Antagonist

When the Knicks last ran New York City, the world wasn't sure what to think. It was the early nineties when the Yankees were trying to shed those Bronx Zoo days and the Mets were far from contenders. The Giants were pushing for another Super Bowl title one year and clawing away from the cellar the next while their roommates, the Jets, already set up their TVs there for some playoff watching. The Rangers broke the Curse of 54 years, but as the rest of the NHL, were losing their goodwill because of the lockout in 1995, they became a high-priced mess. There were no Arena Football, WNBA or MLS teams to ignore and Derek Jeter hadn't become entombed into the shortstop dirt in the Bronx.

1994 was as New York as New York could get when it came to sports. Sure, the city loves a winner, no matter the sport. Yet, the Knicks style of play was as emblematic of the Five Boroughs as anyone could care to admit. It was defensive. It was gritty. It was knock-you-on-your... It was just plain ugly. And it was beautiful. Streetball at its finest. 'Gimme lane' was the cry of the playground dynamo as everyone would clear to one side. That braggadocious fellow was met by a hard foul in the paint. As the city was during those days, there was little flash and even less love for anyone who showed that flair. The Knicks were the proverbial hard foul to the sporting public.

And the country hated it. They hated (and still hate) the Knicks because they represented the city truer than any other team, movie or TV show ever could. They hated the hole Michael Jordan left as he was the deft high-flyer and offensive force that tried to outsmart and outmanuever bigger and stronger opponents that played with the rules as those Knicks did. It was the same style of play that the Bad Boys played in Detroit and that the Celtics ruled with when needed during their last title reigns. Yet, the Knicks were blamed for the apparent demise of the NBA. In other words, they were the last true on-court antagonists the league ever had.

As the furor grows over the suspensions of Amare Stoudamire and Boris Diaw for leaving the bench after Robert Horry's forecheck of Steve Nash, debates rage over if the NBA has done right by its players and its true fans who desire competitive games over tailor-made outcomes. While it was an indefensible foul by Horry, it speaks to the intensity of the playoffs and the 'anything to win' mentality of these men in these spring months. The fouling that has taken place during the playoffs are a result of something greater within the game than fear of a fight. The playoffs are another world as every strength and weakness of not only teams and individual players is magnified, but a style of play and a league. While another post is needed for the true history of the bench rule, which extends to the aftermath of the Kermit Washington-Rudy Tomjanovich incident back in 1977, the glaring weakness that some fans and media are starting to see because of this incident is the loss of defense in the game. The campaign to increase the offense in the game has finally set in at the cost of competition.

The reasoning behind limiting the defense was to give the fans a show. Thinking that combined scores in the 250-point range every night would bring a cavalcade of fans to the arenas, the league felt that they needed to open up the court for the offense with clear path fouls, insitituting zone defense, allowing the pro-hop (you know that's travelling) and calling defensive three-seconds violations. Earlier this year, the league began to call more technicals as they believed it was to limit the whining of players about certain calls, but it was a clever way to add an extra point or two in a game. In addition to the 'Shaq zone' in the paint and handchecking fouls that were in place in the late-nineties, the NBA was an offensive game in the making. The rules have encouraged players to attack the basket at will or contort themselves to draw fouls as defenders are basically handcuffed. The rules in turn have also increased flopping on both sides. On offense, the current king of the flail, Manu Ginobili, makes Reggie Miller seem hard. For defense, it is the only way that they can force turnovers without the referees questioning the use of their hands on the open floor or their bodies in the post. The rules have taken away the balance between scoring and defending.

Other than baseball, team sports have handcuffed defensive specialists while enhancing what Walt Frazier would call 'swiss cheese' or 'matador D'. The NHL wanted to move away from the sluggish traps of the Jacques Lemaire-led Devils. So when the opportunity came after the season-long lockout in 2004-05, league officials tweaked the rules and the ice lines themselves to open up the game and there are still thoughts to have a bigger net behind a goalie with much more streamlined equipment. Older American fans found another reason to scoff at soccer as the overacting and blatant flops from the '06 World Cup marred the experience in their eyes (countered by the toughness of the overmatched US contingent). The NFL has been criticized for their defense against defense: roughing the quarterback, pass interference and the enforcement of the age-old five yard rule against cornerbacks.

Anyone who has played basketball at least once in their lives know how physical of a game it is. Anyone who has ever played against a talented offensive player knows that you have to make him or her earn points. Anyone who ever followed a team for a stretch of games has screamed "STOP HIM!" at least once during a game when teams answer point for point. Essentially, we love sports because there are two conflicting sides on a field or court or ice. One side reacts to the other as opposed to an elaborate shootaround. Defense reacts to offense. The antagonist reacts to the protagonist. The greatest moments in sports occur when one side succeeds in the back-and-forth conflict. How much greater is the feeling after winning when you know that both sides put their work in? After a while, no matter how fun it is to score at will, you still have to stop somebody. How much better is the passion play when fans can't stand the other team for playing their guys so well? For players and fans alike, defense not only wins championships, it defines sports. It's time to bring it back.

Education

My orginial introduction post is still a work in progress, however, a friend of mine proved to be the source of something new.

My introduction to sports was similar to almost every person that calls him or herself a sports fan. I tried to emulate the guys I just watched on the TV screen on Sunday afternoons. My first love, as I tell people, was not a beautiful woman, but the beautiful West Coast offense ran by the San Francisco 49ers. I tried being Joe Montana or Steve Young, Jerry Rice or the underrated John Taylor, Roger Craig or Ricky Watters, pick your poison or era. Of course, it didn't take long for me to see that I was a bit undersized and had too much of a temper to play in the NFL. Yet, I found that I learned much more about football through osmosis than others. I was still curious about the roles of each other player besides the quarterback and wide receiver, so I would ask my father about them. He was his own telestrator for the younger son that didn't possess the physical gifts that his older brother had in order to play. As an engineer or a quality control specialist (had to throw in my business school speak) has to look at the process to find the bottleneck, the young kid was able to see the whole game from the sidelines.

Playing was a passion that translated later on into my stats-keeping and eventually my writing. Over that time, I became less stats-obsessed and more observant of styles and organization. Most fans and media only seen numbers and I would be foolish to dismiss them as they are barometers of performance. My parents are older than most parents of folks my age, so they enlightened me and my siblings on their experiences as participants and fans during the fifties, sixties and seventies. Coming up, we were able to recognize players and feats throughout several generations, not just out own. Fortunately, I never heard my parents utter the words "players nowadays are too _____" because they witnessed the struggles and the progress of sports and society that most of us wouldtake for granted. My dad, in particular, knew of my desire to learn the business. I was designing make-believe stadiums and logos during art class in junior high. I recorded salaries and seasonal stats onto index cards before the Internet became widely available and as my early years were spent without cable. I would grab the New York Times as it was the only paper in the area that would discuss the media and business with some form of fairness.

Especially in places such as New York, Boston or Philadelphia, sports media folks have a tendancy to be know-it-all, jaded and bitter hypocrites in addition to being portly and absurd. Each one of us have our moments of 'ridonculousness' as my former co-host in college would say, but the best are always learning something about the sports they cover. The hacks and loudmouths in this business tend to think that because they are part of the machine that they don't need to brush up on their skills. The sense of entitlement and arrogance that most of us have gets in the way of unearthing good stories and inviting new fans as opposed to making athletes infamous and labeling leagues. You don't get the soul of the game by almanacs and soundbites.

If you want to learn about something, you go to the source. If you want to build a knowledge bank, try your hardest to sift through the clutter and keenly watch your subject. If you want to know the difference between a hard foul in 1997 and a flagarant foul in 2007 or the evolution of the closer, dig deep. Even the experts miss what you might see.

Say What?!?!: Continuing the theme from an old blog and its preceding radio show, I tend to give folks something to think about or to discuss. With recent play during the NBA playoffs, it seems as if the entire world (or at least those who follow the sport) is in an uproar about Amare Stoudamire and Boris Diaw leaving the bench with seconds left in last night's Game 4 between the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs. The uproar isn't necessarily the fact that they rose from the bench to see what was going on after Robert Horry's flagarant foul on Steve Nash, but about the rule that suspends anyone who automatically leaves the bench, regardless of their intentions. It was a necessary rule after the NBA needed to eliminate the fighting in the late seventies, yet it wasn't until the Knicks-Heat rivalry of the late nineties that the rule became re-enforced. It is funny that in the aftermath of a questionable study of race bias by referees that this comes to light. The bias in refereeing is far from racial so much as it is about protecting the superstars. Ten years ago, Patrick Ewing and other Knicks wandered off the bench as Stoudamire and Diaw had done, in order to figure out what was going on. Suspensions were handed down, which cost New York the series against Miami. This time around, there is clamor for going by the spirit of the law, not the letter. While I agree wholeheartedly, how different would things be if there was a bona-fide superstar (or even an anointed one as the league is full of these days) in the Knicks-Heat series? What if it wasn't Nash that was fouled, but it was Speedy Claxton or Delonte West? To keep the series exciting, the league will find a way to maintain the star power, yet the future of the rule is finally in question. Better late than never, right?