PORTLAND, Ore. - A long time ago, when Michael Jordan wasn't finished with his final comeback yet, Kobe Bryant sat in the Rose Garden in Portland and said, "There are only two killers in this league."
Jordan's 51 now, a fat cat on the sidelines owning a team. Bryant hasn't made a playoff appearance in two years. The show must go on, and it has-as seen by the most competitive first round in NBA postseason history.
But even better than good shows are great show-stoppers.
And we just saw 23-year-old drive a ' stake through the first NBA playoff series he ever played.
The Rose Garden has been renamed the Center here in Portland, and this city hadn't seen its one big-time team win a playoff series since before Jordan went to the Washington Wizards. That changed Friday night, when the Trail Blazers' second-year guard accepted the inbounds pass with 0.9 seconds left and proceeded to terminate Dwight Howard, James Harden and the Houston Rockets with a buzzer-beating three-pointer.
"It's definitely the biggest shot of my life-so far."
But he can play: The only players with more points (3,257) and assists (988) than in their first two NBA seasons are Oscar Robertson, Tiny Archibald, Allen Iverson and LeBron James.
Yet, most awe-inspiring, he can close.
There's always a bit of myth-making in this sort of thing, celebrating the makes and sending the misses under the rug, but the truth is that Bryant's and Jordan's overall mental toughness forged the belief that they were clutch as much as individual shot-making.
's case is a little different. He established credibility early with walk-off shots in consecutive games in December at Detroit and Cleveland that had the entire league talking.
Now is 4-of-12 on go-ahead shots in the final five seconds of games, according to ESPN Stats & Info. And as Bryant and Jordan know well, part of the building the big building is being open to digging the deep ditch:
It's misleading to call it fearlessness. What it is, really, is a willingness to fail.
When missed a buzzer-beater in a loss to the Los Angeles Lakers on March 3, he finished his postgame interviews and didn't leave. He lingered at the locker room door. stood and rehashed over and over with veteran Mo Williams his not quite selling the shot fake enough.
There are an awful lot of fantastic players who have no interest in owning failure.
Howard is one of them. He had a terrific series and scored 13 fourth-quarter points Friday night. He did also miss four of his last five free throws to take some shine off that output.
Afterward, he pointed fingers at his younger teammates for relaxing and losing focus. The closest to ownership he came was adding one clause-"including myself at times."
The last two words-a killer would never add those last two words.
Then Howard padded his own resume by exaggerating his level of success in reaching "the top."
"Nothing is easy," Howard said. "I've been to the finals. I've been to the Eastern Conference finals. I've been to the top. And it's not easy getting there. You've got to make everything count."
Howard, 28, signed with the Rockets so he could break away from older players such as Bryant, Steve Nash and Pau Gasol telling him what to do. So if the young Rockets failed to get Howard's veteran message about making everything count, first that's karma-and second that's partly Howard's failure to lead.
Portland's LaMarcus Aldridge is another fantastic player who had a terrific series-who also happens not to be cold-blooded. He acknowledged when he missed two potentially costly free throws late in Game 4 that after missing the first he was so rattled that he changed all of his mechanics on the second.
Aldridge, 28, had never won a playoff series until locked up this date with either San Antonio or Dallas, and Aldridge said about the afterglow, "It feels weird, but it feels good."
It's funny, though, how the moment tends to find the killers, because they don't think about feeling weird or rattled or scared.
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Before anyone else could react, it was go time.
Catch, shoot. Win, preen.
And killing is just one person's will outlasting another's in that ultimate moment.
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