Dale Ellis put thoughts of his aching foot out of his head and gave the San Antonio Spurs the kind of shooting they'd lacked for two ugly games, going 10-for-19 and scoring 24 points. But Ellis couldn't get close enough to the last loose ball of the game, with :01.9 left Thursday night in the Delta Center.
Utah's Karl Malone slapped a ball away from San Antonio's Negele Knight, and David Benoit beat Ellis to the bounding ball and was off for the last basket of a 95-90 Jazz victory that eliminated the San Antonio Spurs."I was shoved on that last play. It was pretty obvious," said Ellis. "It was unbelievable that the refs didn't have the (nerve) to step up and make that call."
Coach John Lucas said the same. "The officials swallowed their whistles on a couple of layup calls, and when Dale got tripped going for a loose ball, there wasn't a foul," he said. He added, "The Jazz beat us" on clutch shots by Malone and ballhandling by John Stockton. "We couldn't get the ball out of his hands at the end," Lucas said.
"Actually," said David Robinson (27 points), "I thought tonight was one of the better-called games. I thought the referees did a nice job.
"In the fourth quarter, we had the game right where we wanted it, and then they put a little pressure on us and made us turn it over," Robinson said.
"It just seemed like Utah had all the answers for everything we did," said Robinson, who played with a knee brace and found that it helped him post up. He hadn't worn it Tuesday, following a Saturday injury, because, "I thought it would discourage the guys; they'd think I wasn't 100 percent," he said.
In the end, the guy almost all of Utah hated was the first to pat Jeff Hornacek on the behind, and he hugged Malone and Jerry Sloan.
"It's frustrating when we've got the game in the bag, 76-71, and all of a sudden, you just fall apart," said Dennis Rodman. "We made some crucial mistakes, as usual, but they played real well. They made the shots. They did what they had to do, and we didn't."
The Spurs, once considered a candidate to win the Western Conference, discovered glaring weaknesses in this series. Other than Rodman, there was no emotional leader, for one. "Dennis was our most consistent player," said Ellis. "We knew what we were going to get from him almost every night. As professionals, we have to be prepared to come out and do our job.
"It was an emotional lift," he added, "to have Dennis on the court tonight. We were a totally different team."
Another problem was that, though they'd played together all season, there were a lot of new faces this season. "We need to know each other better," said Robinson, who said changes the Spurs made in recent years bred that unfamiliarity. "In a year or two, we won't make those same mistakes down the stretch. It's so tough to run plays at the end of a game when you don't know what each other's going to do."
And J.R. Reid, who made three of four shots in eight minutes of the first half, thought Lucas might have used his bench more in the second half. "The second half, no subs. The guys, I think, got a little tired," he said.
Madonna quietly took her place in Jazz-owned second-row seats adjacent to the Spurs' bench a few minutes after play started. She smiled at Rodman and gave him sympathetic looks when things didn't go his way.
"She signed autographs for people around her. She was very good," said security guard Warren Sutton, who's stationed at the visitors' bench each game. "No one gave her a bad time at all," he said.
Aimee Trepanier, of the NCAA-champion Ute gymnastics team, sat a row directly behind Madonna in seats owned by a company for which she works in the summer. "Rodman winked at her," said Trepanier. "The cheerleaders threw her a little Jazz ball that said, `We love you,' " Trepanier said.
Trepanier knows what it's like to be the object of Utahns' disapproval. It wasn't quite the Rodman/Madonna circus, but Trepanier weathered criticism last year for the I-15 gym-team billboard, on which some people thought she'd posed seductively.
At halftime, Madonna was ushered to a room near the Spurs' locker room. It's the same room players use for a pre-game chapel, and the "chapel" sign was still in front of the door. Appropriate for Madonna, right?