The Buch stops here

When the Phoenix Suns landed Shaquille O’Neal at the NBA trade deadline, many thought they had lost their minds. After all, the Suns had made a living running and gunning, draining shots from the outside and playing a fast-paced game. As ESPN.com’s J.A. Adande wrote at the time, it seemed a curious move to add a slow inside big man who most judged to be past his prime, especially when the price was a young, quick player like Shawn Marion.
“The people who think the Suns are better off for this move are in the minority,” he wrote. “The more common reaction was: What were they thinking?”
It has certainly worked out well for Phoenix so far, though. They’ve won seven in a row, and beat the Houston Rockets 122-113 Saturday. The Rockets are no trivial opposition: they’ve been one of the league’s hottest teams lately, and their 22-game winning streak, the second-longest in NBA history, only ended only five days ago. They’ll be dangerous in the playoffs, which makes this Phoenix win even more impressive. News flash: the Suns are hot.
Perhaps most interesting is how Phoenix is now a balanced team. Shaq gives the Suns a viable inside threat at centre, which in turn opens more space for outside shooters like Steve Nash, Raja Bell and Leandro Barbosa, and allows Amare Stoudemire—who drained 38 points against the Rockets and hit all 20 of his foul shots—to return to his natural position as a power forward.
Don’t underestimate the contributions of the Diesel himself, though: as The Arizona Republic’s Paul Coro wrote about the Houston game, Shaq came through in the clutch.
“When the game was in danger late in the third quarter, the offense went through O’Neal,” he wrote. “He scored six points on power moves as the Suns took the lead back up to 105-87.”
Shaq put up 23 points and 13 rebounds on the night, making him the only Sun other than Stoudemire to record a double-double.
Shaq’s post presence allows the Suns to battle it out down low and get the tough points. The match against the Rockets wasn’t a one-off, either: ever since the first few games after the trade where they were adjusting to the Shaq effect, the team’s offense has been on fire. Their shooting percentage has soared, likely due to the extra coverage Shaq draws down low: the Suns hit an incredible 76 per cent of their shots from the field in the first half against the Rockets, and made a very good 56.5 per cent of their field goals over the course of the game. It was the sixth straight game they’d shot over 55 per cent from the field, and they’ve averaged an incredible 120.8 points per game in that stretch.
A lot of the credit for the recent offensive explosion should go to Shaq: as Coro pointed out after the Suns’ March 18 win over Portland, he has been their “offensive focal point.” He has also made a big difference on the defensive side of the ball: the Suns have held opponents to making an average of just 42.3 per cent of their shots from the field in the past six games.
Meanwhile, what about Marion, who was thought to be such a vital part of this team? Well, he’s struggling in Miami. As Leo Rautins, the head coach of Canada’s national basketball team and the lead analyst for Toronto Raptors games on TSN and The Score, wrote on his blog the other day, Marion is even bringing other teammates like Dwayne Wade down. “To see Marion and Wade, in a fourth quarter-long conversation on the Heat bench, with towels covering their mouths, and, for all to see, showing little or no interest in the game, is not something that Miami fans should view lightly,” he wrote. “Speaking of Marion, is he feeling wanted now? Toronto kept the high flyer in half-court mode (props to Jamario Moon), and he was hardly noticeable during the game. A little different when Steve Nash isn’t tossing alley-oops and back door passes, isn’t it Shawn?”
Rautins nailed it: Marion, despite his talent, was negatively affecting the chemistry of the Suns. He had demanded a trade as far back as September, wanting to be a star on his own team rather than merely a good member of a supporting cast. Shaq, on the other hand, genuinely wanted to be a part of this Phoenix squad, as he told the Associated Press after the trade.
“I wanted it to happen because I was going to be coming to a fabulous team with a lot of unselfish players, a lot of great players,” he said. He recognized that he wasn’t going to be the only star attraction, and seems to be willing to put that aside to pursue another championship ring.
So far, the trade has been good for Shaq as well: he’s gone from a career-worst year statistically to dominating in the paint, pouring in the points and grabbing every available rebounds. Many speculated that it wouldn’t be possible for an old, broken-down 36-year-old to have this kind of impact. Well, he certainly picked the perfect city to resurrect his career from the ashes. The rest of the league should watch out: Phoenix is rising again.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge told the Associated Press yesterday he doesn’t want to see a boycott of this summer’s Beijing Olympics despite China’s recent crackdown on Tibetan protestors, which Tibet’s self-proclaimed government-in-exile estimated to have killed at least 80 people thus far. Rogge, who’s on a six-day tour of the Caribbean instead of consulting with the Chinese government, apparently “expressed condolences for the victims and said he hopes calm will be restored immediately,” but declined to comment on the situation beyond a brief statement against boycotts.

Rogge’s probably right to stand against boycotts. The Olympics have been boycotted for all manner of reasons over the years. 28 African nations skipped the 1976 Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was allowed to participate despite their rugby team playing an event in South Africa that reinforced the apartheid regime, 64 countries stayed out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and 14 Eastern Bloc countries refused to travel to Los Angeles for the 1984 Summer Olympics in retaliation. Boycotts aren’t a viable solution, though: all they accomplish is to make the Olympics more political than they already are, and they raise serious questions about whether the medal-winners were truly better than those forced to stay at home by their governments.

Rogge’s lack of comment on the Tibet situation is disturbing, though, and it serves as further evidence that he doesn’t really see China’s atrocious human rights record as a problem. The real issue here is why the Olympics were awarded to China in the first place. Over the years, there have been many Olympics held in countries under problematic regimes with spotty human rights records, such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany, the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico (preceded by security forces killing hundreds of protesting students), the 1980 Summer Olympics in the USSR and the 1984 Winter Olympics in Yugoslavia. The IOC’s prevailing rhetoric has always been similar to Rogge’s claim to Reuters last August that the Olympics will be “a force for good,” which he’s been repeating frequently since. These changes have rarely materialized, though: in fact, the 1936 Olympics in particular were seen by Hitler’s regime as a great propaganda success. Groups such as the American-Israeli Co-operative Enterprise have even linked the lack of protests during the Berlin Olympics to Hitler’s subsequent increased aggression towards Jews and foreign powers.

“For two weeks in August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics,” their website states. “Soft-pedaling its antisemitic agenda and plans for territorial expansion, the regime exploited the Games to bedazzle many foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the United States and other western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that—some observers at the time claimed—might have given Hitler pause and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.”

The point is a valuable one. It’s unclear what difference, if any, stronger protests at the Berlin Games would have made, but the Games as they unfolded certainly didn’t hurt Hitler’s cause or reputation. Today, the defining image of those games remains African-American athlete Jesse Owens besting the Aryan supermen, but as heroic as that was, it didn’t seem to make much of an impact at the time. It definitely didn’t change the views of Hitler and the Nazis on racial superiority, and it didn’t even do much for black athletes in the United States: the NFL was segregated until 1945, Major League Baseball remained segregated until 1947, and the NBA didn’t integrate until 1950.

Rogge’s inaction here illustrates the contradiction in his statements. On the one hand, he has said multiple times the Olympics were given to China to be “a force for good,” but on the other hand, he told the Associated Press in February that the IOC “is a sporting, non-political organization and we cannot solve the problems of the world.” He can’t have his cake and eat it too: either the Olympics are political (which they’ve proven to be over the years) and he should back up his words with some lobbying to actually make the Games change things for the better, or they’re purely non-political, in which case China should never have been awarded the Olympics in the first place. It’s hard to rationalize a “non-political” movement acting as a political “force for good”.

On-field performances are great, but it’s the political statements associated with them that really matter: consider the black-gloved salute of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos after the 200-metre race in Mexico City, which remains one of the defining sporting images of our time and did great things for the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Without Smith and Carlos taking that bold stand on the platform provided by their athletic achievements, they would have quickly faded into obscurity as merely talented sprinters. Unfortunately, as Duke University professor Orin Starn lamented in a March 3 opinion piece for the , it seems “the era of the activist athlete is over.” As Starn later wrote on Duke’s website, “It would be nice to see more sports stars try to wield their immense influence in positive ways. Now it’s too often just about winning and getting your face on a Wheaties box.”

We’ll have to see what happens this summer, but it’s certainly not looking promising. These Olympics have already been marred by accusations of the Chinese government harvesting organs from Falun Gong practioners, clamping down on Tibet, evicting many of their own citizens to make way for Olympic construction and funding genocide in Darfur, but Rogge and the IOC are content to spin off platitudes about the Olympics being a force for good without providing the lobbying or political pressure to actually bring about change. China’s desperate to look good on the world stage at these Olympics, and the time is ripe to use the leverage of the Games to bring about some meaningful change. So far, Rogge and company have been unwilling to step up to the plate and call the Chinese government out, though, preferring instead to fiddle around on tours in the Caribbean. Maybe Starn is wrong, and the era of the activist athlete isn’t over. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has led the way, pulling out of his role as a consultant on the opening ceremonies due to concerns about the government’s involvement in Darfur. It’s now up to the athletes to use the platform the Olympics gives them, as the IOC has spectacularly failed to make use of it thus far. Boycotts aren’t necessary, but taking a stand would be greatly appreciated. As Smith and Carlos showed, sometimes you don’t even need to say anything.

Related: My previous writings on the Olympics.

Playoff prediction wrap-up: I went 7-2, with the only mistakes being a prediction of a first-round win for women’s basketball (they lost to Carleton) and a OUA finals win for men’s volleyball (they lost to McMaster)