NBA: Finals, Game One; Nuggets George Karl, Fired // MLB: Best of the Best; PED Scandal.
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NBA --- Guerrilla fighter, sharpshooter and a fully-armed infantryman led by a four-star general, a.k.a., the San Antonio Spurs Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Tim Duncan and head coach, Gregg Popovich---a foursome hard to put asunder and humiliate. Not even the Miami Heat’s superb guerrilla fighter, LeBron James, sharpshooters D. Wade and Ray Allen + armed trooper, Chris Bosh, and one-star general (head coach) Erik Spoelstra could get the job done (the stars are for number of NBA championships each coach has helped to steer).
The Heat lost game one of the 2012/13 NBA finals last night, 92-88, an event during which the Heat dominated across the lion’s share of minutes from first period on, though rarely with more than three points---a Heat narrative that at mid-fourth Q began to fizzle, fade, lose momentum. The Heat’s speed, player precision at ball-reception and follow-on shooting-prowess dropped just enough for the Spurs to accelerate and maintain the efficiency needed to place them as victors four points up (basketball’s version of baseball’s bottom-of-the-ninth home run breaking a tie, delivering a win.)
Telling during game one was this: how either side selects and manages its defense vs. the opposing team’s offense could be the number one factor separating winner from loser during each remaining Finals game. Double-teaming James, or double-teaming Parker, such leaves more freedom for Duncan and Ginobli, for Wade and Allen or Bosh to position themselves for the shot. But---lending additional power to defend against these others could free the Heat's James or teh Spurs Parker for the shot, though awareness of the opposition’s play being put in motion could call for a switch in tactics from one-on-one to double-teaming lightning-fast, or such could call for the opposite to occur.
Most important, then, will be speed of transition, how quickly either side can process the right defense vs. the immediate situation. Loss of this speed of transition from offense to defense, coupled with the wrong choice of type defense coverage (including those chosen to smother whom, who shouldn't have been selected for the role), such could easily empower James and opponent Parker for those high-end double-digit points per game.
All good generals know that during a battle involving sides that are strong and savvy almost equally, “an exposed flank can mean disaster.” Head coaches Popovich and Spoelstra know that allowing space repeatedly for any opposing player of extraordinary skill to operate freely means exposure and points given away.
Our guess is that from game two on it’ll be about the D---Defense, Defense, Defense, or clever and powerful penetrations of!
Coach Karl ---- SOME mid-market/mid-size city NBA teams that win 50 or more games during a season and that get to the playoffs but are dumped in the first or second round, they remain content. Hey, it’s a mark of being within the better portion of the league, what’s to complain about? Other teams/cities see only "the unfulfilled yearning," the team of 50 or more wins not having reached the very top, not having represented a Conference at the NBA finals. The latter team/city always decides that fixes are then necessary, and too often they rush to judgment. What? A GM that helped build a team that could win 57 2012/13 games and a post-season billet is off suddenly to Toronto
From the abovementioned, one may think of a proverb, “If you are going to replace something of value, be certain that you can replace it with value.” Right now, the Denver Nuggets are without a GM or a head coach of a caliber that’s now history, the team is at Go, at Zero with regard to leadership (above-the-margin GM’s and head coaches are not like busses, where there’ll be several others appearing in 10 or so minutes). The Denver Nuggets are now in a mode best characterized as “Holy sh . . . what the f . . . do we do now?”
The talk is that Coach Karl could get a team to the base of a summit better than most, but getting to the very top of the mountain, well, that’s been something else. In his nine years as Nuggets head coach, a Karl-led Nuggets team reached the playoffs, only to be eliminated in a first or subsequent round, losing to teams they’d defeated during the regular season, e.g., the Spurs, the Clippers, the Lakers, the Jazz, the Thunder, the Warriors.
Of course, no two post-season eliminations can be precisely for the same reason or reasons, but what stands out is a comment from George Karl when he and the writer/editor of this page talked briefly about post-season play. Karl said (paraphrased:), “The playoffs are always a quite different game than those of the regular season.” The comment now seems an undercurrent, causation, for if a head coach believes that post-season play is different from regular season play then surely he’s going to prepare and coach for the post-season differently, he isn’t going to enact all of that which enabled his team to win 50 or more games during the regular season, there’ll be a different strategy, a change in tactics, the use of starters and the bench in new ways, and so on.
Not that Karl’s comment isn’t so. Maybe the new always applied by him just isn’t the workings required to go all the way, reach the Finals. Maybe we are riding a hunch here, and perhaps another comment that Karl made to us has lots of heft (also paraphrased:) “Way too often, the sports media gets it wrong.”
Still, other determinants exist, e.g., Nuggets top shooter Danilo Galinari unable to play in the post-season due to injury, or the Nuggets facing a team in the post-season that can be beaten now and then but not in a best of seven situation primarily because of differences in approach to the NBA game, e.g., that application of big star players like Kobe vs. the teamwork-only/five equals on the floor that Karl has taken pride in developing and employing. In recent years, has there been a team at the Finals that didn’t have a particular star or two for the Hero role?
Too, no NBA coach can control what happens in a game one-hundred percent of the time. Like most sports, professional basketball has its “fog of war.” A coach who can beat odds favoring that is a star coach indeed, and Karl’s 432 wins at Denver and his being one of the most winningest coaches in NBA history point to his being among the NBA’s best---Auerbach, Jackson, Popovich, Riley, Karl.
MLB --- Four of the six division leading MLB clubs are ahead of second place teams by three or more games, top of the pack the NL East’s 37-22 Atlanta Braves leading second place Philadelphia
Four of the above-cited division leading clubs are much-improved, having finished last year’s regular season just at or below .500---the Diamondbacks, the Phillies, the Red Sox and the Indians. Though the current first place Cardinals, Rangers and Tigers finished high-end last season and went to the playoffs, we can no longer say that this year’s MLB is a carbon copy of last year, even with the Cards, Braves and Rangers among the top four franchises/both leagues (37 wins has Boston atop the AL).
Given recent wins that included inning-by-inning smart baseball joined with power hitting, the teams with greater comeback likelihood for second place positions are the NL West’s Colorado Rockies, the NL Central’s Pittsburgh Pirates and the NL East’s Washington Nationals; in the AL, it’s the Baltimore Orioles.
Only two of the above four finished 2012 in the top half of both leagues.
While not of huge yardage and amazing gain, change and diversity is prevailing in pro-baseball---a good thing.
PED’s ---- There was a time in the history of just about every endeavor when the guilty person experienced shame, allowed it to be and to dominate, to flow into a decision to disappear from public view. With or without tears, so-and-so apologized, packed a suitcase and moved on, never to be heard from again, or depending on the crime he went to jail. Today, it’s big-time denial, lots of I done nothin’ wrong or I’m sorry I just wasn’t myself that day, please forgive, let me get on with my career.
There’s no shame anymore, it’s a forgotten moral stance. There’s so little action at confessionals these days, priests may be looking for part time jobs just to cure the boredom.
In sports today, athletes accused of using PED’s they fight back, they argue a case put together for them by big-gun media spinners and law manipulators, much of this the fault of sports commissioners and team bosses fearing the impact of what happens when a star athlete is discovered to be a PED user. The accused fights back, and not just within a court of law but within the court of public opinion---more than one PED-related media circus has brought sports manegement "leniency" to the foreground, in some cases an easy aquittal.
Put aside too often by sports management is the long term effect, so that the immediate, the short term pain can go away; for instance, not doing enough of what needs to be done to undo PED "lenience" in baseball undermines the game’s credibility, builds distrust when it comes to recognition of individual player skill-sets and stats, meanwhile dirtying a long-standing tenet about baseball, a belief that it’s an American tradition, and though not a religion in the truest sense of the word it has had the same moral base, “In baseball, there’s not to be any cheating on the rules, Dudes!” and that’s why the baseball player with most hits ever, Pete Rose, was banned from the game for gambling and will probably never be elected to the sport’s Hall of Fame.
Final word on the subject, one PED-related strike and you ought to be heavily fined with a short suspension, two strikes and you should be fined bigger and suspended for a year or two, three strikes an’ you’re out, gone, done away with---banned from baseball forever.
END/ml
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