zoomy942
05-28-09, 03:44 PM
Pop quiz, hot shot. Danny Biasone was ...
(A) A failed "American Idol" contestant
(B.) The little boy from "Who's the Boss?"
(C) A reputed mobster living in Jersey
(D) The guy who once saved the National Basketball Association
Danny Biasone did more good for basketball than you'll ever know.
The answer: D. He did it 55 years ago this summer. Our beloved NBA was floundering without effective rules to prevent stalling, intentional fouling and roughhouse play. Scoring had plummeted to an appalling 79.5 points per game. If you had a decent big guy, you planted him near the basket and tossed him lob passes, hoping he would get clubbed and sent to the line. If you were protecting a lead, your point guard dribbled around and waited to get fouled. If you were intentionally fouling someone, you popped him UFC-style to send a statement.
In Biasone's day, players fought like hockey thugs, fans frequently threw things on the court and nobody could figure out how to stop the mayhem. You can't overstate how excruciating the stalling and fouling tactics were. There was the time Fort Wayne famously beat the Minneapolis Lakers 19-18. There was the five-OT playoff game between Rochester and Indy in which the winner of each overtime tap held the ball for the rest of the period to attempt a winning shot, leading to a bizarre situation in which Rochester's home fans booed and booed and ultimately started leaving in droves, even with the game still going. The '53 playoffs averaged eighty free throws per game. The anti-electrifying '54 Finals featured scores of 79-68, 62-60, 81-67, 80-69, 84-73, 65-63 and 87-80. You get the idea.
When the Knicks were knocked out of the 1954 playoffs in the first round, author Leonard Koppett wrote that their last game "encompassed all the repulsive features of the grab-and-hold philosophy. It lasted three hours, and the final seconds of a one-point game were abandoned by the network. The arguments with the referees were interminable and degrading. What had been happening, as a matter of course, in dozens of games for the last couple of years, was shown to a nationwide audience in unadulterated impurity."
Unadulterated impurity ... a little different than "Where Amazing Happens." Enter Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals at the time. An Italian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island and made his money by owning a bowling alley -- no, really, a single bowling alley -- Biasone wore long, double-breasted coats, smoked filtered cigarettes and wore Borsalino hats. (Note: I don't know what Borsalino hats are, but they sound fantastic.) For three full years preceding the catastrophic 1954 playoffs, Biasone had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the other owners on a 24-second shot clock that would speed up games.
How did he arrive at 24? Biasone studied games he remembered enjoying and realized that, in each of those games, both teams took around 60 shots. Well, 60+60=120. He settled on 120 shots as the minimum combined total that would be acceptable from a "I'd rather kill myself than watch another NBA game like this" standpoint. And if you shoot every 24 seconds over the course of a 48-minute game, that comes out to .. wait for it ... 120 shots! In August 1954, Biasone staged an exhibition game using his clock with NBA players to prove the idea worked. It did. The other owners voted for the change. Scoring quickly jumped by 13.6 points per team. The Karma Gods rewarded Biasone when Syracuse beat Fort Wayne in seven games for the '55 title, the second lowest-rated sporting event of all-time behind Fox's "Celebrity Boxing 2." Coincidence? I say no. Scoring cracked 100 per game by 1957-58. One year later, Boston beat Minnesota by a record score of 173-139, with Bob Cousy finishing with a record 29 assists. And the NBA never looked back.
Of course, the Basketball Hall of Fame didn't induct Biasone until 2000, which would have been touching if poor Biasone hadn't been dead for eight years. Really, inventing the shot clock and saving professional basketball wasn't worthy of a Hall of Fame nod for 46 years? We should have created a 24-dollar bill and put Biasone's picture on it. We should have retired "24" on every NBA team. We did nothing. The man saved the NBA, and there's a good chance you didn't even know who he was.
Where Aging Doesn't Happen ...
Fifty-five years later, professional basketball is played by the greatest athletes in the world. They run like gazelles and jump like kangaroos. They are chiseled in ways that we cannot fathom. They are taller, faster, stronger and more coordinated than us. We have nothing in common with them. That's one of the reasons we like watching them. They are real-life superheroes.
Let guys like Dwight Howard and LeBron James mix it up a little. Basketball is supposed to be a physical game.In Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, with one second to play and his Cavaliers trailing by 1, a 6-foot-9, 275-pound local kid from Akron bullied toward the basket like a tight end. His goal was to jump as high as he could, extend his hands 2 feet over the 10-foot rim, then catch a lob from 50 feet away that had to be perfectly thrown. When his path was cut off, he recalibrated his mission almost as a navigation system reroutes a car, darted away from the basket toward the top of the key, caught a pass coming from his left, turned toward the rim, took a split second to center his body, bounced off the balls of his feet, extended in the air, then arched a 24-foot shot over the extended fingers of a 6-foot-10 opponent from Turkey. Even as he released the shot, he was falling backward, so his momentum carried him toward the other basket. Somehow, the shot rattled home. And that's when LeBron James turned around, sought out his teammates and joyously hopped into their arms.
This was one of the bigger moments in recent NBA history: The time when our latest hope for "The Next Jordan" actually did something MJ would have done. Like so many other die-hards, I spent the next 24 hours rehashing the moment through phone calls and e-mails and texts. This wasn't about hype, or blowing things out of proportion, or racing to put the proper context in place before everything else. This was just a beautiful moment, one of those nights that made us remember why we waste so much time following sports.
Two nights later, Cleveland and Orlando played an unspeakably awful game that featured a whopping 58 fouls. All the momentum from Game 2 was gone. Here was the new NBA in its new age of unadulterated impurity: Teams hoisting bad 3-pointers, referees trying to "manage" the game and failing, players going one-on-five, stoppages again and again and again, free throws and more free throws, more stoppages, more mismanaging by the refs ... by the time it was over, I wanted to commit a flagrant one on myself. The two teams combined to attempt 96 2-point field goals, 43 3-pointers and a staggering 86 free throws. In other words, there were nearly nine free throws for every 10 2-point field goal attempts. Egads. The next night, Los Angeles and Denver combined to play a similarly brutal game: 113 2-point attempts, 55 3-pointers, 84 free throws. Yuck.
You might argue this happens every playoffs: We bitch about bad calls or choppy games and nothing ever changes. But this spring feels different for two reasons. First, the NBA can't seem to replenish its officiating ranks. 1937, 1939, 1943, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1955 ... those are the actual birth years of 13 current referees. In professional sports, athletes slip from the ages of 34 to 39 unless they extend their stay with PEDs. In the NBA, in which officials are required to run or jog for 150 minutes and make split-second decisions on hundreds of plays, we're expected to believe that the aging process doesn't apply. And if you believe that, I have some Bernie Madoff stock tips for you.
Second, a league-wide objective to regulate physical play has inadvertently compromised a decent slice of competitive spirit. Come playoff time -- with teams kicking into a higher gear, with edginess from a long series inevitable, with desperation in the air -- the league seems more interested in constantly nipping things in the bud (even if there's nothing to nip) over letting these guys compete as human beings would.
I played hoops until I was 33 years old and my back gave out. The best thing about basketball -- really, the single best thing, what I miss over everything else combined -- is the interaction between players. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing pickup in college; to this day, I can rattle off an extended list of everyone I loved playing with. Basketball is about connections. You connect with teammates, reach an advanced form of ESP with them, start moving in rhythm, and then it's magic. The more you play with someone, the better you know them. Same goes for opponents. Play with someone enough and you learn every head fake, every stutter step, everything. I played with my buddy Bish so many times in high school that we just started swallowing up each other's favored moves. That's basketball. It's like chess crossed with ballet.
Because of that, you search for any edge you can get. Maybe you piss off someone with a foul that's a little too hard. Maybe you mutter under your breath, "Can't stop me." Maybe you make a 20-footer and preen a little too long afterward. Maybe you swing an elbow after a rebound simply because the little pest on the other team has an annoying habit of reaching in and invading your personal space. Basketball resembles real life in that way: You coexist for as long as you can, you try to get along, but sometimes, it's impossible.
Here's the crucial wrinkle: It's rarely personal. You're only trying to win. If someone makes you angry, you get over it. I played basketball for three decades and remember going after only one person, during an intramural game in college, when someone nailed me too hard in a must-foul situation and I responded with a hard push in the face. Ten seconds later, we were fine. That's basketball. Put 10 competitive guys on the same court, have them bang bodies for an hour or two, and stuff WILL happen. It's inevitable. You might have some yelling and pointing and staring and everything else. Big deal. That's just testosterone doing its thing.
That testosterone fueled the NBA in its heyday. My favorite game ever (and not just because Boston won) was Game 4 of the 1984 Finals, the ultimate example of stacked teams battling with an extra edge. I rewatched it last summer and couldn't get over how it would have been wrecked today. McHale gets tossed for the Rambis clothesline. Bird gets T'd for nudging Cooper out of bounds. Kareem gets tossed for nearly slicing off Bird's wispy mustache with an elbow. Maxwell gets T'd for walking across the lane and choking himself after Worthy's missed free throw. On the crucial play of OT, when Magic gets switched onto Bird and they fight for position down low -- with Bird finally draining a turnaround over Magic's mug -- the officials would have called Magic for a foul before Bird's shot happened. Six of the iconic moments of the game ... ruined. Could they have competed as hard with the current rules? No.
My single favorite old-school moment of the past two decades happened at the end of Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern finals, when Chicago's Jordan, Pippen and Grant famously blocked four straight Charles Smith shots to clinch the victory in New York. Were the blocks clean? I don't know. Did the Knicks complain after? No. Because you had to watch the whole game -- that play didn't just happen. All four quarters were played with that same cutthroat intensity. Unlike today, the officials didn't change their minds midway through the game on what contact was acceptable. They didn't try to manage the game. They let the players decide what happened and intervened when necessary.
That's basketball. At least, that's what basketball should be.
The General Motors syndrome
The 1993 playoffs were the last time players were allowed to compete like that. Things already were changing; we just didn't know it yet. Blame the Bad Boy Pistons and Pat Riley's Knicks: Once the sport became faster and more athletic in the late '80s, teams used violence and intimidation to even the odds for themselves. Blame ESPN, the Internet and the 24-hour sports cycle for enabling any negative incident to be hashed, rehashed and re-rehashed a million katrillion times. Blame the NBA's arrogance: not just its failure to acknowledge any officiating woes until the Donaghy scandal (and even then the league just shuffled a few Titanic deck chairs and called it a day), but its refusal to come up with a better infrastructure for evaluating and developing referees. And by "better," I mean "competent."
Once the game sped up after various (and sorely needed) rule changes before the 2004-05 season, the officials struggled to handle the increased swiftness. The NBA's solution was to blame players and not officials: by discouraging contact and preventing juices from flowing, as the theory went, the games would be easier to control. The Artest melee in November 2004 became a catalyst of sorts, even if it was the perfect storm of crazy players and crazy fans and couldn't possibly be replicated. We've been paying for it ever since. The NBA's ensuing overreaction would be like the airline industry reacting to Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger's Hudson River flight by refusing to allow any planes to take off with birds in the air.
The insinuation is pretty clear: The league believes its players cannot police themselves, that every movement and innate reaction during a contest played at the highest possible speed should somehow be controlled. Two great Game 4 examples from this week: Andrew Bynum's "flagrant" foul on Kenyon Martin (really, just one guy preventing a layup by slapping down on the ball with both hands), and Dwight Howard getting T'd up for reacting after Anderson Varejao fouled him from behind, wrapped him up and tried to prevent a shot, only Howard still made it falling backward, then turned and screamed in delight at Varejao. (This call was so bad the NBA rescinded the technical Wednesday.) You're not allowed to get excited after a great play? Really? You're not allowed to gain any kind of a mental edge over a guy you're trying to beat?
When in doubt, just put your head down and drive hard to the hole.
.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/090528&sportCat=nba
(A) A failed "American Idol" contestant
(B.) The little boy from "Who's the Boss?"
(C) A reputed mobster living in Jersey
(D) The guy who once saved the National Basketball Association
Danny Biasone did more good for basketball than you'll ever know.
The answer: D. He did it 55 years ago this summer. Our beloved NBA was floundering without effective rules to prevent stalling, intentional fouling and roughhouse play. Scoring had plummeted to an appalling 79.5 points per game. If you had a decent big guy, you planted him near the basket and tossed him lob passes, hoping he would get clubbed and sent to the line. If you were protecting a lead, your point guard dribbled around and waited to get fouled. If you were intentionally fouling someone, you popped him UFC-style to send a statement.
In Biasone's day, players fought like hockey thugs, fans frequently threw things on the court and nobody could figure out how to stop the mayhem. You can't overstate how excruciating the stalling and fouling tactics were. There was the time Fort Wayne famously beat the Minneapolis Lakers 19-18. There was the five-OT playoff game between Rochester and Indy in which the winner of each overtime tap held the ball for the rest of the period to attempt a winning shot, leading to a bizarre situation in which Rochester's home fans booed and booed and ultimately started leaving in droves, even with the game still going. The '53 playoffs averaged eighty free throws per game. The anti-electrifying '54 Finals featured scores of 79-68, 62-60, 81-67, 80-69, 84-73, 65-63 and 87-80. You get the idea.
When the Knicks were knocked out of the 1954 playoffs in the first round, author Leonard Koppett wrote that their last game "encompassed all the repulsive features of the grab-and-hold philosophy. It lasted three hours, and the final seconds of a one-point game were abandoned by the network. The arguments with the referees were interminable and degrading. What had been happening, as a matter of course, in dozens of games for the last couple of years, was shown to a nationwide audience in unadulterated impurity."
Unadulterated impurity ... a little different than "Where Amazing Happens." Enter Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals at the time. An Italian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island and made his money by owning a bowling alley -- no, really, a single bowling alley -- Biasone wore long, double-breasted coats, smoked filtered cigarettes and wore Borsalino hats. (Note: I don't know what Borsalino hats are, but they sound fantastic.) For three full years preceding the catastrophic 1954 playoffs, Biasone had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the other owners on a 24-second shot clock that would speed up games.
How did he arrive at 24? Biasone studied games he remembered enjoying and realized that, in each of those games, both teams took around 60 shots. Well, 60+60=120. He settled on 120 shots as the minimum combined total that would be acceptable from a "I'd rather kill myself than watch another NBA game like this" standpoint. And if you shoot every 24 seconds over the course of a 48-minute game, that comes out to .. wait for it ... 120 shots! In August 1954, Biasone staged an exhibition game using his clock with NBA players to prove the idea worked. It did. The other owners voted for the change. Scoring quickly jumped by 13.6 points per team. The Karma Gods rewarded Biasone when Syracuse beat Fort Wayne in seven games for the '55 title, the second lowest-rated sporting event of all-time behind Fox's "Celebrity Boxing 2." Coincidence? I say no. Scoring cracked 100 per game by 1957-58. One year later, Boston beat Minnesota by a record score of 173-139, with Bob Cousy finishing with a record 29 assists. And the NBA never looked back.
Of course, the Basketball Hall of Fame didn't induct Biasone until 2000, which would have been touching if poor Biasone hadn't been dead for eight years. Really, inventing the shot clock and saving professional basketball wasn't worthy of a Hall of Fame nod for 46 years? We should have created a 24-dollar bill and put Biasone's picture on it. We should have retired "24" on every NBA team. We did nothing. The man saved the NBA, and there's a good chance you didn't even know who he was.
Where Aging Doesn't Happen ...
Fifty-five years later, professional basketball is played by the greatest athletes in the world. They run like gazelles and jump like kangaroos. They are chiseled in ways that we cannot fathom. They are taller, faster, stronger and more coordinated than us. We have nothing in common with them. That's one of the reasons we like watching them. They are real-life superheroes.
Let guys like Dwight Howard and LeBron James mix it up a little. Basketball is supposed to be a physical game.In Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, with one second to play and his Cavaliers trailing by 1, a 6-foot-9, 275-pound local kid from Akron bullied toward the basket like a tight end. His goal was to jump as high as he could, extend his hands 2 feet over the 10-foot rim, then catch a lob from 50 feet away that had to be perfectly thrown. When his path was cut off, he recalibrated his mission almost as a navigation system reroutes a car, darted away from the basket toward the top of the key, caught a pass coming from his left, turned toward the rim, took a split second to center his body, bounced off the balls of his feet, extended in the air, then arched a 24-foot shot over the extended fingers of a 6-foot-10 opponent from Turkey. Even as he released the shot, he was falling backward, so his momentum carried him toward the other basket. Somehow, the shot rattled home. And that's when LeBron James turned around, sought out his teammates and joyously hopped into their arms.
This was one of the bigger moments in recent NBA history: The time when our latest hope for "The Next Jordan" actually did something MJ would have done. Like so many other die-hards, I spent the next 24 hours rehashing the moment through phone calls and e-mails and texts. This wasn't about hype, or blowing things out of proportion, or racing to put the proper context in place before everything else. This was just a beautiful moment, one of those nights that made us remember why we waste so much time following sports.
Two nights later, Cleveland and Orlando played an unspeakably awful game that featured a whopping 58 fouls. All the momentum from Game 2 was gone. Here was the new NBA in its new age of unadulterated impurity: Teams hoisting bad 3-pointers, referees trying to "manage" the game and failing, players going one-on-five, stoppages again and again and again, free throws and more free throws, more stoppages, more mismanaging by the refs ... by the time it was over, I wanted to commit a flagrant one on myself. The two teams combined to attempt 96 2-point field goals, 43 3-pointers and a staggering 86 free throws. In other words, there were nearly nine free throws for every 10 2-point field goal attempts. Egads. The next night, Los Angeles and Denver combined to play a similarly brutal game: 113 2-point attempts, 55 3-pointers, 84 free throws. Yuck.
You might argue this happens every playoffs: We bitch about bad calls or choppy games and nothing ever changes. But this spring feels different for two reasons. First, the NBA can't seem to replenish its officiating ranks. 1937, 1939, 1943, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1955 ... those are the actual birth years of 13 current referees. In professional sports, athletes slip from the ages of 34 to 39 unless they extend their stay with PEDs. In the NBA, in which officials are required to run or jog for 150 minutes and make split-second decisions on hundreds of plays, we're expected to believe that the aging process doesn't apply. And if you believe that, I have some Bernie Madoff stock tips for you.
Second, a league-wide objective to regulate physical play has inadvertently compromised a decent slice of competitive spirit. Come playoff time -- with teams kicking into a higher gear, with edginess from a long series inevitable, with desperation in the air -- the league seems more interested in constantly nipping things in the bud (even if there's nothing to nip) over letting these guys compete as human beings would.
I played hoops until I was 33 years old and my back gave out. The best thing about basketball -- really, the single best thing, what I miss over everything else combined -- is the interaction between players. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing pickup in college; to this day, I can rattle off an extended list of everyone I loved playing with. Basketball is about connections. You connect with teammates, reach an advanced form of ESP with them, start moving in rhythm, and then it's magic. The more you play with someone, the better you know them. Same goes for opponents. Play with someone enough and you learn every head fake, every stutter step, everything. I played with my buddy Bish so many times in high school that we just started swallowing up each other's favored moves. That's basketball. It's like chess crossed with ballet.
Because of that, you search for any edge you can get. Maybe you piss off someone with a foul that's a little too hard. Maybe you mutter under your breath, "Can't stop me." Maybe you make a 20-footer and preen a little too long afterward. Maybe you swing an elbow after a rebound simply because the little pest on the other team has an annoying habit of reaching in and invading your personal space. Basketball resembles real life in that way: You coexist for as long as you can, you try to get along, but sometimes, it's impossible.
Here's the crucial wrinkle: It's rarely personal. You're only trying to win. If someone makes you angry, you get over it. I played basketball for three decades and remember going after only one person, during an intramural game in college, when someone nailed me too hard in a must-foul situation and I responded with a hard push in the face. Ten seconds later, we were fine. That's basketball. Put 10 competitive guys on the same court, have them bang bodies for an hour or two, and stuff WILL happen. It's inevitable. You might have some yelling and pointing and staring and everything else. Big deal. That's just testosterone doing its thing.
That testosterone fueled the NBA in its heyday. My favorite game ever (and not just because Boston won) was Game 4 of the 1984 Finals, the ultimate example of stacked teams battling with an extra edge. I rewatched it last summer and couldn't get over how it would have been wrecked today. McHale gets tossed for the Rambis clothesline. Bird gets T'd for nudging Cooper out of bounds. Kareem gets tossed for nearly slicing off Bird's wispy mustache with an elbow. Maxwell gets T'd for walking across the lane and choking himself after Worthy's missed free throw. On the crucial play of OT, when Magic gets switched onto Bird and they fight for position down low -- with Bird finally draining a turnaround over Magic's mug -- the officials would have called Magic for a foul before Bird's shot happened. Six of the iconic moments of the game ... ruined. Could they have competed as hard with the current rules? No.
My single favorite old-school moment of the past two decades happened at the end of Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern finals, when Chicago's Jordan, Pippen and Grant famously blocked four straight Charles Smith shots to clinch the victory in New York. Were the blocks clean? I don't know. Did the Knicks complain after? No. Because you had to watch the whole game -- that play didn't just happen. All four quarters were played with that same cutthroat intensity. Unlike today, the officials didn't change their minds midway through the game on what contact was acceptable. They didn't try to manage the game. They let the players decide what happened and intervened when necessary.
That's basketball. At least, that's what basketball should be.
The General Motors syndrome
The 1993 playoffs were the last time players were allowed to compete like that. Things already were changing; we just didn't know it yet. Blame the Bad Boy Pistons and Pat Riley's Knicks: Once the sport became faster and more athletic in the late '80s, teams used violence and intimidation to even the odds for themselves. Blame ESPN, the Internet and the 24-hour sports cycle for enabling any negative incident to be hashed, rehashed and re-rehashed a million katrillion times. Blame the NBA's arrogance: not just its failure to acknowledge any officiating woes until the Donaghy scandal (and even then the league just shuffled a few Titanic deck chairs and called it a day), but its refusal to come up with a better infrastructure for evaluating and developing referees. And by "better," I mean "competent."
Once the game sped up after various (and sorely needed) rule changes before the 2004-05 season, the officials struggled to handle the increased swiftness. The NBA's solution was to blame players and not officials: by discouraging contact and preventing juices from flowing, as the theory went, the games would be easier to control. The Artest melee in November 2004 became a catalyst of sorts, even if it was the perfect storm of crazy players and crazy fans and couldn't possibly be replicated. We've been paying for it ever since. The NBA's ensuing overreaction would be like the airline industry reacting to Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger's Hudson River flight by refusing to allow any planes to take off with birds in the air.
The insinuation is pretty clear: The league believes its players cannot police themselves, that every movement and innate reaction during a contest played at the highest possible speed should somehow be controlled. Two great Game 4 examples from this week: Andrew Bynum's "flagrant" foul on Kenyon Martin (really, just one guy preventing a layup by slapping down on the ball with both hands), and Dwight Howard getting T'd up for reacting after Anderson Varejao fouled him from behind, wrapped him up and tried to prevent a shot, only Howard still made it falling backward, then turned and screamed in delight at Varejao. (This call was so bad the NBA rescinded the technical Wednesday.) You're not allowed to get excited after a great play? Really? You're not allowed to gain any kind of a mental edge over a guy you're trying to beat?
When in doubt, just put your head down and drive hard to the hole.
.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/090528&sportCat=nba