Antonio McDyess explains how he ended up tumbling to the floor with Dwight Howard in Game 4: “I threw him to the ground. Get it right,” quipped McDyess. “I felt that he was trying to bully me, so I saw him trying to throw me down. So I said, ‘I’m not falling by myself. He gotta come with me.’ So I kind of grabbed him along with me when I was falling backwards.”
Tag Archive for 'Dwight Howard'
Just like last year, Rasheed Wallace has taken Dwight Howard under his wing by offering advice.
From A. Sherrod Blakely:
“Jason Maxiell is about as physical as any low-post defender in the league,” Magic coach Stan Van Gundy said. “He was able to use his strength and leverage to take Dwight out of position.”
The key to Maxiell’s defensive success against Howard was his ability to use his strength against Howard’s lower body, to move him from where his sweet spots on the floor.
“(Howard) has a very strong upper body,” said Maxiell, who is listed at 6-7. “But if you get down low and take his legs out, he’s not that powerful.”
When told of Maxiell’s comments, Howard replied, “That’s not true. Trust me.”
Howard may think Maxiell is talking trash, but I think Van Gundy knows better. All Maxiell is saying is one of the first things elementary school kids learn at basketball camp: defense is all about positioning and leverage, and the best defensive stance is one low to the ground.
The biggest shoulders in the world won’t help you rebound if your feet are moved off the block. It’s like when a running back and linebacker collide in football: the guy lowest to the ground is the one who can take the hit and keep moving forward.
And, for lack of a clever segue, I’ll just end this post now with an entertaining excerpt from a great piece by Austin Kent of HoopsAddict comparing Howard and Maxey:
A high school manchild-turned-NBA man’s man, Howard wasted no time becoming one of the best young big men in the galaxy. And fresh off a first round victory against the Toronto Raptors, he’s ready to prove it. In other words, even your very own mom would blush at the opportunity to invite this man for dinner, not because he’s faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive, but because Dwight Howard is Superman.
Now meet Jason Maxiell. Though it took him four years of college experience and two more buried deep in the bowels of the Detroit Pistons depth chart, Mad Max finally found his way into Flip Saunders’ esteemed rotation. He isn’t tall, he doesn’t smile a whole lot, his arms are long enough for mid-mission spaceship repairs and, unlike the Man of Steel over there, his muscles don’t look like he stole them from an action figure.
If you’re familiar with the DC Comics universe, Jason Maxiell is Bizarro Superman, an inverted replica of regular Superman. If you’re not familiar with the DC Comics universe, Jason Maxiell is simply the reason the Pistons have the best second unit in the NBA.
From my FanHouse post on Saturday’s game:
Things almost boiled over in the fourth when Rashard Lewis wrapped up Theo Ratliff under Detroit’s basket. Ratliff shook off the contact, but Lewis drew a technical, as well as an earful from Maxiell. “I wanted to make sure my teammate’s okay,” he said after the game. “We’re all family here, so I let it be known [if they] try to get physical, it’s not going to be that easy for them and we’re going to fire it back at them.”
When asked if the rough play affected the Pistons, Maxiell laughed. “Oh no, not at all,” he said. “We’re a rough team ourselves. We’re going to do the roughing.”
As Theo Ratliff explained later, though, he didn’t really need Maxiell’s help. From A. Sherrod Blakely:
“I told him (Maxiell) to calm down,” Ratliff said. “There’s no sense in guys coming to my rescue. I mean, that was Rashard Lewis. He tried to foul me hard, but he’s a three-man (small forward). It was no big deal.”
Shard isn’t known to be the most physical player in the league, but it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have pride, and he didn’t appreciate hearing from someone on Detroit’s bench:
Ratliff’s comments made their way back to Lewis, who was visibly upset.
“You can have a lot of energy in five minutes a game,” said Lewis, referring to Ratliff’s limited role. “What’s he played? 15 games. Tell him to come out and guard me.”
But that’s the thing: the Pistons know they have a lot of energy playing five minutes at a time. As Flip Saunders explained during Saturday’s post-game press conference, it’s literally part of their strategy.
“[The] big thing is we try to send a lot of bodies at him. And we wanted to keep a fresh body on him all the time,” said Saunders. “I took Maxey out, I think five minutes, six minutes into the game. Some of the guys on the bench are saying, ‘Why take him out?’ I said because I want to keep somebody fresh on him, and our guys have to know that they don’t have to play 10 minutes, they can play six minutes and they can go as hard as they can, and hopefully what it’ll do is when you get in the third and fourth quarter, it’ll wear him down.”
And as Krista Jahnke explains, that’s just what the Pistons did on Saturday:
Maxiell worked the first five and a half minutes on Howard before Saunders subbed him out. Then Rasheed Wallace took over manning up Howard. Later, Antonio McDyess switched onto him, and for 12 minutes Ratliff helped out, too. When Howard put the ball on the floor, the Pistons would occasionally send help, but they battled him for the most part one-on-one.
“We’ve got so many guys running in there 6-10, big guys stepping in there after them,” Ratliff said. “They really can’t match up with us.”
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