Experience

They just don't get it.

Chris Broussard is reaching into his imagination for any reason to pick Miami to win. The statements he makes are too incredible to be real.

"J-Will will hit 3s."

Jason Williams has a career 32% 3-pt shooting percentage. In these 2006 playoffs, his 3-pt percentage has dropped to 24%.

"Antoine Walker will make 3s and plays at just the right time."

Walker's career 3-pt percentage is 33%. In these playoffs, he is at 34%. A slight improvement, but nothing spectacular. As far as his playmaking skill is concerned, he has a 1.33 assist to turnover ratio. In these playoffs, it drops to a ratio of 1.25. And just for kicks, Walker is shooting 58% from the free throw line.

Playoff experience seems to be the reason for most analysts to pick Miami. I say that experience is overrated and useless. Pau Gasol, who has been to the playoffs three times in a row, has yet to win a playoff game. Kobe Bryant, who has three championship rings, didn't make it out of the first round this year. In the 2004 Finals, Detroit beat the L.A. Lakers, who had Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton as four of their starters. All four had NBA Finals experience. They were demolished by the Pistons.

A lack of experience isn't doom for that team. LeBron James, with no playoff experience, forced Detroit to play a game 7 in the second round. The L.A. Clippers forced a game 7 against the Phoenix Suns in the second round.

Shaq and Gary Payton just so happen to be on the roster for the Miami Heat. Pat Riley has experience, but his last attempt at winning a championship was well over a decade ago.

Experience is just the nice way of saying, "old."

Shaq is 34. Payton is 37. Alonzo Mourning is 36. Pat Riley is 61.

These games may go on past their bedtime.

THE “WHOLE” of the GOAL

I’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately as the calendar changed from 2005 - 2006. And it may be no surprise to learn (in this election year) that teamwork is one topic very ‘top of mind’ these days.

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This old bromide doesn’t mean that one hundred $1 bills are any more valuable than a single $100 bill; they aren’t. It’s meant to apply elsewhere.

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s founding fathers (and the man whose face actually appears on the $100 bill), said, “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

As a current example: a football team has eleven players. Though there are eleven people on a team, the value and ability of the team as a whole is much greater than the skill of each individual player simply multiplied by eleven. In fact, the greatest contribution a player can make is to cause the team to play better.

The late Vince Lombardi, championship NFL football coach, knew this principle inside and out. He said, “People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society … Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”[1]

Unfortunately, though a coach may work tirelessly to get a team to play better together, the players don’t always care about the team.

Phil Jackson, NBA coach for the L.A. Lakers, former coach of the Chicago Bulls, said, “Despite their tremendous talent, [NBA players] are still, by and large, young adults, seeking validation from an authority figure, and there is no greater authority figure on a team than the coach. Needless to say, in today's warped, self-indulgent climate, too many players couldn't care less about appeasing the coach.”[2]

Clearly this sentiment also applies to the players’ perspective of the team, and this is a primary component of much of what is faltering in America right now.

No particular group has a definitive monopoly on this. It is a systemic cultural problem brought on by years of separating ourselves from each other.

If we apply the football team analogy to America, we could (for simplicity’s sake) have a team comprised of: atheists, blacks, Christians, Democrats, executives, farmers, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, Republicans, and whites—plus 50 other players on the sidelines, dressed and ready to take the field. But how well are we playing as a team? How effective are we at running the ball across the goal line? And who exactly is our opponent?

More often than not, it seems, especially with the players we’ve chosen here, that each member of America’s team may be more interested in how many yards he gained for himself today than how the team is playing as a whole, or how much time is left on the clock.

This isn’t an indictment; it’s an observation I had while reading a newspaper. And this example obviously isn’t practical; it’s representational. But now think of an office staff as a team; or a hospital staff of doctors and nurses; or the U.S. Congress. Now the players are much more closely identified with the example above.

Like it or not, we’re all in this together. If we continue to play the game separately, we’ll lose. Only when we band together will we continue to win, and enjoy one championship after another.

Ben Franklin was also the first president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery.[3] And more than two centuries ago he joined John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in recommending as our nation’s motto: E Pluribus Unum, which is Latin for ‘out of many, one’.

E Pluribus Unum remains our national motto to this day, appearing in the Great Seal of the United States.[4]

[1] Source: www.vincelombardi.com
[2] Source: The Sporting News, Oct 28, 2005, by Sean Deveney
[3] America’s first abolitionist organization
[4] Officially adopted by the U.S. Congress on June 20, 1782

Bad news for Dallas

Things don't look good for the Dallas Mavericks, and I'm not just talking about the fact that Jason Terry got suspended for Game 6. History is against them too. I know, I know...only eight teams have ever come back from a 3-1 deficit. Below I'll list those eight series, home team vs. road team, with the winning team shown in red bold face:
1. Boston vs. Philadelphia 1968 Eastern Division finals
2. LA Lakers vs. Phoenix 1970 Western Division semifinals
3. Washington vs. San Antonio 1979 Eastern Conference finals
4. Boston vs. Philadelphia 1981 Eastern Conference finals
5. Phoenix vs. Houston 1995 Western Conference semifinals
6. Miami vs. New York 1997 Eastern Conference semifinals
7. Detroit vs. Orlando 2003 Eastern Conference first round
8. Phoenix vs. LA Lakers 2006 Western Conference first round
Notice a pattern? First off, half of the comebacks have happened in the last 11 seasons...which means that a comeback from 3-1 is relatively more common than it was during the NBA's first 48 seasons. But that's secondary. The most important aspect of this pattern is that, of the eight comebacks, seven of them were accomplished by the team that originally had the home court advantage. In this case, that would be the Spurs.

I've personally watched five of the eight series. The key component seems to be winning Game 5. In his 1989 autobiography, Drive, Larry Bird repeatedly stressed the importance of winning the fifth game of a seven game series. "Game 5 is a crucial game," Larry said. "The team that wins game usually ends up winning the series." And while there are certainly many examples in which the team that won game five didn't win the series, it's obviously happened in every 3-1 comeback (if it hadn't, there would have been no comebacks).

The common component in these games seems to be that both teams are very evenly matched. I think that, once a team returns home for Game 6 after having been up 3-1, all the pressure is on them to win that game. After all, winning a Game 7 on the road may be even more unusual than coming back from being down 3-1 (although I don't have the exact numbers on that). The mental strain of feeling as though Game 6 is your last chance to win is more than all but a few very mentally tough teams can withstand.

So the Mavericks are facing some tough questions. Can they win Game 6 without Jason Terry, their quarterback, their second-best player, and probably the MVP (so far) of this series? And if they don't, are they good enough, and tough enough, to win Game 7 on the road, against a San Antonio team that rarely loses at home...and has the undisputed edge in elimination game experience? The answers to these questions will be very, very interesting.

A new nickname

Since Shaquille O'Neal had the audacity to nickname Eric Dampier, it's only fair that Shaquille is given a nickname of his own. I've decided that from here on out, Shaquille O'Neal will now be referred to as ....duh donna nuh.......Shaquira!

LA Lakers

The Lakers never lost a Game 7 like this — their worst Game 7 defeat had been a 113-99 loss to New York in the 1970 NBA Finals — and the Suns became only the eighth team in league history to win a series after trailing, 3-1.

la lakers

The Los Angeles Lakers are a National Basketball Association team based in Los Angeles, California. They are notable for having (at the end of the 2004–05 season) the highest number of wins (2,621), the highest winning percentage (61.9%), the most number of finals appearances (28), and the second most championships (14), behind the Boston Celtics who have 16.