Rockets Will Take Off Against Upstart Magic

Never has a team won an NBA championship the same year it won its first playoff game. It is just not done. This would be like composing the score to “Sunset Boulevard” after just learning to play the piano, and that could explain it. “Sunset Boulevard,” I mean, not the Orlando Magic.

No, there are rites of passage in the NBA, and I’m afraid the apprentices of Orlando will just have to do their duty and lose to Houston. I think six games should do it.

I would make it seven because Houston has a way of dragging these things to the limit. Five times the Rockets were at match point in the playoffs, but they found their way against San Antonio in six, and I would have picked San Antonio over Orlando, too.

It is too soon for Orlando. The Pistons had to wait on the Celtics, the Bulls had to wait on the Pistons and the Rockets had to wait on Michael Jordan to retire. And so on and so on.

Orlando has never waited on anybody, save its own citizens crossing the street. It has not done its time as a contender, not been properly pained to win it all.

The Magic cannot just leap over the ordeal and go right to the reward as if the struggles of Jordan himself, or poor Charles Barkley, or the fading Patrick Ewing and the frustrated Reggie Miller have meant nothing.

They are the Magic, not the Magic Johnson.

Winning it all in Shaquille O’Neal’s third year and Penny Hardaway’s second would leave these young men with nothing to do with the rest of their careers, unless they are serious about making it a habit. The idea of a basketball dynasty in the middle of an orange grove contradicts the essence of what has always been a city game.

This is just the way it is. So, sorry, Orlando. You are about to be Hakeemed.

Suffer first, party later.

It is not just that the Rockets are the defending champions … well, yes it is, sort of. It is that they are the defending champions we did not appreciate. We did not give Hakeem Olajuwon and chums the proper respect when they did this last year.

We were too preoccupied with how ugly it all was. That series with the Knicks was like wandering through a junkyard, complete with dog. Pick a Knick. I’ll take John Starks.

The Rockets were going to be these one-time wonders, parked to the side like the Rick Barry Warriors and the Bill Walton Trail Blazers, local memories and good riddance from the rest of us.

They even played the season as such, clumsily and indifferently. Olajuwon missed eight games because of iron-deficiency anemia, but the problem wasn’t too little iron, it was too little net.

The Rockets couldn’t even get the home court for any playoff series. They were the sixth-best team in the West and, worse, the second-best team in Texas. They have defied reason and won hearts.

This is a stirring march they’ve made in the playoffs, with Olajuwon providing all the drums, the bugles and the sheet music.

How could he have been overlooked to finish as the third-best center in the MVP voting behind David Robinson and O’Neal? He may not be the third-best center behind Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The lesson Olajuwon gave Robinson in the San Antonio series - which began with Olajuwon having to watch commissioner David Stern give Robinson the MVP trophy, for which Olajuwon finished sixth - is the lesson he will give O’Neal.

The Shaq creature has not played consistently well and not against a real center yet - not the three on the Bulls nor the lone Dutchman from Indiana - never mind one of the best of all time.

The marquee that was Jordan vs. Shaq was inaccurate, similar to speedskating. They were never on the ice at the same time. But Hakeem vs. Shaq will be real, one-on-one, best center wins.

No contest, really.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Bernie Lincicome Chicago Tribune