Losing Lakers starting to worry
Coach Mike Brown’s Princeton offence shows no signs of working
The Sports Illustrated cover jinx works its voodoo fast, these days. Within a week of its NBA Preview issue, which featured new Los Angeles Lakers Steve Nash and Dwight Howard next to the headline, “Now This Is Going To Be Fun,” the Lakers were 0-3, Nash was hurt, and Kobe Bryant was telling the team’s critics to shut up and let us work. The Lakers are a lot of things right now. Fun does not appear to be one of them.
And although Sunday night’s 10879 home victory over the winless Detroit Pistons got L.A. its first win of the season, the Lakers are still a precarious enterprise.
People keep talking about Miami’s 9-8 start when the Heat first put LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh together, but the Lakers already have as many double-digit losses as Miami had in 17 games. And when Miami started, its three stars were 26, 28, and 26, respectively. They had time.
The Lakers don’t have that much time. The Lakers should have been getting anxious months ago.
In some ways, though, Los Angeles has no choice but to wait. Nash’s non-displaced shin fracture, suffered in a loss in Portland, will take at least a week and maybe more to heal. Howard is clearly still not recovered from the back surgery he underwent earlier this year, which helps explain his lack of impact at the back of the Laker defence. And head coach Mike Brown is trying to install the Princeton offence, which is one of the reasons he should almost certainly be fired.
But we excitable basketball-loving Canadians are getting ahead of ourselves.
Even healthy, the Lakers have flaws. They are not fast. Howard aside, they are not athletic. They are not quick (which is different from fast). They are not deep. They have to out-think and out-execute opponents by leveraging their top-end talent, from Bryant to Nash to Howard to Pau Gasol. They have brains and skill and experience and size. But they need to add up to more than that.
Now in some cases, waiting should solve some of their issues. A healthy Howard is basically a giant flying top-five defence, and Brown’s strength as a coach is that end of the floor. Let’s assume that once Howard is healthy, the defence markedly improves.
Which will leave the offence, which is why we excitable basketball-loving Canadians believe Brown should be fired, but also believe he will not be. Not yet. Brown’s strategy this year, when given four Hall of Fame players, has been to install the Princeton offence. The Princeton offence is essentially basketball socialism, which given Princeton’s role in the world is a little ironic. It was designed at Princeton to keep their smart and unathletic white guys in games, and is designed to reduce the importance of positional play and emphasize the unit. In some forms of it, the guards are essentially interchangeable. It has worked in places like Sacramento and Washington, when they did not have traditional point guards. None of the Laker starters have ever played it before. In his first game and a half in it, Nash handed off the ball, and looked lost.
So here is the choice Mike Brown faces: He can stick with the Princeton offence in the hope that it will maximize all the offensive talent he has, knowing it will take some time to jell, if it ever truly does. Or, you know, he could go with the guy who has run offences that finished fourth, first, first, first, first, second, first, second, second, and first between 2000 and 2010. The Suns fell to ninth the past two years as they stripped the team of talent, though Nash did turn Marcin Gortat into the league’s most efficient pick-and-roll scorer in his spare time. The best single offensive system in the NBA over the last 12 years hasn’t been the triangle. It has been the man of many haircuts from Victoria.
Of course, to turn over the Lakers to Nash is a risk, says Brown, because Nash is 38. In remarks to L.A. reporters earlier this week Brown said, ‘‘We can say Steve, go play and roll. He did that in Phoenix and they won a lot of games, it was fun to watch, but where were they in May?’’ He said that in a playoff series, ‘They’ll stop that one thing you’re good at.’ He said Nash didn’t want to run the pick-and-roll every time because it would tire him out, and that Nash liked the flexibility of not having to make a play every time down the floor.
This is head-shaking stuff, and not just because the Suns were a perennial contender afflicted by horrendous luck, or because the pick-androll is the most effective play in the NBA, or because Nash is the best man alive at running it.
Nash is not complaining, because Nash does not complain. When Terry Porter was slowing the Suns down in 2008, leading Grant Hill to famously describe Nash as ‘a hummingbird trapped in a plastic bag,’ Nash made all the same patient, encouraging noises about that offence as he is making about this one.
As his then-teammate Shaquille O’Neal put it during a visit to Toronto, ‘‘He sacrifices. He sacrifices himself 1,000 per cent of the time.’’
Of course, to turn over the Lakers offence to Nash would mean taking it out of the hands of Bryant, who believes in system basketball as long as he is at the centre of the system. A great coach, a Jerry Sloan, or even Nash’s basketball soulmate and Bryant’s childhood hero Mike D’Antoni, could probably devise something that mixed Nash’s ability to make his teammates both happy and productive with Bryant’s need to be Kobe, come what may.
Brown is not that guy. Essentially, the Lakers are a PhD thesis, and offensively, Brown has traditionally been a safety school coach. And so we basketball lovers worry. Miami had time, but Nash does not, because to be a 38-year-old point guard is to be an endangered species. And there’s only one of him left.