Dealing With Changed Men

By Mike Wise
Monday, June 5, 2006

I'm one of those pompom wavers who keeps gushing about the transcendent year of change in the NBA, how new rules and fresh coaching perspectives gave us fuel-injected Phoenix and now a cachet finals between Miami and Dallas. I keep going on about how the league took back its game from the ruffians and restored it to the playmakers.

It's all true. But I forgot to mention how the ruffians changed.

For instance, Shaquille O'Neal told me six summers ago he would never play for Pat Riley.

"All those suicide drills, where you run and run," O'Neal began, "it just takes too much out of you."

He kept sniping at the coach infamous for practicing his players for five hours or until they keeled over -- or both.

"Look at his Knicks and Heat teams and see how fresh they were at the end of the regular season," Shaq said at the time. "I'm not saying the man is not one of the greatest coaches to ever coach the game. I'm just saying as a hard-working NBA player I don't know how much my body can take."

The night after Detroit was dumped in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, after O'Neal and Riley combined to take their third different team to an NBA finals, Shaq called Riley "the perfect coach for me now."

"He's simmered down," he said in a telephone interview from his Miami home Saturday night. "He's not like he used to be. One-hour practices. Coming in at 12 some days. Days off. Pat knows our bodies."

At Riley's request, O'Neal lost bulk and body fat.

"You could say we both changed," Shaq said. "Actually, you could say that with all of us."

Gary Payton was once as disagreeable a soul as there ever was in the NBA. If Payton wasn't a coach-killer, he made it hard on anyone who ever told him how to play basketball. Now he's 37, a 16-year veteran. Like O'Neal, 34, Payton is more worried about his legacy than silly spats over playing time and shots.

This is what happens when the anger-management guard, the big, distracted kid who likes to eat and the great dictator all make adjustments. You get a different team and a different league.

The Heat's evolution is essentially pro basketball's this season, and Miami and the game are about to be rewarded.

Dwyane Wade's first finals. Dirk Nowitzki's coming-out bash. And, for better or worse, Mark Cuban is back on ABC in prime time. His Mavericks, we promise, will not be canceled earlier than "The Benefactor."

Of course, Steve Nash would have been a natural David to Shaq's Goliath. But without a 6-foot-9 body to guard the basket area, no one in basketball believed Phoenix could go more than five games against Miami. Heat-Mavericks is very likely going six, if not seven games.

Beyond Dallas, that series doesn't happen without headstrong icons taking stock of their ways.

Riley, 61, has not been to the finals since 1994 with New York. He last won a championship in 1988 with Magic and Kareem in Los Angeles. Personally, I think his decreasing stature in the game after he moved himself to the front office -- along with the growing lore of Phil Jackson and Larry Brown -- made him feel like Red Holzman in the 1980s or Dick Motta in the 1990s: old and out of place.

He had to know his whole militancy-in-sports shtick was not working, that more and more players were fraternizing before and after games, realizing sport was invented to bridge worlds rather than divide them. At some point, Riley stopped being Patton in Armani and started becoming the driven man who gets paid handsomely to motivate millionaires. Being a basketball coach -- and not a GQ advertisement -- seemed okay. He could still buy into his belief system, his win-or-die moral universe. But players like O'Neal didn't have to anymore as long as they performed.

O'Neal, after all, is 34 going on 12, a guy caught between the child off the court and the brute on it. He wants to win as many titles as possible his last five years -- and guest-star in "Scary Movie 8." If he has to diet and run more for Riley to make it reality, he will.

Payton still has the most menacing scowl in the game after Alonzo Mourning, but he doesn't sulk the way he used to. He's not the persecuted kid who can't get a call anymore. He's a backup point guard on a team four wins from helping him earn a championship ring, and he's okay with that.

On it goes with Miami. Jason Williams, the former Sacramento knucklehead, shelving his tricks so he could learn the trade of point guard. Antoine Walker, another one-time malcontent, taking a role instead of another bad shot. And, finally, Mourning, who drank Riley's Kool-Aid even in the lean times, the former Georgetown center within reach of an NBA championship that eluded Patrick Ewing and, so far, Dikembe Mutombo. After a kidney transplant in 2003 and two retirements, he also came back a changed ruffian.

"We just pushed each other, used each other to get there," O'Neal said. "I'm using what they got and they're using me. We're using each other to get one in Miami.

"We call it adding pages to our book."