Simple thing. The most basic thing in basketball. Most basic thing in sports. Don’t quit.
Two-possession game, nearly 40 seconds to go. That’s a lifetime in the NBA. That’s 20 lifetimes. How to get the ball back?
All non-Hall of Fame players please answer the following question. Hint: It requires only one word.
Just check one of the following: (1.) Let the Bulls dribble the ball around and run the clock down. (2.) Let the Bulls stand with the ball on a hip until the clock runs down. (3.) Surrender outright. (4.) Foul.
Send the answer to the Indiana Pacers bench. To the attention of a Mr. Larry Legend. He’s the fellow leaning on his elbow. No need to hurry. There are 39.2 seconds left.
“Hey,” said Larry Bird, “we know we are playing the Chicago Bulls. We know we’re going to fight and scrap.”
Victory is not so precious to the Coach of the Year that it requires scrapping and fighting all the way to, you know, the end of the game.
All that hand-wringing and fretting may not have been necessary after all, all that respect paid by the Bulls to the Pacers, a team that has done nothing to actually earn it, a team that will lose from in front, a team that will shrug at the end.
Here is what can be taken from the first game of Eastern Conference finals. The Pacers are a team that can play worse than the Bulls can play even when the Bulls play the worst they’ve yet played.
“As long as we win,” said Michael Jordan.
This was a game that brought back memories of the “Doo-Doo and me” game in last year’s playoffs, when Jordan and Scottie Pippen played as self-confessed bird droppings, no pun intended to the Pacers’ Coach of the Year.
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Without some competent shooting by Ron Harper and Dennis (yes, Dennis) Rodman, the Bulls shoot their sock size.
Rodman was, in fact, high scorer at the half. For both teams.
Bad games are always blamed on good defense, and the Bulls did play a bit of that. For a portion of the third quarter, in fact, it was the best defense seen in Chicago since the 1985 Bears.
“Their defense was cranked up to the max,” said Bird.
How so? Did Rik Smits get any shorter? Did Reggie Miller develop his own limp against the one-legged Harper? Did the Davis duo, Clunk and Clank, miss more than a single shot between them? They did not.
Did Mark Jackson, the Pacers point guard, play like a man with his thumbs on backward? Well, that last one is true.
Jackson turned the ball over as if he were looking for worms.
But as anxious as the Pacers are to give the Bulls’ defense credit and as eager as the Bulls may be to accept it, this was just bad basketball.
The Bulls swore they would have to play better to beat Indiana. They played worse. They worried about Smits. Smits was as invisible as a 7-foot-4-inch hat rack can be.
The Bulls worried about the Pacers’ bench? Not to worry, unless somebody throws it at them.
Reggie Miller? Where was Miller? Being shut down by Jordan is one thing. Being eliminated by Harper is your own thing.
And what about Bird, the non-coaching Coach of the Year? Actual coaches adjust when their point guard is being erased, they adjust during the game, Coaches of the Year during timeouts.
Pippen turned Jackson into toenail clippings.
They adjust when the best rebounder in the league, the aforementioned Rodman, is held out of the start of the game and saved for their sixth man, one of the aforementioned Davises, Clunk, I think.
Matchups. You have to know your matchups.
Actual coaches ask why Jordan is guarding Chris Mullin and why the team with the best help defense in basketball is not needing to help at all.
Maybe that is why Bird let the game run out without fouling at the end, without giving his team every chance to win. He was just anxious to get to figuring this all out for Game 2.
Or have somebody tell him.