Jeff Eisenberg of The Press Enterprise: “If the Lakers discover the Denver coaching staff shouting out their sets before they run them tonight, they can blame an otherwise innocuous roster move made the morning of their season opener. That was the day the Lakers trimmed their roster to 14 by cutting guard Coby Karl. The son of Denver coach George Karl has since fed his father every bit of inside intelligence he garnered during his 15-month stint with the Lakers, in hopes of giving the Nuggets a leg-up in the Western Conference finals. Among the highlights of the younger Karl’s report: tips on containing Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom, a recap of how the Lakers coaches advised the team to defend Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith, and an amusing look inside Phil Jackson’s film room before last year’s first-round series against Denver. ‘He told me they had a tape of us that had cartoons spliced in when we would run and get a dunk,’ George Karl said. ‘They would have a cartoon Mickey Mouse going ‘Ouch’ or getting hit over the head with a hammer just to emphasize ‘we can’t let them do this.’”
Chris Dempsey of The Denver Post: “Nuggets coach George Karl wants to replicate as much of his team’s effort on Bryant in that February win as he can. He’s just not sure anything that happened during the regular season is applicable now. ‘All the games had different personalities, so I don’t know how much we can take from them,’ Karl said. ‘We’ve looked at all the video, and game three was personality-wise how we’re going to have to play him, which is physical and aggressive, try to think about defense first and not try to outscore him. Even though it was an ugly game, it was still a spirited game for us.’ Bryant is crafty. He’s adept at surveying the situation, picking his spots and hurting the opposition anyway. The Nuggets also will try their fair share of double-teams to get the ball out of Bryant’s hands. ‘We got big guys that are going to cover him, we got little guys that are going to cover him,’ Karl said. ‘If we play big on him, they play him out front. When we play little on him, they put him underneath the basket. Pretty simple stuff.’”
Mary Schmitt Boyer of The Plain Dealer: “In their most recent matchup April 3, the Magic crushed the Cavs, 116-87. It was Cleveland’s worst loss of the season and it gave Orlando the season series, 2-1. ‘We’ve got to get better from that,’ LeBron James said, referring to the 29-point loss. ‘But the regular season doesn’t matter. You take things from that game, but you lose by one or you lose by 40, it’s the same loss. It counts as one loss.’ It’s not as if the Cavs have been stewing over that loss, plotting for revenge. But there clearly are issues they’ll need to address as they prepare to open the Eastern Conference finals against Dwight Howard and the Magic on Wednesday night at The Q. ‘We got our behinds kicked in transition,’ Cavs coach Mike Brown said. ‘That’s something, even with Atlanta, we tried to make a conscious effort to not get hurt in transition. Hopefully we’ll do a better job with our transition defense this time around. Then their pick-and-roll game is tough for us to handle. It’s tough for anybody to handle. Defensively, they do a nice job also, especially with Dwight hanging around the paint. So we’re going to have to make sure we attack them and try to get to the free-throw line.’”
The Associated Press: “Can they play physical? Will they shoot such a high percentage when the pressure gets greater? Will Dwight Howard be the leader theyneed him to be? Will coach Stan Van Gundy crumble in the big moment? Even the Magic aren’t really sure how far they can go. ‘We want to see,’ Magic forward Hedo Turkoglu said after the team’s 101-82 win over Boston on Sunday night. ‘We have a chance. We never lose confidence of what we can do — not myself, not anybody.’ Van Gundy and his Magic players were mighty confident about a possible meeting with the Cavs after a blowout win against James and Co. in April, repeatedly saying how much they love the matchup. ‘If we ever got in a series with Cleveland, we’d have great confidence going in,’ Van Gundy said then, grinning like a coach who had just beat the Cavaliers 116-87. Be careful what you wish for. While the Magic have won eight of the last 11 meetings against Cleveland, all that means nothing when the ball is tossed and the flashbulbs pop at the start of Game 1.”
Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle: “The Rockets feel better about the nucleus of their team than they would have if the season ended with another first-round flameout. But after the Lakers sent them to the offseason with a Game 7 rout, Rockets general manager Daryl Morey said he would not be blinded by the encouraging, sometimes even thrilling, signs along the way. ‘You have to take a really hard assessment of where you’re at and make your decisions based on that,’ Morey said. ‘I have to sit down with Rick (Adelman), get his thoughts on all the players, because he is obviously closer to them during the season. His feedback will weigh heavily. We have a lot of great pieces to build on. We got a lot of great experience. We showed a lot of toughness and fight that’s going to carry over. There are a lot of great things about this core, and we feel great about it. But I do think you can’t have emotion in this job. You have to assess how close we are.’”
Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald: “Management now has to find other means, with frontline help a priority. That will be a challenge, considering that the salary cap is expected to drop from $72 million to about $69 million for next season. It makes preserving that core a little more difficult. But the ‘Aging Three’ is going to need more support. The development of Glen Davis, Rajon Rondo and Kendrick Perkins was a bonus this season, but it won’t be enough. ‘We fell into a bad mode,’ Allen said. ‘We won 62 games during the regular season, and you can ask anyone in the locker room. It felt like we won maybe 52. We were four games off the pace from last year and mentally I think sometimes we didn’t think we were as good, so we fought even harder. That’s what it taught me. When you’re good you’re not that far from being bad, but when you think you’re bad you’re not that far from being that good.”
Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News: “Vandeweghe is a realist, not a contrarian. He understands the Nuggets will have to play nearly perfect to have a shot at upsetting the Lakers. He is a sentimentalist, too, so Vandeweghe makes no attempt to hide his Nuggets bias. Heck, he picked the colors the Nuggets now wear. A big chunk of his basketball heart and soul is still colored powder blue and gold. A big chunk of the Nuggets’ player rotation in the playoffs still has Vandeweghe’s stamp, too. He drafted Carmelo Anthony and Nenê and traded for Kenyon Martin. He gave the undrafted Chris Andersen his start in the league. Mark Warkentien, who replaced Vandeweghe as Nuggets GM, earned this season’s Executive of the Year for engineering the Allen Iverson-for-Chauncey Billups trade. But the frontline consists entirely of players Vandeweghe brought to Denver. Make no mistake: If the Nuggets have a chance to beat the Lakers, it is because they have an athletic, physical frontline capable of negating the advantage the Lakers enjoyed in the first two rounds.”
Buck Harvey of the San Antonio Express News: “Turkoglu was likeable, with a good sense of humor, and he came with a noticeable skill. He could speak Serbian with Gregg Popovich. But he was also a reclamation project. He was fragile, without competitive instincts, and Popovich reacted to that. He didn’t bark at him — in any language — because he didn’t think Turkoglu needed the stress. Still, when Turkoglu started off in a slump, Popovich didn’t pull back. ‘He is the key,’ Popovich said in November of 2003. ‘He’s a necessity. We’re not going to get it done without him.’ Popovich tried to jump-start Turkoglu, starting him ahead of Manu Ginobili, and for a time the spark caught. Turkoglu went on a shooting streak in the middle of the season. He relapsed in the playoffs. Turkoglu went cold in the Derek Fisher 0.4 loss, and his final game as a Spur left a lasting image. Starting against the Lakers as the so-called shooting guard, Turkoglu didn’t score a point. When the Magic offered Turkoglu a six-year, $37 million contract, the Spurs never considered matching. They had to pay Ginobili and Bruce Bowen that summer, and they wondered if Turkoglu would ever have fourth-quarter toughness.”
Ross Siler of The Salt Lake Tribune: “Should Boozer, Mehmet Okur and Kyle Korver not opt out of their contracts, the Jazz would have more than $71 million committed to only nine players for next season and likely face being luxury-tax payers. But Miller said the Jazz would be willing to pay the tax if it meant retaining Millsap. He added that the Jazz would welcome back Okur and said Korver ‘embodies the traits and the culture that we try to put forward as an organization.’ Miller was particularly no-nonsense in describing the Jazz as lacking toughness. The Jazz dropped seven of their last nine games of the regular season to finish as the Western Conference’s No. 8 playoff seed and draw the Lakers in the first round. ‘The thing that I’m most concerned about is our toughness,’ Miller said. ‘I think we’ve got very talented players, we’ve got very capable players, we’ve got respected players, we’ve got players who know how to win, but I think that there were elements of our team that left a bit to be desired.’”
Don Seeholzer of the Pioneer Press: “Penn didn’t want to discuss the particulars of his negotiations with the Wolves but said he made the decision to stay in Portland late Sunday night. Penn’s withdrawal leaves former Indiana Pacers general manager David Kahn as one of three known remaining candidates, along with the internal duo of assistant general manager Fred Hoiberg and GM Jim Stack. So where do the Wolves go from here? Owner Glen Taylor hasn’t returned phone calls for weeks, but he can’t be happy about the prospect of having to reopen a search he had hoped to wrap up within two weeks after the season. In addition to Penn, San Antonio Spurs assistant general manager Dennis Lindsey and former Miami Heat general manager Randy Pfund have withdrawn as candidates, and ESPN.com reported Friday that Taylor has mandated whoever gets the job allow Kevin McHale to decide whether he wants to return as coach. That is believed to have been a stumbling block with Lindsey and might have factored into Penn’s decision, as well. Further complicating matters, ESPN.com reported that McHale is looking for at least a two-year contract, while Taylor wants to commit for just one year and then re-evaluate.”
Marc Berman of the New York Post: “This is the last day the Knicks can dream about the lottery’s two biggest prizes: Oklahoma power forward Blake Griffin and Spanish point guard Ricky Rubio. By 9 o’clock tonight, the NBA lottery will be done, and there’s a 94 percent chance the Knicks won’t get one of the first two picks and those fantasies become moot. Griffin is the consensus No. 1 pick who swept the nation by powering the Sooners to the NCAA Final Four. But Rubio is the most tantalizing prize tonight for Mike D’Antoni’s speedball offense — an 18-year-old playmaking phenom. ‘All you do is put the DVD in from the gold-medal game — Spain vs. USA, we had Jason Kidd, Chris Paul and Deron Williams,’ said a league executive who was in Beijing. ‘[Rubio] had no fear. Jose Calderon gets hurt and he held his own and did very well. One thing he can do is he can guard. He was making steals against our guys. He anticipates well, he’s better in the open court and a great passer. The only thing suspect is his shot. Everyone gets better shooting in the NBA because all you do is shoot every day. He sees the floor and reads plays.’”
Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial Appeal: “Some NBA franchises are considered lottery teams no matter what because of their infamous futility. Others are deemed perennial losers because the team’s playoff status seems like a fleeting moment in league history. If you’re a Los Angeles Clippers fan, then you root for the aforementioned: a team that’s made Secaucus, N.J., an offseason vacation home. Today, the Clippers will make their 20th lottery selection in the 25 years the system has been in place. The Grizzlies own the latter sentiment. They’ve been a member of the lottery club in all but three seasons of their eight-year Memphis existence. A segment of the Grizzlies’ faithful and national onlookers have relegated the club’s three-year postseason run to short-term memory. And the pessimists have a point. All that matters today is that the Griz are in the lottery for a Memphis franchise third consecutive season. So how does a franchise dig itself out of such despair? The simple answer is drafting well.”
Sam Amico of Pro Basketball News: “Is the lottery pre-arranged? Absolutely not. It just seems that way. Actually, I’d be in favor of rigging the thing, provided the team with the worst record got the No. 1 pick. That’s how it works in other sports and that’s how it should be. My theory is if a team wants to lose on purpose, let it. Honestly, could the Clippers have been any worse even if they had tried? I doubt it. You can’t get beat by Sacramento in three out of four games (as the Clippers did) and convince me that you’re giving maximum effort. So what difference does it make? Basically, the bottom line is the league sets itself up for doubt by using the lottery system. I know, I know. There are a bunch of people in a private room watching the ping-pong balls rattle around and pop out long before the results are announced on television. But where there’s a will, conspiracy theorists will find a way.”
Dave D’Alessandro of The Star-Ledger: “It was exactly 30 years and one month ago that Rod Thorn sat in his office one afternoon at the old Chicago Stadium in Chicago, where he had just completed his first season running the Bulls, and croaked ‘Heads’ into a phone line connected to Larry O’Brien’s office on Fifth Avenue. ‘Tails it is,’ the commissioner announced. Then there was a short whoop on the line, probably coming from whomever was representing the Los Angeles Lakers in O’Brien’s office. That was how Thorn found out he wasn’t getting the first pick in the 1979 NBA Draft, which turned out to be Magic Johnson. Thorn and the Bulls got — hold your applause, please — the immortal David Greenwood, the forward from UCLA. Still think there’s no need for a draft lottery in the NBA? Would anybody really want to go back to the days of flipping a coin to determine which team would win five NBA titles in the next decade? ‘I personally like the lottery,’ Thorn, the Nets’ president, said Monday, as he prepared for Tuesday night’s annual event in Secaucus. ‘A lot of my friends, like Jerry West, hate it. But I think it’s exciting. It gives everyone some kind of chance at the first pick, and if you have the worst record, you have a one-in-four chance of winning the lottery.”
