HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Roland Lazenby

It’s one of those questions that heats up late January for the NBA. Does Pau Gasol deserve to be selected by Western Conference coaches to fill an at-large spot on the All-Star roster?

The Los Angeles Lakers’ loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers this past week would have seemed to settle the issue in some minds. Gasol seemed weak, ineffectual, couldn’t hold position.

“Weenie Gasol,” declared a heading on at least one Lakers internet discussion board after he struggled against the Cavs.

At least that’s how some fickle, frustrated fans see it.

That’s not necessarily the view of the coaches and support personnel around the league, however.

“He’s had those hamstring injuries,” explained a close associate of Lakers coach Phil Jackson. “Pau couldn’t hold position, hasn’t been able to get a lot of lift. That’s what happens to people with bad hamstrings. They can’t perform. That’s all that is.”

“He’s still in the All-Star mix, and he should be.”

Indeed.

There’s a high regard for Gasol among coaches around the league based on what he’s done since coming to the Lakers in an early 2008 trade, especially his play in last June’s championship run by the Lakers.

You can hear that same regard in the voices of his teammates.

“Pau’s always prepared,” said the Lakers’ Lamar Odom in late December. “You see him catch the ball and just go with that pretty left hook. He has an awesome array of moves and shots.”

The seven-foot Spaniard missed the start of the season with a hamstring injury, but upon returning to the lineup and regaining some strength and flexibility, Gasol ripped off a series of huge rebounding games in December, prompting this reporter to ask him if he was trying to imitate Bill Russell.

Gasol laughed off the comment in typical fashion, but his value to the Lakers has been obvious from the moment he joined the team.

If you want a measure of that impact and the respect Gasol has earned, you only need to look at the double teams he draws virtually every time he catches the ball in the post.

“Teams double Pau a lot,” Odom said. “A lot.”

Those double-teams make it possible for the Lakers’ offense to operate at high efficiency. Statistics don’t cover Gasol’s full impact, but his presence has meant so much in terms of taking pressure off Kobe Bryant and creating space for the athletic guard to move and attack.

“Pau’s so versatile, so underrated,” Odom said. “There are so many ways he can hurt a team in so many different aspects. His passing. He hits me down low with passes all the time.”

Defenses simply have to be aware of Gasol at all times, and no one knows that better than the opposing coaches who will hold the votes that determine who makes the team.

His place on the team might not be an issue if it weren’t for the fine seasons being turned in by two other bigs in the Western Conference.

Forward Zach Randolph is averaging 20.9 points per game and 11.4 rebounds while appearing in the first 42 games for the Memphis Grizzlies.

Although center Chris Kaman has missed four games for the Clippers, he’s averaged 20.4 points and better than nine rebounds.

Both numbers appear better than the 16.9 points and 11 rebounds Gasol has averaged in 28 games for the Lakers.

Always frank in his assessments, Kaman offered the opinion recently that Gasol shouldn’t be an All-Star because he really isn’t a center and he’s missed a lot of games.

Actually, Gasol is effective at both the four and five positions, and that versatility is a key argument for his inclusion on the team. Gasol is a key reason the Lakers are one of the top teams in the league. He sacrifices shots playing in L.A.’s deep lineup that includes Bryant, but that sacrifice is also reason for his selection.

Kaman is having a fine year, but he plays on the Clippers. Coaches have usually avoided selecting players from teams with losing records. Kaman, however, has twice been named Western Conference Player of the Week and is certainly deserving of consideration.

Randolph probably offers the stiffest competition, with the Grizzlies producing a winning record that hardly anyone expected heading into the season. A bulky forward, Randolph has long put up numbers on a series of losing teams. He has never been known as a strong defensive player.

What hurts his candidacy is that All-Star awards have long been cumulative honors. Coaches might be shy about selecting Randolph for a few months of inspired play with the fear that he could easily revert to old form.

Truth be told, the Lakers coaching and medical staffs are hoping Gasol isn’t selected. That would mean that instead of going to Dallas for a busy weekend, Gasol can get some much-needed rest and additional treatment for all that ails him.

The issue will be settled this coming Thursday when the All-Star reserves are announced.

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Gilbert Arenas has got to be sick about the recent troubles he’s found with firearms and poker hands. All of a sudden people are treating him like Adolf Hitler.

Yes, he’s been short-sighted, but he’s hardly a lone figure in the history of American basketball.

I suspect that the level of ostracizing he faces has much to do with his contract that is worth better than $100 million.

With that level of money, he should have been very, very careful. But in some ways it’s understandable that he made light of the issue after he was confronted with it. After all, that’s how the basketball world has traditionally treated the issues of guns and gambling.

Ever see the movie “White Men Can’t Jump”?

Over the years I’ve interviewed many of the game’s old timers and former legends. They’ve all joked about the issues in interviews I’ve done with them. That’s because gunplay and gambling are as old as peach baskets and balls with laces.

Truth be told, the problem is common. Years ago I had a gun shoved in my face during a pickup game gone wrong. Anybody who’s played on America’s public courts for any length of time has probably encountered similar experiences with guns.

From its earliest days in the YMCA gyms, basketball quickly became known for its emotional outbursts and ensuing fistfights. That’s why gyms often banned the playing of the sport in the early days. Take all the emotion of the sport and throw in a little hustling and it’s easy to see how people end up getting shot.

Even though gambling and guns are serious issues, that doesn’t mean that pro basketballers haven’t traditionally made light of them.

Take, for example, the strange tale of Reggie Harding, gun-toting character who inhabited the margins of the game.

REGGIE

The Chicago Bulls lost their first nine games in the fall of 1967, won one in Seattle, then lost another six. Desperate to shore up their weakness at center, the Bulls pulled in 6-11 Reggie Harding from the Detroit Pistons. One of the first players to move directly from high school to the pros, Harding had been suspended for the 1965-66 season. Sadly, he had been raised on Detroit’s mean streets and could never overcome his gangster background. (He would be shot to death in 1972.) He was known for finishing practice and leaving without showering, pausing only to towel off and spin the cylinder on his revolver. Once while playing in Detroit, Harding was said to have shot at teammate Terry Dischinger’s feet to make him “dance.”

One night Bulls roommate Flynn Robinson awakened in the dark, cut on the light and found Reggie pointing a gun at him. Legend has it that Harding robbed the same gas station three times in his own Detroit neighborhood. According to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the third time a masked Harding robbed the place, the attendant said,  “I know that’s you, Reggie.”

“No, man, it ain’t me,” Reg was said to have replied. “Shut up and give me the money!”

“I got a chance to get Reggie Harding,” the late Johnny “Red” Kerr once told me of his days as coach of the Bulls. “We needed a big center. I had heard about his pistol. Rumor had it that he carried it in his gym bag. . . He’d play one-on-one with Flynn Robinson. Flynn would beat him, and Reggie would say, ‘Get out of here Flynn before I pistol whip you.’ Everybody figured he might have it with him.

“When we were in the midst of that losing streak in 1967-68, we played the Lakers in Los Angeles,” Kerr recalled. “We needed a win in the worst way, and we had a one-point lead with just a few seconds left on the clock. The Lakers got the ball at half court, and I put Reggie in to guard Mel Counts, their big guy. I didn’t want them getting an alley-oop. Counts set up out near the free throw line, but Walt Hazzard, who was taking the ball out of bounds, threw the ball over the backboard and the buzzer sounded. I was jumping around and screaming because we had finally won a game. I looked up, and Reggie had decked Mel Counts. Counts got up and shot two free throws and beat us.”

During that West Coast road trip, Harding was called home for his mother’s funeral. For the next 10 days, the Bulls didn’t hear from him. Finally he returned, saying that he had been appointed executor of his mother’s estate and needed the extra time away. A few days later, the Bulls placed Reggie Harding on waivers. It seems the gun had only a little to do with it.

DEAL ‘EM UP

Card playing has been an element of basketball – and all other sports for that matter – from the very beginning. Players have long dealt ‘em up to even out the highs and lows of winning and losing on the court.

“Hot Rod” Hundley often tells tales of 1957-58, his first year with the Minneapolis Lakers.

“My rookie year we were in last place,” Hundley once told me. “By the end of the season we were 19-53. There was a lot of poker playing. Slick Leonard, Dick Garmaker, Corky Devlin and me, we were the four ringleaders that played a lot of cards.”

Hundley and Leonard had teamed up in training camp as a pair who liked to drink, smoke and run around all night. Coach George Mikan didn’t seek to stop them. He just wanted to join ‘em, Hundley recalled.

“Mikan missed his playing days. He wanted to run around with us, but we wouldn’t let him. We told him that having the coach along just wouldn’t be fun.”

Long before Hundley arrived, Lakers’ road trips were dominated by partying and marathon late-night poker games.

“There was a lot of gambling,” former Lakers coach and Hall of Famer John Kundla once told me.

“It was Mikan who gave Slick his nickname ‘cause he lost so much money to him,” Hundley recalled with a chuckle. “We took a lot of George’s money.”

The Lakers were not a good team, which allowed them to get Elgin Baylor in the 1958 draft. But soon the team’s owners feared that the hard-partying veterans would corrupt the brilliant rookie.

To make matters worse, Baylor was inducted in the army right before the season started, meaning he couldn’t be in training camp.

“He couldn’t come to the team, so we took the team to him to practice,” Hundley recalled. “That was kind of fun. Down in Texas. Elgin was in basic training at Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio. Elgin would play solider all day and then he would join us at night for these open gyms. There’d be a couple of thousand people watching us practice. At night after practice, we sampled the South Texas night life. When we got bored with that, we’d go down into Mexico. We stayed in a barracks, which we pretty soon trashed. The army brass got wind of our partying and poker playing and made us clean the place up. That meant we spent even more time down in Mexico sipping Mexican beer and partying with the senoritas.”

Despite the disaster of training camp, Baylor opened the season by scoring 52 against Detroit. A few nights later, on November 8, 1959, he rang up 64 points against the Celtics, breaking the league’s single-game record set a decade earlier by Jumpin’ Joe Fulks.

Soon fans were lining up to see this phenomenal young scoring machine wherever the Lakers played. But the atmosphere around the team remained a joke so the owners soon brought in former Laker great Jim Pollard to clean up the mess.

“One of my first moves was to stop the poker playing,” Pollard once told me. “Slick Leonard and Dick Garmaker were winning a lot of money from Elgin. I didn’t think it was good for the team’s best player to be losing that much. Elgin wasn’t that bad of a player, really. But Slick was a great poker player.”

Pollard, however, only coached the Lakers their last season in Minneapolis. The next year, they moved to Los Angeles, and Baylor became one of the game’s all time great card players in his own right with his own nickname – “Motormouth.”

If you ask just about any NBA old timers, they’ll tell you the card games between their battles on the court offered some of their best fun and best memories.

That’s why Lakers coach Phil Jackson spoke out against the idea of the NBA banning card playing on its teams. It has long played a part in building team chemistry – when it wasn’t playing a part in tearing down team chemistry.

As for the guns, they’ve now become a gnarly issue that has suddenly come to dog the game, and these days it’s no laughing matter, no matter how much you laugh about the good old days.

If you don’t believe that, just ask Gilbert Arenas.

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Although the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant have gotten off to a strong start this season despite early injuries, forward Lamar Odom says there’s no question they miss triangle guru Tex Winter, who still battles the effects of a stroke suffered last April.

Odom says he has no doubt what the perfectionist coach would be telling the club.

“He would be telling Kobe to move the ball,” Odom said with a laugh recently. “But he was always telling Kobe to move the ball, even when Kobe was moving the ball. He would tell us to ping the ball. He would say we should be passing a lot better, having a lot more assists.”

And if the team had defensive breakdowns, the 87-year-old Winter would blame the troubles on improper offensive execution, Odom said.

That’s because the triangle, a team offense, is predicated on floor balance that always leaves players in position to get back on defense.

Winter, the longtime assistant and mentor to Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, is himself nominated once again for the Hall of Fame this year, after failing to gain election on numerous occasions.

It’s a system good enough to win 10 of the last 20 NBA championships, but is it good enough to get Winter elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame?

His nomination goes against the Hall’s formula for electing the game’s star coaches and players. Assistant coaches simply aren’t elected to the Hall of Fame, as longtime Celtics player, coach and broadcaster Tommy Heinsohn, himself a Hall of Fame player, explained.

But Winter’s career has broken the mold and merits special consideration, his supporters point out, largely because of the unique triangle offense and Winter’s ability to teach it and coach it.

Former Bulls GM Jerry Krause hired Winter, a veteran college coach who had great success at Kansas State and other places, as the “coach’s coach” in the late 1980s. Krause wanted Winter to teach his unique offense to Bulls head coach Doug Collins.

When Collins declined much of Winter’s advice, he was replaced by Phil Jackson, and the greatest coaching combo of all time was born. Working under Winter’s tutelage and using Winter’s offensive system, Jackson coached the Bulls and later the Lakers to 10 championships in 20 seasons, an unprecedented run.

Pro basketball had long been viewed as an undisciplined domain until it came to be ruled by Winter’s marvelously disciplined approach to team play.

“People don’t realize it’s mostly a zone offense,” Odom explained. “You overload one side, and you always have people in rebounding position. You just kind of pick your spots. It’s a pass-first offense. You just pass the ball to the open man and see what develops from there.”

Winter would be delighted to hear Odom discussing the triangle so authoritatively. Truth be told, Odom has never been all that well suited to Winter’s system.

Winter always said Odom is one of the finest humans he ever coached, and that’s saying something because Winter coached for better than six decades.

Still, as you might expect, Winter’s admiration never left him shy about lighting up Odom if the Lakers forward violated one of the principles of Winter’s system.

Over the past five seasons, Winter was often in Odom’s ear, sometimes fussing about one thing or another, or sometimes just talking about the game. But then the spry pioneer was silenced by a stroke last April.

The Lakers and Kobe Bryant are now moving through another season with hopes of defending the NBA title they won last June, and Odom says he can still feel Winter right there in his ear.

“Experience is the best teacher in the world,” Odom explained recently with more than a bit of tenderness in his voice. “He’d been around the block. And Tex always had stories for me. I miss his presence. We all miss Tex. A lot.”

Odom is a brilliant open-court player, able to operate instinctively on the break like only a select few in the world can do. Yet it says much about Odom that he’s willing to give himself over to system basketball with so little complaint.

Winter has long marveled at Jackson’s ability to sell modern NBA players on the merits of the unusual offense.

Then again, Winter has spent years in Jackson’s ear too. Winter not only provided Jackson the triangle offense and all of its various schematics, but the older mentor gave the younger Jackson the essential sets of drills and fundamentals for playing in his system.

Initially, Jackson provided a vision and an uncanny ability to relate to players and to build them into a team. But over the years, Jackson came to grasp the triangle and to teach it in ways that awed even Winter.

It became apparent that Jackson grew tremendously from their unique relationship and became the kind of coach who has dominated the game.

At every turn, there are regular reminders as to why Odom and today’s younger Lakers players keep plugging away at the different rhythms of the triangle. Odom got one such reminder recently when the Lakers visited Chicago, where Jackson and Winter coached the Bulls to six NBA championships.

Odom said he walked into the United Center and he was immediately left stunned when he glanced up to see the banners that the coaches won with teams led by Michael Jordan.

“I came in here, it was like I forgot,” Odom said. “I see like six championship banners? Then he won three more with the Lakers. I was like, ‘Wow.’ And then I was able to win one more with him last spring? And for me to be here in this presence?”

It’s like walking with history, Odom said.

That’s not to say the versatile forward hasn’t had tremendous frustrations with the system. He laughed heartily when he heard that new teammate Ron Artest talked of the triangle as an impetuous lady who needs constant romance.

“You can call it that,” Odom said. “Romance is good. It’s always better when you take your time.”

The Lakers’ relationship with the triangle has evolved over the course of every season, and this is no different. It’s a constant adventure, Odom admitted with a laugh. “Any given night, you never know. It can be your night to take four shots. Or it can be your night to take 14 shots. That’s how it is. You just have to be prepared.”

That, of course, was part of Winter’s uncanny grand plan to keep the opponent off balance.

NOW IT’S JACKSON’S SHOW TO RUN

In seasons past, Winter has always been the guardian of how the Lakers play the game. Now, Jackson is moving through his first full season without his longtime mentor and assistant. The Lakers coach is also without top assistant Kurt Rambis, now the head coach for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Odom says Jackson and the team have managed the way they always have.

“We’re always growing,” he explained, “and most people say they don’t change. But I don’t think we can help but change. I think it’s nature, you know?”

For example, the Lakers changed much over the course of the 2009 season, and that helped make them champions.

“P.J., he’s probably more outgoing, speaks a little bit more” now that Winter and Rambis are no longer around, Odom said, adding that Jackson also is now enjoying better health. “I know he feels better with his back and his legs and he’s moving around more. He feels good. He’s upbeat.”

Odom means that literally. Jackson still brings out his “warrior’s drum” and beats it for the team before every home game, a ritual that seems hard to fathom for some opponents in the NBA. The beating drum, according to Jackson’s belief, stirs the heart, just as it did for Native American warriors.

“He gives you that push, that pump that you always need,” Odom said of Jackson. “You want to play for and with the best.”

If it seems like Odom is extremely appreciative of where he is in life, he is. Lakers fans recall that he suffered through substantial off-season anxiety as a free agent before finally re-signing with the Lakers.

Where Jackson used to have psychologist George Mumford lead the team in meditation, Jackson himself now takes the team through these sessions. “Our energy many times is mental,” Odom explained. “The way we meditate with each other and stay poised, it feeds our energy.”

BRYANT/GASOL

If the triangle and Jackson’s methods remain something of a mystery for the team, one thing does not — Bryant’s approach to the game.

“We know what he wants to do,” Odom said with a laugh. “He’s gonna come out and be offensively aggressive at all times. But he earns that. He earns that.”

Lakers center/forward Pau Gasol recently pointed out that he has to keep working the offensive boards because he’s only getting about five shots a game in the offense.

Some observers might take that as criticism of Bryant or teammates, but both Gasol and Odom say that’s not the case at all.

It’s more a testament to Gasol’s effectiveness and the efforts of opposing defenses, Odom explained. “Pau’s always prepared. You see him catch the ball and just go with that pretty left hook. He has an awesome array of moves and shots.

“Teams double Pau a lot,” Odom said. “We try to get him the ball as much as possible. When Kobe gets going, you got to understand that he’s going to stay aggressive, he’s gonna stay in the attack mode. Pau’s so versatile, so underrated as a rebounder. There are so many ways he can hurt a team in so many different. His passing. He hits me down low with passes all the time. He’s always around four or five or six assists a night.”

The situation itself reminds Odom of why Winter, who continues to battle the effects of the stroke at his Oregon residence, remains in his thoughts.

“There are always going to be nights where the defenses are going to take something away,” he explains, echoing Winter.

So it remains the job of the system and the team to produce another option, another way to succeed. That’s the way of the triangle, Odom explained.

Yes, the older coach always had stories for Odom, and it’s clear that Winter didn’t just train players. He also taught them to be guardians of the game in their own right.

In that regard, Odom has placed himself among the elite, because he’s always been the kind of guy to take the things that Winter said to heart.

Perhaps the people involved in the highly secretive Hall of Fame election process will finally do the same.

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