With 2:48 left in a road game in Newark, the Portland Trail Blazers and New Jersey Nets were tied at 87.
Lookout, crunch time. Ignore, for a moment, that this was a middling team playing a poor one, or that the stands were nearly empty. This was, if you're a basketball fan, a moment. Tactics would be deployed. There was about to be a show.
Only: How were we to know that the show would fizzle thanks to one team's utter lack of timeouts?
Nate McMillan called timeout with 2:48 left. It was a noteworthy one (the TV broadcasters were in a tizzy) because what in fact happened was that the Nets had called a 20-second timeout, which eventually rolled right into Portland's full timeout, which created a lavish, and confusingly long, break in the action.
That left McMillan's team with three timeouts.
They're incredibly valuable, of course. In close games, timeouts not only let coaches deliver wisdom, rest and water, but they also allow an array of tactical advantages. They are chances to move the ball, to substitute players and -- more importantly than anything else, I'd argue -- to extend a game if you get behind............
.................So, with three timeouts to deploy over the game's final 2:48, surely McMillan would get stingy and save some for the closing seconds, right?
Wrong. Instead, he called one a minute later, another a minute after that, and his final timeout with 20 seconds left and his team down four.
I have nothing but respect for Coach McMillan, who knows all kinds of stuff I don't about the game and his team. Quite possibly the team would have been down eight or ten had he not called those timeouts earlier. (I'm also picking on McMillan arbitrarily here -- lots of coaches do this.)
But I know this: There's a steep price to pay for having no timeouts in the waning seconds of a close game. And Portland paid it..............
