| Sunday, April 2
By David Aldridge
Special to ESPN.com |
|
What's up with the Trail Blazers?
For three months, they run roughshod over the league, tantalizing
opponents with their rugged defense and unselfish offense. They impress with
their basketball IQ, veteran savvy and chemistry. Scottie Pippen was free
and loose; Damon Stoudamire understood the difference between his
on-the-edge group last season and Camp Harmony this season.
|  | | Without Brian Grant, Rasheed Wallace has had to raise his game. |
Then they play the Lakers -- with whom they share the league's best
record -- at home Feb. 29, for first place in the Pacific Division. The
winner, Phil Jackson says, will win out.
He was right.
And the Blazers have gone south ever since.
A sub-.500 record. Four straight home losses entering play on Friday.
More urgently, they now resemble a team not sure of itself, not certain what
to do in crunch time. Bad fouls, bad decisions with the ball, poor
execution. Could one loss discombobulate a team that badly?
"There was a little bit (of a letdown) after you lose a game like
that," Mike Dunleavy told me the other day. "But a Laker hangover is only
gonna last a game or two. The coinciding event with that was the loss of
Brian Grant."
Indeed, Grant may be the team's most important player. When he was
healthy and more than holding his own against Karl Malone in the playoffs
last spring, the Blazers were a tough team to beat. He is Portland's best
low-post defender, great against the pick and roll.
More importantly, when Grant was starting, Rasheed Wallace was coming
off the bench. And Wallace was the glue that held the second unit
together -- both with his play and his sacrifice of minutes to help the team.
With Wallace starting, come the whispers out of the Rose City, there are
three to five teams that might have a superior second unit.
Grant has been hobbling most of the season. He missed the start of the
season after knee surgery. Then, just when he was rounding himself back into
shape, he missed 11 more after the Lakers loss with plantar fascitis in his
right foot. That injury robs you of the ability to push off and jump, which
brings the hyperactive Grant down to earth.
And now that Grant's back, Arvydas Sabonis is out indefinitely after
badly spraining his ankle last week. While it's better than it first
appeared -- "I thought he'd blown out his knee for sure," Dunleavy said -- the
Blazers don't know if he'll be ready for the start of the playoffs. In the
15 games before his injury, he'd been shooting 57 percent from the floor,
almost 90 from the foul line, and averaging 15 points and 9 boards in just
27 minutes of play.
"He was playing the best basketball he's played since he's been here,"
Dunleavy said.
Now, Dunleavy is shorter up front. And he has to worry about keeping
playing time down down the stretch. Keep in mind that Steve Smith and Detlef
Schrempf have appeared to suffer the last couple of years with big minutes.
Smith's chronically bad knees seemed to give out on him in the playoffs
against the Knicks. It's one reason Dunleavy has used a 10-man rotation most
of the season. With the playoffs coming, he'll have to shorten the run.
More troubling is Portland's mental meltdowns in key situations of late.
Taking threes with plenty of time on the shot clock. Not finding the open
man. Fouling when there was no need to. Dunleavy will only acknowledge some
"miscommunications for no reason," but won't go further.
But is there time to fix things? The Spurs came into Portland last
Tuesday and, for the first time this season, resembled the squad that ran
the table to the title last year. They shut the Blazers down over the last
four minutes. Tim Duncan looked as if his stomach was healed. In short, it
was a carbon copy of last year's Western Conference Finals.
The Lakers are rolling. The Jazz are, too. And San Antonio's gotten a
lift from the return of Sean Elliott. What looked like a cakewalk two months
ago has suddenly gotten dicey. For his part, Dunleavy is still confident.
"As long as we get healthy by playoff time, we'll be all right," he
says.
For the money Paul Allen is shelling out, he'd better be right.
Around The League
There's a winner in the Vince Carter agent stakes. Sources indicate
Carter, who indicated he wouldn't select a new agent until August, will soon
sign with IMG. The papers aren't finalized yet, but a deal appears to be in
place. Elsewhere in the agent biz, agent Dan Fegan (Shandon Anderson, Howard
Eisley, et. al.) has the inside track to Cincinnati's duo of Kenyon Martin
and DeMarr Johnson.
Expect Vernon Maxwell and Gary Payton to be on the same team in practice
for the rest of the season after last week's scuffle. Sources indicate GM
Wally Walker told the two in no uncertain terms that if their fight leads to
splitting the team into cliques, he'll suspend both of them. Walker would
only say he told Maxwell and Payton, "'you guys figure it out. You work it
out between the two of you, because if you don't, the team is going to have
to intervene. And you're not gonna like what happens.'"
For his part, Maxwell says it was no big deal. "Me and G, we're just
alike," Max told me on Tuesday. "We both knew it was gonna happen some part
of the year. But me and G, we're the best of friends." Still, Payton threw a
chair at Maxwell, and Maxwell threw a weight at Payton -- which hit Horace
Grant, injuring his shoulder. "We had words," Maxwell said. "That's all that
happened. That was basically it. It got a little heated like we was gonna
fight, but it never did happen."
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Maxwell and Payton took the team out for dinner and a night of pool
Tuesday, but coach Paul Westphal laid down the law at practice. He won't
take any more griping about minutes and playing time.
George Karl denies published reports that he and Glenn Robinson had a
physical altercation after the Bucks' win over Boston on Sunday. "Dog and I
are cool," Karl said. "I took him out early in the fourth quarter, when we
had an eight-point lead. And by the time I was going to put him back in it
was 15 or 16. So maybe he was pissed because he didn't go back in, but
nothing happened." Karl says his team may have bottomed out after a horrible
mid-March stretch. "I don't think they've ever not listened," he says now,
after ripping his players' defensive heart. "I think they're trying to learn
some new habits. They haven't been disrespectful and at times the confidence
has gone out the window because of our lack of passing."
Magic GM John
Gabriel bristles at the notion fostered by Anfernee Hardaway that free agents
won't come to the Magic this summer because of the way he and Shaquille
O'Neal were supposedly treated. "I think it's a misunderstanding that the
Orlando Magic can't either keep or acquire free agents," he said. "We've
only lost one, and that guy wanted to go to the West coast ... we traded Penny
Hardaway. We've had far more free agents sign here, people want to play
here, under market value, just to be a part of our organization, than we've
ever lost -- which is one."
People now expect 6-9 high schooler Eddie Griffin
to honor his commitment to go to Seton Hall next season instead of opting
for the NBA draft.
Among the early commitments for the Nike Desert Classic in Phoenix next
month are Michigan State point guard Mateen Cleaves and forward Morris
Peterson; North Carolina point Ed Cota; Auburn forward Chris Porter; Fresno
State shooting guard Courtney Alexander; Oklahoma State forward Desmond
Mason' Ohio State guard Scoonie Penn; Temple point Pepe Sanchez; Weber State
guard Harold (The Show) Arceneaux; Duke swingman Chris Carrawell; Georgia
Tech's Jason Collier; Indiana's A.J. Guyton; Syracuse's Jason Hart; Arizona
State gunner Eddie House and forwards Etan Thomas (Syracuse), Mark Madsen
(Stanford), Eduardo Najera (Oklahoma), Matt Santangelo (Gonzaga), Pete
Mickeal (Cincinnati), Jamal Magliore (Kentucky) and Mamadou N'Diaye
(Auburn). |  |
Aldridge: Say no to NBA minor league
