My Life, My Fight Page 13
I looked around and pointed to myself. Was he talking about me? I thought it was a bit late to be calling my elbow, especially since it was accidental. We formed a team huddle while the refs reviewed the play and I watched myself get elbowed in the face by Vince Carter on the huge TV. It looked kinda funny in slow motion, but I couldn’t laugh otherwise I’d look bad, so I just watched and chewed my gum and tried to look nonchalant while the crowd booed for my poor cheekbone.
The refs ended up giving me a technical for my first (admittedly uncalled) foul, which was my first real technical ever. I’d had technicals that were defensive three-second violations, which aren’t the same thing. As they announced it over the speakers, I thought it was all a bit unfair until they added that Carter got a flagrant 2 technical foul, which meant automatic ejection from the game. As I shot my free throws I wondered if he hated me and really hoped not. After the game I asked MB again if I was doing something wrong and again he said, “No, keep doing what you’re doing.”
It took two weeks of preseason games and one week of regular-season games for people to stop saying that I’d be spending my rookie year in the development league. I wouldn’t have been confident enough to bet money on it, but I definitely didn’t feel like I was going anywhere. I’d already exceeded expectations by not being completely out of my depth, and the OKC fans were loving the fact that I was a Kiwi who wasn’t dramatic. I knew all along that I had what it took to at least be a bruiser coming off the bench, but even I didn’t think I’d be starting within two weeks of the season opener.
Perk’s grandfather passed away the day before we were leaving for a series of away games on the West Coast. He couldn’t make at least two games, so suddenly there was an opening in the starting five for a center. I thought the coach, Scott (Scotty) Brooks, would start Nick, but when he named the starting five that day in Los Angeles, there I was. And there’s nothing like matching up against DeAndre Jordan for your first starting appearance. I was almost glad it was an away game. The Thunder crowd are so loyal and supportive that they would have loved cheering me on, which would have made me nervous about not letting them down. The LA Clippers fans at the Staples Center in Los Angeles didn’t give two shits that it was a big moment for me. In the end I had a quiet game because DeAndre Jordan is a big man who knows how to dominate the key.
Once the season gets going, all the games start to merge into one. Life becomes a blur of flights, hotels, and endless different basketball courts. Players generally remember games specifically because they were really good or they were really bad. I was lucky enough not to have any truly bad games in 2013, the first half of the season. I got Jordan Hamilton of the Nuggets ejected for perhaps the softest flagrant foul in NBA history (which is saying something). He was running on transition and I slowed down to get in his way. When he ran into me, he swung his arm out instinctively and hit me about as hard as a toddler hits their parent. Because of his intent (to hurt me, I guess) he was ejected and suspended for a game. Other than that incident, the last months of the year were filled with steady progress and gradual stat improvement, which was exactly what I was working towards.
While my friends back in New Zealand were celebrating the first days of 2014 by getting drunk and passing out in paddocks, I marked the occasion by fouling out in three consecutive games. My first foul-out was against the Houston Rockets, matching up against Dwight Howard, the guy with the bubble arms. I came in off the bench and went straight to fouling. A lot of the time when you get called for a foul, you know you’ve fouled. Even if you look all shocked and like that shrugging emoji, you know you kinda deserved it. The difference in my rookie season is that I got called for a lot of fouls that I genuinely didn’t know were fouls.
Early in the fourth quarter, when I was sitting on five fouls, Dwight (who was on four fouls himself) and I got into it off the ball and were called for a double foul. Dwight was subbed off with five fouls and I was fouled out for the first time with six. There’s a funny GIF out there somewhere of us reacting in unison to the ref’s call, but that’s really the only good thing to come out of that game.
I managed to foul out in 10 minutes of playing time, which has got to be some sort of record. What it definitely was on the night was embarrassing. Fouling out always stinks because it means you’re useless to your team and have to watch the rest of the game from the bench. Fouling out after starting on the bench is worse as it means you were supposed to be giving an energy boost and letting the starters rest, and instead you put yourself out of the game. Fouling out after starting on the bench and playing only 10 minutes is beyond stink. I pledged that day that I would never do it again.
The very next day we played the Golden State Warriors at home—and what did I do? I fouled out after starting on the bench and playing only 10 minutes. It might seem funny now, but trust me, it wasn’t funny when it happened. This time I managed to not foul until the final minutes of the first quarter, which was a fairly rare feat for me my whole rookie season. But with three fouls before halftime, it was feeling a bit like déjà vu. Cut to the fourth quarter and I picked up my fifth foul. Before coach could even think about pulling me out, the ball went back down the court, Klay Thompson scored, and we were back on offense, which I thought was a safer area for me foul-wise. On that play, I set up in the low post, pivoted, and was called for a charge. Six fouls, back on the bench.
We had a rest the next day, so I could think about my 12 fouls in 48 hours, and then we were back at the arena playing DeMarcus Cousins and the Sacramento Kings. Cousins is easily one of the toughest guys to mark in the league. He’s strong but also plays angry, so you never know what he might suddenly do. I can take a punch to the face better than anyone, but even I would like a bit of warning. I wasn’t looking forward to playing him because he was physical, and when you match up with an enforcer, you can’t help but dial up your own roughness. That almost always means more fouls for everyone.
As it turned out, I didn’t get my first foul until five minutes into the second quarter, but I also wasn’t getting anything else. My shot was off, and my confidence was low after the previous two games. I was doing a good job of making sure every Cousins shot was a contested one, but I was still fouling and was fouled out for the third time in a row with five minutes left to play.
Fouling out in three consecutive games made me question my whole style of play. It wasn’t just one end of the floor either; I was getting called for shooting fouls, offensive fouls, loose ball fouls. I started to wonder whether the refs had had a talk and decided that all the things I was doing to piss off other guys and get them ejected would now be fouls. If that was the case, I was screwed. I spoke to Scotty after that third game and asked him if I should maybe try being a bit less physical so I could stop getting fouled out all the time. He didn’t hesitate at all in telling me no. In fact, he said the only reason he’d get angry was if I changed how I played.
Turns out refs are just like players and need to study how teams play before every game so they know how best to officiate. When a bunch of rookies come in each season, refs don’t know how they play and it can take a while for them to get used to the new players’ styles. I was big and staunch, so when refs saw veterans ending up on the floor after running into me, of course they were going to call a foul on the big rookie. Nowadays, those same plays wouldn’t be called as fouls against me because those same refs now know how I play.
But, at the time, I didn’t know what to do. I thought I’d keep getting calls against me and fouling out every game until I was forced to retire. It’s something almost every rookie who gets decent playing time has to go through, and as the years went by I saw it happening to new guys every season. There’s nothing anyone else can do but continue to encourage them and empathize. Nobody told me to do anything differently because they all knew it would pass, and it did. I didn’t foul out the rest of my rookie season.
The next few games I tried to play like normal, but it’s impossible to not adjust a
t least a little bit after fouling out so quickly three games in a row. Thankfully, it didn’t take long before I was back annoying opponents and catching elbows. My last ejection of that season had happened a few days before my terrible fouling spree, against the Milwaukee Bucks.
Once again it was a scuffle that happened off the ball. In the middle of the second quarter, Reggie Jackson set up on the wing for a three-point shot while I cut to the basket, ready for the rebound. On my way in I bumped Larry Sanders. It was an intentional bump because no big ever cuts through the paint without making contact with anyone. So I bumped him and he bumped me back and it was all fun bumping, until he decided to bump me in the throat with his forearm. He was ejected and later fined $2,000.
I didn’t understand how all these players could react so aggressively to me all the time. I figured they must all have grown up as only children. Anyone who grew up with a bunch of siblings knows that parents are basically just refs for the first 10 years of your life. The trick was to annoy your siblings as much as you could without being caught by your household ref. Nudge them, bump them, stand in their way, but insist you’re not touching them. These are all little kiddie moves that work just as well on the basketball court. At home, if you cracked first and tried to punch your sibling in front of your parents, everyone got a hiding. But on the basketball court, if you lose your cool first, you’re usually the only one who gets punished.
I grew up the youngest of 14 kids. My ability to annoy and my capacity to withstand physical taunts is pretty bloody high. I think what took those veterans by surprise was that I was a mere rookie and yet had the gall to annoy them and make them crack. I think some of them considered it disrespectful of me or some sort of dirty tactic. No, it was just that in that particular aspect of the game I’d had a lifetime of practice. When I started in the NBA I was already a veteran in taking hits.
13.
SMALL FISH IN A BIGGER POND
In my first NBA season, I found myself taking the court in the playoffs. We had finished second in the Western Conference behind the San Antonio Spurs and were well positioned for a strong playoff run. Our first best-of-seven playoff series would be against the seventh-place Memphis Grizzlies. In theory, this should be the easiest series in a playoff run, but in the NBA there’s no such thing as an easy series. Every team plays differently and so every team requires the same diligent approach.
Not everyone gets to experience the playoffs in their rookie season. Some players don’t get to experience it their whole career. I was just lucky that I got drafted by such a good team.
The playoffs really are something else. Regular season is fun, but by the time you get to game 70 of 82, you’re ready for it to be over. Once the playoffs start, you might as well throw your whole regular season out the window because it means nothing now. All that matters is winning four games against one team. And then winning four more against another. Repeat, until you’re NBA Champions.
Preparing for a playoff series is like studying for an exam. During the regular season there are so many games that teams only get a few hours to think about their opponents’ systems and how they like to play. But in the playoffs, the week before that first game is spent going over hours and hours of footage, figuring out what your opponent likes to do and then working out how to force them to do anything but that. If they like to pick-and-roll for 90 percent of the time and play in isolation for 10 percent, you figure out how to make them play in isolation the whole time. It’s all mental work and is so much tougher than physically playing a game.
After we’d done our film work, the bigs and the guards separated to each study our match-ups in the Grizzlies and suss out how they played individually and what, if any, were their weaknesses. Perk and I were studying Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph. Gasol was an idol of mine as a big man who was agile and could shoot outside the paint, and Randolph was a tank of a man with aggression to rival DeMarcus Cousins. We knew that the Grizzlies liked to slow the game down and force teams to play at their pace, so our approach was to try to outrun them and speed everything up. This meant that even though it was my first playoffs, I’d probably be seeing a bit of court time.
Being the higher seed, we were given home-court advantage for the first two games and I got to see the transformation that happens in Oklahoma City when the playoffs start. Every home game sold out in minutes and the noise inside the Chesapeake Arena never stopped. I could barely hear my own teammates calling for the ball. It made me realize how quiet Kiwi fans are at pretty much every New Zealand sporting event.
We started the game doing exactly what we planned to do—run transition and not let them control the pace—and it worked incredibly well. Thanks to our natural hustle defense and fast transitions, we were up by 22 points at halftime. But as every NBA fan knows, there’s no such thing as a safe halftime lead. The Grizzlies came back out a new team and suddenly it was them controlling the pace by slowing things down and shutting down our fast breaks. By the end of the third quarter, our lead had been cut to nine.
The small-ball approach was working though, so Perk and I spent most of the game on the bench while Serge Ibaka and Caron Butler played as power forwards without a center. We got our groove back in the fourth quarter and finished with 100–86 to take a 1–0 lead in the series. It was a typically fast game. In the playoffs every quarter is played like the final minutes of a close regular-season game. By that point, though, everyone is so fit that the physical demands of the playoffs are hardly a factor. It’s the extra mental work that leaves you drained.
If preparing for the playoffs is like studying for an exam, playing the actual series is like a boxing match. The first game in the series is like the first round. Everyone’s playing hard, but you’re really just dancing around each other, throwing jabs and trying to figure out what everyone’s moves are.
After that first game we went away and watched footage to see what we had missed in our preparations and what adjustments we needed to make for game two. Because our fast, small game had worked so well, our only adjustment was to focus on not lagging after halftime.
Game two turned out to be one of the best games in the whole of the 2013 NBA playoffs. I played two minutes and spent the rest of the game as on edge as the 18,000-strong crowd. With 18.1 seconds to go in regulation time, the Grizzlies were up 98–93, but we had possession. Russ tried to pass to Kevin “KD” Durant for a corner three, but it got deflected.
When the ball is loose in a game, it’s like everything stops. Every player on the court has to make a split-second decision whether to go for the ball or leave it. A moment’s hesitation and you’re out, mate. Our Thunder practices had everyone diving on every loose ball, even in the scrimmages, which set us up to be one of the best defending teams for deflections and loose ball recoveries. That night against the Grizzlies it came in handy.
Russ scrambled to retrieve the loose ball, scooped it up, and threw it to KD who was already falling out-of-bounds after being fouled. He shot it as he fell onto someone’s lap and it somehow went in. It was ridiculous. He made the free throw and the score was suddenly 98–97 with 13.8 on the clock. We fouled down the other end to stop the clock and the Grizzlies made one free throw: 99–97. With one second on the clock, Russ shot a tough three, which missed. But Perk, the steady ship, was under the hoop and managed to tap it in just as the buzzer sounded: 99–99. I’d never heard anything as loud as the cheer that erupted when that ball rolled through the net.
Sadly, in a major anti-climax, the Grizzlies ended up winning in overtime, 111–105. It was devastating, not just to lose but to lose at home too. Everyone wants to win a series 4–0 to get as long a rest as possible before the next round, but now we’d be playing at least five games, with the next two in Memphis.
Games three, four, and five all went into overtime—not your usual first-round playoff series. The Grizzlies took game three, we took game four, and the Grizzlies took game five. I didn’t play in games three or five, and I was in for ju
st five minutes in game four. But I was ready to go as soon as my team needed me. Down 3–2 in the series, game six was obviously a must-win. And that’s when I was able to make my accidental trademark move of having someone punch me.
I got in for 20 minutes and made sure it counted. They didn’t need my help scoring and I wasn’t getting a bunch of rebounds so I just made sure no one would score on me. I had been resting on the bench for a week and my legs felt springy, so I went out and got a then career-high five blocks. In the middle of the fourth quarter, I turned around on transition to run my lane and ended up tangled with Zach Randolph. I pulled my arm away and I guess he didn’t like how I did it because he shoved me. I was so exhausted by this point that when he shoved me I didn’t have the energy to correct my course, so I just kept jogging in the direction he pushed me to avoid falling over. The refs called a common foul and I got told off by Russ for not calling a screen that had blindsided him the play before. We won the game by 20 points.
After the game, the foul was reviewed and the NBA suspended Randolph for one game, meaning he would miss the game seven decider. It was back at home, where we won 120–109. I almost felt bad about Randolph’s suspension because I knew he’d have been beating himself up over being unavailable for game seven. He was an impact player for the Grizzlies and his absence made all the difference. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had held a grudge over it for years, but the first time I matched up against him the next season, we were all good.