Bay Area Buzz 4/19: Mark Jackson, Sharks-Kings, Warriors Center Problem

Mark Jackson’s game of thrones

"Watching and listening to Mark Jackson lately reminds me of Ned Stark near the conclusion of the first season of “Game of Thrones.” There’s an air of resignation to him, an acceptance of the fact that this won’t end well for him.On the night the Golden State Warriors secured their second consecutive playoff berth, something this franchise has not done since 1991 and 1992, Jackson offered this fatalistic comment:“It’s not our goal to just be a playoff basketball team,” Jackson said. “We want to chase the mark of winning, set a standard for the next group of Warriors — players, coaches, whoever — down the road, and put the pressure on them.”The best present the Warriors have enjoyed in two decades and he’s already talking about the Warriors of the future? Maybe it’s because he realizes it won’t be too long until his time with the Warriors is up. He has been around the NBA since 1987, experienced it on the court, the sidelines, the locker room and the broadcast table. He knows all the sights and sounds, and understands that sometimes the most telling thing of all is silence.There has been nothing at all from the upper levels of Warriors management to curtail the speculation swirling around that the team isn’t progressing at a satisfactory rate and nothing short of a trip to the conference finals would be enough for Jackson to keep his job. There certainly hasn’t been news of the kind of lucrative contract extension that Don Nelson was able to parlay from his lone playoff trip with the Warriors during his last stint there. That leaves Jackson to ponder just like everyone else.Begging would be a bad look. So would campaigning, so he simply states the achievements and leaves it to everyone else to interpret.Jackson knows more about the dismissals of assistant coaches Brian Scalabrine and Darren Erman than he can tactfully or even legally disclose, although I’ve talked to enough other people to draw the conclusion that they were in “gots-to-go” situations. So while those moves scream dysfunction, Jackson has to remain quiet.Once again, it leaves us to interpret the words Jackson does say publicly. I’ve noticed a change in those as well. It speaks to a sense of urgency. Usually he’s the same guy you see in those mic’ed up huddles, constantly using positive reinforcement with his players. It’s the way he was on Christmas night, when the Warriors trailed the Los Angeles Clippers 53-51 at halftime, and Jackson was walking back to the court for the start of the third quarter.“We’re fine,” he insisted. He ran off the things that hadn’t gone their way — yet they still trailed by only two points.“We’re fine,” he said again.Indeed they were. They went on to win a contentious game.There was a slight change in tone last Friday, the day after his team had blown a big lead to the Denver Nuggets and he was asked about the learning curve required for the team to become more like, say, the San Antonio Spurs.“Hopefully the process speeds up, because we’ve got to figure that out,” Jackson said. “We’re getting too comfortable. At times we get too comfortable and you give teams life. It’s happened more than once. Not to say it does not happen to the Spurs and other teams in this league, but it’s not acceptable. We’ve got to find a way to close this thing out the right way.”In other words, they’re not fine. Good isn’t good enough. Better be better.Isn’t that similar to the message — subliminal or otherwise — being sent by Warriors owner Joe Lacob? And isn’t it within the rights of an ownership group that spent $450 million to buy the team in 2010 to expect some return on investment? Fifty-five wins and a 4-seed don’t sound so far-fetched when you consider the 51-win Warriors lost home games to theCharlotte Bobcats, Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets (twice).Something’s a little off, as Stephen Curry addressed recently.“We have to figure out how not to have lulls in games,” Curry said. “If we give full energy and lose on our terms, that’s fine. But the way that we’ve given up huge runs and blown leads, you’ve got to figure that out. We’ve got to do that sooner or later.”But there’s also something to be said about appreciating what’s good while you’ve got it. The Warriors won 50 games for the first time since 1994, a number the players celebrated with an on-court group hug around Jackson.“We want to support him,” Draymond Green said afterward. “He put us in a great position.”The Warriors won more than twice as many games as they did in 2011-12, Jackson’s first season.“We’re not that far removed from dreaming of this moment,” Jackson said.Until the Warriors have one of the league’s top five players, championships will remain the stuff of reverie. Curry might be getting close — there’s a strong case for him as a first team All-NBA guard — but you’d have to go back to the Bad Boy Pistons to find the last time a point guard-oriented team won a championship. It’s possible that the ceiling is simply beyond their reach.The one word you won’t hear from Jackson is “unfair.” He knows that the professional sports concoction of money, expectations, pressure and egos can be toxic despite the best of intentions — or even results.“Great organization, great management; I’m thrilled to be part of it,” he told reporters, apropos of nothing, after a recent game.The bases are covered. If he’s going to go, he won’t inadvertently write his own resignation letter. And he’s not going to suffer from an inadequate résumé. If he wins two games against the Clippers in the opening round it will give him eight playoff victories in the past two years, more than any Warriors coach in a two-year span since Al Attles took them to the conference finals and the championship in the mid-1970s. If the Warriors advance, Jackson will join Attles and Bill Sharman as the only Warriors coaches to do so in back-to-back seasons since the franchise moved to California in 1962."

–J.A. Adande, ESPN.com

Expect Kings to push back in Game 2 vs. Sharks

"Let that be a lesson to all of us — pre-playoff series analysis is a game for fools.What was advertised with almost metaphysical certitude as a taut, pushy, vexatious matchup between the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks began Thursday night, and it took barely 20 minutes to turn it into an odd joke.San Jose controlled, and occasionally dominated, the evening, scoring thrice in the first period and pulling away from there to exfoliate the Kings, 6-3, in a game that wasn’t as close as the scoreboard implied.“Well, especially the first two periods,” defenseman and fifth goal-scorer Marc-Edouard Vlasic said with a smile. “The third period, even if you’re up 5-0, you don’t ease up on these guys. You think it comes easily, and you find out.”Yeah, but . . .“For the first two periods, I don’t know that we could have done anything better.”Indeed, San Jose handled their archest of rivals over the first 35 minutes as though this was a February game at home against Edmonton. Inspired by a brief pregame power outage, the Kings played as though the game was on the verge of postponement. They were sloppy in their own end and shockingly slow, both in speed and reaction time, to San Jose’s early rush. If it weren’t for the fact that this was so uncharacteristic for a Los Angeles team in the Darryl Sutter era, one might think that the Sharks had set a series-long tone.And that is why the natural human impulse to ease off the throttle when a game has been strangled into submission often serves more as a bracing knee in the junction – which is how the Sharks are planning to take the third (or Kings) period.“We eased off?” fourth-line wing and fourth goal scorer Raffi Torres asked rhetorically. “That’s what it looked like. You can’t sit back against a team like that. You have to keep playing them the whole time they way you intend to play them. You can’t pump the brakes. You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s going to be this kind of series.”Plus:“No music out there for a period and a half. It was weird.”The silence was not an aesthetic choice, but part of the aftermath of the pregame short that darkened the arena and apparently discombobulated the arena juke box, to the relief of all right-thinking people. But the 20-year-old building rallied quickly, powering back up and causing no delay in the start. The grand old San Jose Arena (the pre-extortion name) shrugged off the inconvenience and was back to normal in plenty of time.Which is more than can be said for the game itself.That’s the one grand hope for the hyperbole that preceded this series – that there is no momentum between playoff games between relative equals. Nothing kills a budding story line in a series quite like the final horn of a game, because changes get made, tempers are raised, adjustments are forced, and series turn on an edge.In short, Game 2 cannot logically be like Game 1 unless we have all badly misjudged the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two teams. Game 1 was simply out of the norm, which is why one can almost not trust the way it was played. It wasn’t the result so much as the way it was played – San Jose took 65 total shots on the team that allowed the fewest shots in the league, and though Kings goalie Jonathan Quick was well below his norm, he was not helped by his mates in any material way.And conversely, the Kings owned the third, outshooting San Jose, 16-5, with all the zone time and chances the Sharks had in the first period. That made no more sense than the first two periods, except that the Sharks might have pulling their punches at that point.The Kings flew back to Los Angeles to regroup for Game 2 Sunday. One should assume they shall do so, and that said game will probably feature one-third as many goals and about three times as much grinding."

–Ray Ratto, CSNBayArea.com

Warriors have a big problem heading into playoffs

"Don’t let anything spoil your enjoyment during the Warriors-Clippers playoff series, especially the daunting lessons of history, but it’s worth noting: Teams without a center, or those relying on a rather slight fellow to lead the way, generally don’t fare so well.Since the mid-1970s, when Clifford Ray shared the duties with George Johnson, the Warriors have entered only two postseasons with a legitimate center: 1987 under coach George Karl (although you’d acknowledge the ill-fated Joe Barry Carroll at your peril) and last year, when an injury-tormented Andrew Bogut fought his way through 12 games. You weren’t exactly reminded of Hakeem Olajuwon in either case.It’s as if the Warriors are doomed to “play small” this time of year, although the first round tends to be spectacularly fun. That ’87 team upset the Utah Jazz of Karl Malone andJohn Stockton; Don Nelson’s teams knocked off Utah (’89), San Antonio (’91) and Dallas (’07) in glorious fashion, and the Denver Nuggets went down last year.As for the issue of “me against the world,” as some critics are characterizing the Warriors’ chances with Stephen Curry, it never ends well. Only once in NBA history has a defying-the-odds guard carried the weight of his team’s performance into the Finals, and that was Allen Iverson on the Philadelphia 76ers of 2001 (losing to the Lakers in five games).Curry has a bit more help than Iverson did, but it’s not such an inappropriate comparison. In moments of crisis against the Clippers, it will be all up to Curry. Grantland.com’s Zach Lowe – who has an MVP ballot and lists him No. 3 – describes Curry’s Warriors as “our offense dies without me.”"

–Bruce Jenkins, San Francisco Chronicle