Friday, June 6, 2008
NBA Finals Game 1 Recap: Truth Hurts
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"Wheelchairs are for guys like Lieutenant Dan." 10:54 PM.
"Seriously." 10:56 PM.
"How much you wanna bet he makes a 'heroic' comeback and hits some big shots?" 10:57 PM.
That is the text message exchange I had with one of my friends after Paul Pierce's near-fatal knee sprain. Less than five minutes later, he was back in the game.
After watching him go down in the third quarter of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I actually believed momentarily that Pierce was hurt pretty badly. I thought that we as basketball fans were going to be robbed of what could have been a great series because one of the most key players had been injured.
Then they busted out the wheelchair and I knew better.
I'm not saying that Pierce didn't hurt his knee. I'm not saying that initially the Celtics didn't have every right to ere on the side of caution. I'm not even saying that his return to the game wasn't impressive.
I'm just saying that once I saw him being pushed in the wheelchair that there was no doubt in my mind that he was coming back into the game.
Sure enough, about five minutes later, Pierce came trotting out of the Celtics locker room like he was back there changing his socks instead of being treated for a serious knee injury.
This is a trend in the NBA that has to stop. I can't put my finger on exactly when it started, but sometime in the last five years or so, it became the cool thing for NBA players to get dinged up, go back to the locker room and build suspense, then return a few short minutes later like nothing happened.
I call it pulling a Dwyane Wade. I'm positive that Wade wasn't the first to do this, but in the past three or four seasons, Wade has to have shattered the all-time record for visits to the locker room during the game after a hard fall. Then he topped it off by being taken off the court in a wheelchair with a shoulder injury.
Can you imagine Jordan or Isiah or Magic ever being carted off the floor? I think that if Jordan were on Wade's team when he hurt his shoulder, as soon as they plopped him into that chair, M.J. would have walked up to him and reenacted the scene from "The Godfather" where Vito Corleone slaps Johnny Fontane in the face and screams at him, "You can act like a man!"
Unless you are old, pregnant, or crippled, there is absolutely no reason to get a wheelchair involved. I think that teams only keep wheelchairs on hand just so they can build the drama for TV. Were Scot Pollard and "Big Baby" Davis so busy that they couldn't have helped Pierce back to the locker room?
The sad part about the whole situation is that Pierce played awesome in the second half. He was absolutely lights-out. Had he not tried to milk his injury so bad, I would remember that game for Paul Pierce being unstoppable in the second half.
Instead, the only thing that I took away from game one is that the Lakers played terribly, K.G. came to play early and then disappeared, and Paul Pierce is a drama queen that craves attention. (We're talking about the same guy who showed up to the press conference after Game 6 of the Pacers series in '05 with a bandage around his head in protest of a non-call that got him ejected.)
As for the series itself, the Lakers can't be all the miserable after the loss. They played as badly as they've played all postseason and were still close enough that a little spurt at the end would have been enough to win.
The big question that may be answered in Game 2 is are the Celtics so good that they forced the Lakers into looking so bad, or were the Lakers just that flat?
In my NBA Finals preview, I wrote that the Celtics will probably come out more prepared than the Lakers in game one. That held true.
I also said that the Lakers will be better at making adjustments between games. They had better be, or they could find themselves in deep trouble heading back to L.A.