| |
 Put out the garbage In an ugly NBA postseason, shooters missing their mark
Posted: Thursday May 27, 1999 12:09 PM
There's a trashcan across the room here at the CNN/Sports Illustrated Sports Empire, where cleanliness, truth be told, is not necessarily in the same ethereal plane as godliness. Every once in a while, when the office putting cup isn't being used by the hard-working CNN/SI producers, some of us will fire off a paper wad or two in a friendly game of trashball. The hoop -- a standard, two-foot tall trashcan -- is a good 12 feet, three computer stations, two tape decks and four TVs away, over the putting course. Not to brag here. But we shoot better than the Atlanta Hawks. Now, this isn't picking on the Hawks, our brethren in this extended Turner/Time Warner/CNN/Sports Illustrated Sports Empire. The point is, no one can shoot worth a darn in these NBA Playoffs. And it's downright alarming. The Knicks stink, too. The only reason they're still playing is they stink -- or stank, or stunk, whatever -- less than the Hawks. The Magic were anything but Magic. The Heat were ice cold. The Rockets? Brick-ets is more like it. It's probably not all that much of a shock, then, that the nine worst shooting teams in the playoffs are already gone, bounced out like so many Allen Iverson jumpers. A note on Iverson, the league's leading scorer this season (who, incidentally, had the lowest shooting percentage for a scoring leader in nearly 50 years): The man takes more than a third of the 76ers' shots in their second-round series against the Indiana Pacers and makes only 38 percent of them. Any surprise the Pacers sweep? Anyway, it's easy to say these NBA playoffs are scoring-challenged, but it's way more than that. The fast break has gone the way of the two-handed set shot and taken the 120-point game with it. Even in a half-court offense, guys shoot open jumpers -- wide open, even -- and they bounce crazily all over the place, kind of like Brian Grant's hairdo. The Hawks -- sorry to jump on you guys again -- shot less than 32 percent in their second-round sweep by the all-of-a-sudden mighty New York Knicks. Atlanta's Steve Smith, supposedly one of the better shooting guards in the NBA, creaked and groaned his way to 27 percent shooting against the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference. And what about Miami's Dan Majerle? A big outside threat, supposedly, he shot 19 percent -- 19 percent! -- against the Knicks in the first round. Is it the Knicks' defense? Well, no. The Pacers are shooting around 44 percent, the Jazz worse than that. Karl Malone, who shot nearly 50 percent during the season and is a career 53 percent shooter, is under 44 percent for the playoffs. The Portland Trail Blazers scraped together just five points in the fourth quarter of Game 1 in their second-round series against the Jazz. I asked Alex English, the former Denver Nuggets' gunner (.507 lifetime, 21.5 points a game) and now an NBA analyst for the CNN/Sports Illustrated television network, if five of us here in the office could take on five members of a bad NBA team and score five points in a quarter. This has become a hot debate at the Empire, where arguing about sports is often the only sport many of us do: Five of our best against five of the NBA's worst, for 12 minutes, with five points by the good guys as the goal. You'd be stunned how much valuable work time can be wasted on a debate like that. Anyway, good ol' Alex is on our side. "Of course you can," said English, who gave us the nod even without seeing any of us put up a leaning, fadeaway 3-pointer from beyond the Macintosh in a game of trashball. "Of course you can." English, like a lot of NBA old-timers, is a little disturbed at all the bad shooting. You can make all the excuses you want -- short preseason, short season, tougher defenses in the postseason, bad officiating, flawed fundamentals, whatever -- but the fact is, these guys just don't shoot as well as they did in years past. It's hard to say whether all the poor shooting has turned people off this year. The combined television ratings for TNT and TBS are down about 7 percent from last year, and NBC is down around 8 percent. But the scheduling has been a little rough on our Turner partners, and there's the fallout from the lockout and the fact that Michael Jordan is playing golf somewhere. Still, everyone recognizes the problem. The NBA promises to address it in the off-season with a look at changes that may include widening the lane, allowing zone defenses and adding time to the 24-second shot clock. This postseason, though, we're stuck with missed layups, clanging rims and 75-65 playoff games. Talk about trashball. John Donovan is senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
| |||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||
