Five As One

NBA news, Detroit Pistons stomp on the Los Angeles Losers Fakers Lakers, and Detroit should have won the series 4-0, except for one miracle shot by Kobe Bryant at the end of game 2.

One of the more interesting post-game comments was by Rip Hamilton aka Man without a Face. Paraphrased from memory, Hamilton commented that Detroit had the best team game in the league this year, and that they played 5 as one. Five As One, that's a good phrase. My Sacramento Kings, when they play their motion, flowing game also play Five As One, passing the ball, with lots of player and ball movement, and are hard to beat. Detroit also played 5 as 1 on defense, which the Kings didn't do as well this year as last.

I suppose having Shaq or Kobe on ones team somewhat precludes playing 5 as 1, much easier to give the ball to Kobe and run away (as Larry Brown said about his Allen Iverson teams)
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Different, for sure, from Brown's 2001 Finals team in Philadelphia, which revolved good and bad around scoring guard Allen Iverson. "There wasn't a time we didn't have a timeout that somebody on the team wasn't mumbling about what Allen had just done," Brown said, "but really, when the clock was running down, they threw him the ball and ran away."

and for an unrelated NBA news tidbit, memory is an odd thing, quite unreliable. I had a conversation with the creator of ecto a few weeks ago, and I was insistent that the New York Knicks' Allan Houston threw up the miracle shot against the Indiana Pacers a few years ago that resulted in a game winning 4 point play. However, a few days afterward, NBA TV showed the highlights of that 1999 playoff game, and lo and behold, it was actually Larry Johnson. Doh! Sorry Adriaan.