Plodding Cavaliers Take A Step Forward By Booting Fratello

We hate to be ones to dance on someone's grave.

But what the heck.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead. The Cleveland Cadavers have fired Mike Fratello. Goodbye, StallBall.

Good riddance.

Few have done more to ruin professional basketball than Fratello. He introduced that control-freak, slowdown style and had mild success with it. StallBall spread through a copycat league like the plague.

We don't have anyone specifically to blame for the fact that NBA players can't shoot anymore or NBA teams don't run anymore. At least we have Fratello. He is the root of the insidious offense disguised as defense, designed to milk the clock and keep the scores low - and therefore close.

So afterward the coach can say, aha, see what I can do?

The NBA has a scoring problem. Talk all you want about the lockout, no training camps and out-of-shape players. This is a problem that has been around for a while.

As the Oregonian's Dwight Jaynes pointed out last week, much has changed in just seven years. In 1992, the last time the Trail Blazers made the Western Conference finals, Portland scored 113, 119, 127 and 105 points in its victories. Nowadays teams are prolific if they score in the 80s in an NBA playoff game.

The NBA has tried to spin it, saying fans enjoyed the competitiveness of close (read: low-scoring) games. But even the league admits it has a problem. It will try to invoke some remedies this summer to speed up the game and increase scoring. The result probably will be something closer to the international game with its wider lanes, shorter three-point lines and more generous defensive rules.

Mix in a bunch of mechanical Euro-chain-smokers and you might have something. Though not anything worth watching. Otherwise, NBA coaches with their arsenal of athletes always will find a counter to the rules.

The only real solution is to do what Gordon Gund did in Cleveland - weed out the heretics. Players told Gund they no longer enjoyed playing Fratello's style. Season-ticket holders, in a survey, said they didn't enjoy watching Fratello's style.

Result: Fratello can crawl back to the telestrator.

Next? Well, Chuck Daly, architect of the Bad Boys in Detroit, left of his own accord. But there's still Pat Riley, part of the Eastern mafia that cheapened the personal foul, making it a lethal weapon of choice against opposing offenses. Scorers will never be allowed to flourish until defenses are truly prohibited from grabbing, holding, pushing, as well as hunting down penetrators like they were common criminals.

No wonder guys can't shoot anymore. They're defended by players trained to sock a forearm in their midsections and deftly graze their elbows during their release. Either that, or some idiot is coaching them to allow 23 of the 24 seconds to tick off the shot clock before jacking something up in desperation.

OK, no one had to tell Charles Barkley how to do that.

Coaches who run pseudo-isolation post offenses, coaches who refuse to run, coaches who allow their point guards to walk the ball upcourt - they all should be on David Stern's hit list. All NBA coaches must be reprogrammed to understand that professional basketball isn't just a game anymore. It's an entertainment.

And we ain't entertained.

We're tired of this ball-above-the-head, force-feed-the-post, dribble-hit-dribble-hit, kick, rotate, shoot-an-airball basketball. Give us flowing 'fros, taking off from the foul line, red-white-and-blue balls. Give us San Antonio and Indiana in the NBA Finals.

Most of all, give us more moves like the one Gordon Gund made. If they want to walk, give them their walking papers. The only way we're going to get our game back from the likes of Fratello is to eradicate the likes of Fratello from our game.

Damongate

The local reaction in Po-dunk, Ore., to Damon Stoudamire's "I want to play" comments last week were typical of a backwater town that doesn't know the first thing about being big league. Trail Blazer fans flooded the talk shows and Oregonian writers' voice mail with demands that Stoudamire's head be paraded down Po-Dunk's only main street. Never mind that the young point guard is a local product and one of the main reasons the Blazers are in the Western Conference finals.

Talk about Rip City.

Besides bad timing, the only thing Stoudamire was guilty of was being too honest. In a business brimming with self-serving, back-stabbing double-talkers, that's refreshing. This guy's the deal, believe us. He's so nice, he can't even decline answering questions, no matter how indelicate. Stoudamire wasn't advancing his own agenda. He was prodded.

Maybe in time Stoudamire will learn about timing and the presence of national media. But dude's only 25, for Jordan's sake. He is not a finished product as a person or a point guard, no matter how well he's done at both. That should be taken into account by Blazer Coach Mike Dunleavy.

As deserving as he was of the NBA Coach of the Year award, Dunleavy hasn't handled his point-guard situation very well. The franchise has made a huge commitment to Stoudamire that goes far beyond this series. Eroding his confidence - in both himself and his coach - could have negative consequences down the road.

It even has in the short run. It isn't beyond the realm of possibility that Stoudamire was pressing during a rare fourth-quarter appearance in Game 2 in San Antonio. Maybe if Stoudamire regularly played at least portions of final periods, he would have been more mentally prepared and not have made a critical turnover and missed a free throw down the stretch.

Criticism of his missed jumper with 33 seconds remaining is way off base. Po-dunk fans are using the misfire as evidence of Stoudamire's selfishness. They are too ill informed to know that Dunleavy ordered a quick shot, to ensure the Blazers would have the final possession in a tight game.

If Po-dunkers want to carry the what-if game even further, then we say Stoudamire would have turned the corner on the pick-and-roll in Game 1 and produced a better shot than Rasheed Wallace did. And, point is, playing Greg Anthony for defense down the stretch often is a sound way to go. But not against the Spurs, where the concern is more at the offensive end than stopping the likes of Avery Johnson on defense.

By advancing trades for Gary Payton or Terrell Brandon, Po-dunkers demonstrate extreme short-sightedness. Stoudamire is a legit talent who's only going to get better and better as the next eight or so years unfold. To give that up over an ill-timed slip of the tongue is so Mayberry RFD.

Jail baiting

Getting back to the sorry state of the NBA, it's only going to get worse until the league does something about the influx of college underclassmen and high-school graduates. It's not that these young players are not talented. It's more and more that basic fundamentals such as shooting a basketball (pretty important) and making a cut are going dinosaur.

What can be done? One suggestion comes from a surprising source. Super agent David Falk says about half the states have some sort of law regulating what agents can do with college or high-school kids. In North Carolina, for example, it's a felony for an agent to have contact with a student-athlete without first giving written notification to the applicable college athletic director or high-school principal.

It won't directly stop the flow, but it will prevent impressionables from getting bad advice from flimflam passing themselves off as agents. Falk thinks many kids "commit economic suicide" by going to the NBA too early. A competent agent could make that point.

Old Milwaukeeans

George Karl probably has one more career move before he can set his sights on NBA Coach of the Year honors. Why? Po-dunk's Dunleavy was the fourth recipient of the award who previously coached for the Bucks under owner Herb Kohl. The others were Don Nelson with Golden State, Del Harris with the Lakers and Mike Schuler (an assistant under Nelson) with Portland.

Hot Penny

OK, OK, you all can stop the nasty e-mails about the possibility of the Sonics going after Penny Hardaway. We were just thinking out loud. Besides (and we're not sure how this is legal), the Phoenix Suns seem to be the front-runners by virtue of already having contacted the Orlando Magic about a sign- and-trade deal.

The Suns don't want to give up Tom Gugliotta for Hardaway, but probably will have to. Gugliotta's $7.2 million salary is close enough to the $9 million starting salary Hardaway seeks in a new, seven-year, $85 million contract. Phoenix would have to have some inkling that Clifford Robinson will re-sign before pulling off a deal for the All-Star shooting guard.

Boston supposedly is interested, possibly dangling Ron Mercer, but Hardaway apparently wants to play in the West.

Speak of the week

Vancouver Coach Brian Hill on Phil Jackson meeting with David Checketts about the Knicks' coaching job: "(Jackson) stepped way over the line. You just don't do that if you have any type of professional ethics. I can't think of anyone else in our league who would have done what he did. To openly solicit another guy's job, when his team is still playing, is about as unethical as you can get in this business." ------------------------------- TOP 10

Youngsters to rebuild the NBA around:

1. Kobe Bryant . 2. Vince Carter . 3. Allen Iverson . 4. Tim Duncan . 5. Shaquille O'Neal . 6. Kevin Garnett . 7. Jason Williams . 8. Grant Hill . 9. Jason Kidd . 10. Stephon Marbury .