2:32 a.m. EDT May 11, 2015 LOS ANGELES — Right about the time Kevin McHale and his Houston Rockets were dying the death of a thousand Hack-a-Shaq cuts on Sunday night, the man who helped Shaquille O'Neal with his free throws so many years ago had his own ailment to worry about.
"I'm barfing watching this (expletive)!" Buzz Braman text-messaged during the third quarter of the Los Angeles Clippers' 128-95 win in Game 4 of the Western Conference Semifinals that put them up 3-1 on the Rockets.
The Shot Doctor, as he is legally known by way of a U.S. trademark on the nickname, wasn't alone.
Not since Waterworld threatened to drown Kevin Costner's acting career have we seen a big-money production with less entertainment value than this.
DeAndre Jordan, the Clippers big man who played the part of O'Neal in the 2015 version of this B-movie, came just five free throw attempts shy of O'Neal's playoff record of 39 (hitting 14). The Rockets, who played such valiant basketball during the regular season and willed their way to a No. 2 seed in the brutal Western Conference despite so many injuries, reached the brink of elimination in about as humbling a way as Dr. James Naismith could have ever imagined. And Braman, who once helped Chris Webber set the NBA record for largest free-throw percentage increase and even received some on-air recognition recently from his former client turned TNT analyst, was as disgusted as anyone.
For the record, he doesn't think the league should make any changes to the current rules. As Braman sees it, players should be held responsible for improving on this basic and necessary skill. He didn't cut O'Neal, Webber, Penny Hardaway or any of the others any slack during his 24 years of personal coaching, and he's not about to suggest that the Jordans or Dwight Howards of this world should be let off the hook either. No excuse, whether it's the big-hands theory or anything else, holds merit with Braman.
"I could get Dwight Howard to 82% in about three weeks," Braman told USA TODAY Sports by phone from his West Palm Beach, Fla. home. "It has nothing to do with the size of people's hands. That's one of the great shooting myths. You can't give me the excuse of 'bad hands' because — guess what? — Gheorge Muresan's hands were bigger than everybody's, and he shot, I think, 77 or 78% from the line. Rik Smits was 7-foot-4, and shot 82% from the line. So the excuse of the hands is one of the great shooting myths of all time."
For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that Muresan actually shot 64.4% and Smits 77.3%. But the pivotal point, one that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has shown signs of agreeing with, remains.
When Silver was asked about this issue recently in an interview with The Bleacher Report, he shared the fact that youth coaches often e-mail him begging him not to change the rules. The fear from this corner of the basketball community would be that young players the world over would have little incentive to work on the art of the free throw if the big boys in the NBA created a loophole of sorts. There is merit in that stance, to be sure, but the conversation gets complicated when one considers the aesthetics of this Clippers-Rockets affair that was so utterly dreadful.
It's one thing to go the hack-a-whoever route in key second-half moments, a la Gregg Popovich, but McHale went to it early on in the first quarter and didn't stop until he and his team had slid all the way down that slippery slope. In turn, a Rockets team that made such admirable strides on the defensive end this season sent the clear message to the Clippers that there was desperation in the air.
When the league's competition committee meets sometime soon to converse on the matter and decide whether or not changes should be made, rest assured that this game will be at the center of the discussion. That debate raged on during the first half that lasted nearly 90 minutes, with fans and media members alike shaking their head.
"Hey McHale, what would Red (Auerbach) think?!?" one fan yelled in the first quarter to the former Boston Celtics big man about his late, legendary coach.
"Brilliant move, coach!" another fan hollered when the Rockets were still hacking away late in the third quarter.
Braman was practically yelling the same thing from his couch in Florida. As much pride as he always took in helping the charity-stripe-challenged turn things around, he never understood why coaches went the hack-a-Shaq route to begin with.
"The hack-a-Shaq thing, it never really worked," said Braman, who stopped coaching two years ago and now manages a high-end car dealership. "So you want your guys to grab Shaq and make him shoot a free throw. OK, so the game starts, and who is it that you want to have keep fouling him? Well, what happens is one of your starting five players, or two of your starting five players, gets in foul trouble early, and sends Shaq to the line.
"Now you have to take your two guys out in the first quarter. So now your offense is diminished, because now you bring two guys off the bench. Shaq makes one out of two free throws, and it puts the pressure on your offense to score, but unfortunately you have two non-starters in the game. Every time you come down the court, you have to score. But unfortunately you have two guys in the game who are not capable of scoring or who don't want to take the shot, and it never really worked out. The hack-a-Shaq thing was kind of a myth."
While the Game 4 script didn't go quite like that, it was another version of that same story. The Rockets trailed 60-54 at halftime, then defended with concrete sneakers in a third quarter in which it was impossible not to wonder if there was a psychological impact of all the first-half fouling. They allowed 43 points, with Jordan and J.J. Redick combining for 29. Afterward, the players who paid the price for the hack-a-DeAndre approach had a variety of views.
Harden: "I mean, personally I don't like it, but I guess different coaches have their different philosophies on the game."
Rockets forward Trevor Ariza: "You know, it is what it is. It's a strategy. When you're out there, you try to do anything you can to win, so you try to make the game ugly. If it doesn't work, then you've got to try something else. But you can't really worry about rhythm to the game when you're trying to get wins. You've got to try anything."
Rockets forward Josh Smith: "It's a decision that the coach made, and you have to just roll with it. Whatever he decides to do."
Howard: "I don't think that was the reason (they lost the game). I don't think it had an effect on the game."
For McHale's part, he said that Howard's early foul trouble inspired the move.
"We were just trying to see if we could muck up the game a little bit," McHale said. "We didn't. We came back in and we kind of had to play small, so we just thought maybe we could get them out of their rhythm a little bit."
Instead, the Rockets hacked their way into a hole that they won't likely recover from. Sickening stuff indeed.
