I Made ESPN...

On Monday, the Raptors again, were on the wrong end of a nail-biting finish. Hosting the Mavs, Toronto built up a 6-point lead after Chris Bosh capped a 9-0 run with a pair of free-throws. That with just 2:07 left in the 4^th. Then Dirk Nowitzki went off. With 1:42 remaining, Dallas missed a jumper and the Raps couldn’t snag the bouncing board. The Mavs retrieved it, and dished it out to Dirk for an open-3, kicking off a personal 8-0 run.

Matt Bonner tied it up with a long-2 (his foot was on the line), with just 2 seconds left. Overtime? Dallas said no thanks.

The Raptors took away any impending pass to Nowitzki, forcing Dallas to burn a timeout. The Mavs reworked the play, and drew up something that made the Raptors look foolish. The inbounds pass went right to Jason Terry, who saw a week’s worth of daylight in the lane. JT drove through, and dropped a floater, just slivers above the outstretched hand of Bosh, as time expired.

Mavericks 93, Raptors 91

After the game (since the return of a co-worker meant I was back to the visitor’s dressing room), I spoke to Dallas Coach Avery Johnson, who responded to a question about the final play as being the work of assistant coach Dell Harris. “We both wanted to get to ball to JT,” Coach said. “We just wanted to get it to him in different ways… I’ll buy him lunch for drawing up that play.” As the scrum was nearing its end, the man once known as the General went into an inspirational rant about the Raptors’ future, which I used in one of my two post-game reports. Here it is, in its beautiful entirety:

“We were concerned coming into this game. Not because of their record or anything. We think this is a good basketball team…we think Sam Mitchell – forget about the record – he’s doing a good job with this basketball team. They’ve had some tough losses. Here, another game they lose by two; fortunately we won, and we wanted to win…but you know, they lost to the Clippers, they lost to Sacramento…they played well against Miami at home. So again, this is a tough basketball team, I just hope the people here don’t give up on the team or their coach.”

A few quick questions, and the cameras clicked off, coach left and we went scurrying into the Mavs’ dressing room.

Terry was already sitting down, with his feet planted in a tub of ice water. I squeezed my way in beside a reporter from the Score, and got right beside JT. Blah blah blah… a few questions came and went… I want to get to the part that got me smiling the day after. As the scrum was starting to draw to a close, the reporters started to walk away, when I spoke up and asked Jason: “Did you know you had enough time to take the inbounds pass and nail the floater?” All the reporters came fluttering back just before JT replied: “That’s something I work on all summer long, during the season, individual workouts…you take one, two dribbles, and float it up… it takes less than two seconds, I guess it was perfect.”

We waited about 20 minutes for Dirk to come out, and say nothing fabulous.

I was doing my morning run-through of the basketball daily’s today, which included a stop at ESPN’s daily dime (via Insider). At #8 was a blurb from Elias Sports Bureau, which featured the response to the question I had asked JT.

I was brimming with pride. So much so that I changed my MSN name… that’s how you know I felt good. It may seem insignificant to you, but to someone who is still not the most confident in his line of questioning, this was glory at its best.

Time to build on it.

The Raptors hit the road for stops in Atlanta, Jersey, and Washington, before hosting the Lakers next week. We’ll chat then.