Playoff ball not for faint of heart
Claws come out as players will do whatever it takes
A quick inventory of Bismack Biyombo’s contribution to Wednesday night’s highlight reel included four blocked shots, three resounding dunks, another in a line of his Mutombo finger wags and a Usain Bolt tribute pose.
For all that electrifying labour and showmanship, Biyombo was left with a physical reminder of his gamely performance that probably didn’t make the video capsule. As the Raptors wrapped up practice on Thursday — this before they flew to Miami for Friday’s Game 6 of the second-round series they now lead 3-2 — Biyombo touched his hand to a still-fresh flesh wound. When he suffered the gash, which begins around the spot where the left pectoral muscle meets the shoulder and boomerangs down to the top of his biceps, they had to stop the game to stop the bleeding.
It looked ghastly enough to make an observer wonder if a feral cat had invaded the court — or if, maybe, a member of the Miami Heat had smuggled a razorblade in his shorts, pro wrestler style. But Biyombo was sure enough about the weapon of choice: Sharp fingernails.
“I can’t remember whose,” Biyombo said. “I know it was on an offensive rebound. I just felt like I got this wild scratch. And by the time I looked, it was bloody. But look, I could care less about this scratch. “It’s just part of the game, man.” Clawing and scratching, figurative and otherwise, has certainly been a big part of these games between the Raptors and the Heat. While the brand of basketball in the NBA’s Western Conference is being heralded for its ball-moving, slick-shooting beauty, Toronto and Miami have been partaking in a less telegenic form of grinding brutality.
The evidence is everywhere, and not only in the fact that the Raptors, who averaged 102.7 points a game during the regular season, are averaging 94.7 a game in a series in which three of five games have gone to overtime. Raptors all-star Kyle Lowry has been seen wearing surgical tape to cover the spot near his left eye where an opposing elbow split the skin. Teammate DeMar DeRozan submitted to an in-game therapy of having a shoelace wrapped around his injured right thumb, presumably to reduce swelling. Both starting centres, Toronto’s Jonas Valanciunas and Miami’s Hassan Whiteside, remain out with respective ankle and knee injuries. And while both Raptors forward DeMarre Carroll and Heat forward Luol Deng have been listed as questionable for Game 6 — both with bruised left wrists suffered in the wild fray of Game 5 — it’s expected both Carroll and Deng will see some time given the stakes.
“If it ain’t broke, with me, I’m ready to play,” Carroll said Thursday.
Given the collective pain that’s been inflicted, Biyombo was hardly complaining about the clawings he has endured in the trenches, even if Game 5 also saw him suffer another blood-oozing removal of some skin on the back of his shoulder.
“I get scratched a lot. I get elbowed a lot. I get grabbed a lot,” Biyombo said with a shrug. “But look — I will go for the offensive rebound no matter what. The last thing I care about is somebody scratching me. As long as we win, at the end of the series, I hope I have as many scratches as possible.”
In other words, if the Heat are succeeding in getting under Biyombo’s skin, they’re only doing so literally. Certainly Biyombo isn’t the first player to be inconvenienced by such bloodlettings. NBA legend has it that Dennis Rodman, the Hall of Fame rebounding savant and bodyart enthusiast, was also known for growing his outlandishly-polished talons to occasionally scary lengths.
And back in 2008, then-Celtics guard Ray Allen donned an arm sleeve to protect against the postseason pawing of Detroit’s Richard Hamilton. Hamilton had a reputation for purposely growing his nails to menacing effect. But when Allen later complained, Hamilton pleaded ignorance.
“I told him, ‘Come on, dog, you know why you’re using them,’ ” Allen once said.
Few players have ever copped to the charge of intentionally cultivating harm-inducing claws. But there have been exceptions.
“I did it a couple of times just to irritate somebody,” longtime NBA guard Andre Miller told the Oregonian in 2010. “I think every player has thought about that, letting them grow and possibly getting a couple scratches in and irritating someone.”
Basketball players, of course, aren’t the citizens of the sporting world most often associated with paying special attention to nail care. That honour would fall to baseball pitchers, whose trade relies on fingertip control. The memoir of Blue Jays knuckleballer R.A. Dickey includes an anecdote of an emergency trip to a salon called Pink Nails to have acrylic coating applied to a broken nail in the hours before an important start for the New York Mets.
“Do I have to tell you I was the only ballplayer, in full uniform, on the premises?” Dickey wrote.
If NBAers spend time having their cuticles tended, they’re often most concerned with the state of the ones on their feet. Pedicures have become a common NBA ritual, in part because in-grown toenails are a painful occupational hazard best avoided. And if players also opt for simultaneous manicures — well, Carroll, for one, said he’s never heard of a colleague forgoing a clipping in the name of pain infliction.
“That’s crazy. But now that you say it, it’s kind of interesting,” Carroll said. “I could see some people doing it.” At playoff time, after all, every possibility of a fingernail’s advantage has to be considered.