From: Deadspin.com
As Alex remembers it now, Olajuwon had a double-double with nine blocks at some point during the fourth quarter. "Someone in management came to me and said, basically, Thou shalt give Hakeem Olajuwon a triple-double. Come hell or high water, he's getting a triple-double. I'm like, uh, OK." The Grizzlies had small monitors on which they kept a running box score. Anyone could see if someone was closing in on a milestone. "If a guy is in vicinity of a record, people are tracking those things. I know those things," Alex says. "If a guy has an eight-game streak of getting 10 rebounds, I'll know that. Am I gonna help that? Probably." The Rockets game, though, "was the one time someone said, 'You'll do this.' And I did." (For the record, Alex is reasonably certain that the 10th block was legitimate. "If he got a bullshit block," he says, "it probably happened before the 10th one.")
He won't say who issued the commandment, other than that it was someone in basketball operations who helped compile statistical packets for the media. "It was a mid-level guy, not a GM or an assistant GM," he says. Alex believes the suit was acting on his own initiative, though the habit of fudging statistics upward was practically an organizational, if not leaguewide, imperative. "When you get a triple-double, that dramatically increases the potential of our game being shown on ESPN. 'Here are some highlights of Olajuwon, and oh, by the way, they happen to be in Vancouver.' A team like ours was getting zero national media coverage. There's some value in that, even if someone is lighting us up, for marketing and longterm growth."
Alex was new to the game, however, and the request pissed him off. "I was immature," he says, "I was 20-21 years old, and some dude was telling me I needed to do something."
Which is perhaps why, a little more than a year later, with Nick Van Exel and the Lakers in town, Alex decided to act out. "I was sort of disgruntled," he says. "I loved the game. I don't want the numbers to be meaningless, and I felt they were becoming meaningless because of how stats were kept. So I decided, I'm gonna do this totally immature thing and see what happens. It was childish. The Lakers are in town. We're gonna lose. Fuck it. He's getting a shitload of assists." If you were to watch the game today, you'd see some "comically bad assists." Alex's fingerprints are all over the box score. He gave Van Exel everything. "Van Exel would pass from the top of the three-point line to someone on the wing who'd hold the ball for five seconds, dribble, then make a move to the basket. Assist, Van Exel."
No one noticed. From his chair, Alex could hear the legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn calling the game. Van Exel's having a great game! He's moving the ball exceptionally well! And in the next day's writeups, Van Exel was of course the hero. Alex thought, What the fuck?
"This is a bad analogy, but it's like a husband cheating on a wife in such a way as to guarantee he's going to be caught," Alex says. "There's nothing to justify it. It was stupid. And there were no consequences." He figured he'd at least get scolded. He wasn't. In fact, a management guy congratulated him. The game was sure to get on SportsCenter now. FULL STORY
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