WHILE “Whattaya gotta do to win today’s game?” has become a stock TV question that inspires stock TV answers and stock disinterest from TV viewers, the Sixers’ Matt Geiger, Saturday, delivered one of those stock answers to NBC that was well worth remembering.
Except it wasn’t.
At halftime in the telecast of Pacers-Sixers Game 4, NBC interviewed Geiger, who said that the Sixers had allowed Indy too many easy baskets in the first three games. With a devilish smile, Geiger said the Pacers can expect increased resistance.
Hmmm. Down three games to none, Geiger and his teammates had little to lose. Was Geiger’s comments of the throw-away variety, or had he issued a genuine heads-up?
Late in the third quarter, Geiger was ejected with his second flagrant foul, this one leading to a hassle with Reggie Miller that led to Miller’s ejection.
Miller, as if the target of Geiger’s plan, had been sucked in the way Jo Jo English baited Derek Harper in the ’94 Bulls-Knicks series. Miller is now suspended from tonight’s Game 5. So much for “playoff experience” counting for so much.
Yet, with an extended break in play to adjudicate the hassle, NBC had a perfect window to either again air tape of Geiger’s pregame comments or to at least address them as they were heard earlier on NBC. After all, to some degree, Geiger had issued a warning on NBC. But that didn’t even get a mention.
Yesterday, during NBC’s Heat-Knicks pregame, the Geiger halftime interview was resurrected. Better late than never. Some stock interviews are worth taking stock of.
Incidentally, NBC’s pregame panelists, yesterday, shined the light on Geiger as a brute when that light should’ve been shared by Miller, the far better player, as a sucker. And those were precisely the postgame thoughts, Saturday, of Larry Bird, Miller’s coach.
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MSG Network productions remain two cuts above the second best, regional or national.
While Anthony Carter’s iffy shot in OT, Friday night, was a stunning conclusion to another strange Heat-Knicks playoff game, equally memorable was MSG’s postgame.
Minutes after the game ended, producer Howie Singer aired tape of similar plays. One was of a shot taken by the Raptors’ Doug Christie against Vancouver in 1997. The other was taken by Bird in a 1986 preseason Rockets-Celtics game in Hartford. Both baskets were waved off as illegal.
That Singer had these clips at his near-instant disposal was mind-blowing. What were they filed under, “OTB shots,” as in over- the-backboard shots? That Singer’s crew could so quickly identify, prepare, then air these shots was beyond comprehension.
We’re told that the clips appear on MSG’s “Raptors’ rollout tape.” When someone recalled the Bird shot from ’86, that was attached to the Christie clip. Nothing to it. Yeah, but still …
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NBC’s Bill Walton yesterday made a good point when he said that Kareem Abdul–Jabbar developed a great shooting touch around the basket in college because he played when the NCAA disallowed the dunk. Such shooting is a mostly lost art among modern centers, he said.
But Walton’s sagacious point was left for dead when Tom Hammond, before Walton completed his thought, suggested that he was about to say something “off the wall.” Later, Steve Jones brought Walton’s thought up again, but only to ridicule it.
On the other hand, a point made by Walton that was worth ridiculing, yesterday, went uncontested. Walton noted the Heat’s paucity of fastbreak points. Yet, none of the three noted that QB Tim Hardaway has been playing on one leg.
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Nice touch by NBC, yesterday, inserting a clip of Jeff Van Gundy and his brother, Stan, a Heat assistant, wishing their mom a happy Mother’s Day.
Heat-Knick games make for freakish stats. In Friday’s losing OT, the Knicks shot 75 percent. They were three-for-four. In five minutes, they took only four shots. With a 24-second clock.
Through four games and one OT vs. the Heat, and averaging nearly 40 minutes, Patrick Ewing has zero assists. Zero. In 160 minutes you should have at least one, even by accident. Ewing did fire a pass underneath to an unguarded Marcus Camby, yesterday, but Camby, perhaps startled, reacted slowly and it went out of bounds.
Why would Cinemax, yesterday, put the basketball movie “Blue Chips” on against the NBA playoffs? For people who don’t like basketball? But this kind of mindless, audience-minimizing programming is common.
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Someday, perhaps, WFAN’s Bob Wischusen will understand that because he speaks in an ultra-authoritative, condescending fashion, his mistakes seem louder and worse.
Saturday night, Wischusen said – unequivocally, of course – that the Mets’ problems with Rickey Henderson began this season, that last season “there was no problem with Rickey.”
What!? Perhaps Wischusen was blinded by Rickey’s batting average, last year, but there were several episodes when his career-long inclination toward self-interest contributed to Met losses.
Last season was when Bobby Valentine, in an attempt to defend the indefensible and make nice to an ingrate, explained Henderson’s habit of jogging to first base as the result of swinging so hard that he gets a slow start out of the box.
Wait a second … . did the all-knowing Wischusen buy that explanation?
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Joe Pepitone, tonight at 10 in an HBO “Real Sports” segment about baseball fantasy camps, is asked if he thinks today’s major leaguers will participate in such camps, 30 years from now.
No, said Pepitone. “I think today maybe the kids are a little spoiled. I mean for $10 million, I’d probably choose my friends. I think it will be very tough for guys making all that big money to attend something like this.”
As things stand today, most big league fantasy camps are so expensive only affluent fans can afford to attend. *
Golf fans took it on the chin again yesterday. At 6:38 p.m., with Davis Love III and Jesper Parnevik on the third hole in OT of Byron Nelson Classic, CBS pulled the plug for local news. You think it would have happened had Tiger Woods been one of the players?
