W.W.I.D. What would Isiah do? Those of us who were around the game
when
Isiah Thomas, the player, was a little man with a big man’s
ferocity know exactly what the now
New York Knicks president and head
coach would have done had
J.R. Smith, the acrobatic guard of the
Denver
Nuggets, been barreling towards the basket during a rout against
Thomas’ former team, the Bad Boy
Detroit Pistons. He’d have done just what Knicks rookie Mardy Collins did, only better.
Thomas would have hammered him. He’d have sent Smith sprawling and
tumbling. But then the diminutive point guard with the angelic face and
assassin’s heart would have slipped from the fray while Bill Laimbeer,
Rick Mahorn,
Dennis Rodman,
Joe Dumars and various sundry Pistons
enforcers dared anyone to retaliate.
That was the good old bad old days of the
NBA when
everyone knew their roles and, more important, knew the unwritten,
unspoken boundaries of macho behavior:
A rout on an opponents’ floor was cool as long as the routers
didn’t showboat and taunt the routees. That’s when somebody was going
down. “If a team was up by a lot on your home floor and they were
laughing on the bench, that was okay,” says Maurice Lucas, a Hall of
Fame enforcer and now an assistant coach with the
Portland TrailBlazers, in a telephone chat on Sunday evening. “But if teams were
up by a lot and getting fancy…” He started laughing. No need the
complete the sentence.
If you’re up by a bunch in the final minutes, don’t keep
driving to the basket. “That’s showing no respect for your big guys,”
says Lucas. “You’d at least have to show them there’s a no-fly zone.”
Commit a hard foul but not with the intent of hurting an
opponent. “The art of the hard foul is lost,” said Lucas. “There’s a
difference between a hard foul and a dirty foul. [Collins] committed a
dirty foul. He could have slammed the guy into the post and hurt his
neck.”
Never ever (or at least mostly never) sucker-punch a guy.
“You don’t really want to fight,” Lucas says. “You only fight when
you’re trying to protect something, like your ego. But even then it’s
not worth it in the long-run. Too expensive.”
And superstars, stay out of the mix. “That’s right,” Lucas
said. “Let the rest of us handle it.”
Carmelo Anthony,
Nate Robinson -- and likely Collins and Smith -- are
about to discover the price for their ugly skirmish Friday night in
Madison Square Garden. With 1:15 left, well, forget the details, all
hell broke loose.
Collins horse-collared Smith. Smith took umbrage. Robinson woofed.
Smith took umbrage and tackled he little fella. Carmelo took umbrage
and, well, lost his sanity.
He sucker-punched Collins then became Michael Jackson doing the
Moonwalk on skates. He retreated so fast television cameras had trouble
keeping him in the frame. (For this action, the word “punk” was used
frequently by visitors to my blog, www.passtheword,wordpress.com).
Knick forward
Jared Jeffries chased not-so-mellow ‘Melo like he’d
stole his wallet. Fortunately for all he was tripped up by Nuggets
center
Marcus Camby and calf-wrestled by a hoard of Knick assistant
coaches.
Lucas says one reason the fight may have escalated is due to the
overall lack of physical play today. So guys are touchy when things do
get rough. “The game has gotten soft anyway,” He said. “I don’t think
guys think about how to help teammate because it’s so expensive to do.
If I was playing today, I’d be second-guessing things myself. Guys are
more conscious of the consequences.”
Perhaps the most intriguing - and potentially troubling –
aspect of the melee was that its roots just may have laid in
circumstances that had little to do with the 10 players on the floor
who were ejected from the game.
Last season, Thomas unceremoniously fired Larry Brown, an
ace boon coon of Nuggets coach
George Karl. This summer, Karl made some
nasty remarks about the firing, which prompted Thomas to seek Karl out
during the summer league in Las Vegas and “ask” him to worry about his
own franchise.
The two men vowed they’d settled their differences earlier
this season when the Knicks defeated the Nuggets in Denver. But as our
boy Arsenio would have said, I didn’t go “Hmmm,” when I noticed
Anthony, the league’s leading scorer, Smith and Camby – all starters –
were still in the game in the final fruitless minutes.
Was Karl rubbing it in the Knicks faces on their home
court? He would not say.
Did Thomas – now a suit – order some sort of old-school
retaliation? Anthony reportedly said Thomas told him to stay away from
“the paint,” an indication that a hard foul was about to occur. Thomas
did not address the accusation after the game, only saying Collins may
have been trying to ensure Smith did not execute another
Barnam-and-Bailey slam, as he’d done moments before.
I’d be surprised if Thomas and/or Karl were hit with fines
and/or suspensions given how difficult it might be for even
David
Stern, ’s sleuths to prove what was in their hearts. But it seems likely
they were not innocent bystanders.
But then W.D.I.D. What did Isiah do? We’ll probably never
really know.
Lucas remembered a particular story from his days in the
late 70s with the
Portland TrailBlazers when his then NBA champs where
putting a pasting on the
Indiana Pacers in Indianapolis. Portland guard
Lionel Hollins was playing for the stat sheet against Pacer guards
Ricky Sobers and (Super) John Williamson, no Mr. Softees either of
them. “I told him not to go [into the lane] with those two boys,” Lucas
recalls. “We were kicking them. He got killed. There was a lot of
pushing and shoving but no big fight. It was kind of a choice Lionel
made. Those two guys were dirty. You knew not to mess with them anyway.”
The guy not to mess with these days is commissioner
David
Stern, who’s about to show, once again, that the NBA is now a no-fight
zone.
