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Sum of the Parts The triangle offense became the Bermuda Triangle. The no-look was replaced by pissed off looks when the pass never came. Phil Jackson ran out of granola and koans. Then again, there is no Zen philosophy in this universe that could substitute for Shaq hitting his foul shots. Shaquille O’Neil with Lisa Leslie’s free throw could have changed Ben Wallace’s summer altogether. Exactly why a human being can get off a better shot with two six-foot-nine power forwards hanging on him than with nothing between him and the net will not be understood until sometime after the national debt is paid off. Bill O’Reilly fans should watch the Lakers center at the line if they’re looking for a real no-spin zone. In Phil Jackson’s final season in La-La Land, everything was organic except the team. With the exception of a few bed springs in Colorado, nothing from the previous season was really that broken. So why was it fixed with a pair of aging superstars? If there was a missing ingredient here, it was Jerry West, at any age. With Shaq's shack up for sale and the Lakers apparently going the way of Freddie Laker, analyses of what went wrong are perhaps the only thing as plentiful as the franchise center's brick free throws. But the larger question concerns built-to-win-now megastar lineups. One listen to We Are the World will tell you they rarely work in popular music. Why are they often doomed in professional sports and in life? How many marriages between supermodels work? Between Hollywood A-listers? Between your two hottest friends? Why couldn’t Blind Faith find their way home after just one album? Why did the band Asia suck? As every New York Ranger team since 1994 has proved, the whole is often less than the sum of the parts. Chemistry is what separates real ball from rotisserie leagues. Chemistry is why real ball is played. Bogie and Bacall had it. Madonna and Sean Penn didn’t. Regis and Kathy Lee had it. Regis and Kelly Ripa do not. The ’69 Mets had so much of it they could have lit up a northeast seaboard city. And they did. The Yankees of the late ‘80s, with parts plugged in and out weekly like an old stock car, barely had enough to light up a 40-Watt bulb in a junior high school science experiment. Sonny and Cher had it. Fleetwood Mac had a little too much of it. The Sex Pistols had it, but it was basically an acid-base titration. The Knicks of the early 70s had enough of it to invent an on-court gibberish only they understood. Today’s NBA gibberish is barely understood by the players who utter it, the fans at home, or Summer Sanders. Chemistry is elusive. Like a soul, you can’t see it, hold it, or measure it, but you know it’s there. When it’s gone, you know it too. It’s the difference between Ice-T and Vanilla Ice. It’s The Who without Keith Moon. The Doors without Jim Morrison. Ebert without Siskel. You catch shades of it in double plays, alley-oops, and flea-flickers. The ’83 Wheeze Kids—reassembling the core of the Reds from the mid-70s, adding Mike Schmidt, and stirring--wasn’t a bad idea. It just wasn’t enough to beat hungry upstarts like Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray. The record shows that this year’s Lakers team wasn’t such a terrible idea either. So why is it that results the Rockets, Spurs, and T-Wolves would have killed for caused the Lakers to come apart like snakes in a can? As much as chemistry or the lack thereof, it’s expectations. Life can be less than satisfying when anything short of a championship spells Armageddon. The competition is hard enough as it is. If you’ve created an environment of jealousy and loathing around you by buying up talent from your competition, it gets even harder. The fact is, flung-together all-star teams rarely produce more playoff berths than no-trade clauses About the most fun I ever had was rooting for the ’74 Yankees, who won 89 games with a rag-tag, home-grown, pre-Steinbrenner team and who everyone began to realize were just a role player or two away from dominance. Right behind that was the ’91-‘92 Knicks. Back then you could get a ticket and witness flashes of brilliance from a John Starks not far removed from Cedar Rapids. The Detroit Pistons are perhaps the closest thing this generation has to the ’69 Mets. They played in the spirit of the ’68 Tigers, ‘76-’77 Trailblazers, and ’79 Pirates. The 2003-04 Detroit Pistons did more than redeem the New Jersey Nets, or the Eastern Conference, or even the NBA. They redeemed pro sports itself, at least for a few weeks. Because without upsets—specifically the kind that make complacent fans, greedy bettors, and wealthy ownership very, very upset—there is really no reason to pay the cable bill. As we speak, the New York Yankees, with a payroll the size of Guatemala’s, still have not left the Devil Rays completely in the dust. If A-Rod and Randy Johnson hit it off in Houston, will the Yankees win 85 percent of their remaining games and walk through the playoffs? The answer, thankfully, is maybe, maybe not. The best team on paper—and in life—can sometimes be ripped, shredded, crumpled, and burned. And that’s why there’s hope for the rest of us. Click here to rant back. |