[dime]Remembering Hakeem Olajuwon’s Unstoppable ’95 Playoffs, From The Players Who Were There

Bob Hill made some mistakes in that series, but Rudy kinda forced his hand on that one. Horry was playing at the 4 a lot and Rodman wasn't used to coming out to the perimeter to guard his man. He was a rebounder and wanted to stay near the basket.

What really screwed Hill and the Spurs in that series(aside from Dream's insane performance) was Clyde. Del Negro could not guard him, so he had to put Elliott on him as well as drag Willie Anderson off the end of the bench and use him out of desperation. The Spurs went 5-1 against the Rockets in the regular season, but most of those wins came before that Valentine's Day trade.

 

...and, just to add a bit more perspective (because I have a GREAT deal of respect for David Robinson the player and person)....

...in the subsequent title round of 1995, you saw the matchup between the Dream and the Diesel essentially become a wash, statistically...
...and even in the year before, when Hakeem faced another "classic" center in Patrick Ewing...

...Dream's eventual statistical dominance was not as pronounced against those two players as it was against Robinson, because neither Ewing or O'Neal relied so heavily on speed or quickness or athleticism to play good post defense, and were not so obviously fooled as Robinson often was.

They couldn't afford to play that way, really. Both Ewing and O'Neal knew that they had no way of staying with Olajuwon, so they were able to keep their feet for the most part...stay on the ground, and stay big, and force Hakeem to make shots over them...

...or around them, in a lot of cases...

Hakeem, by the time the '95 playoffs were finished, hadn't just completed the SECOND of two CONSECUTIVE championship runs (two of the most unlikely and improbable runs in NBA history, given context, history and competition)...

...he'd displayed a range of offensive capability for a CENTER that hadn't been seen in the modern era. I think only Wilt Chamberlain could perhaps boast anything like the offense repertoire Hakeem could as a center...

...and you hear and see now even guards coveting the footwork of Olajuwon as a big man, where that type of thing is almost non-existent...even with the uber-athletes of today's game....

...you weren't stopping Hakeem. Not with numbers. Not with bodies. Not with individuals. Not with seeding. Nothing.

...and if you couldn't stop The Dream, then you couldn't stop the Rockets.

...it's why I loathe Seattle to this day...they figured it out.

..and I STILL want that area to get an NBA team back...go figure....

 

The top 5 centers of the 90s are probably:

Hakeem, Shaq, Robinson, Ewing, Alonzo

Hakeem faced 3 of his closest peers in the playoffs and won every test. He also faced two of the best PFs ever in Barkley and Malone. That run may never find an equal. It would be like LeBron facing Kobe, Durant and Dwayne Wade in their peak years and dominating each on the way to two trophies while playing them each straight up while having to beat teams led by Harden and Curry along the way. Simply amazing and it might be the best basketball any player has ever played in a playoff stretch ever. It's exactly the reason no one calls Curry the best ever because he hasn't been tested in the playoffs by a quality peer.

 

Hakeem just blocked D Rob

94-93 Rockets with 2 min to go Game 6

 

Forget which game it was, but I seem to remember David Robinson's other quote being "I thought i played pretty good defense."

 

Would you mind elaborating how exactly Seattle figured it out? I was a toddler during the championship runs lol. Thanks!

 

...Don't mind if I do...!
(sorry about the late response, by the way...usually have other things to do)...

I used to hear all the time about how the Seattle Supersonics of that time (Gary Payton/Shawn Kemp/Detlef Schrempf et al) were the only team that could (and often did) give the Rockets a rough time...

...much was made of the fact that the Rockets lost only two playoff series between 1993 and 1995...and both losses came at the hands of the Sonics (West 2nd round, 1993, and West 2nd round 1996)...

...and that, historically, the Sonics always seemed to get the better of the Rockets in the postseason (Hakeem, when he was 'Akeem' lost to Seattle in 6 games in 1986, I believe...had a monstrous game 6 there in defeat...)...

...people were even saying (Seattle included) that the only reason that the Rockets got out of the Western Conference for their championship runs was because Seattle had done them a favor and bowed out in the first round and never faced them.

I hated that line of logic with a passion. You beat whoever's in front of you. And if Seattle wasn't good enough to even get to play the Rockets, then they were the last people to suggest how legitimate the Rockets' championships were.

Of course, any talk like that is just gamesmanship. But fans will be fans, you know.

And also, there was a lot of truth to the claim. History wasn't on the Rockets' side in facing the Sonics.

But more to the point...Seattle faced the Rockets 3 times a year in the regular season, on average. They knew who the Rockets were, and most of their contests were tooth-and-nail, and very close. There was one game in the old Summit in 1993 (early season, I think) where the Rockets and Sonics played what I thought was the best basketball game of the year...a low-scoring defensive slugfest that might have looked ugly, but only because both squads were so evenly matched...particularly defensively.

George Karl, Seattle's coach at the time, said that Hakeem Olajuwon was the most difficult player to play against that he ever saw. And Karl held to that notion firm, even when the Sonics weren't playing the Rockets in 1994 and 1995.

When Seattle finally does get to play the Rockets in the playoffs in 1996...I thought to myself that this was where all the critics and naysayers could finally get to shut up. The Rockets, for two years running, had beaten all comers...they literally transformed themselves right in the middle of the playoff pressure cooker just a season before...they found ways to win...they still had one of the best players in the league in Hakeem...anybody betting against Houston would again get a large, piping-hot bowl of crow to eat by the end of it all...

...and then George Karl gets up in front of a national television audience, after the Sonics beat whoever it was they faced in the first round that year, and proceeds to say exactly the same thing he said three years before...Hakeem was the guy you had to stop if you had any chance at all of beating the Rockets. He was not going to let Hakeem do to his club what he had done to just about everybody else for the last couple of years...he was going to zone/trap/double-team (or, by the rules of the day, cheat) Hakeem as soon as he crossed half-court...maybe even sooner if he could get away with it.

If he was going to lose to ANYBODY in a Rockets uniform, by God, it wasn't going to be Hakeem.

He dared the officials to call illegal defense on his club every time, because that's what they were going to have to do if they wanted Seattle to play the Rockets any other way.

...and I'll be damned if that's not exactly what he and the Sonics did. They took the ball out of Hakeem's hands at virtually every opportunity. Whether their "zone-trap" defensive philosophy was technically legal or not was beside the point...they were committed to taking Hakeem out of the equation as often as possible and forcing the other Rockets to beat them....

...lots of things were going on with the Rockets that season, too...mostly injuries throughout the season kept the team from forming an identity yet again...but the thing that baffled me the most was the way the Rockets approached playing Seattle that year.

I always thought it was a major miscalculation to try to platoon a traditional 4-man alongside Hakeem, ESPECIALLY against Seattle. Seattle was a big team anyway, especially at the wings (Schrempf and Derrick McKey, primarily)...

...and the Rockets were so far ahead of the curve with Robert Horry playing four alongside Hakeem in the '95 postseason (going "small" before "small" was in vogue, in essence), that it sort of seemed to me that they had the distinctly unique blueprint at the time that they needed to contend with the Sonics.

It was a numbers game, essentially...one I think the Rockets took a wrong turn on, especially in retrospect.

Even though Seattle could play a small team effectively (the Sonics' roster was loaded that season-Vincent Askew, Hersey Hawkins, Nate McMillian, to name three), I felt the Rockets were better at the "small ball" line-up than the Sonics were...because the more room you gave Hakeem in the half-court, the harder the Rockets in general were to defend...and it would have exposed Seattle's "zone" more often than not...

Going big because Shawn Kemp was giving fits to whoever you put at the four (and ultimately led to the Rockets trading for Charles Barkley...another overreaction/miscalculation in my view) did more to help Seattle than it did anything else...

...because what you're essentially saying is that Kemp is a better player than Olajuwon. George Karl never said that, or even pretended to say that. He said over and over again that the best player on the floor for both teams was the Dream, and that they had to do whatever they could to take him out of the game. You don't hear any coaches make declarations like that...or commit so ferociously to an approach like that...every day.

The Rockets had the trump card (ouch), in my view...and didn't play it...

The teams that Seattle had faced before weren't the same as the Rockets had become in 1995. That team was the one that the Sonics should have faced and didn't.

Some of the reasons for that were out of the Rockets hands, no doubt.

But an awful lot of those reasons weren't.

Ah well.

At least zone defenses are legal now.

So something good came out of all that...right?

 

Ewing got his lunch bag stolen by Hakeem as well.

He was single covered by Hakeem most of the series and Ewing's FG% was pretty poor.

In contrast, Knicks did not cover Hakeem with just Ewing. Pat Riley threw everythign at Hakeem. Combination of defense from Ewing, Mason, Smith, and sometimes even Oakley. Combinations of double teams as well. Mutiple looks to keep Hakeem guessing with most signle coverage done with Mason.

Hakeem still shot at 50% for the entire series.

If you want to see what a single coverage of Hakeem by Ewing for the entire series would have resulted in....

Here you go.

Game 15 of the regular season that season when Ewing attempted to cover Hakeem by himself....

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Hakeem - 37 points and 13 rebounds at the Garden.

And this was a regular season Hakeem.

There is a reason Pat Riley decided against just Ewing trying to stop Hakeem in the finals...

A playoff Hakeem was even better.

Finals would have been over in 4 or 5 games because Ewing would have gotten destroyed just like Robinson was.

Ewing can thank Pat Riley that it didnt get as bad for him.



PS. Just for ****s and giggles..... highlights of another game in 88-89.

Hakeem - 29 points on 55% shooting and 25 rebounds.
Ewing - 20 points on 43% shooting and 3 rebounds lol...

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Marv Albert at the end of the clip..."Once again Hakeem Olajuwon has severely outplayed Patrick Ewing." And this was as early as 89. Dont think Pat Riley did not know this going into the Finals...

Knicks announcer at the beginning of the clip as Hakeem stuffs Ewing, "You dont think of Olajuwon as a shot blocker......" LOL!!!

 

Gearge Karl's 1-3-1 illegal zone defense is what gave them the advantage against the Rockets. They made it hard to get the ball to Hakeem in the post and when they made him give it up they all played the passing lanes when he tried to kick it out to his 3 point shooters.

 

Of course. If anyone gives seattle's claims credit. They would also have to give credit to the Rockets claim that they would have given MJ and the bulls fits should they have met. All speculation and fun for thought at this point.

 

Not looking to downplay Hakeem's consistent brilliance at all, ZBoy...
...even taking on what may appear to be a devil's advocate position, for all intents and purposes, in this conversation.

Hakeem was better individually than most of his big man peers because he was so versatile offensively.

How many centers do you run curl screens for to get them a 18-foot jumpshot?
How many centers do you clear out a side of the court for and let them take the ball to the basket from 23 ft.?

You don't stop that conventionally (be it individual or platoon), because you don't see that everyday.

Hakeem, offensively, to me, was always more forward than pivot. The fact that he could expand his offense from the blocks to the wings so seamlessly, by default in a lot of ways, created a unique (and like you point out, dire) problem for anybody facing him.

When people talk about players "...changing the game..."...really only a very few people can make a claim like that, from what most of us can claim to have witnessed in the modern era.

Michael Jordan, for one...because he won without what was once considered a necessity...a quality, all-star level big man (no disrespect intended to Dennis Rodman or Horace Grant)...coming routinely out of an Eastern Conference gauntlet of quality frontlines (Detroit, New York, Indiana, Miami...even Charlotte and Washington)...

...Magic Johnson, for another...one of the first players to be able to play any of the five positions effectively...and could dominate and control a game without scoring a "meaningful" point himself...

...and Hakeem Olajuwon. No post player (since Wilt Chamberlain, who you have to remove by default, because I don't believe it makes sense to compare "eras") could do offensively what Hakeem could...

...The Dream could play out at the high elbow like David Robinson or Alonzo Mourning...

...he could play down on the blocks like Shaquille O'Neal or Patrick Ewing...

...he could play from a spread floor like...well, like nobody else...

...he could do all those things better than any of his peers...and all at the same time and in the same game...

...so you don't kid yourself into thinking that you're going to find a way to slow him down...there's just too much ground to cover for your bigs...

...there's no way to stop somebody like that...the best you can do is get the ball out of his hands...

...which is what Seattle did in 1996...by hook and by crook...

...I don't mind respecting Patrick Ewing. He was the prototype center, to me. A lot of guys were back then, in a lot of ways.

But none of them were Olajuwon. It wasn't a "mismatch" because Patrick wasn't a great player in his own right.

It was because Hakeem was more like those other couple guys I mentioned...unique.

 

You are crazy if you don't think Rodman is a hof player

 

Hakeem pretty much IS the organization.

Moses is no slouch, but he didn't have the tenure and didn't win ('81 was great though). Do most non-Texans think of PHI or HOU regarding Mo? I think most say PHI.

One day the organization will have other championship era's and other great players who are associated as Rockets, but until then, Hakeem pretty much is the franchise.