jobs make sense for Avery Johnson? If we want to keep ruining the Suns, as Steve Kerr seems determined to do, I guess Johnson could go there and have Steve Nash just stand around and shoot threes off of kickouts from Shaq. New York would probably be a terrible place for him: this was already a boring team, and Johnson loves the boring, grind-it-out basketball game. Plus, he'd probably murder Eddy Curry by December. The last thing the Bulls need is another taskmaster whose idea of beautiful basketball is 85-79 with three punches landed. Maybe Avery could do a good job in Denver. Imagine if the guys in front of Marcus Camby actually focused a little bit on defense. Imagine if Eduardo Najera wasn't allowed to shoot threes. On the other hand, imagine if the four tremendous offensive players on that team (Iverson, Carmelo, Kleiza, JR Smith) were shackled. So I don't know.

Mike D'Antoni would be awesome in New York, by contrast, not because of the players there, but because at least it'd be fun. Do we want to waste a good coach in such a bad situation? It'll be getting better now that Isiah is out and Donnie Walsh is in, but it's going to take a while with all those long, untradeable contracts on the roster. No, I think the most intriguing place for D'Antoni is Dallas. Wouldn't that be great? It's like the Pistons moving from Larry Brown to Flip Saunders, except way more fun. Kidd would be useful again, Dirk could maximize his end-of-peak value, Josh Howard would be the new Shawn Marion, and Jason Terry and Jerry Stackhouse would hit hundreds of open jumpers. I'd feel bad for my Knicks friend fans, but I really want to see D'Antoni in Dallas. And you know who'd be crazy enough to pull this off? Mark Cuban.

If D'Antoni's not going to Dallas, I'd like to see him in Chicago. The talent there is versatile, it's not particularly big or slow (except Aaron Gray), there are some good shooters ... in short, it looks like his system could take them from boring and bad to exciting and a contender for a top-four spot in the East. In Denver, he'd just be redundant. He's a better coach than Karl, probably, but when you fire a coach, it seems, you're usually looking for a new style. Karl to D'Antoni isn't a new style.

So who should we want in Phoenix? How about Jeff Van Gundy? He'll be a Steve Kerr kind of guy, with defense and posting up and all kinds of good stuff, but I trust he's smart enough to let Steve Nash do his thing at the same time. I'd miss him on the broadcasts, but that's a minor worry. Or maybe Tom Thibodeau, who's been talked up a lot as Boston's defensive coach this year and is a long-time Van Gundy understudy?

If New York doesn't end up with one of these guys, Donnie Walsh could do worse than make a Rick Carlisle reunion happen.

I wonder what assistant coaches, outside of Thibodeau, might be candidates. Mario Elie of Dallas? How about making Igor Kokoskov (Detroit) the first foreign head coach (that I'm aware of)? Brian Shaw from the Lakers?

(Did you know that Scott Layden is an assistant coach in Utah? How humiliating is that?)

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Basketball at 23:10 | |

So Paul Pierce's "menacing gesture" from Game 3 was, in fact, seen by the league, and he got hit with a $25,000 fine for it. Danny Ainge says that Pierce makes this sign all the time, and that it stands for "blood, sweat, and tears", not for any gang activity. Doc Rivers tried to make light of the incident, saying that he'll "be careful when [he's] giving signals to the players" from now on. Rivers apparently also said that he'd interpret the sign as "Ok". That's consistent with holding the sign so that the fingers are vertical, not horizontal, the way Pierce had it (and the chart of gang signs I linked to in the last post).

Some news stories go so far as to say that the entire team has used it as an internal signal this year. It isn't clear what it could possibly mean at that point to Al Horford, though, nor is it really helping Paul Pierce's case that the first word in the three-part signal is "blood". The fact that Pierce does the sign before every game, as Ainge says, isn't exactly inconsistent with it being a gang sign, either.

I'm not sure what the real deal is here. I don't know Paul Pierce. I don't know anyone who knows Paul Pierce. But I'm not sure this thing should just quietly go away until some adequate resolution on exactly what happened is reached.

I just saw David Stern questioned by Cheryl Miller on TNT. He first defused the question with a joke ("What was that we did? Ask Stu!"), then basically refused to answer: a menacing gesture is whatever Stu Jackson determines it is. The reality, according to Stern, is that he doesn't want players walking toward each other's benches and making any gestures. That's all well and good, but there are a million gestures Pierce could have made that likely wouldn't have been labeled "menacing" and likely wouldn't have resulted in such a hefty fine. For instance, what about that most unambiguous of gestures, the middle finger? Is that menacing? Unlikely. So clearly there are some gestures that are menacing and some that are not, but Stern refused to say what the menacing ones were, likely because he didn't want to admit that he and Jackson thought Pierce threw up a gang sign.

Oh, on another note, Brendan Haywood keeps endearing himself to me:

But first, Haywood puckered his face up like a baby and did a mocking imitation of James.

"Oooh, they're trying to hurt me," Haywood said before turning serious. "C'mon man, this is the playoffs. He wears 23 and he wants to be Michael Jordan. I respect that because he's a great player. But look what Mike went through. Mike got fouled way worse than this. You know what I'm saying? Nobody is trying to hurt him. Everybody is trying to play basketball, trying to win, trying to play tough. Leave it alone."

Haywood also said that he can't remember a player ever complaining so much about physical play.

"When I was growing up, I never heard that," Haywood said. "I never heard Magic [Johnson] say that. Or Mike. Or Larry [Bird]."

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Basketball at 00:07 | |

So Al Horford, after hitting a big jumper late in the Hawks-Celtics game last night, threw some words at Paul Pierce, who was on the floor, on his way back on defense. It was straight taunting, no question, and Horford should have been T'd up. Can the NBA impose retroactive T's? Maybe fine him? I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen. It really was a textbook case.

However, what came after was the really crazy part: Paul Pierce started walking back up the court toward Horford. He didn't look like he was talking, but right around midcourt, Brian Scalabrine caught up with him and started to pull him back to the Celtics bench (they had called a timeout). Pierce then decided to throw up one of these:



Now, wait just a minute. Was that one of these? In particular, the piru blood sign? (See here for more on the pirus.) There is some speculation on some message boards that this was in fact a blood sign. See also.

So, um, bets on whether Al Horford lives to see his sophomore slump?

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Basketball at 13:36 | |

It's possible that the Nuggets are the best #8 seed in history, and the Lakers made them look silly tonight. (It's also possible that the Mavericks are the best #7 ever, and the Hornets made them look silly last night.) I don't think the Lakers will sweep, but I do think they'll take one of the two games in Denver and then close the series out in Game 5 at home behind a meltdown by one of the three at-times-overly-emotional Nuggets scoring guards (Iverson, Carmelo, JR Smith). L.A. just looked too good tonight. They have too much size, too much shooting ability, too much penetration ability, and they're a marquee team that, this being the NBA, gets the borderline calls when they play at home. Things just don't look good for Denver.

Looking ahead, at the risk of a jinx, I have to say that L.A.'s road doesn't look easy. I'm afraid of every team L.A. might have to play, except for Phoenix (and it's looking very unlikely that they'll have to play them). They'll get Utah in the second round -- with so many weapons, and an unstoppability on their home court, they're fearsome. If they get past Utah, they'll have to deal with either the Hornets, who, after watching their dismantling of a Dallas team that doesn't have a quick guard to put on Chris Paul (check the Lakers roster -- they're not exactly brimming with quickness at the guard spot) really frighten me, or the Spurs. San Antonio's players don't really intimdate me that much, because L.A. has a variety of big bodies to throw at Duncan, and at least some semblence of a defensive presence against Manu Ginobli. (Don't ask me about Tony Parker.) The real reason I'm afraid of San Antonio is because, outside of Utah, they have the only coach in the league who can actually go toe-to-toe with Phil Jackson. Byron Scott, George Karl, AVERY JOHNSON? Flip Saunders? Doc Rivers?

That said, even if the Lakers get to the Finals, they're still faced with Detroit or Boston. (Wait, what? LeBron? Ha! Haha! Please, the man can't get up for a game unless DeShawn Stevenson is insulting him. He has less fun on the court than Kevin Garnett. He hates his teammates more than Kobe. Don't talk to me about LeBron James.) Either of those teams is, I think, perfectly capable of sweeping L.A. (which I think isn't something you could say even about any of the Western teams).

Yes, this is the best basketball season I've ever seen. Nice of you to ask.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in L.A. Lakers at 02:11 | |

Look, anyone who knows me knows how I feel about LeBron James. He's a giant baby, a ballhog, utterly full of himself, and likely to have a Dale Murphy-style decline starting in about six years when his body gives out and his basketball skills have atrophied from overreliance on his physical tools. This bile on my part likely colors my views of anything LeBron-related. Still, I have to comment on the Brendan Haywood flagrant two in Game 2 tonight.

First, respek to Reggie Miller for calling it like it is when he wondered whether that would have been the same call if the foulee had been Delonte West instead of LeBron James. There was great video of Mike Brown, right on top of the play, screaming, "That's bullshit!" about the Haywood push. And Brown's right, it was bullshit. It's not part of the game to give a guy a push in the ribs while he's in the air. But you know what? Miller's right, too. You have to seriously question whether it's an ejection if that's someone else getting pushed. I'm not questioning whether this was a flagrant or just a normal foul. It was clearly a flagrant. The question is the distinction between a one and a two.

Remember the other flagrant foul, earlier in the game? Anderson Varejao took a full windup swat right through Andray Blatche's head. What's the call? Flagrant one. What's more likely to actually cause someone an injury? A hit to the head or a push while a guy's in the air? Guys get knocked out of the air all the time, don't they? It usually happens through body blows while a guy is going for the ball, but the point remains: people go to the ground, and people go to the ground hard, and people fly into the cameras all game, every game. But getting hit in the head? That's concussions, lost teeth, or T.J. Ford-style crazy nerve injuries. So why was Varejao a flagrant one, uncontroversially, and Haywood a two? I just don't see the difference.

This leads to a larger issue. A major problem with the way games are refereed is that the refs pay too much attention to outputs instead of inputs. Haywood's foul looked bad, but a big part of the reason why is because of LeBron's athleticism: James gets so high in the air and with such momentum that when he gets knocked off, he goes sprawling. It also looks worse to get knocked into the cameras than it does to just get knocked down in the middle of the floor, even if you fall the same way. I think the referees responded to that, and it's not uncommon. It's the same problem as Shaquille O'Neal has complained about for years: he gets hit harder than anyone else in the game, but the referees miss calls because he's just powering right through the hits.

I want to add that I'm not one of these people who wants to go back to the clutching, grabbing, punching, scratching days of yore in basketball. I don't lament the toning down of the not-really-basketball physical aspects. But I do want some measure of consistency in refereeing. I want LeBron to get hit with a taunting technical when he does DeShawn Stevenson's "hand on the face" move to DeShawn Stevenson (Stevenson's version of the gesture isn't directed at anyone). I want Zydrunas Ilgauskas to get hit with a technical when he comes running into a scrum from ten feet away, because you gave Antawn Jamison a tech for doing exactly that on the other side. Is this really so much to ask?

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Basketball at 21:49 | |