Hitch Your Wagon to the Furies

I will never question the basketball genius of Bill Russell. Full disclosure, I don't really understand the game from a technical standpoint and my only competitive playing experience is limited to a few seasons of CYO and riding the bench of my High School's team for one year.

I tell you all this because, here on this very blog that nobody reads, I am going to question the wisdom of the "fingertip block," a technique long espoused by Mr. Russell in his many sit-downs with today's premiere big men. The premise is pretty simple, according to Mr. Russell: If you block a ball with your fingertips, rather than swatting it out of bounds, you're more likely to secure possession and star a fast break for your team. It's both a selfless and erudite technique that neatly encompasses what made Mr. Russell and his Celtics such a model of efficiency.

I related this theory with no small portion of self satisfaction during a regular season Celtics game against the Atlanta Hawks last month. And then, about five minutes later, Glen Davis blocked a Marvin Williams jumper about 24 rows deep and I nearly threw all the money I had in my pocket onto the court like I had just been verbally seduced by the most beguiling evangelical preacher on earth. Children grasped their mothers for comfort. Women wept and men doused themselves in Meade and invoke Odin. Simply put, It was an orgiastic scene which emboldened everyone allied with the men in green and white.

Now, this was at a basically meaningless game at the tail end of the season. If you care about basketball at all, I don't need to embed a YouTube video to show what kind of impact a dramatic move like can have at place like the Phillips Center, home of the Celtics opponent that night, especially when executed by one Joshua Smith.

Mr. Smith did his dirty with dunks - but the impact was the same, only magnified a thousand times. Going into the Hawks/Heat series, the one to watch for most all NBA zealots, conversation swirled about the element of chaos Dwayne Wade would bring. Could Atlanta hope to contain the inexorable one? Or would his singular dominance slice through the more balanced Birds and render moot their emergence during the regular season? Well, while Wade is still the best player on the court and ignites crowds in Miami as a matter of course, glaringly lost in all of that conversation is just how tailor-made Mr. Smith and his nightmarish assortment of skills are tailor-made for the post season.



Here's a quick and dirty list of what I consider to be the most frenzy inducing plays in a playoff basketball game.

A) Ferocious dunk in a big's face off an iso.
B) Chase down block.
C) Half-Court alley-oop
D) "Heat Check" make
E) Transition three
F) No look pass leading to dunk
G) Interior block out of bounds
H) Counter-intuitive defensive play or score (Duncan three-pointer)

These are the kinds plays out of which "Where Amazing Happens" commercials are made. They're also the kind that are either seen as the residue of greatness by the game's elite (James, Bryant, Wade) or proof positive of those derided as desperately lost or just a monumental waste of talent (Josh Smith, JR Smith, Tyrus Thomas, Gerald Wallace). It's not coincidental that the first three in that latter category all came up huge for their respective teams during the opening weekend of the playoffs.

This doesn't negate the post-season primacy of players like Billups and Duncan. They are foundation upon which you build your Church. But it does highlight just how different the playoffs are from the regular season. Momentum is everything, and sometimes, in critical situations, making a calculated embrace of the unsound and absurd is the most heroic and uplifting act a player can make. Players like like Josh and JR Smith, often derided as savants who impact games only accidentally, should be credited for having the awareness to realize that.