ESPN NBA Insider - 7/7/04

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Wednesday, July 7 Updated 11:44 AM EST

Rumor Central

Raptors may be forced to deal Carter

WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Vince Carter
Raptors
? Jul. 7 - Carter doesn't like the Raptors' new general manager (Rob Babcock). He doesn't like their lottery pick (Rafael Arajuo) and, according to ESPN's David Aldridge, wants out of the city as soon as possible. If Carter wants to leave the Raptors, then there's nothing the Raptors can do about it anymore.
"My feeling is, and Sam (Mitchell, Toronto's new coach) feels, too, that we've done everything we can," general manager Rob Babcock said in the Toronto Star. "If there are things with Vince that are in the past, they are in the past. There's only so much we can do, but we're here for him and we feel comfortable we're establishing a basketball team Vince or any other player would love to play for."



WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Paul Pierce
Celtics
? Jul. 7 - Just as quickly as word spread that Pierce was on the trading block, Celtic general manager Danny Ainge wants to squash the rumors. "I don't like to comment on trade rumors, but I want to put an end to speculation about Paul Pierce," said Ainge in the Boston Globe. "I have absolutely no intention of trading Paul Pierce. I believe we have two special pieces, in Doc and Paul. I want to see them grow together. I believe that relationship will help make the Celtics an exciting and competitive franchise in the future."


WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Kenyon Martin
Nets
Nets
Nuggets
Jazz
Hawks Jul. 7 - Martin begins his free-agent tour in Denver, where he could join Carmelo Anthony, Marcus Camby and Nene to form an active, athletic front line. Anthony, for one, thinks the Nuggets have a shot at luring K-Mart west. "From what I've heard, he wants to come here. That's just what I heard," Anthony told the Newark Star Ledger. "I haven't really talked to him. I just heard he wants to play in Denver."
Martin also is scheduled to visit Utah and Atlanta, to other teams with enough cap space to sign him to a lucrative deal without having to work a sign-and-trade deal with New Jersey. Nets owner Bruce Ratner has made re-signing Martin the team's top priority but stopped short of saying the team would sign him at maximum dollars, the Bergen County Record reports.



WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Jamal Crawford
Bulls
Bulls
Knicks Jul. 7 - For the second time in four days, the Knicks and Bulls have swapped proposals that would send Crawford to New York. The Knicks would send Kurt Thomas to the Bulls in one proposed sign-and-trade package. Also mentioned in the swap have been Othella Harrington and Frank Williams of the Knicks and Eddie Robinson and Jerome Williams of the Bulls.
"Well, if the players are players I like and think can play and help us, it wouldn't be that big of a problem," Isiah Thomas told the New York Daily News. "If we take contracts, then we have to give contracts. We're not under the cap, so it would be a dollar-for-dollar trade."



WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Erick Dampier
Warriors
Wizards
Grizzlies
Mavericks
Pacers?
Jazz? Jul. 7 - Add the Wizards to the list of teams pursuing Dampier. The Washington Times reports there at least eight teams after the restricted free agent, with the Grizzlies thought to be leading the charge. However, Memphis has only its mid-level exception to offer, and Dampier reportedly is looking for a multi-year deal starting at $10 million per season.
In Washington, though, Dampier would be reunited with former Warriors teammates Gilbert Arenas, Atawn Jamison and Larry Hughes. The Wizards would need to work out some sort of sign and trade package since they are only $5 million under the salary cap. The Mavericks are also in pursuit of Dampier either as their center of the future or as another piece to lure Shaq away from the Lakers.



WHO INTERESTED THE SKINNY

Troy Hudson
Timberwolves
Raptors
Timberwolves Jul. 7 - It has come down to a bidding war between the Timberwolves and the Raptors with Hudson's current team making the latest proposal of about $18 million over five years with incentives that could boost that number to $25 million. Bill Neff, Hudson's agent, confirmed the proposal ... "But," he added in the Star Tribune, "we're not in the same place right now." A counter proposal has already been sent back to Minnesota that starts at around $5 million per season.

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Wednesday, July 7, 2004

By Chad Ford
ESPN Insider

The Pacers won a league-best and team-record 61 games last season. They took the eventual world champs deep into the Eastern Conference finals. They still have one of the youngest rosters in the league. So why has there been so much trade talk swirling around Indiana these days?
"We're just trying to make our team better," team president Donnie Walsh told Insider. "I don't think were looking to make a major change. But we know we have a few weaknesses. During the course of the season we covered them well. But they got exposed to a certain extent in the Detroit series. It's our job to smooth out the rough edges."

It's already been an eventful summer for the Pacers.

For starters, Al Harrington, the teams' sixth man, asked Larry Bird for a trade in his exit interview. Then Ron Artest, the defensive player of the year, skipped his exit interview completely.

Add those to the team's disappointing guard play in the playoffs, and the Pacers entered the offseason willing to make a deal. Their point guard needs to get older and more experienced. Their two guard is getting older by the minute. Their perimeter game, offensively and defensively, needs help, and they seem determined to fix it.

Indiana already has been in hot pursuit of everyone from T-Mac to Shaq to Ben Gordon this summer. Don't expect Bird to stop until he gets what he wants.

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New Clothes
By Dan Le Batard
Comment on this article





So much happened before Michael Jordan reached the mountaintop.



Take his first moments in China, for example. All those smiling faces at the airport, so many, waiting for Jordan with the kind of hyperventilation articulated by the front-page headline of the Beijing Daily Messenger: "How We Have Been Longing For Your Flying Glamour!" Jordan hadn't expected rock-star commotion, not on the other side of the world, not six years removed from championships, not in a bowing land known for polite rigidity. How did all these breathless people know when he'd land, anyway?


Thousands turned out to see MJ in China.
As Jordan looked out the window of Nike's Gulfstream V airplane, he marveled at how his vertical leap had carried him over so many cultural, political and language barriers. His global reach? The power of American fame? Maybe even the answer to any creeping doubt about how the second half of his life could possibly be as successful as the first? It was all there, right outside his window, screaming to be heard.


"Brought me to my knees," Jordan said later. He'd have to get used to that feeling. Because this wouldn't even be the most overwhelming airport scene of the trip.


Not nearly.


Jordan Asia Tour 2004 included Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo, but first came the insanity in Beijing. At what was supposed to be a little Nike-sponsored basketball court dedication, thousands of fans turned out, many in NBA jerseys. They held up signs that called Jordan "God," chanted his first name in accented English, stopped traffic by spilling into the streets. Asked what Jordan meant to him, one man said, "Everything. He is inspiration for life. He is a spirit." That sentiment surrounded him.


Six rows deep, standing atop bicycles and each other, fans crushed against a chain-link fence. One crammed kid squatted for hours under a mass of humanity and over a grid that reeked of sewage. Adults hung out office windows. Youngsters perched dangerously atop a three-story fence, fingers and toes going numb after hours in the same awkward, clinging position.


"Never thought it was this magnitude," Jordan said. "Very shocking."




The Mag in ESPN Motion



ESPN The Magazine got exclusive video access to Michael Jordan's trip to China.


• Motion: MJ at the Great Wall



• Motion: MJ's life after hoops







Maybe all these people showed up because the event was free. Or maybe they showed up because the country isn't. Whether it's America's food, its funk or its freedom, this stifled part of the globe longs for super-size slices of the United States. And what is more American, in every way, than Michael Jordan?


China is trapped in an interesting time, its citizens caught in the strained tension between past and future as the government nervously unwraps the present. Critical journalists are still jailed for revealing too much truth, and authorities shut down Internet blogs about freedom, but this still represents something closer to free speech than China has ever had.


Television programming is riskier, with shows like 24 airing after 11 p.m. to unprecedented ratings, but TV hosts are prohibited from wearing revealing (read: Western) clothes. Women wait longer to get married, divorce is up and Britney Spears is allowed to perform here-but only if the government preapproves her wardrobe. And, of course, you can buy a grande-vanilla-no-whip-non-fat latte at the Starbucks near a 500-year-old mosque where women remain relegated to one corner.


Into this collision of ancient and modern, wearing a $3,000 suit and a famous smile, comes the ultimate symbol of American grace, gluttony and greatness. Jordan's timing-he's always had a gift for it-isn't coincidental. Beijing is in one big hurry, full-court pressing after years of plodding government game plans created the need for catch-up. Hutongs, the traditional neighborhoods built for communal interaction, are being swept away by glass-and-steel high-rises, all those cranes and half-built buildings making the skyline for the world's second-fastest-growingeconomy (India's is first) look like God's cardiogram. Jordan has always had a need to be at the action's center, so past all those bicycles, he and his police escort headed toward that little park because the people of this city have something he wants, too. It's called yuan, Renminbi, kwai. Dollars, in other words.


Jordan fans scaled tall fences for a better vantage point to catch a glimpse of His Airness.
There are an awful lot of feet over here that Jordan thinks would look awfully good in his expensive sneakers. More than one billion consumers in China alone-or more than the U.S. and Europe combined. And every little opportunity is being taken to reach them, right down to Jordan's handlers scrambling to turn Gatorade bottles at a Hong Kong basketball game so the labels could be captured by the flashbulbs going off in his face.


Jordan saw the possibilities up close one enlightening morning, as he toured a collection of his products in a closed mall. Avid collectors bowed before him with staggering amounts of his memorabilia, and he was informed while at a computer between exhibits that not only had his brief visit generated more than 2,500 headlines, but that 10 million people right now were on-line watching a video feed of him staring into that computer. Later, after a 15-minute Internet chat, he was told that 2.6 million more of his fans were disappointed that he'd left, oh, 230,000 questions unanswered. And he was awed by the crowd at Beijing's airport?


"May we fly together to the brilliant future," read a sign for Jordan at the park. But he never saw it. A block away, he was only able to glimpse his undiminished power through the shield of smoke-tinted van windows before the court dedication was canceled. The police feared the chaos of too many of its citizens gasping for Air all at once.


Most of Jordan's Beijing experience was squelched like that. For three days, authorities didn't let him out for dinner or to shop. At one point, tired of staring at the same Nike contingent in the same hotel cigar bar, Jordan asked if he could at least meet some locals somewhere else in the hotel. Authorities said yes, then led him to another bar, one they'd just evacuated, so he could sit and stare at the same Nike contingent. This is why Jordan says people would want to be him for six weeks but not six years.


"Cabin-fevered," he called himself.


A luxury cabin, for sure. Jordan's suite overlooking Hong Kong, for example, went for $5,220 a night and came with a private gym, Jacuzzi, complimentary butler service (if anything at $5,220 a night can be considered complimentary) and the motto "Where luxury knows no limit and where the view goes on forever." But once you've seen one $5,220-a-night-view-goes-on-forever room, haven't you seen them all?


Jordan considered a disguise in Beijing before realizing that, despite the billion-plus people outside his hotel, not a whole lot of them were 6'6" and African-American. The only sightseeing he did came after fed-up Nike officials asked authorities if the only impression of Beijing they wanted Jordan to take home was of his four hotel walls.


And that is how Jordan finally came to the mountain.


It was meant to be very hush-hush, this trip to the Great Wall. How could anyone possibly guess which part of the wall Jordan would be visiting, seeing as how it stretches 4,500 miles (or as far as it is from Miami to the North Pole)? The area Jordan visited was indeed desolate, save for a few merchants, right up until his police escort approached. Then fans started to pour in from all points, wearing jerseys, holding signs, singing his name. There were so many of them that Jordan sat in his surrounded van and discussed canceling this outing, too. The buzz outside was not unlike the one you hear around power plants. Asked how he knew to be there, one fan claimed Jesus Christ told him.


Jordan had already driven past Tiananmen Square without being allowed to stop, so now he dropped into the clamor and, surrounded by security, made the 15-minute climb up hundreds of very steep steps, stopping once to catch his breath. Fans gave him gifts and fell to their knees before him, some trembling, some sobbing. A group chanted in sing-song, accented English, "Michael, we love you forever." At one point, everyone had their backs to the slender little wall, gazing instead upon another wonder of our world.


Most of China is atheist, but they clearly love their gods. Flying Man, they call Jordan, and when Flying Man finally arrived at the top of the mountain, he was greeted by a wind stiff and true. He stood there, gazing out over this ancient land, and it was a pretty breathtaking snapshot for all the cameras clicking around him. There they were together, for posterity, two of the most enduring symbols of communism and capitalism.


"Wow," Jordan said. And then he said it again.


"Wow."


He'd found a new world to conquer.


SO MANY new worlds at once. What about the unchartered one Jordan has entered compassless, accompanied by doubt and vulnerability? It's a *****, entering midlife, even when you haven't spent two decades as a symbol for youth, strength and flight. There is nothing quite so deafening for an athlete as the silence that follows a lifetime amid cheering, and few athletes ever, any sport, any time, have needed the feeling of being the tank's biggest shark the way Jordan has. Now that's gone, forever, and he's dealing with the loss. And unlike basketball, it ain't easy for him.


He has always been gluttonous about his appetites, whether smoking 12 cigars day, or playing 46 holes of a golf the day before a playoff game, or gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars in all-night sessions. But nothing else gave him the high of owning the loftiest level of sport, of being the conquering king. It wasn't just competition that satiated him. It was beating it. He has searched Yao-high and Boykins-low, and he vigorously shakes his head when asked if there is a replacement in retirement for the rush.


"I miss the game," he says, but that's not quite right. What he misses is dominating it. Controlling everything around him. And being the absolute best.


Since leaving the Wizards, Jordan has become as invisible as someone so visible can be, on purpose. He doesn't want to be near basketball again until he owns a team. He goes out of his way to avoid it, in fact. That's why, as the NBA playoffs reached a crescendo, he was on the other side of the world.


The god, it turns out, is mortal. "Basketball was the place where I could express who I was," he says. "I wish I could play forever, but I know I'm old. My knees hurt."


Michael Jordan still draws a crowd in China.

He says that last sentence a lot: "My knees hurt." And it makes him sound as ancient as when he describes hip-hop as "the kids' noise."


Jordan has gone from defying gravity to very much feeling it, even as he pushes to move on. "That's the tough part for a guy who for 20 years was able to do what he wanted to do in the game," he says.


Jordan looks at Kobe Bryant and LeBron James-or at their youth, anyway-with some envy, because the old shark in him very much wants to devour them both. Unsolicited, he mentions them by name, and then this: "Mentally, I could kick their butts. Physically, they have the advantage."


He says he plays what-if a lot. So it's easier to stay away. Instead, he helps to get the kids to school, plays golf and studies business opportunities at his Chicago office-none of which sounds as pulse-racing as beating Bryon Russell with the clock ticking down on a season's worth of stakes. Good luck trying to recreate that over coffee and cookies in some business bored-room.


Even gods hurt when the fall is from the mountaintop. At various points on this trip, Jordan said he lived now through his children, his brand, his memories and the athletes he's influenced. That's not the same as living through, you know, Michael Jordan. Which is what, once upon a time, much of the world did.


"Now it's going to be a memory instead of an action," he says. "When I played, it was an art form. I was able to create this picture. Now I can't create it with a paintbrush. I have to do it through other vehicles."


Jordan has spent a long time sculpting and honing himself and his image, and that is what he was peddling in Asia. He did it with eye contact, with smiles, with photo-ops among children, Tasmanian-deviling through Hong Kong and Taiwan in less than 24 hours each, all of it superficial by design.


This is the secret of the gods: let the humans in close enough to see you, but not so close that they notice the flaws. Then tell the people who make the commercials to polish the rest. That way, you always look perfect to the masses, who, as they watch you climb the mountain, very badly want to believe you are. The next day's newspapers help with the myth-making, as they did in Beijing, with fictional accounts of how Jordan had floated up that mountain as if it were flat.


Nike and Michael hope to sell millions of sneakers in Asia.
So the press conference in Beijing began with the edict "No personal questions." The one in Hong Kong was limited to just seven queries, three of which were about Jordan's favorite Asian food ("shrimp tempura"), his next commercial's star ("maybe my kids") and his advice to children on dunking ("jump high"). There was the illusion of intimacy in Tokyo, where Jordan did his only one-on-one interviews by zig-zagging from cramped hotel room to cramped hotel room as camera people scurried barefoot across beds, but all the talking points were preapproved ("Nike brand-sanctioned questions," as one publicist put it, seriously). A Nike representative literally poked you in the back if you asked Jordan too much about his first-ever visit (no media allowed) to one of the company's Asian factories.


From old to new, that's the miracle the god was trying to conjure in this land of fresh witnesses, but you could hear the mortality when he was asked how he could possibly make the second half of his life as rewarding as the first.


"I think I have all the right traits inside me-dedication, work ethic, joy," he said. Coming from the world's most confident athlete, the front of that sentence might have been more telling than the end.


I think.


WORSHIP TRANSLATES in any language. Jordan was introduced at a high school game in China with darkness, smoke and the Buffer-esque echoing, "From North Carolina, No.23, Super Air Majesty & " The fans outside his Hong Kong hotel held signs that read "God = Mr.23" and "No Mike, No Life" and "Bless Us, Flying One." And then there were all the disciples in Taiwan's airport.


It had been a long time since Jordan walked to baggage claim like other human beings. The crush around him in the Taipei airport was so suffocating that people couldn't see their feet, and a scared Jordan thought about running, because, in his words, "this can turn from admiration to tragedy." He added, "I don't want people to get hurt on my watch."


His gospel? Sneaker sales.


He was consistent about that everywhere. His final words to awed collectors in Beijing were to "keep collecting." He asked a Japanese TV couple dressed in tuxedo and evening gown to put the newest model of Air Jordans where the audience could see them. And his visits to gyms began with old Nike commercials on giant screens for the kids, the accompanying video not of him playing, winning or even talking, but just wearing. He always seemed to light up most when the younger him came up on those screens, and so the flashbulbs too would light up around him at those moments, creating quite the burst of illumination, a galaxy of little stars popping around the big one.


His arrival at those games, always mere minutes before their conclusion, was timed to allow minimum exposure as Michael Jordan, basketball player, but maximum exposure as Michael Jordan, clothing impresario. Each press conference began with Jordan Brand president Larry Miller giving a 15-minute slide presentation nobody was there to see and, given the language differences, nobody could understand anyway. In Hong Kong, the translator boiled down all that Miller said to 45 rat-a-tat-tat seconds while Jordan laughed. Given what we've made the man, it was not unlike watching Peter circus-bark for Bible sales with a silent Jesus sitting next to him. There were hundreds of yawning cameramen in the audience during Miller's presentation, many in Jordan jerseys, but cameras clicked and whirred only when a silent Jordan, seated next to Miller, lifted his bowed head from his manicured hands, or laughed as he did in that moment.


Jordan was here to smile and sell, and he was honest about it. The objective, he said, was "to expand the brand, connect with the consumer and let everyone understand the future of the brand has to come through Asia."


But don't get the idea he's just a giant puppet interested only in sole-selling. Jordan has taken away the swoosh of his brand, replacing it with a silhouette of himself jumping to carve out his own space. He refers to Nike as a rival. Manufacturing the competition he can't stop craving, he wants to sell more sneakers with Jordan Brand member Carmelo Anthony than Nike does with LeBron, and here's one of the reasons:


More cash will buy him the kind of freedom in basketball he has never had. It will buy him ownership. And, well, he still wants to kick everyone's butt at his game. His fire helped him to succeed like no athlete before him, and you can't just turn down the roar on that after a lifetime spent feeding it, and being rewarded for feeding it. You don't just put on a suit and cool off. The dominance-junkie still craves the winning, any game, any stakes, and while you might not like him channeling all that power into becoming a sneaker salesman, of all things, that's your problem, not his.


He wants to be a god only when it suits him now, on his terms. We might prefer to remember him as what he was once, not what he wants to be now, but that just means he's working harder at figuring out the second half of his life than the rest of us are working at figuring out life without him.


He's always taken us along for the ride, so it makes sense that now we, like him, must grow up and let go.