Some Food for Thought

Posted by Rob Mahoney on May 10, 2009 under Commentary | 7 Comments to Read

• Art Garcia of NBA.com: “Wright said he didn’t want to make any extra contact in case Anthony was about to shoot, which would have led to three foul shots. ‘What do you want me to do? Do you want me to Derek Fisher him, just take him out and then I get a flagrant foul late in the game,’ Wright fumed. ‘I can’t blatantly run through the guy. I have to try to make a play on the ball and that’s what I felt like I did. I didn’t want to jeopardize my team in any way by making a foolish foul.’” In the grand scheme of things, Wright is but a peon.  Carmelo is an elite offensive player that tends to do amazing things in the final moments of games.  Call me crazy, but I err on the Wright side of this debate.  If AW is waiting for a whistle and one never comes, he has fractions of a second to react and scramble to contest the shot.  In that scramble, the odds that he gets called for a foul are probably 50-50, despite what actually does or doesn’t happen.  In a perfect world, should Wright have played out the sequence regardless of a whistle?  Sure.  Does that mean we should blame him for it?  Hardly.
• Randy Galloway of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Despite a controversial ending, let there be no Mavs crying, not after missing two free throws (one by Jason Terry, one by Josh Howard) in the final 2:12, among four clanged in the fourth quarter. Or when Dirk Nowitzki, who otherwise was very game, threw up a lame shot with 7.9 seconds left, which was a failure in three areas: No. 1, he missed. No. 2, Dirk didn’t milk the shot clock enough, leaving three critical seconds and 6.5 overall. No. 3, while guarded man-to-man by Kenyon Martin, he didn’t do what he had been doing much of the afternoon. Driving the rim hard, getting to the line.” There are millions of reasons why the Mavs ended up at 105 points, and plenty of those reasons are failures to complete certain tasks.  Yes, Dirk should have milked the clock.  Yes, he should’ve tried to get to the basket.  And yes, the Mavs should’ve made their free throws.  But essentially, the Mavs were penalized for regressing toward the mean.  On the season, the Mavs as a team shot 81.6% on their free throws.  They shot exactly that same percentage in Game 3.  On the season, the Mavs as a team had 49 free throw attempts, which is almost double their regular season average.  Dirk far exceeded his average attempts of 6.7 by shooting 15 free throws.  It’s a pity that those already excellent marks were brought back down to earth by a failure to score in the final minutes, but the numbers would tell you that such a fall was inevitable.  The Mavs had played well enough to endure that slip, but they were hardly afforded the chance to.
• Via Tim MacMahon of the DMN Mavs Blog: “If I was the league, I wouldn’t say that,” Dirk said Sunday. “I don’t think it makes anybody feel better. We don’t get the last seven seconds back, to kind of play it over again. So more than anything, I think it made it worse.”  Sigh.