By Michael Wilbon
Thursday, May 5, 2005
CHICAGO
With one flick of his right wrist, Gilbert Arenas rescued his crew from the brink of the biggest NBA playoff embarrassment in recent memory and instead delivered one of the most memorable playoff victories in team history. Perhaps this is where Arenas's story will have officially begun, when we look back on it.
We're not accustomed to seeing the Chicago Bulls walk off the floor losers after a buzzer-beater. That was the province of Michael Jordan, Steve Kerr and Toni Kukoc for years and years, walking off the floor triumphant after some miracle shot. And for the first time in a long, long time they felt the despair of turnabout. After a mighty noise accompanied Jannero Pargo's three-pointer with 5.2 seconds left, erasing every bit of what had been a 22-point second-half deficit, the Wizards called a timeout, then eventually threw the ball to Arenas and let him do what players who think of themselves as stars do in the playoffs. He rose over Chicago's Kirk Hinrich and the shot swished the net to just as mighty a silence.
Asked if he ever heard a building go so silent, go from such unbridled joy and hope to such depression, Arenas said, "Only when Michael Jordan did it."
Wizards win, Wizards win, Wizards win, 112-110. They would have been dogged, with good reason, for the rest of these playoffs had Chicago somehow won in overtime. They would have had to come back to Chicago for Game 7 to win a series against a franchise that has never lost a playoff in which it has had home-court advantage. They would have been at least temporarily reduced to chumps really, unable to close out the equivalent of a 10-run lead with two out in the ninth. They allowed Pargo to hit three three-pointers in the final 39 seconds. He didn't even enter the game until 41 seconds remained. This kind of loss would have been devastating, almost certainly a series-changer.
But Arenas took care of all that. In a bit of irony, a second-round pick from the 2001 draft won the game while the top pick in that same draft, Kwame Brown, was 670 miles away, told his services would no longer be needed. Arenas, who has the skills and personality to be a star in a league devoted to stars, bailed his team out with a beautiful jump shot, the kind of shot they used to see in this building all the time but almost never from the enemy. So, the Wizards will return to Washington for Game 6, the toast of the town, anything but chumps.
"I'd been setting up my team all night," Arenas said. "I'm going to win the game. That's what I do. . . . They didn't say it was going to be easy."
Rarely is anything in the playoffs easy, especially for neophytes such as the Wizards, or the Bulls for that matter.
Because they prevailed, because they won in such a preposterously emotional way, this might be exactly what not only rallies them through this series but also what launches the club to the next level of competition. And because they hung on, it's important to remember how they built such a big lead in the first place, how they turned a 0-2 deficit into a 3-2 series lead.
Heart-stopping drama aside, the beauty of a seven-game playoff series is that a team has time to get smarter, time to identify an opponent's weakness and time to remind its own players of their strengths. That's what has happened between the Wizards and Bulls. The Wizards, superior physically anyway, figured out over the course of the series -- at least through the first three quarters -- how to trump the Bulls in every conceivable way.
After two games the Wizards figured out they have dependable players besides Arenas, Larry Hughes and Antawn Jamison.
They figured out that if they feed the big men on offense, those same big men -- Brendan Haywood, Etan Thomas and Michael Ruffin -- become even more inspired to play good defense (they shot 12 for 16 in Game 5). They figured out that if they stop taking difficult shots and make the extra pass, they are incredibly difficult to defend even by the Bulls, the No. 1 defensive team in the NBA.
They figured out that half of Ruffin is more valuable than two Kwame Browns.
They figured out that Haywood (17 points, 7 rebounds, 5 blocks) is the best big man in this series.
They figured out, after playing no defense whatsoever for two games, that you cannot win in the playoffs by simply trying to outscore the other guy.
They figured out that you have to play harder in the playoffs than you ever thought you could play.
"Figuring out what has to be done and making adjustments is what playoff basketball is all about," TNT analyst Steve Kerr said Wednesday night.
The Wizards didn't really know what was required to succeed in the playoffs, but they're learning.
And as a result, the Fat Lady should be making an appearance on Friday night in Washington. You remember the Fat Lady, don't you? She was the rage back in 1979 when the Washington basketball team last won a seven-game playoff series (over San Antonio in the Eastern Conference finals).
Washington has been so far off the NBA radar for so long, you'd have to be 35 years old at the very least to get the reference, to recall it was Bullets Coach Dick Motta who in 1978 uttered the words, "The Opera ain't over 'till the fat lady sings." Well, she ought to be warming up now, because this series is over.
The Wizards knew by the end of Monday's Game 4 in Washington they were the better team, and proved it Wednesday night, earning the franchise's first road playoff win since April 18, 1986, in Philadelphia.
Talk about improbable. . . . In the Chicago Bulls' 39 seasons, they are 27-0 in series with the home-court advantage. Also, the Bulls are 29-1 in series when winning Game 1.
You want more? The Wizards, if they can finish this thing off, will be just the ninth team in NBA history to win a seven-game series after going 0-2. The better team has been identified. The best player in the series has been identified, too.
It's Arenas, who had the entire play scripted in his head when he left the huddle. He knew he was going to drive left, he knew he wasn't going to pump fake and he knew Tyson Chandler, all 7 feet 1 of him, was coming to block the shot. "So," Arenas thought to himself, "stop before you get to the foul line." Sure enough, look at the replay and you can see Chandler coming up behind Hinrich to block Arenas's shot.
But Arenas also envisioned it going in. He envisioned walking off the floor triumphantly, just like he dreamed as a kid, just like Jordan did when he'd shoot over Craig Ehlo or Gerald Wilkins or Bryon Russell in the playoffs, swish at the buzzer.
It's the last bit of drama Arenas wants, at least in this series. "We don't want to come back here," he said. "This [win] doesn't mean anything if we have to come back to this building."