Larry Brown Sports

Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard is one of the worst free throws shooters in the NBA. He is shooting less than 50% from the line this season, and opponents have begun preying on his weakness.

During Tuesday night’s win over the Orlando Magic, Howard went to the free throw line an NBA record-tying 39 times. He converted 25 of those attempts, which is better than expected, but Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni was quick to criticize Orlando’s approach after the game.

“I hate it for the fans,” D’Antoni said according to NBA.com. “They can come to practice for free and watch him shoot 40, 50 foul shots. They don’t even have to pay for the tickets. I’ll invite them all.”

If the Magic’s plan was to foul Dwight in the second half in an attempt to get back into the game, it backfired. Howard found a rhythm and converted 16 of 20 free throws in the final two quarters.

“With any player, if you get 39 cracks at it, it’s only natural for you to gain some type of rhythm,” Magic guard Arron Affalo said. “Usually the percentages kick in when you take five to 10. But when you actually make a few, you gain some confidence, and he did a good job of making them down the stretch for them.”

D’Antoni may not like hack-a-Dwight, but he has made it clear that he does not intend to bench his center late in games because of it. Howard rewarded D’Antoni’s confidence in him by shooting lights out from the line in the second half on Tuesday. The more practice he gets now, the better off he’ll be down the stretch.

The Los Angeles Lakers lost on Wednesday night — again. This time, it was the San Antonio Spurs that added to L.A.’s losing streak, which currently sits at five games. As the new head coach who is supposed to turn his talented roster into a championship contender, Mike D’Antoni is under a tremendous amount of pressure. Perhaps even too much.

“At least they put my (hotel) room on the third floor, so if I did jump I would just hurt my ankle a little bit,” D’Antoni said Wednesday night, via the LA Times.

The Lakers are doing plenty of scoring. Kobe Bryant is averaging over 30 points per game. Steve Nash has averaged over 10 assists per game during the losing streak and the team has scored 100 or more points in 18 of its last 20 games. Their defense, on the other hand, has been abysmal.

With a record of 15-20, it won’t be long before L.A. fans have to start wondering if their team is in danger of missing the playoffs. It may only be January, but the pressure continues to build as the losses pile up. And if the team wasn’t struggling enough when healthy, Dwight Howard has missed the last two games with a shoulder injury.

Most NBA fans thought this Lakers team would be fun to watch, but they thought that fun would come in the form of blowout victories — not gross incidents involving towels. If D’Antoni can’t get his team to figure out how to stop opponents from scoring on every possession, L.A.’s season could be ending early.

Photo Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

One of the main reasons the New York Knicks have been successful this season is their vast improvement on defense. They have allowed 97.5 points per game, which ranks near the middle of the pack in the NBA. Much of their improvement has come with Amar’e Stoudemire out nursing a knee injury. The Knicks have cooled off a bit as of late, but many wonder if Stoudemire’s return will help or hinder their growth.

Stoudemire has always been considered an above-average player offensively, but defense has never been been his strong suit. Accoring to Amar’e, that’s because no one before Mike Woodson ever worked with him on it. Considering Stoudemire played almost his entire career under Mike D’Antoni with the Phoenix Suns and in New York, I guess it would be fair to view that as a shot at his former coach.

“I think having a defensive coach for the first time in my career is going to help,” Stoudemire said Wednesday according to the NY Daily News. “I’ve never been taught defense in my whole career. So to now have a coach who actually teaches defense and teaches strategies and knows positioning and posture and how to guard different plays, it’s going to be helpful.”

The Knicks’ defense began improving when they acquired Tyson Chandler, so it’s more likely that the improvement happened in spite of Stoudemire — not because of him. About a month ago, Stoudemire said he would be willing to accept a bench role when he finished recovering from knee surgery. He returned on New Year’s Day and scored six points off the bench. It appears he will stay there for at least the immediate future.

“I’m taking it as a challenge,” Stoudemire said. “I’m going to accept the challenge. And I’m going to try to improve as a player.”

The Knicks are currently 21-10 and in first place in the Atlantic Division, but they have scored more than 100 points only twice in their last eight games. Stoudemire’s return may not help the team defensively, but they aren’t exactly lighting it up on offense. While many fans would have been happy trading him when New York began the season looking like the NBA’s best team, they might welcome the boost he provides on offense down the stretch.

Photo credit: Steve Mitchell-US PRESSWIRE

The mounting frustration over the Lakers’ poor start to the season culminated with new head coach Mike D’Antoni snapping at a media member following the team’s 100-94 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday.

Los Angeles Times columnist T.J. Simers, who has been an irritant to most LA sports figures for the past two decades, was grilling D’Antoni over the team’s lack of defense when he got a rise out of the coach.

Apparently Simers was questioning whether the Lakers had practiced defense on Tuesday before their game.

“You’re criticized for (unintelligible) defense. You come here, you go to shootaround this morning, you do a film session, and a little old shooting on everyone’s own …” Simers was saying before D’Antoni interrupted him.

“I didn’t see you at the film session,” D’Antoni interjected.

“So that’s not true then?” Simers asked.

“No, that’s not true,” D’Antoni answered.

“So you worked on defense then?” Simers pressed.

“Hell yeah. We worked for a half-hour. You’re starting to piss me off. You’re starting to piss me off,” he repeated. “Because you said something that’s not factually correct.”

D’Antoni apparently went on to defend how much the team works on defense before Time Warner Cable’s feed of the postgame news conference cut away.

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Los Angeles Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni says he does not plan to bench Dwight Howard at the end of games despite the center’s struggles at the free throw line.

The Houston Rockets became the latest team to foul Howard purposely at the end of a game and see the strategy work in their favor. They began fouling Howard when they were down 97-93 with 3:17 left on Tuesday. Howard went 5-for-10 from the line after being fouled five straight times, and the Rockets went on to win the game 107-105.

Coach D’Antoni said that Howard’s missed free throws weren’t the issue, and that he wouldn’t bench him anyway to solve the problem.

“You don’t do that to a guy, and he made his foul shots. He’s not the reason that our defense breaks down, he’s not the reason that stuff happens,” D’Antoni said, via Lakers.com. “He’s gotta work through this. You take him out now, and what are you going to do, take him out all the time? You have a player that’s going to be your franchise player and you don’t do that to him.

“It’s not him that’s causing the problem. It’s not a good thing, a knee-jerk kind of reaction … he’s fine. That’s not a problem. He made the last 4 out 6, and you have to go up and knock them down, and he will. We shouldn’t even be talking about that, because it shouldn’t come down to that. We shouldn’t have had 19 turnovers, and we shouldn’t lose our guys on a switch or on the perimeter. That’s not him; he’s doing a hell of a job, and he will continue to do that, and we’ll work through this.”

D’Antoni is right in his mindset. You cannot plan to bench one of your franchise players at the end of all your close games, especially when he has such a big impact defensively. However, he needs to come up with a better solution. D’Antoni might have to consider taking Dwight off the floor when the Lakers get the ball, and then reinserting him into the game when they’re on defense.

The numbers speak the truth about the matter.

According to stats from ESPN, Dwight Howard’s free throw shooting has been awful in “clutch time,” which is defined as times when the score is within five in last five minutes of fourth quarter or overtime.

Howard is 7-16 (43.8%) during “clutch time,” while the rest of the Lakers are 13-19 (68.4%).

Howard is shooting .468% on free throws this season, which is down from his career average of .584. Even Shaq was never this bad at the line when teams began employing the “Hack-a-Shaq” strategy against his teams (he was a .557 shooter in his worst year). Howard really needs to get his act together.

Mike D’Antoni helped turn the Phoenix Suns into a championship contender before abruptly leaving for the New York Knicks after the 2008 season, and now the current Lakers coach says he regrets making the move.

D’Antoni led the Suns to the playoffs four straight seasons. They even made back-to-back appearances in the Western Conference Finals, and I’ll argue if it weren’t for a few suspensions to key players in the playoffs, they likely would have won a championship. But after a first-round exit from the 2008 NBA playoffs, a discouraged D’Antoni decided to take the big money the Knicks were offering.

In an excellent interview with ESPN LA’s Ramona Shelburne, D’Antoni said he shouldn’t have taken the job.

“I shouldn’t have gone to New York,” D’Antoni told Shelburne.

“I should have stuck in there and battled. You don’t get to coach somebody like him [Nash] too many times. It’s pretty sacred and you need to take care of it. I didn’t.”

D’Antoni stepped into a bad situation with the Knicks. The team was coming off seven straight losing seasons, and it wasn’t until D’Antoni’s third season that they finally achieved a winning record during his tenure. He went 121-167 (.451) over three-plus seasons as their coach before stepping down in March after clashing with star player Carmelo Anthony.

He provided further insight about why he left Phoenix.

“I think we got frustrated and I got frustrated. That’s why I left. We were there, it seemed like we deserved it, and then it seemed like something happened all the time. Maybe we weren’t good enough either. We have to understand that.

“I probably irrationally made a decision right when the season was over. You should take a month to figure it out. I shouldn’t have left. That was my fault.”

D’Antoni also told Shelburne that he initiated the split from the Suns.

Maybe it wasn’t the wisest move for D’Antoni to leave for New York, but now he’s in a great situation. He’s coaching several All-Stars and potential Hall of Famers on the Lakers, and he has an excellent chance to win the title that eluded him in Phoenix. If he finally wins one, then he shouldn’t regret anything about his career arc.

The Los Angeles Lakers have taken heat from a number of people over the way they handled their coaching change situation earlier this month, and Charles Barkley is one of the latest. Barkley said he is a fan of Mike D’Antoni as a coach, but he disagrees with the way the Lakers treated Phil Jackson.

“Well, I just thought they disrespected Phil Jackson,” Barkley told The Mike Lupica Show on 98.7 ESPN New York. “Mike D’Antoni is a very good coach. But you could just tell they are not going to hire Phil Jackson. I just thought they disrespected him, to be honest with you. If you look at all the background, they told him to think about the job, but they were interviewing Mike D’Antoni on the side. They clearly weren’t going to give him a choice to make a decision, so they should have treated him better.”

Doc Rivers shared almost the exact same thoughts as Barkley, and their opinion seems to be a popular one. Jackson won multiple championships with L.A., and most feel as though the Lakers could have handled the situation better. As for D’Antoni being the man for the job, Barkley believes he’s going to have to change his style for the Lakers to succeed.

“Mike D’Antoni is going to have to change,” Barkley said. “That team is old. Kobe is old. Steve Nash is old. Ron Artest is old. They are not going to be able to play his style. He’s going to have to change his style as a coach. Like I said, Steve Nash got hurt running up and down the court. He can’t play like he did eight to nine years ago and he ran that system. … Only thing that is going to be hurting Los Angeles is going to be a bunch of pulled hamstrings and groins if they try to play that fast.”

Barkley may have a point. D’Antoni’s up-tempo offense is perfect for making stars out of young players like Jeremy Lin, but will he have to adjust in order to win with aging veterans and superstars? The Lakers won’t have a ton of time to figure it out.

Thanks to Sports Radio Interviews for transcribing the interview
Photo Credit: Cary Edmondson-US PRESSWIRE