John Schuhmann of NBA.com: “If you know Stan Van Gundy, you know that he’s not much of a storyteller. The guy generally sticks to getting his team prepared for the next game. But today, his daughter’s swim coach gave him a story about Greg LeMond in the 1989 Tour de France. ‘He had come from behind and then taken the lead and then lost it on one of the late stages, and people started to write him off,’ Van Gundy retold it. ‘And at the end of the stage he looked beaten, and he and his wife were talking when they left. They asked his wife what he had said, and he said, ‘It’ll just make the story all that much better when I come back and win it.’ Van Gundy liked the story enough to alter his own style and pass it on to his team. Remember, it was just five years ago that the Boston Red Sox overcame more than 100 years of baseball history to come back from 3-0 and beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League championship series.”
Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel: “If and when L.A. closes out the Magic to win the NBA championship, it will be portrayed nationally as the grand restoration of the storied Lakers, the coronation of Kobe Bryant as one of the greatest champions the game has ever known and the crowning of Phil Jackson as the most decorated coach in NBA history. Nobody will argue with that glowing national assessment, but locally it will be a much more haunting, harassing conclusion. It will not go down as the 15th NBA title the Lakers will have won; it will go down as the championship — that elusive first championship — the Magic will have lost. Even worse, they will have lost it by failing at the most basic of all basketball tenets: Hit your free throws, make your layups, coach with consistency and patience. The Lakers now hold a 3-1 series lead — an advantage that has never been lost in Finals history. Call me a provincialist if you must, but the Magic could easily have a 3-1 lead if Dwight Howard made a free throw at the end of Game 4 and Courtney Lee hit an alley-oop layup at the end of Game 2.”
Tim Povtak of FanHouse: “Magic journeyman Anthony Johnson has been in the NBA 12 years, a former second-round pick from the obscure College of Charleston. He has scratched and clawed every step of the way, bouncing through 10 different teams with stops in the Development League and free agent summer camps in between. He has had 10-day contracts and minimum wage contracts, never far from being outside looking in. He has been traded more than once for a cup of coffee and future consideration. Nothing has come easy. It’s why he thought this NBA Finals was going to be the highlight, the crowning moment of his career, coming on the heels of his most consistent, most satisfying season. Instead, it was turned into the biggest disappointment of his life. ‘This is the toughest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Johnson said Saturday afternoon. ‘I’ve dealt with a lot of stuff through the years, but to help my team get to the Finals, the biggest stage in basketball, and then get told you’re not going to play, that has been very, very difficult.’”
Ramona Shelburne of the Los Angeles Daily News: “No other Laker bore as much criticism after last season’s meltdown against the Celtics as the 7-foot Spaniard. ‘When you lose, they blame it on something,’ Odom said. ‘If we would’ve won, they’d be saying he’s the best finesse player ever. But we lost. So you blame it on something.’ Privately though, the criticism bothered Gasol deeply. He’s a proud man, from a proud country that celebrates its bullfighters alongside its soccer stars. In the offseason, he did as much to prepare himself as he could. Building muscle, getting into the best condition of his career, using the criticism as motivation. Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who’d spent his first few months as Gasol’s coach last season admiring the Spaniard’s talent and figuring out how best to utilize it within the team’s system, felt comfortable enough with him to try and push him and chide him to be even better. Publicly, Jackson rarely took shots at Gasol; but in practice, he rarely missed an opportunity to get in a subtle dig. And Gasol, who speaks English better than most of the sportswriters who cover the team, always heard him.”
Jeff Eisenberg of The Press-Enterprise: “Instead of greeting reporters on a conference call the morning after Derek Fisher’s larger-than-life threes propelled the Lakers to the brink of a 15th title, Jackson launched into an opening statement that felt more like a public service announcement minus the catchy jingle. Said Jackson: ‘I just wanted to inform our listeners and participants that even having won that game, which is obviously a big boost for us in advancing toward winning a championship, we recognize that we still have a big battle to win before we can claim anything more.’ Jackson’s stay-focused mantra is the same one the Lakers have been preaching since the giddy aftermath of Thursday’s emotional overtime victory over the Orlando Magic. Fisher immediately reminded his teammates of the Game 5 beating Indiana gave the Lakers after they took a 3-1 lead in the 2000 Finals, while the coaching staff addressed the importance of matching Orlando’s desperation in a team meeting Friday morning.”
Dave McMenamin of NBA.com: “Odom turns 30 in November and already has logged 10 NBA seasons on those long legs of his. Ariza is in his fifth year in the league and turns 24 at the end of the month. ‘There’s no way the Lakers don’t sign Ariza,’ said one Western Conference executive. ‘Youth, defense, improved shooting … his game is still ahead of him. Lamar is what he is.’ What Lamar is, is overpaid when you compare his $11.4 million salary this past season to Ariza $2.9 million. The Lakers already have $74 million in salary committed next season, with a penalty looming with the luxury tax speculated to be in the $70 million range. Even to re-sign Odom and Ariza for the same amount of money both players are making this season would put the team way over the luxury tax threshold. Both players have stated their intentions to stay in L.A. Odom said it would take an ‘offer he can’t refuse’ to leave the Purple and Gold. Ariza, who played high school ball at Westchester right outside of Tinseltown, said ‘we have an opportunity to be a really good team for a long time … To be able to stay in L.A. would be a good thing. I would love it.’”
Jerry Zgoda of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “He has designated the next 16 months as a transformative time for the franchise and has chosen that time frame because of what he calls its five ‘significant bubbles of activity’: The 2009 and 2010 drafts, when the Wolves could have a combined five first-round draft picks, the free-agency periods those two summers and the trading deadline next February, when they conceivably could have more than $26 million in expiring contracts belonging to Mike Miller, Brian Cardinal, Ryan Gomes, Mark Madsen, Craig Smith and Bobby Brown. ‘It’s a 16-month plan to add pieces to this team and make it a better team,’ Kahn said. ‘That doesn’t mean at the end of 16 months we’re going to be a championship team. In fact, I highly doubt it because some of these pieces will be young by nature, through the draft. But I believe we can change the team fundamentally here in the next 16 months.’”
Steve Luhm of The Salt Lake Tribune: “If the Jazz end up keeping their first-round pick and taking a player for next season, they could certainly do worse than Hansbrough. He is a 6-foot-9 forward. I have seen his weight listed between 235 and 250 on various biographies on the internet. Hansbrough played 142 games during his college career at North Carolina, so he is more experienced than most players in the draft. As a senior, he averaged 20.7 points and 8.1 rebounds for the Tar Heels, who breezed to the national championship. So he is used to winning, too. One thing that gets overlooked about Hansbrough, I think, is his outside shooting ability. He made 39 percent of his three-pointers last season, meaning he’s got range on a jump shot, which is important for a power forward in the Jazz’s system.”
The AP: “Jeremy Tyler’s jump from high school to an overseas professional basketball league is progressing to the point that his agent is negotiating with a team in Haifa, Israel. The 6-foot-11, 260-pound Tyler announced in late April that he was skipping his senior season at San Diego High to play overseas. He had hoped to be able to make a decision by Friday, his 18th birthday. ‘We’re pretty close,’ said Sonny Vaccaro, the former shoe company executive who is advising Tyler and his family. ‘There’s no hurry. They don’t start playing until next December. He’s in good shape. We know we have something.’ Tyler would become the first American-born player to leave high school early to play professionally overseas. When he’s eligible for the NBA draft in 2011, some see him as a potential No. 1 pick overall.”
Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star: “Interest rates were anywhere from 18 to 15 per cent during this period of starting a new business, and so after running the business for almost a year, the opportunity came for me to coach (with the CBA’s Albany Patroons),’ said Jackson. ‘It was a part-time, four-and-a-half, five-month operation, and it was something that could help with our business problems, and my partner was perfectly capable of running it by himself. This was an opportunity for me. But I went there kind of on a gamut to see what it was like and ended up winning a championship in my first full year.’ Still, Jackson was hardly on easy street after his CBA title. He spoke of having kids heading to college. He remembered his coach’s salary was a not-quite-providing $25,000 (all figures U.S.). And he remembered taking the advice of a member of the media. ‘One of our sports announcers at a game … said to me, ‘If you’re having success and, it’s your bliss, make sure you do it, and successes will follow you,’‘ said Jackson. ‘Certainly that’s what’s happened, and I’ve been fortunate to have the right opportunities follow behind it.’”
Jonathan Abrams of The New York Post: “With his weight supported by a cane and wearing a steady smile, Rich DeVos, the Orlando Magic’s owner, is 83 years of smooth and steady. To Otis Smith, a former player and the current general manager of the Magic, DeVos is the same man who greeted the team after he bought the fledgling franchise 18 years ago. ‘He walked in the door and had his Rolex showing just a little bit, he had his hand in his pocket,’ Smith said of that first meeting. ‘He was just smooth. And giving the speech to the team, he said, ‘I bought this team with the equivalent of the pocket change that you put in the dresser every night.’’ DeVos is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing company of consumer products. He started it in his garage with $49. He is a wealthy man, and his lesson to his players — then as now — was that they should be careful with their money. That they were themselves rich. In the nearly two decades that DeVos has owned the Magic, little has changed. The Magic is somewhat of an anomaly as a sports franchise. In a landscape dominated by corporations, Orlando is a mom-and-pop store.”
