| Thursday, November 11
By David Aldridge
Special to ESPN.com |
|
He wouldn't be human if he hadn't thought about it.
Being human, Sean Elliott thought damned long and hard about it.
|  | | Sean Elliott, left, and his brother Noel were all smiles after the successful kidney transplant on Aug. 19. |
He thought about the new kidney in his body, and how fortunate he was,
and he thought about Walter Payton, and how unlucky Payton was. Sean Elliott is alive because he got a transplant, and Walter Payton is dead because, at the last moment, he was no longer a candidate for one.
"My situation was different," Elliott said last week. "With the
kidney, I was a week or two weeks away from dialysis when I had my surgery. After my transplant, I go up for tests, and I see guys, people that have been on dialysis for 13 years. I mean, I could've survived. But there's
nothing that does the job that the liver does. He was in really dire, dire
straits."
Elliott is no longer in the woods. Three-plus months after
receiving a kidney from his brother Noel that saved his life, he's doing
color commentary for Spurs games, still hoping to be cleared for a January return to the floor. No one else seems to believe that he'll be back that soon, if at all. What doctor in his or her right mind would clear Elliott to play,
knowing he's one shot in the back away from, well, disaster?
Elliott still runs. Still hopes for a miracle that will get him back
on the court before the All-Star break. But why not take this year off, heal
up and come back strong in 2000? Too much time off, he believes. He would
have retired if he'd been told there was no chance he could return this
year.
In the interim, he still pals around with Avery Johnson and David Robinson. But he's not there in the meetings and in the locker rooms. He still travels with the team, "but now I'm a media guy, so I might have to sit in the back of the plane," he says. "Front of the bus and back of the plane. I know I've lost my spot in the front. We used to call the spots in the back of the plane 'the ghetto.'"
Elliott is laughing. He has to keep a sense of humor about things.
Because he knows better than anyone how different things could have turned out for him.
"As an athlete, you rely on your body your whole life," he said. "And
for it to, like, go south on you, it's different. Three weeks before surgery, I was a zombie. I knew there had to be something really wrong. Every day, I didn't eat anything, I would sleep half the day. Had no energy."
Three weeks before the surgery, Elliott had just finished the NBA
Finals. Which, again, puts his incredible run through the playoffs in an
incredible light. I tell him, I can't believe that he got through the
regular season, much less the postseason, in his condition.
"I don't know how I did it, either."
Should we stay or should we go?
The league's rejection of Bill Laurie from the Vancouver ownership two weeks ago was stunning in its swiftness. Owners were pretty much told that Laurie would move the Grizzlies to St. Louis in two years, and wanted to give Vancouver more time -- five years, to be exact -- to prove its worthiness as an NBA city. Also, a Vancouver failure would put even more pressure onthe Raptors to deliver all of the Great White North.
Said one owner: "We very much want Canada to succeed, and we want
Canada to become a basketball country. I was also strong against Vancouver moving. I don't think it had a chance. I think they're doing well enough that we need to give them some more years. Mr. Laurie is probably a good guy, but to come in and pretty much tell us that that's what he was planning on doing, I just don't think that that's what we in the NBA would like to see happen. And I'm sure Toronto doesn't want that to happen."
But one city's rejoicing is another's dread. Just when Vancouver and
San Antonio appear safe, Houston becomes vulnerable. Voters there soundly rejected a referendum that would have raised hotel and car rental taxes to help build an arena. Now, owner Les Alexander has nothing to keep him from bolting town when his lease at the Compaq Center expires in 2003. If Laurie doesn't have a team by then, St. Louis again is a possibility. So are, interestingly, New Orleans and Las Vegas. The Commish has adjusted his position on allowing the NBA to come into proximity with cities with gambling interests. A source with knowledge of his thinking says Stern has accepted the notion that, with the explosion of lotteries and riverboat gambling nationwide, there's no way to escape wagering as a part of life.
Triangle talk
For perspective on the Lakers' adjustment to the triangle offense, we asked someone who'd done it before -- Jamal Mashburn, who played the triangle for both Quinn Buckner and Jim Cleamons in Dallas. "The toughest thing to pick up was all the ball movement," Mashburn said. "People are used to, after a certain amount of time in the league, you're used to kind of
isolation. It's kind of like going back to college, where you have all the
back screens, the way Indiana used to run certain things. It was just tough
to pick up, because it didn't work at first, and it took a long time. We
only got to one stage and then they abandoned it ... we didn't have a lot of
pieces to the puzzle. And when you're a high draft pick, people expect
certain things from you, and if you're not producing, they don't want to
hear that it's the triangle offense."
With Jimmy Jackson and Jason Kidd and Mashburn and the triangle, the Mavericks won a grand total of 50 games in two years. Buckner got fired. Cleamons got fired.
"The only great passer we had as a big man was Popeye Jones," Mashburn
said. "You need big players who can pass the ball. If you have that, that's
a blessing. Luc Longley was an excellent passer and he got overshadowed a lot. It's real important. There's a difference between making a pass and making a scoring pass. That's why I think Oliver Miller, if he played in it, he'd be excellent. You need great high-post passers."
Mashburn's prediction for the Lakers? "I think Glen Rice will be
good," he said. "He'll get a lot of catch-and-shoots, a lot of slice cuts to
the basket. I don't think he wants to dribble more than twice to get his
shot off. I think Shaq will be good in it. He's become one of the better passers in the league. And Kobe? We'll see what happens."
Notes
It's gotten almost no ink, but uberagents David Falk and Arn Tellem
have joined forces -- like Mothra and Godzilla putting down their fire and
serrated tails to form the ultimate Duo of Destruction. Tellem has completed
the sale of his company to the supersized SFX Corporation, the marketing and concert promotions conglomerate that sucked up Falk's basketball business two years ago.
Now under the SFX umbrella is a who's who in the NBA -- Falk's
client list of Alonzo Mourning, Dikembe Mutombo, Rice, Patrick Ewing, Keith
Van Horn, Juwan Howard, Antoine Walker, Larry Hughes, et. al -- combined with
Tellem's Kobe Bryant, Reggie Miller, Antonio McDyess, Isaiah Rider, Sam
Cassell, Tracy McGrady, etc. With that collection, SFX will be a behemoth to
deal with the next time collective bargaining rolls around.
Best feel-good story of the season so far is Adrian Griffin in Boston.
He's been a revelation defensively and on the boards, and is among the league leaders
in steals. His assist-to-turnover ratio is a ridiculous 7.7 through one week of
the season. The 9.8 points per game are just walking-around money.
Griffin played in the CBA for the Connecticut Pride and won league MVP
honors, but he's also bounced around in Italy. He probably would still be
bouncing if not for his CBA coach, longtime talent finder Gerald Oliver, and
Kevin Mackey, Griffin's coach while he was playing in the USBL with the
Atlantic City Seagulls. Oliver and Mackey both told Rick Pitino the same
thing: don't judge this kid by one practice or one scrimmage. Keep him
around a while. So the Celtics did. And when Paul Pierce left the Celtics'
summer league team, Griffin, who had barely registered a scoring blip until
then, promptly dropped in 30 the next night. "To change roles like that
takes mental discipline," Oliver said, and he's right.
The desperate Pistons are looking for any size they can find. They'd love to add Terry Davis, released
last week by the Magic, but they don't have the room right now. They have
nobody to post inside -- Eric Montross, Don Reid and Christian Laettner have
all been found wanting -- which is wasting strong efforts from Grant Hill and
Jerry Stackhouse, who's dramatically improved his shot selection. The Pistons
are hoping the Lakers get equally desperate for a four -- Bison Dele -- to get
serious talks for Rice underway.
The Hawks' attitude toward Isaiah Rider is strictly business. If he's around, great. If he isn't, well, that's why Jimmy Jackson is there. They accepted Rider's late explanation for his absence from last week's season opener in Washington -- he had to attend his grandfather's funeral. "It's communication more than anything else," GM Pete Babcock said. "Other than him reporting two days late for camp, we haven't had a problem with him. Everyone's antenna kind of goes up ... and it turns out that it was valid."
Atlanta makes no bones of the fact that if Rider flames out, he won't
be around after this season, and the Hawks will gleefully take his $5.2
million and spend it on someone else. The Hawks won't lose sleep if he pulls
a disappearing act. "He's been late a few times, and he gets fined," Babcock
said. "We don't make a big deal about it. We don't want to embarrass him. But we do fine him, and we don't rescind the fine money. I can't tell you how we'll feel two months from now, but this is how we feel now. We figure there will be games when J.R. isn't there."
Sixers players are upset that Larry Brown instituted a dress code on the road. Not just because of the code, but because they figure it's Brown's reaction to Allen Iverson's hip-hop wear. Ironic it comes now, because Iverson has been accepted by just about everyone else.
He's on the cover of the league's player register and he's in
NBA ads. For his part, Iverson hopes he's in the league's good graces. "It's
been a tough four years, with the bad boy image and everything," he told me
last week. "A lot of times I felt like I didn't deserve a lot of things that
came up. I do a lot of crying all the time, but I just don't whine. I just
take everything on the chin. Hopefully, people are starting to accept who I
am as a player and as a person." |  |
Aldridge: 'Everybody's gone'
