Killer Crossover, page 17
Despite all the craziness on the court, Oak is a friend of mine. We’d actually been talking all game. He told me when it started that Van Gundy had been on their asses about being more physical. “Done come down the lane here today,” he’d warned me with a smile before the game. “Not a good day for that.” But I was a veteran and I knew you just had to give it to them before they gave it to you. Still, I guess toughness was on their minds. And sometimes the chaos of a game can outweigh any previous friendly relationship. And that’s what happened next …
168 On the next possession, they fouled me immediately and I headed for the free-throw line. After hitting the first, I sunk the second and began backing up to get on defense. That’s when all hell broke loose.
With the ball in the air, Ward, the former football player, boxed out the 6-foot-11 Brown in a way that could have seriously injured him. Brown didn’t like it and, well, he picked up the 6-foot-2 Ward, flipped him in the air, and dropped his ass on a few photographers under the basket like a sack of potatoes.
Ward, now on the floor, started grabbing after P. J., and Scott Brooks grabbed him from behind. And just like that the benches cleared—something the league had been trying to curtail. Riley and Jeff Van Gundy came into the fray and tried to stop it. I didn’t know what to think at the time, it happened so fast. I just wanted the fight to break up. I could hear some guys on the court blaming Charlie and some blaming P. J. It was only later watching the replay that I could see what Ward had down to Brown. Ward, Brown, and Starks were tossed. The fans were chanting “New York Sucks” and some even threw cups at John as he left. After the game, I asked P. J. what happened. “That fucker,” he told me. “Ward tried to clip me like he was playing football.” I went back and looked at the tape and he was right. Ward went for his knees. It was a stupid move. The Knicks had us on the ropes and were going home to New York for Game Six. Maybe he thought P. J. wouldn’t retaliate. But some people do shit just to do it.
I was glad P. J. handled his business. Jeff Van Gundy said they gave us life after that, and they had. The league came down hard on the players after the game. P. J. was suspended for the rest of the series, but New York got it worse. Ewing, 169Houston, Ward, L. J., and Starks were all suspended for one game for leaving the bench and participating in the fight. But since there were so many guys, the NBA split the games up. Ewing, Houston, and Ward would miss Game Six while Starks and Johnson would miss Game Seven. That gave us a huge advantage. I was telling on people, too! Listing in the postgame press conference everyone who came onto the court. The Knicks got mad at me, but I was pointing people out to the league who came off the bench. The Knicks called me a snitch, but I just said, “Hey, man, rules are rules and I’m trying to win! You don’t like it, you shouldn’t have got your ass off the bench!” I used their idiocy to our advantage.
Back in New York for Game Six, we knew we had a chance thanks to our renewed toughness and their suspensions. Majerle started in place of P. J. and had a great game, rising to the challenge and scoring 18 points with seven rebounds and six assists (along with making four of eight threes). I scored 20 to go along with eight assists and six boards and Zo had 28 points with nine rebounds. The Knicks played well without Ewing, but we got the win, 95–90.
Just like with the Orlando series, we had the deciding game at home. And just like in the Orlando series, I took over. One of the more special moments of my career came before Game Seven got going. My son, who was just five years old, came to watch the game. Most of the time, since he was so young, he didn’t watch the games too closely when he was there. He’d be playing around with toys or something. But ahead of Game Seven, he asked me in the car to the game, “Dad? What’s the ‘killer crossover’ thing everybody keeps talking about? They always ask me about it, but I’ve never seen it.”
170 I said, “You never seen it?” And he shook his head. “Son, you just make sure to stay in your seat tonight, you can’t go nowhere unless it’s halftime. And I’m going to show you what they’re talking about. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I’ll make sure it happens for you.” He nodded and said, “Alright, Daddy.” But Tim Jr. didn’t have to wait long. Five minutes into the first, I stole the ball from Houston at center court and as I came down dribbling, I remember clearly thinking I hope he’s in his chair. I knew what was about to happen. Chris Childs stepped up to guard me in the paint and I froze him—boom-BOOM—and went up for the basket.
I got the layup and my son got to see it. I pointed at him in the stands after it to let him know I remembered our talk and he was jumping up and down. That was special. And it was the start of maybe my best game as a pro. If you’ve played basketball, chances are you’ve heard the phrase “in the zone.” It’s a feeling when you’re on the court and everything you shoot goes in. Players can have cold games where the opposite happens. And in the series against the Knicks, I had bad games when I shot 6–22 and 3–17. But in Game Seven, I was in the zone. I made three after three. I drove to the hoop, scoring among the Oakley and Ewing trees.
And I played it up to the home crowd, waving my arms. Being in the zone, you feel like you can’t miss, you’re unstoppable. You’re in a groove and no one can take you out of it. It’s a lot like a baseball pitcher throwing a no-hitter. Your teammates are talking to you, but you aren’t really engaging with them. You’re doing your job at a high level and tuning everything else out. I’d had this same feeling once earlier in the season in a game against Washington in March. The Bullets had a good team then with 171Juwan Howard and Rod Strickland, who each had 28 points that night. But it wasn’t enough.
Just a quick flashback: We’d played Washington the night before. We’d been up in that game by 16 points after three quarters, but we got too comfortable and let them come back in the fourth and beat us. Pat was livid. He hated when an inferior team stole a win from us. So the very next night we had another game against them. We got up big and led at the half, 59–38. But in the fourth quarter we let them come back again, this time sending the game into overtime. But I knew I had to make sure we won it and didn’t have Pat screaming at us. So I finished the game with my career-high 45 points. I knew for us to win, I had to take over.
We won by three after I hit the game winner against Washington with four seconds left to notch my 45th point. I also had seven assists, seven rebounds, and four steals. We won, 108–105, to earn our 45th win against only 16 losses. Pat might have held a 24-hour practice if we’d lost that one. But that wasn’t the only time I was ITZ that season. The second time came in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the New York Knicks.
In that third quarter, Zo, who’d been playing really well with 16 points, got his fourth foul and had to be taken out for a while. When that happened, barely three minutes into the quarter, Pat was worried. At a loss; I’d never seen him like that. The look in his eyes said: What am I going to do? Pat was in the huddle during a time out, and he didn’t say a single word. He was trying to figure out a gameplan in his head, trying to figure out what the hell we could do against the Knicks at home in a deciding Game Seven. The team was sitting there on the bench 172waiting for anything from the coach. So I said, “Shit, I’m going to take this over. Just like in a summer league game. Let me take this over. Let me revert to old school Tim.” So I started to hit shots. I got myself in a groove like never before. This wasn’t no March regular-season game against the Bullets. This was Game Seven against the Knicks.
After the game, people asked me, “Damn, Tim, where did that come from?” And I said, “It came from Pat not saying nothing. He needed someone to step up.” I knew that if I didn’t take over and we had lost, I would have always wondered what I could have done. As a point guard, you want to get other people involved. But sometimes it has to be your game. That was that night for me. No one could touch me. It was just swish, swish, swish. The announcer said over the loudspeaker after every basket, “TIM … HARDAWAY!” I was busting Ward with my killer crossover, hitting three after three.
The legendary play-by-play man Marv Albert kept saying on TV, “Oh my!” And later, “It has been a Jordan-esque performance!” That night I scored my playoff career high of 38 points, and we won the game, 101–90. For me, there was nothing like it before or since. I’d had 13 at halftime but scored 25 in the second half. I also added seven assists and five steals. The win made us only the sixth team in NBA history to come back from a 3–1 series deficit. Now, we were in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Chicago Bulls. We’d made the NBA’s Final Four, which was a first for me.
But the Bulls were rested.
They’d beaten Washington 3–0 and Atlanta 4–1 in the two series prior, whereas we’d gone the distance in both of ours. Chicago, which had won the NBA Finals the year prior against 173Seattle, had home-court advantage. It was a rematch against the team that had beaten us in the playoffs the year prior. But instead of meeting in the first round, we were now in the Conference Finals. Unfortunately, though, the series still wasn’t all that close. You could feel the rivalry between Pat and Chicago’s coach, Phil Jackson. They didn’t talk about it, but you could sense it.
Phil had beaten Pat’s Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals, and the two had squared off three times in the early 1990s when Pat was with the Knicks. Phil won a lot of games and a lot of series, which is what happens when you have Michael Jordan on your team. But for me facing the Bulls, I was happy. I was headed home to Chicago to play in front of my friends and family and a city that loved me. Sadly, though, the Bulls were just too good. They knew how to win, and they’d been there before. They had the confidence of champions. The only way we could make any dent on them was in the pick and roll.
If you posted up against the Bulls, they had you dead. Dennis Rodman was great on the block, and they were so long with MJ, Scottie Pippen, Ron Harper, and Toni Kukoč that they could cover a lot of ground. But they were also an older team, so if you got the Bulls moving around the perimeter, you could try to exploit what little weaknesses they had. They were great on defense, but they didn’t want to play it much since most of them were in their late thirties. If you got the ball to spots around the three-point line, you could find openings. But it didn’t do us much. We fell down 3–0 before winning our first game at home, 87–80 (which was also the first game in which we’d scored 80 points).
Two days later, back in Chicago for Game Five, they finished us off. Despite the loss, we’d turned around the Miami Heat 174franchise and became contenders in the league. For the season, I’d become the best point guard in the NBA after being benched and traded by Golden State. That meant a lot. We’d set a franchise record with 61 wins and earned the league’s best road record at 32–9. Pat won Coach of the Year for the third time in his career. He’d set us up for years of success. We had championship aspirations. We were all about hard work and improvement. But little did we know how hard the road ahead would be, and how many times we’d face our blood rivals, the Knicks.
175
10 F*** the Knicks!
Miami and The Big Apple are separated by nearly 1,300 miles of Atlantic coastline. While many New Yorkers fly down to Florida for the winter, it was in May and June that the Heat and the Knicks saw one another most often over a four-year span. And each season, we ramped up knowing we’d have to go through each other in order to move on into the playoffs. It was the case the season before, and would be the case, incredibly, for the next three. But while the Knicks-Heat rivalry was always seemingly at the end of the road, the path to get there was long and fraught. To begin the 1997–98 season, for example, we suffered through injury after injury.
Ahead of the year, Pat Riley picked up three-point shooter Terry Mills and slasher Todd Day. Day, though, only lasted two months before getting into a spat with Pat and then was gone. The big blow to open the year, though, was Zo, who missed the first 22 games due to a knee injury he suffered over the summer. Thankfully, we had center Isaac Austin to step in and carry the load. That’s the benefit in having a good bench: when the 176starters are out, they can fill in for a spell. They might not be All-Stars, but they can play that way for stretches. It also helped that Austin, who’d won the Sixth Man of the Year Award a year prior, was one of the best bench players in the league.
I was having another strong year. But a great year for an All-Star is no easy task. Point guards don’t get a lot of open looks. We’re usually the ones setting up our teammates for open jump shots, so have to take the contested offerings. Sometimes Pat got on me and told me to shoot fewer threes, but I liked to use the shots as weapons. “Hey,” he’d say, “you’re jacking up too many, Timmy.” I understood what he was saying—threes are, after all, tough to make by definition. As Pat was the general, I understood his request and scaled back.
But I knew they were also daggers—especially at the end of games. Pat had us practice long-distance shots all the time. During the course of a day, he might have us take 300 threes. He’d designed our Heat team to be a collection of marksmen, from Dan Majerle and Voshon Lenard to Jamal Mashburn and me. It was a way to space the floor for Zo and our other bigs. That’s why he’d have us stay late to shoot them, to hone our rhythm. He encouraged it if you were open, but he also made sure that we weren’t abusing the privilege. There’s always a balance. But, in the end, the best part about my game was that I was a versatile scorer.
I could shoot but I could also post up, thanks to the early lessons my grammar school coach Donald Pittman told me, and from my dad who told me there were no positions in basketball, just great players. I remember one game when I had Reggie Miller guarding me and I took him to the post. I shot a jump hook right in his face. Then, as we were running back the other 177way, I told him, “I’m coming back at you again!” But Reggie said, “No way, that’s fake! You got lucky!” So I had to take him down low again and give him another hook from the block to prove I wasn’t just a short guy with no inside game to my name.
In every contest, no matter the opponent, I wanted to tear your heart out and make the opposing crowd sit down. So I’d come down the court and size my opponent up, and sometimes just rise up on him or take a step-back three. That’s what I used to do on the courts in Chicago, and it transferred over to the pros. Maybe I took a few too many in the early parts of the game but, by the end, I wanted to be ready to sink a game winner. When it’s money time, I made sure to make my jumpers. It was the result of the year I tore my ACL in Golden State and put up thousands of shots, getting my form and rhythm right. When you can sink a shot from the outside, you’re more dangerous.
The guy guarding you has to take that into consideration. You become a multi-dimensional scorer. In fact, that helped me in the second game of the season that year, on November 1, 1997. Just three days after NBA Live ’98 came out with me on the cover, we were playing the Bullets in DC, which was always a tight matchup. In the final seconds, Washington’s talented guard Rod Strickland, who continues to be underrated today, took the ball down and made a twisting scoop layup with about five seconds left to put his team up, 108–107. When Mashburn inbounded the ball to me under the basket, I drove the length of the court with my left hand—but I hesitated for a split second at the three-point line and then bolted ahead. My defender Strickland froze momentarily. I leapt from two feet inside the line, double-pumped in the air, floated to the rim, and let the ball go just before the buzzer. The shot was Good! We celebrated 178the victory, our second in a row to begin the season. That’s what preparation can do for you. As the year continued, we managed to play solid ball without Zo, going 15–7 during that time. In fact, it wasn’t until the middle of December that we lost two straight games. Then in mid-February we lost Mashburn to a thumb injury. It was tough, but we stuck together as we’d done without Zo.
Our team was built on Riley’s toughness. We were tough-minded individuals, each one of us. But you couldn’t be on the Miami Heat and not understand the influence of our coach and president. Because Riley left New York how he did—wanting to be the team’s president but getting denied and then resigning via fax to join Miami—there was always going to be tension between our two franchises. And our squad was always going to be defined by Pat’s demeanor. There would always be that lingering sense of hatred between New York and Miami, and it would touch every part of our season. Yet, we thrived off it. And let me say this: I don’t begrudge Pat one bit. Get your money! He had confidence in himself and it worked out great for him. Just as I had confidence in myself and it paid off that season with another All-Star appearance.
Since Pat had left New York, the Knicks had undergone some changes of their own. In came Don Nelson briefly as coach and then, when he left, Jeff Van Gundy took over. Jeff’s first full season was 1996–97, and with him came new players on the roster, including the aforementioned guard Chris Childs. New York also acquired the veteran frontcourt player Buck Williams and two big stars: sharp-shooter Allan Houston from the Detroit Pistons (on a record contract) and All-Star power forward Larry Johnson from the Charlotte Hornets (which was also Zo’s former 179team). LJ was a bit diminished due to a back injury, but was still a potent scorer and badass.
