League Was Already in a Danger Zone

Once upon a time, hard times befell a happy league, which began changing things, whether they needed it or not.

It redesigned its Web site, once attractive and functional, adding way cool stuff, such as the Sacramento King-Dallas Maverick Webcast, to make the experience more like MTV, the holy grail of youth-targeted marketing.

Unfortunately, Web pages no longer fit on a 15-inch monitor (hold on while I run out and get a $750 17-inch flat panel display, will you?). Pages came up agonizingly when they came up at all.

Oh, and the hard times continued.

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Finally turning to a real problem, the NBA redesigned its game, legalizing zone defense and, judging from the reaction--TNT’s Charles Barkley: “They just made the world safe for crappy players!”--ending the world as we knew it.

If that’s true, what can one say but:

Great!

As one general manager growled, “Our game is so . . . bad, anything’s an improvement.”

Not that anyone is confident this will boost scoring. They’ve been trying for years and running into the law of unintended consequences.

For years, the league was in tinker mode, trying little adjustments as the game ground ever slower under the weight of layer upon layer of artificial gimmicks called “zone defense rules.”

Did you know there are nine zones? I didn’t and I do this for a living.

The rules let Barkley set up light housekeeping under the basket with only one normal-sized human allowed to guard his big rear end until he actually received the ball. No wonder Charlie liked it.

This encouraged coaches to slow play down to take advantage of their mismatches.

So there were games like the Laker-Houston opener after the 1999 lockout. The Lakers pounded the ball in to Shaquille O’Neal, who waited for the double-team . . . and waited . . . and finally, as the shot clock passed 20, made his move or threw the ball out to a shooter.

The Rockets did the same thing with Hakeem Olajuwon. There was a great deal of spotting up on the three-point arc and no electricity. I sat in the upstairs press box thinking, “Someone missed this?”

Not that coaches can be expected to worry about entertainment. They don’t care if games are played in the 100s or 50s, as long as they still get to coach them.

“I laugh all the time,” says Milwaukee’s George Karl, coaching one of the few let-’er-rip teams left. “I say, ‘You want to speed the game up? Well, give the coaches bonuses for scoring 100 points a game.’

“Because coaches over-coach. We over-control. And it works. . . . There are teams in this league that don’t have [a fastbreak offense]. The truth of the matter is, it’s easier to coach five-on-five basketball than it is to coach fastbreak basketball. It takes more time and you don’t have as much control when you’re running up and down. . . .

“Coaches hate not having control. Give ‘em bonuses. Give bonuses to a coach who scores 100 points.”

He’s not talking about chalupas, either. If you couldn’t tell, coaches like bonuses even more than they like control.

Now, however, things will change. Of course, not in the way everyone’s talking about:

* No one will actually play zone.

This isn’t the YMCA. Too many players can shoot--for all the crying about lost arts, the league shoots 35% on three-pointers--so don’t expect those 2-3 zones they used to play in college.

Few of the good college coaches play zones, except for a few minutes here and there to impress Billy Packer and Dick Vitale with their repertoires.

NBA teams will play sagging man-to-man, which will still make it harder to get the ball to Shaq. So the Lakers will have to bring him off screens and people will move.

* NBA coaches will have to learn how to coach.

NBA coaching has always been more about personality and tiny adjustments than strategy and creativity. If you ask a college coach, it’s a stooge game, mechanical and limited by its gimmicks. You have to shoot in 24 seconds. You not only have to play man-to-man, you have to line up according to how the other coach draws up his offense. If you have Shaq, good for you. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

(By the way, hats off to the Lakers and Jerry Buss for voting for the game’s interest, rather than their own.)

* NBA players will have to learn to move and adjust, or in other words, play.

Talk about your lost arts. Players are so used to their mechanical game, they’ve lost the ability to read and react. Ask Laker assistant Jim Cleamons, who tried to install the triangle, a simple, reading offense, in Dallas--or Quinn Bucker in Dallas, or Cotton Fitzsimmons in Phoenix. The players hated it and barely tried it.

(By the way, this suggests an advantage for the Lakers, who already run the triangle. No wonder they voted yes.)

* Things will change.

“People are calling this the biggest rule change since the shot clock in 1954,” a general manager says. “I told my college scouts, ‘Forget about the lists, we have to talk about these rules. We have to figure out how this is going to change the nature of the players we need.’ ”

Shooters will be more important, as will players who can handle the ball, pass and make good decisions.

* It might not work.

Scoring might go down again. But if it does, there’s an easy way to fix it: Take four seconds off the 24-second clock. There won’t be enough time to attack a sagging man-to-man and coaches will have to try to beat it down the floor.

Whatever happens, they just left tinker mode. You know how bad things are when a purist as mild-mannered and respected as Pete Newell savages David Stern as a marketing-driven basketball-selling cynic.

Stern rammed this through, over more opposition than the 22-6 vote suggested. Stern is now taking heat for it in his home base of New York, where the motto is, “If it moves, blast it.”

But he did the right thing. Or if he didn’t, at least he got off the dime he’d been camped on.

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On Feb. 22, 1993, two seasons after Magic Johnson had retired, with the Lakers mediocre and getting worse, Jerry West traded Sam Perkins, their best player, to Seattle for Doug Christie and Benoit Benjamin.

The new Lakers soon came and went, making the deal a bust. But it also ended any thought of staying respectable and snatching the No. 8 slot, putting them on the road to rebuilding, from which there could be no turning back. (It also got Randy Pfund fired, but they gave him a nice severance package.)

I’ve always thought the Laker turnaround in the ‘90s dates from that move.

It’s good to dare but it’s scary too. Stern just took his first big step away from the old and stale, into the wild unknown.

FACES AND FIGURES

I can’t think of one good reason for Michael Jordan to come back, but then, it’s not my comeback: Jordan is stewing at Washington Wizard owner Abe Pollin for predicting he’ll return. It’s not that Jordan isn’t thinking about it, but he’s big on it being his idea. He is telling intimates Pollin did it to sell tickets. In the end, Mike will set it up so that “everyone” is trying to get him to go one way--so he’ll go the other.

Said Wizard co-owner Ted Leonsis, who’s closer to Jordan than Pollin, “There would have to be lots of discussions between Michael and me, Michael and Abe, Michael and the league [about selling Jordan’s piece of the club] and none of that is happening. If this was real, I think we would be further down that road.”

Insiders still think Jordan won’t return. Although intrigued, he is still asking what does he have to gain from it?

Golden State Warrior Coach Dave Cowens, who can’t get his team to play, also can’t get leading scorer Antawn Jamison to pass. “I talked to him about it,” Cowens said. “He needs to distribute the ball more often. He has to sacrifice some to get other guys involved.” Not that he’s not getting through, but Jamison said he’d “continue playing my game.” In April, that meant an average of 20.5 shots a game versus 2.6 assists.

New York Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy, on Sacramento’s Peja Stojakovic: “His first season, we’d go at him and score. Last year, we’d go at him and get something maybe half the time. But now we go at him only because Doug Christie is the other option.”

Only you, Jalen Rose: Said the Indiana Pacer guard after almost registering his first triple-double, “To be honest, growing up, I thought I’d come into the league and average a triple-double.”

Only you, Stephon Marbury: Asked about his disastrous decision to leave Minnesota for New Jersey, Marbury said, “That . . . is over. Do I think I made a mistake? No, I don’t think I made a mistake.” If that’s true, let’s hope he never makes a mistake.

Net Coach Byron Scott, who could have been a little luckier in his choice of opportunities too: “I always remember what Chris Webber said in Sacramento when he was real angry at halftime. He said, ‘Don’t talk about it. Be about it.’ That’s the same thing we’re trying to promote here. I don’t want to talk about leadership. It has to be shown on the court, in practice, in games. Actions speak louder. And that’s what we’ve got to get to.”