The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 348 - 83 It Can’t Get Any Worse

[In the 1986 Western Conference Finals, we headed to Houston feeling relaxed and joyful. After all, we were leading 2-0 and could already see the Finals waving at us.]

[I was extremely excited inside. I thought this was a great opportunity to get revenge on the people of Houston, to make them regret not choosing me back in 1983.]

[It proved that going into the matchup with this mindset was wrong. We underestimated the Houstonians’ intense desire for victory and Hakeem’s determination to defeat Ah Gan.]

[During the playoffs, Hakeem had no private contact with me. Of course, we would exchange a few words on the court, chat during downtime, but when things got heated we would trash-talk, which was rare in the past.]

[Hakeem had been notably provoked in the first two games; suppressed by Ah Gan, beaten by Ah Gan’s buzzer-beater, but he seemed relaxed before the start of Game 3, even smiling.]

[Before, he always wore a bitter face, tense, as if he was about to storm the beaches of Normandy. Yet that evening, he loosened up, greeting the referees, Ah Gan, and even me.]

[On the other hand, Ah Gan looked much more serious, frowning. Ah Gan was one of the few on our team that always stayed tense. He kept telling everyone on the flight to Houston that winning at the Summit Arena wouldn’t be easy, that we needed to focus, completely.]

[We were all surprised. Ah Gan is a very confident person; he had just pulled off a spectacular buzzer-beater, a clip that would play for thirty years on the local Portland television stations.]

[As it turned out, Ah Gan’s concerns were justified. In our first game in Houston, we faced a relentless counterattack from the Rockets. My mother, brother, and sister were all there that night to watch the game at the Summit, rooting for the Rockets. I played terribly; I can’t even remember how many turnovers I had.]

[The Rockets applied extremely harsh defensive pressure on our backcourt. I even struggled to get the ball to Ah Gan reliably. We lacked a real, experienced Point Guard.]

[’Terry Porter: In the ’86 Western Finals, our backcourt faced the most dreadful test. Whether or not the guards could support Ah Gan was the key to victory. Bill Fitch’s defensive strategy was very targeted; Ah Gan had to face the Houston Twin Towers alone. At that time, I was sitting on the bench watching the intense confrontations, constantly questioning myself - could I hold up if I went on? Could I support the team?’]

[The backcourt issue was quite fatal. Anyone else, including Ah Gan, could take on a part of the ball-handling and organizing, but that wasn’t their primary role; they all had other tasks. Facing the Rockets’ high-intensity defense, we needed an experienced guy.]

[Unfortunately, we had none. When I had to undertake a lot of the ball-handling duties, some mistakes were inevitable. I was stripped of the ball, made bad passes, and I was under huge pressure.]

[Those Houstonians who once supported me were all booing me, not stopping from the first quarter. They cheered loudly when I made mistakes, yelling and shouting at me.]

[The pre-game relaxation had long vanished. My entire body, my whole mood, was tense. I was in extreme discomfort; we fell behind from the start.]

[We were down by eleven at the half. Come the third quarter, we desperately chased points, but the problem was that our rhythm was off, we made a lot of small mistakes.]

[Ah Gan and Walton kept coming out to receive and set screens, they were constantly hammered, and every possession became a struggle. Ah Gan was tightly double-teamed by Olajuwon and Sampson.]

[I had never witnessed such intense defense; they were almost about to fight in the paint. I bet there were many illegal defenses, but the refs didn’t call them.]

[Ah Gan didn’t complain; he kept fighting for points. At the beginning of the fourth, we managed to narrow the gap to four, but turnovers once again wrecked our efforts. Tonight, we totaled 21 turnovers, which was just awful.]

[This was the worst I had ever performed in the playoffs. I scored only 8 points, made 3 assists. I was frozen out. The Trail Blazers lost the game, 101:105, and the series was now 2-1.]

[’Vandeweghe: The third game was a turning point. By then, the Rockets had found some tricks to victory. Their defensive intensity became very high, with many forceful moves. Both Jim Paxson and I were a bit uncomfortable. Some moves, which would be fouls in the regular season, went uncalled by the referees, as they encouraged physical play. For shooters like us, physicality often means losing our touch. Moreover, our backcourt was under pressure, our offense was no longer smooth, and we became extremely reliant on Ah Gan.’]

[After the game, I refused to do interviews. The next day, I canceled my meeting with the fraternity from the University of Houston’s basketball team. I couldn’t face them; I needed to reflect and prepare for Game 4.]

[The team realized the problem: our backcourt was too weak. We only had Terry Porter and Steve Colter as Point Guards, and they were even younger than me, hardly able to shoulder the responsibility.]

[After all, not everyone is Ah Gan. He played like a Point Guard in the third game, achieving a triple-double, but the support we gave him was not enough.]

The situation didn’t improve in Game 4. Summit Arena was bigger than Memorial Coliseum, and Hakeem was still looking relaxed before the game. I think he had found a way to handle Ah Gan.

Although his numbers had dropped, in the third game he and Sampson together scored as much as Ah Gan did, but they invested a lot in the defense.

Many years later when I asked Hakeem, he told me he had really adjusted his mindset towards facing Ah Gan. During the game, he let go of himself and fully integrated into the team. He said he saw no Ah Gan, only the game and the victory.

’Olajuwon: Before Game 3, Sampson and I stayed up all night drinking and watching videos. We communicated fully and poured our hearts out. We resolved some past issues and had only one goal in mind—to defeat Ah Gan and the Trail Blazers. Later, Fitch told us that it was even more important to sever the connection between Ah Gan and his teammates, letting him score 60 points but still not win the game. In Houston, we did just that. We still couldn’t completely limit Ah Gan, but the Trail Blazers’ offense was shattered by our systematic defense.’

At that time, I couldn’t do the same as Hakeem. All I could think about was how to accurately pass the ball to the inside, how to initiate a counterattack, and how to beat that damned McGrady.

The Rockets continued to press our backcourt, and we found some methods to deal with it, like long passes and a lot of assists and screens. This worked to some extent.

But I want to say that this was not our game rhythm. When Ramsay went with three tall players, we played a good positional battle, but the problem was still in the backcourt. We made fewer mistakes, but our initial passes were terrible.

The result of bad initial passes was that we couldn’t get our fast breaks going. Our positional attack was slower than usual, and at the end of the game, it devolved into Ah Gan going one-on-one. This was the Rockets’ trap, a net meticulously woven by Olajuwon and Sampson to ensnare Ah Gan.

Ah Gan scored 40 points in the fourth game, but he couldn’t do it alone. 105:107, Ah Gan missed the final shot that could have won the game, and we lost the fourth game, tying the series at 2:2.

Things started looking grim. On the plane back to Portland, the relaxed atmosphere was long gone, and everyone was silent. We hoped things would be better at home, that we would win the match point game, that we wouldn’t disappoint the Portland fans.

But to be honest, leaving Portland with a 2:0 lead and returning with a 2:2 scoreline felt terrible.

About a thousand fans came to Portland Airport to welcome us. They cheered for us and gave us comfort, but I have to say I felt ashamed and under a lot of pressure back then.

Our fifth game was do or die, but as it always happens when you think you can’t afford to lose, something unexpected occurs. The unexpected event in the fifth game was our poor shooting from outside. Every year in the playoffs, there’s always one game where the team’s shooting turns terrible, and even open shots won’t go in.

Unfortunately, that year in the playoffs, that unlucky night fell on the crucial Game 5. The Rockets zealously shrank their defense, giving us plenty of chances from outside, but we just couldn’t make the shots.

The more we missed, the more nervous everyone got. We quickly fell behind and had to struggle to catch up. It was a terrible feeling. At that moment, all I wanted was to slam the ball into the hoop. I was restless, committed fouls from charging three times, lost my temper, and complained to the referee, ending up with a technical foul.

The referee that night was Jack O’Donnell, and that’s when I started disliking him. He held grudges, something a referee shouldn’t do, although he was fair.

We fought until the last moment, but the momentum and luck were not on our side. Ah Gan hit a three-pointer that could have changed the game, but he stepped on the line.

It was like a volcano suddenly erupting, then after half a minute, the flames instantly extinguished. Everybody was extremely downhearted.

He only stepped on the line by a little bit. The shot counted for two points, but we failed to tie the game. After the game, everyone blamed the Avia shoes, wondering if they were made too thick.

94:95, in the end, Hakeem intentionally missed a free throw to waste time. We lost the game. It was the worst day I had experienced in 1986, and I don’t even remember how I got back to the locker room.

The atmosphere in the locker room was as somber and heavy as a funeral. Ah Gan walked in and said, ’We can’t play worse than we did tonight, right? So, we have two more games. We can win them, correct?’

If I said that everyone was inspired and immediately cheered up, that would be total crap. It was impossible.

But at that moment, I really did feel a lot better, and then we started brewing a comeback, right there in the locker room, starting from that terrible loss. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

————Excerpt from Clyde Drexler’s autobiography "Clyde The Glide," published in 2004.