Terry Tyler (been a while since you thought about him, eh?), Long, Laimbeer, Johnson, Thomas and Tripucka were all good for 18-plus points per 40. They always had five on the floor who could fill it up. "That's what our team was back then." Detroit had six players post Player Efficiency Ratings (PER) over 14.0 that year. "Outscore the other team," Laimbeer wrote in a recent Basketball Digest piece. English hit for 30.2, and Dan Issel was good for 29.0.Īlex English averaged 25 points or more per game eight times in his career.Īnd never mind the "Bad Boys" - the 1984 Pistons, in their first season under Chuck Daly, were nearly as potent as the Nuggets. Vandeweghe averaged 33.6 points per 40 minutes in 1984. "But no one was limited or afraid to try things." Even now, Vandeweghe chuckles just thinking about how much fun it was: "Doug never criticized a shot."Ĭonfidence is a beautiful thing. "Everyone knew what their roles were," English says. "Free-flowing, with the pressure off the players." At a time when the iconic face of coaching in America was Bobby Knight's red-cheeked rant at some poor kid unfortunate enough to miss a teammate coming off a back-screen, Moe, more like a bandleader, was letting his guys find a groove. "It was basketball at its purest," he says. It was an attitude thing with him."Įnglish describes ball under Moe in more reverent terms. "But I don't think Doug knew anything about pace numbers or anything like that. "We always felt we could use the altitude to our advantage," Vandeweghe says. In that same span, five of the top six field-goal-attempt averages (the sixth belonged to the '85 Pistons) and five out of the top six points-per-game averages (the sixth belonged to the '84 Spurs) also belong to Nuggets teams. Since 1982, the top six (and seven out of the top 10) pace factors in the NBA have been recorded by Denver squads. Though it often made for some ugly numbers for what Moe likes to describe, with a mocking sneer in his voice, as "so-called" defense (the '84 Nuggets gave up 112.6 points per 100 possessions), the combination of the thin Denver air and a fast-on-the-floor pace was a Nuggets tradition once upon a time. "Get more chances with the ball, play at a different pace than most of the other teams." "You have to let go," he told me recently. Whereas the Larry Browns and Rick Carlisles of the world treat each possession like a Faberge egg, Moe thought of them more like Skittles they're great, and you can never have enough of them, but they aren't precious or anything. Moe, the one-time undisputed king of golf-shirt chic, wanted things loose. We knew we had to play a certain way with them." "They didn't run a lot of plays, they just kept running. "At that time, if you go to Denver you know you're going to be in for a scoring match," says Tripucka. The 1984 Nuggets led the league with a pace factor (i.e., possessions per 48 minutes for a team and its opponent) of 110.5, and Detroit posted a pace factor of 103.8 that year (today's Suns, by comparison, crank it up to 95.1). The teams were playing just the way Nuggets head coach Doug Moe liked it: fast. The game film is a blur Detroit's Vinnie Johnson doing a goofy pirouette jumper at one end, English flashing his signature baseline fadeaway at the other, and Isiah and Denver's Mike Evans pushing it from circle to circle in between. There were 113 rebounds, though, remarkably, only English and Bill Laimbeer managed double-digit boards, with 12 apiece. There were a record 93 assists in the game Isiah had 17 of them. The Pistons shot 60 free throws, the Nuggets 57. The teams took a combined 251 shots and hit on 142 of them (56.6 percent). The game, played at the high altitude of Denver's McNichols Sports Arena, lasted 3 hours, 11 minutes. In all, an NBA-record four players scored over 40 points and 12 players (six Pistons, six Nuggets) had double figures, including Isiah Thomas (47), John Long (41), Kelly Tripucka (35) and Dan Issel (28). And Nuggets general manager Kiki Vandeweghe tells me he was there. The New York Times has commemorated the game in its "This Day in Sports" series. The league has a photo of the official scorebook at NBA.com. The Portland Trail Blazers bring up the rear at 85.9.īut it happened. The 2005-06 Phoenix Suns, everybody's high-octane darlings, lead the league right now, averaging 103 points per game. They're not just out of the past, they're altogether alien. Before they were the Bad Boys, Isiah and the Pistons were a high-scoring machine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |