King Kaufman's Sports Daily
With every excuse to lose, the Jazz and Derek Fisher beat the Warriors in -- yes, TNT -- dramatic fashion.
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May 10, 2007 | It doesn't get a whole lot more made-for-TV than the Utah Jazz's 127-117 overtime victory over the Golden State Warriors Wednesday night.
I don't mean that in a cynical way. TV loves the kind of amazing story Derek Fisher and the Jazz provided in the victory that gave Utah a 2-0 series lead. It's the kind of drama sports are great at providing. But the TV industry is happy to manufacture it as necessary.
This one wasn't manufactured at all, though TNT announcer Dick Stockton's repetitive use of the word "drama," the key word in TNT's promotional campaign, started to sound like a suspiciously happy coincidence.
Write this one as a script and it gets sent back for rewrite unless you're working on an "Afterschool Special" or something. Too corny. Too obvious. Nobody'd believe it.
Fisher missed Game 1 and the start of Game 2 as he dealt with what was described all week as a "personal family problem," which Fisher revealed Wednesday was his infant daughter's diagnosis of retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that threatened her life. With time of the essence, Fisher and his wife, Candace, rushed their daughter to New York, where she underwent successful surgery Wednesday morning to remove a tumor behind her eye.
With permission from doctors for 10-month-old Tatum to travel on the Jazz's private plane and, he said, permission from Candace to play, Fisher and family flew back to Salt Lake Wednesday. He told the team he'd be back, though not for the start of the game, and coach Jerry Sloan kept him on the active roster.
That wasn't the dramatic part. Here's the dramatic part.
Fisher is Utah's starting-off guard, but he's also the backup to Deron Williams at point guard. His absence meant Gordan Giricek started and Dee Brown became the backup point. This became an issue with one minute gone when Williams picked up two quick fouls and headed to the bench.
Brown is a rookie second-round pick from Illinois who was a lightning bolt in college but doesn't project to be a regular in the NBA. He'd averaged about nine largely ineffective minutes per game in the regular year, but he acquitted himself just fine in almost six minutes on the floor, committing a turnover but also making a shot and collecting an assist.
Then he got hurt in an ugly collision, and that was the end of Act I.