Mocking Charles Barkley for his insistence that Kobe Bryant’s failure to take more than 3 shots during the 2nd half of Saturday’s Game 7 between the Lakers and Suns was “selfish” (“TNTexecs are charmed, I’m sure, that Charles Barkley has yet to utter a significant or grammatically correct statement since joining the nitwork.”), the New York Post’s Peter Vescey has no problem with spreading the blame around.
Why did Kobe clam up in the second half down 15? We understand Barkley is too lame to figure it out on his own. But he didn’t even get it after Phil Jackson explained the Lakers tried to exploit Steve Nash’s gimpy right ankle by increasing Smush Parker’s offensive freedom.
“I couldn’t have stayed out there the whole second half,” Nash confessed at the podium. “I was having trouble just limping around.” With any luck, Nash didn’t expend too much energy yesterday when the NBA presented him with a second straight MVP award.
Jackson said the second-half plan was to go back inside to Odom and Kwame Brown in hopes of energizing the Lakers and reestablishing their confidence.
Neither strategy worked. Smush went poof, again, under the acute atmospheric conditions, and Phoenix’s pressure chamber had long since decomposed Odom and Brown. The more their carcasses decayed, the more Suns congregated around Kobe.
It’s unsophisticated – asinine, actually – to think Kobe could stage a 15-point comeback all by his lonesome.
Presumably, a future Vescey column will take Dee Brown to task, after the ESPN commentator declared that Bryant had “given up” on Saturday.
In addition to predicting the outcome of every game of the forthcoming Nets/Heat series (“if any of this is inaccurate in any way, we™ll do what comes naturally: We™ll blame the refs.”), the Newark Star Ledger’s Dave D’Allesandro caught up with Miami’s Pat Riley at this morning’s shootaround :
Riles, who with the possible exception of Sasha Danilovic and Martin Muursepp has never exactly been a big fan of Euros, is smitten by one:
œA lot of Europeans, you know, I don™t know that much about them, he said, as he began his analysis of Nenad Krstic (above). œI was familiar with him when they drafted him, only from numbers and seeing him on film. But I think like Nocioni and some of these other guys, I think the year that (Krstic) stayed away was good for him. He™s really developed. He™s on his way. If he™s much better, he™s going to be one of the better players in this league. He can really shoot. He™s gotten quicker. He™s more comfortable. He™s got a post-up game inside. He™s got good mobility on defense and pick and rolls and stuff. So they did a great job of drafting him. He™s developed, done a good job.
Coach, if you don™t know, is probably the most geographically-challenged fellow since Columbus “ not only does he still refer to Nets beat people as œYou #$&@&* New York guys, he has yet to learn that Nocioni is American, of the Southern variety.
The Association’s Craig Kwasniewski, unlike D’Allesandro, is content to cut to the chase, picking the Heat in 5 :
You will hear a lot how New Jersey’s quickness and athleticism will cause problems with the older and slower Heat. You will hear how Nenad Krstic will draw Shaq out on the perimeter and render the Diesel ineffective on defense. You will hear a ton of “experts” take New Jersey as their sleeper.
So what’s the difference between this year’s New Jersey team and last season’s one that got swept by the Heat in the first round? So suddenly Nenad Krstic is a difference maker? Shaq has made a career killing Euro-trash beard-wearing centers (Vlade Divac anyone?). So how is New Jersey going to stop Shaq? I know the ’06 Shaq is not the three-peat Lakers Shaq, but he’s also not the 01-02 Hakeem Olajuwon who was hobbling around with Toronto. He can still bring his A game 3 or 4 times a series.
Kobe did quite! In the 3rd quarter he didn’t drive to draw defenders and pass. he stood at the point and swung the ball then started going back down the court. To say the lakers wanted to get the big men involved is obserd. The big men alone can bring them back from down 15. If the defence is so focused on kobe he should have at least tried to drible and darw the defence to comit to him. He was picking his drible up two steps behind the 3 pt line and lookin to just swing the ball. In all honesty it look like they were playing 4 on 5 and you could see the rest of the team lost their emotion when their star stood around. The effect that has on a team can change the game. I would have to say yes Kobe could have brought them back, because the emotion he can bring to a team can effect the rest of the team. Might even got them to play alittle deffence.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly w/CC. When Kobe was guilty of extra-marital activity he paid his wife a couple of hundred k’s . How much did he pay Vecsey for his compliance in this latest affair? B/c he cheated the L.A. fans just as surely as he did his wife. For Vescey to say that it is a gameplan that a team’s superstar not shoot at all for an entire 2nd half of a 7th-game playoff is beyond ridiculous. If Vince Carter had done that in Toronto when Chas. Oakley was there, Oak AND the media would have flambee’d him alive…just because you are looking for a strategy doesn’t mean that you are still not the most important person on the floor. If you draw attention to yourself, and establish the threat of attack, THEN you set up your wide-open teammates, and disrupt the D. Not stand out on the perimeter and make perimeter passes which make you a non-factor. Kobe knows that better than anyone, which means that Charles’ explanation is a lot more plausible than Vescey’s, and makes me suspect his motives for writing it in the first place. Finally, Vescey’s ugly comments about Chas’ diction (or lack thereof), taken from the perspective that Chuck is a southern black man, sounded like they were border-line racist… are we condemning Chas. for speaking like a southern black man? Magic is similarly challenged regarding the “queen’s English” but he had his own talk show. Is there a double-standard here, or what was Vescey’s point, anyway? Chas. is a ballplayer, not a journalist. He is able to rock in Vescey’s world… can Vescey rock in Chas.’ ? Nuff said…
I’m not sure how there’s a double standard. Surely Vescey didn’t commission Magic’s chat show — a program so short lived it made “Thicke Of The Night” look like “Gunsmoke” by comparison.
Actually, Barkley is neither a ballplayer (anymore) nor a journalist. He’s a studio analyst / talking head, and yeah, Vescey’s been there and done that.
If you think Vescey’s criticism of Barkley is borderline racist, you’re entitled to your opinion. Me, I felt very defensive on behalf of bald white men with suspicious facial hair when he brutally slagged off Tom Tolbert.
hmmm… always wondered what happened to Tommy Boy… I don’t know, sometimes Barkley does act like a clown, but on the other hand, he absolutely takes a stand that few others have the gumption to do, and his opinion is valued tremendously within the players… I’m not at all sure the same could be said for Vescey… Anyway, he’s far better to me than Bill Walton and the other fool that colors the games with him… who decided that punch and judy show passed for insight?? As far as Vescey and Chas., if Vescey’s thoughts on Kobe are way off base, as I think they are, then Chas.’ is much more plausible, and if correct then he was the only commentator to have the gumption to say directly, on air, what all of Kobe’s teammates and half of L.A. (the non-Clipper half) must have been thinking. Got to give that some credit… Kobe is arguably one of the three best in the game, to call him out you got to have some street cred, in the league…
for whatever it is worth, I don’t agree with Vescey in this instance…and just from watching the game, it was hard to fathom how Kobe’s role could be so minimal in the second half, even when he was double teamed. I mean, if it’s crazy to think the guy who dropped 63 points on Dallas (I’m not gonna mention the 81 point game due to the opposition) would erase a 15 point deficit against the Suns, then it is SUPER CRAZY to entrust Smush Parker with the same task.
But to repeat what I said in the original post. Barkley isn’t the only commentator to have called Kobe out — Dee Brown said he flat out quit. Perhaps Brown doesn’t have nearly as much street cred, but these are all just opinions. Vescey could lose to Mary Lou Retton in a game of H-O-R-S-E and he’d still have the requisite knowledge and insight to pass judgement.
I mean, prior history as a ballplayer in no way makes anyone a cogent commentator. You clearly don’t have a high opinion of Bill Walton, a sentiment shared by most of the non-deaf community. Yet we’re talking about a guy who has two NBA Championship rings (compared to Chuck’s ZERO) and might’ve been the greatest college basketball player of all time. If that’s not street cred, I don’t know what is. While a credible resume as a player might inform his analysis, it doesn’t make him any more listenable.