Looking Back On The 2011/12 NBA Season – Part 2
Chris Paul’s LA Crossover
Chris Paul caught an outlet pass in New Orleans and saw an opening at the other end. He drove towards Lakerland for what looked to be an easy lay-in. Denied! By David Stern.
Stern’s refusal to allow Paul to join the Lakers for ‘basketball reasons’ smelled like conspiracy, and the leaked email to him from Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert helped strengthen that theory. Regardless, Paul made his move to Los Angeles, but instead ended up in a Clippers jersey.
The Clippers were a basketball punchline, a team known more for their owner’s reputation as an alleged slumlord and racist than any on-court efficiency. Yet, somehow the franchise became quietly respectable, adding Paul and Chauncey Billups to a lineup with Blake Griffin. And while Billups got injured, Paul, Griffin and DeAndre Jordan pick and rolled teams to death, with lob after lob. They rode into the playoffs as the fifth seed and defeated a tough Grizzlies team before being taken down by the immortal Spurs.
The team made a few changes during this off-season, adding Lamar Odom and Grant Hill. With a little fine-tuning, and if Paul can stay healthy, the Clippers could become a dominant force in the Western Conference. Is this really happening?
Dwight Howard’s nonsense
Dwight was leaving. Staying. Leaving. This season. Next. Nobody knew where Superman would land. Howard made a meal of the situation, making his decision as publicly as possible, while his team-mates played under a cloud of uncertainty, never knowing if their man in the middle would be on the team for the next game.
In this rapid-response era of internet journalism, sports sites were so desperate for a scoop that every unsubstantiated rumour wound up on the front page. ‘Anonymous sources’ confirmed who Dwight would play for next. And if the source was wrong? Put that down to Dwight’s uncertainty– he did choose that team, he just changed his mind. Rumours flew, accountability went out the window.
Now that Howard’s a Laker all that’s over, right? For a while, perhaps. Dwight’s contract is up after the 2012-13 season, so he could go through this whole rigmarole again. At this point I don’t really care what he does, as long as he shuts up about it.
Lamar Odom
When did you last see a player have such a huge drop in productivity that wasn’t related to injury? Odom went from Sixth Man of the Year to most despised athlete in Dallas in the span of one season.
Odom was offended by the Lakers’ attempt to trade him. He huffed, and days later found himself a Dallas Maverick. LA were so desperate to shift him that they traded the league’s best substitute to the team that swept them in the playoffs the previous year for little more than cash advantages.
But Lam-Lam was a lemon. Odom couldn’t deliver anything close to his previous season’s production. He seemed to struggle to get in shape, to fit into the Mav’s system. He publicly argued with team owner Mark Cuban. Relations with the team became so fractured that the players decided they didn’t want Lamar to join them for their playoff run.
Were there less measurable reasons for Odom’s decline? During that summer he returned to his hometown New York for a family funeral. While there he was involved in a car accident that left a 15 year-old boy dead. Odom has already experienced a lot of tragedy, and there was the suggestion that what happened that summer caused him to lose his motivation and focus on basketball. Perhaps he serves as a reminder that there are far more important things than sports.
Lamar has chosen to keep relatively quiet on what happened last year; we may never know exactly what the causes of his decline were. We can only look to next season– and his return to his former team the Clippers– to see if he can become a valuable player again.
Flopping
Manu Ginobili and Derek Fisher have been battling for the title of King Flopper for years now. But last season James Harden and a trio of Clippers—Reggie Evans, Blake Griffin, Chris Paul—all hit their acting peak.
Thankfully, David Stern and his henchmen have promised to crack down—fines will be doled out to those prone to flopping. However, the NBA’s guidelines are vague and the new rule looks difficult to enforce evenly. The idea behind this new rule is good, whether it works or not remains to be seen.
Tanking
Every year a handful of NBA squads take the back-end of the season off. ‘We’re resting our best players…we’re developing our young players’, coaches will say, while their noses stretch to the back row of the press conference. No, you’re trying to lose to get a good draft pick.
Though this happens every year, last season’s first-to-lose-wins strategy was particularly notable. With Kentucky’s defensive monster Anthony Davis looming as first pick in the draft, many teams deliberately self-destructed to increase their chances at getting him.
The Charlotte Bobcats took things to a whole different level. They spent the entire season being so horrible that there was serious debate about whether they could be beaten by Davis’ college team. As a player, Michael Jordan had an almost psychopathic need to win. As an owner he seemed to have channelled that competitiveness into making sure his team was the best loser ever. He succeeded. Charlotte finished with a 7-59 record and the worst winning percentage ever. Thankfully, they still didn’t get the first pick, retribution for those who had the bad luck to watch that team wander up and down the court.
With all the tanking going on, talk restarted of an unweighted lottery, where season record doesn’t determine draft order. Why reward teams for sucking? But the usual draft process looks set to continue, and by the looks of things, Charlotte look set to keep losing as hard as possible next season.
Age
Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan are both 36, with a lot of basketball mileage on those legs. Both seemed to be done years ago. But somehow they’re both still playing better than many expected.
Steve Nash is 38, yet still managed averages of over 12 points and 10 assists last season.
Grant Hill is 40. He looked broken years ago, when repeated ankle injuries seemed likely to end his career. But he emerged as one of the best players on the Phoenix Suns and will continue his remarkably long career as an LA Clipper.
Kobe Bryant is the relative youngster of this group, but he’s still 34 with a lot of playoff games to his name. His athleticism noticeably dwindled during the 2010-11 season, and it was hard not to think that his decline was accelerating. But after a controversial German knee surgery, Kobe looked surprisingly good last year. Criticism of his game aimed at his shot selection, but few could fault his stamina and energy.
Is this evidence enough that we’re witnessing a quiet revolution in the NBA – one of extended longevity?
We’ve had an athletic revolution, when players like Lebron James, Dwight Howard and Josh Smith arrived, players who simply wouldn’t have existed in another era. Now we seem to be watching another athletic long jump, an increase in…something. Surgical procedures, injury rehab, conditioning, functional fitness, or some combination of those factors is helping players extend their careers. The continued success of these players may be coincidence, but don’t be surprised in a few years to see a number of players in their mid-40s.
Positional Redefinition
Or simply ‘put your best five out there’.
After the Heat lost Chris Bosh to injury, coach Erik Spoelstra had to make tough decisions throughout the playoffs. Was he better to slot another big man into the starting five, one who may be less effective but give Miami the size they’d probably need, or simply put his next best player out there and rely on talent? Playing the Thunder in the finals gave Spoelstra the chance to go relatively small and put Shane Battier in the starting lineup. A championship suggests he made the right decision.
With Battier in the lineup, Lebron became the team’s power forward, a position he’s wildly effective in, but one he didn’t play much as a Cavalier. The traditional thinking has been that players with perimeter skills have no place muscling into the power forward position. Lebron, Carmelo Anthony, even skinny-ass Kevin Durant started their careers as small forwards; yet they may all finish their careers as power forwards.
Maybe in the future we’ll just class them as forwards, if we have to class them as anything. Basketball is an evolving sport. In a league that allows zone defence, where Pau Gasol can guard Derek Fisher, where Josh Smith can lead a fastbreak, where Dwight Howard can be the first one down court, old definitions of position may simply not be suitable any more.
Basketball is changing, we’ll just have to wait and see what it turns into.
