bwgood77 wrote:If Barkley would have accepted the same role with the Suns that he talks about with the Rockets, the Suns probably have a championship. The offense needed to run through KJ and they would have been unstoppable.
Barkley may have humbled himself slightly with Houston by recognizing that he was a little older (thirty-three at the time of the trade) and that he could no longer carry a club as consistently as he had a few years earlier. Plus, Barkley had to respect the fact that Hakeem Olajuwon had already led the Rockets to two championships in Houston, aided by Clyde Drexler for the second title. Olajuwon and Drexler were champions, whereas Barkley was still trying to become one.
But by their second year together, Barkley ended up squabbling with Olajuwon and Drexler over the ball, anyway.
I studied Game One of the 1994 Western Conference Semifinals, between the Suns and Rockets, over the last couple of weeks. In the fourth quarter, the Suns mainly used Barkley as a decoy while K.J. controlled the offense from the right wing on almost every possession. The strategy worked well: the visiting Suns scored 30 points in the quarter and out-scored Houston by nine to win the game 91-87, led by K.J.'s 11 points in the period on 5-8 field goal shooting (1-2 from the free throw line, with the miss being irrelevant as the Suns had a four-point lead with 5.5 seconds to play and the Rockets had no timeouts remaining), plus 2 assists, 1 turnover, and 3 rebounds. K.J. shot 5-5 on jumpers in the quarter, one an open catch-and-shoot eighteen-footer off a kick-out pass from Barkley on the left block, the other four being one-on-one pull-up jumpers over Houston's starting guards: a seventeen-footer over Kenny Smith to open the period, an eighteen-foot step-back over Vernon Maxwell (an elite defender) from the right baseline, a thirteen-footer along the right baseline over Smith, and a nineteen-footer over Maxwell from the right baseline to basically win the game (after the Suns' lead had been narrowed to one) where Barkley was coming out to set a pick, and K.J. saw Maxwell peeking to his right and backing up slightly in anticipation of the screen. As soon as K.J. saw Maxwell peeking and shuffling for a split-second, he rose up and pulled the trigger. Of K.J.'s three misses, one was a driving layup where Otis Thorpe knocked the ball off the rim and should have been called for goal-tending, as noted by Steve "Snapper" Jones on the NBC telecast. Another miss came off an offensive rebound at the basket, and the third was a left-handed layup attempt with the shot clock about to expire that Thorpe blocked and Barkley put back in, one of Sir Charles' two field goals in the quarter. (The other came when Barkley back-slipped a pick-and-roll and laid in the long alley-oop lob pass from K.J.)
When K.J. was not pulling up for jumpers, he was repeatedly driving under the hoop from the right baseline, collapsing Houston's defense, and kicking the ball out to the perimeter. The ball was moving, bodies were moving, and the Suns' offense proved both fluid and controlled.
K.J. played all 48 minutes and Barkley played 45; keeping the ball in K.J.'s hands, for the most part, during the fourth quarter made sense, because K.J. had the conditioning to go all 48 and thrive down the stretch (even while playing with an undiagnosed sports hernia) whereas Barkley did not.
I have started studying (or re-studying) Game Two of the series, which I last viewed four years ago. Barkley scored 10 points in the first three minutes of the game: blowing past Otis Thorpe along the left baseline and dunking on Robert Horry, hitting a three from the left wing, hitting a pull-up jumper along the left baseline while drawing the foul on Thorpe, crossing over left-to-right, between his legs, on Thorpe to get into the paint from the soft left corner, using an up-and-under fake to clear Thorpe out of the way, and then rocking back to sink a high-arching fadeaway jumper over the out-stretched lunge of Hakeem Olajuwon. When Barkley was fresh, he could certainly be unstoppable and unique. Rarely, however, could he sustain that level throughout a full game.
The Suns' offense, therefore, did not need to run through K.J. for four quarters. Rather, it usually needed to run through K.J. in the fourth quarter, because Barkley was typically too tired by then and sometimes was even spent by the third or second quarter. (There were exceptions, of course.) And when the Suns got into trouble in the playoffs, the reason could sometimes be found in them trying to play through Barkley rather than K.J. in the fourth quarter. For instance, in Game Six of the 1993 NBA Finals, the offense was flowing nicely through K.J. in the second half, but Barkley shot 0-5 from the field off post-ups or "isos" in the fourth period. He hit two field goals in the period (shooting 2-7 in the fourth quarter): off an offensive rebound and off an assist from K.J. via a sort of two-part pick-and-roll where Mark West set the pick high on the left wing and rolled to occupy the help defender (Barkley's man), thus freeing Barkley with an open driving lane from around the top of the key after K.J. had delivered the ball to him. But Barkley's 0-5 in other situations meant that the Suns could not quite pull away, and of course the Bulls came back to win the title by one point, 99-98, on John Paxson's infamous three-pointer.
Another example was Game Five of the 1995 Western Conference Semifinals against Houston, when the Suns were trying to eliminate the Rockets at home. Barkley shot 1-13 from the field in the second half and overtime, plus 1-6 from the free throw line for the game (1-4 from the stripe late in the fourth quarter). K.J., conversely, was 9-12 from the field in the game when Barkley checked back into the contest during the fourth quarter, after the point guard had shot 18-24 in Game Four (plus 4-8 in Game Three, 12-18 in Game Two, and 8-12 in Game One). But as the offense froze behind Barkley's frigid shooting in the fourth quarter of Game Five, K.J. lost his own rhythm and finished 1-5 from the field the rest of the way. (He ended up with 28 points on 10-17 field goal shooting, plus 8 assists, 8 rebounds, and 2 blocks). Worse, on one play late in the fourth quarter, K.J. dished to Barkley off a pick-and-roll from the right wing, but Barkley did not have his hands up—he was already playing for an offensive rebound—and the ball sailed out of bounds. One can see a photograph of the play, just as K.J. is releasing the pass, here:
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/kevin-johnson-of-the-phoenix-suns-passes-against-chucky-news-photo/88761716The Suns lost in overtime and ultimately lost the series.
So, again, during the Barkley years, Phoenix did not need to run its offense through Kevin Johnson throughout the game, but the offense usually needed to run through K.J. in the fourth quarter. And often times (perhaps the majority of the games), the offense indeed mostly ran through K.J. in the fourth, because Barkley was too fatigued and he would frequently be double-teamed in the post, anyway. But when Barkley demanded the ball in the fourth quarter despite his fatigue, the Suns' offense could become ugly, and those occasions may well have cost Phoenix championships in 1993 and 1995. (1994 constituted a different story, one that I can relay in another thread.) Again, there were exceptions, but if Barkley was not clearly countering the default position—that he was too tired to dominate or even be that effective in the fourth—then he needed to serve as a decoy. When he accepted that role in the fourth quarter, the Suns' performance was often bright, as in Game One of the 1994 Western Conference Semifinals.
For another example, seemingly everyone remembers Barkley's famous series-winning jumper over David Robinson at the close of Game Six of the 1993 Western Conference Semifinals in the last NBA game ever played at the old Hemisphere Arena in San Antonio. But how was the Suns' offense functioning and flowing down the stretch to get them to that point? See for yourself here:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ9NUpX8JGc[/youtube]
Before Barkley buried that jumper, he was 9-23 from the field for the game. He dominated the first quarter offensively (sometimes at the cost of not bothering to run back on defense) and then did little the rest of the way—aside from rebounding—until the final possession. And that kind of performance was not atypical. As long as Barkley did not 'fight' his fatigue in the fourth quarter, matters could work because of K.J.'s presence. But if he tried to take over in the fourth with little-to-nothing in his tank, the results could be very poor indeed.
