But for two reasons: (a) They don’t think anyone can guard them and (b) they really scoff at the notion Shane Battier could guard them. Morey confirmed as much: “That’s actually true. “No one dreads being guarded by me,” he said. They think of me as some chump.” He senses that some players actually look forward to being guarded by him. Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players - LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce - and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.” Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row - the second-longest streak in N.B.A. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. “We played the Knicks!”) Tonight, though it was a midweek game in the middle of January, was different. (“The Knicks!” he exclaimed a minute later. Yesterday Battier couldn’t tell me whom the team played three days before. Seldom are regular-season games in the N.B.A. Now, finally, came the best part of his day, when he would be, oddly, most scrutinized and least understood. “I used to try to talk to people, but then I figured out no one actually liked me very much.” Instead of engaging in the pretense that these other professional basketball players actually know and like him, he slips away into the locker room.Īnd up Shane Battier popped, to the howl of the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game at the Toyota Center in Houston, and jumped playfully into Yao Ming (the center “out of China”). “I hate being out on the floor wasting that time,” he said. All those players making exaggerated gestures of affection toward one another before the game, who don’t actually know one another, or even want to. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small talk with players on the other team. To him the only pleasure in these sounds - the name of his beloved alma mater, the roar of the crowd - was that they marked the end of the worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups and the introductions. “If you had filet mignon every single night, you’d stop tasting it.” ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ he said, as he struggled to explain how a man on the receiving end of the raging love of 18,557 people in a darkened arena could feel nothing. He had more or less admitted to me that this part of his job left him cold. Nobody has done it since.Out of Duke University. Nobody had jumped over a 7 footer before. Vince stole it at the three-point line, took 3 dribbles, gathered himself and then jumped over 7'2'' Frederic Weis. A Frenchman nabbed the rebound and tried a doofy no-look pass. One legendary dunk itself is enough to make Vince Carter the #1 Dunker Of All Time. #8 Dunking - Vince Carter Vince Carter dunks over a 7 footer while playing for Team USA It's a shame that Pippen never won Defensive Player Of The Year to show for his defensive expertise but he did make the All-First Defensive Team 8 times, All-Second Defensive Team 2 times in a span of 8 years. He made perfect use of his long wingspan and agility to lock-down some of NBA's best volume scorers. Breaking through the first line of defense is critical and Pippen stood there like a wall.
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