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Sunday, April 20, 2008
Crazy like a … Woodson?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Editor’s Note: Commenting on this blog has been closed. To continue the conversation, join Mark Bradley’s Monday morning column recapping last night’s Game 1 of the Hawks-Celtics series.
Boston - Mike Woodson is either the most delusional coach in the history of NBA basketball or missing his calling on the $400-a-plate rubber chicken circuit.
Because he’s talking championship with his team set to face the league-leading Boston Celtics in a first-round playoff matchup just hours from now, while the rest of the [real] world expects his team’s season to end in the next four games.
Everything Woodson’s done up to this point screams title chase - from the photocopied images of the Larry O’Brien trophy taped to the inside wall of all his players’ lockers to the diamond-dripping finger weight he’s wearing around town now, courtesy of his championship run with Detroit in 2004 as Larry Brown’s top assistant.
I don’t know if you should admire the guy for believing in the unbelievable or help sign the petition to get him committed for the same the thing.
On paper this series shouldn’t even be close. One team ripped off a league-best 66 wins this season while the other slid into the playoffs on its backside with a meager 37 wins.
But maybe Woodson is counting on the Celtics’ five-year playoff drought being a bigger deal than anyone else. Maybe he sees chinks in the Celtics’ Teflon armor that the rest of us haven’t seen. Or maybe, just maybe, Woodson is crazy enough to think his team can pull off the unthinkable.
He’s already succeeded in baiting Celtics coach Doc Rivers (with the aid of certain member of the Boston media) into a verbal debate about which team has the most to lose in this series.
When peppered about this by reporters Saturday, Rivers got heated.
“They have the series to lose,” Rivers told reporters. “They have the same thing to lose that we do. I love when people say they have nothing to lose. That’s a bunch of [expletive]. They have just as much to lose as us. If they lose this series, they’re going to really disappointed. If we lose this series, we’re going to be really disappointed. I’ve been the eighth seed as a coach and an eighth seed as a player, I thought the same pressure as the first seed. You want to win that series.”
Sorry Doc.
But you’re wrong.
So wrong you make Woodson seem like the sane one coach in this series.
Anything over four games is a victory for these Hawks, at least in basketball’s court of public opinion.
Anything over five games will send shockwaves through the NBA ranks. A Hawks win in this series (play along here, folks, be nice to the crazy coach) and this city gets tossed upside down by fire-breathing Celtics fans that will expect Rivers to be shipped out of town on the first thing smoking.
There’s no shortage of motivation for either team (or either coach for that matter).
One just happens to be in close touch with visitors from another dimension while the other would just as soon get rid of these visitors as quickly as possible.
Problem is, the only thing we’ll know for sure after tonight, is that somebody is three wins away from either shocking the world or doing exactly what they were supposed to do.
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