The problem with basketball is that the games too often come down to not merely one but a series of “last shots”; that, and the professional season lasts too long. The sport nevertheless is enjoying a well-deserved resurgence. Attendance is higher than ever in the National Basketball Association because the games no longer consist of 46 minutes of trudging up and down the court and then two minutes of basketball on the way to a final shot, but rather 46 minutes of one team trying to blow the other out and vice versa, and then two minutes of basketball on the way to a last shot. Still, this overabundance of tension and clutch plays causes the separate games to be lost, as some new splendid contest and last-second basket comes along every week. Basketball will never produce anything on the level of Bill Mazeroski’s home run to end the 1960 World Series or Carlton Fisk’s blast in game six of the 1975 Series, for the simple reason that it’s producing events like that all the time. Already Nick Anderson’s last-second 30-footer to lift Illinois over Indiana at the end of the Big Ten season is diminished, and how was it, exactly, that Michigan beat, who was it, Seton Hall, in the NCAA Tournament final? And Michael Jordan’s next-to-last-second shot to beat the Milwaukee Bucks only a couple of months ago: who remembers that?
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We skipped out of the White Sox game last Sunday after attending the ground breaking for the “new” Comiskey Park (surely a name that can’t last, but what are they to call it–“Comiskey Park II,” “Son of Comiskey Park,” “That New Ballyard With the Extra Box Seats So the Owners Can Make More Money”?), and we did so with the full intention of doing a season-ending postmortem on the Bulls. We joined the rest of Western civilization in picking the Cavs in their five-game series. We were surprised but not shocked by the Bulls’ victory in the first game, in Cleveland. The Cavs were without star guard Mark Price in that game, the Bulls were rested and well prepared, and they simply beat them off the ball to win the game. Price was back for the next game, and the Cavs won.
We joined the Bulls for game three by running out to our neighborhood tap, a SportsChannel client. There we saw the Bulls win the game and take the lead in the series, but we also developed our theory on the series: it was that tired old saw, “the Bulls are a better basketball team, but the Cavs have better athletes,” and familiar as that refrain is, it nonetheless appeared to be true.
We were quite plainly too anxious to watch Friday’s game, which the Cavs won when Jordan missed a free throw that would have put the Bulls three points up in the closing seconds. The Cavs exploited the opportunity, made the final basket in regulation, and sent the game into overtime. There the Bulls lost–leaving the court one by one with foul trouble as if it were an epidemic–sending them back to Cleveland.
Jordan took the shot, of course, and of course he made it, with six seconds left, but then the Cavs called a time-out and ran a heart-wrenching play. The Bulls were set up in a solid man-on-man defense, but the Cavs beat it with the oldest play in the book, the give-and-go. Ehlo passed in and ran straight for the hoop, catching a return pass on the way and laying the ball in.
