The Xavier McDaniel Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Thursday, May 5th, 2005
You
came into the league during the Golden Age of Basketball, with Larry Bird and
Magic Johnson in their prime, and a young Michael Jordan on the rise. What was
it like to face each of these players for the first time?
I
had already played against Michael Jordan in the Pan-Am tryouts – we we were on
the same team. So I was more afraid of Bird and Dr. J. When I went to
Philadelphia, I was like, ‘Man, that’s Doc!’ So I asked the ball boy to go get
Dr. J’s autograph. And then, in the game Doc goes up over me for an ally-oop
dunk. It blew me away. Even at his age, the guy could still jump. He was
probably a fifteen year veteran at that point in his career.
And then I went up against Larry Legend that first year. I said to myself, ‘Well, he can’t do anything more to me than he’s done to everybody else.’ Sure enough, he went out and torched me, too [laughs]. I remember a game, before Larry started having all of those back problems, and he was going up against Shawn Kemp. Larry had something like 40 points, 15 rebounds, and 15 assists. And he told Shawn Kemp, ‘I’m the best fucking player to ever play this game.’ And then he shot a three-pointer right in Shawn Kemp’s face. And I looked at Larry and thought, ‘You conceited bastard.’ But I looked forward to playing against guys like Larry, and James Worthy, because they forced you to be on top of your game. If you weren’t, then they were going to abuse you.
Today, you don’t always see the best players guarding each other. But when I played, I guarded Mike Mitchell. I guarded James Worthy. I guarded Larry Bird, and Kevin McHale. I guarded Charles Barkley, who was one tough mother. Now, a lot of times teams will try to protect their scorer. Back then, nobody could protect you, because guys were very skilled on both ends of the court. That’s the biggest difference between today’s kids and yesterday’s players. That’s the only thing – these kids today can play. It’s just that their skill level ain’t as good as the older players. If you watch a game today, you’ll see ESPN and TNT talk about how hot a player is during a game. And he may have only made 2 shots altogether. When I played, you were considered hot when you made six or seven shots in a row. You watch the ESPN highlights, and you think a guy was in the zone. You say, ‘Damn, he was killin’.’ And then you go look at the box score, and he was 7-for-25.
When I played, you didn’t have guys jumping directly from high school to the pros. That’s one reason we were more skillful. Dr. J, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson made an immediate impact on their teams, but they went to college before turning pro. There ain’t one kid coming out of high school to make that kind of difference, except LeBron James. And LeBron is a special case. Even Kevin Garnett struggled to put up numbers during his rookie season – he averaged under 11 points-per-game.
So for most players dreaming of the NBA, college is the best place to prepare. In the pros, you play so many games once the season starts that it’s hard to practice. Think about it: If you’re on an east coast team and you make one of those brutal trips out west, when are you going to have time to practice? The travel schedule is crazy. During the course of a week you look at your schedule and it says game, game, day off, game, game, day off, game. You don’t have time to practice. College gives you that time to practice and prepare. For the average player jumping from high school to the pros, it takes four or five years to really put it all together. And then you don’t know if the motivation is there, because they’ve already got their money. When I’m sitting around with my friends, drinking a cold beer and watching an NBA game on TV, I always tell them that I wouldn’t last as a NBA general manger because I wouldn’t draft a high school kid. I’d probably get fired [laughs]. Not that the kid couldn’t play. But nine times out of ten, he would stay with my team just long enough to sign a free agent deal somewhere else. Either that, or I’d be forced to trade him, like the Trailblazers did with Jermaine O’Neal. That’s a prime example. He barely played for Portland after coming directly out of high school, and then he moved on to Indiana and became an All-Star. My friends will say, ‘What about you, X? You played five years for the Sonics and then they traded you to Phoenix.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, but they got something out of me.’ And they did. They got a lot out of me. They got over 8,000 points, and over 3,000 rebounds. What did Portland get out of Jermaine O’Neal while he was there?
During
your second season in the league, the Sonics shocked the NBA by upsetting
the highly favored Dallas Mavericks in the 1987 NBA Playoffs. You scored 29
points in the clinching game four win. Please take me back to that series.
They
beat the hell out of us in Game 1. They beat us by 35 points that night.
We went back and watched the film – Mark Aguirre was killing me. And when I
say he was killing me, Mark Aguirre was the bully, and I was the nerd that
he slapped around and stole lunch money from. So we changed our strategy.
We put Tom Chambers on Aguirre, and I guarded Sam Perkins because I was a
better trapper than Tom. Half of the time I’d be waiting on the trap, and
Tom never would get down to help out. So we switched assignments, and we
trapped Aguirre every time he touched the basketball. It took him
completely out of the game, because he was so unselfish that he would just
give up the ball. Once we realized that he was going to keep giving it up,
and not even try to get around us or look to score, then we just kept doing
it. So that forced everybody else to score. I think I had 28 points in
Game 2, and I fouled out. Dale Ellis got fouled coming off the baseline and
hit two big free throws to put us up with two seconds left. That gave us
the split in Dallas.
I didn’t have a particularly good game in Game 3 – I think I was 4-for-14 from the field, but it didn’t matter because we won the game in a blowout. We had to make adjustments in that game as well, because Nate McMillan was having all kind of trouble with Derek Harper. Derek Harper was the other bully, beating up the other nerd. It was so bad that Nate couldn’t even bring the ball up the court. So they would pass me the ball, and I would bring it up the court and pass it off to Nate. I was used to dribbling. I could handle the ball. And that strategy did two things; it took the pressure off of Nate, and it put pressure on Mark Aguirre. Mark was a big man – 240 pounds – and he wasn’t used to pressuring the ball up the court. So that took it’s toll on him. Wore him down. I became a point forward, so to speak, and this was years before you heard people using that term. But it worked. Derek Harper had Nate so shook up. Nate and I took a look of the blame in Game 1, when the Mavericks kicked our ass, so it was good to turn the tables around on Mark Aguirre and Derek Harper.
I knew I was going to have a good Game 4, because I had a lot of bounce in my legs. I got to the arena earlier than normal – three hours instead of two – and I started shooting with one of the assistant coaches, Tom Newell. And I was hitting seven and eight in a row before I missed one. That was every time. I took close to 100 shots, and I probably made 90 of them. And I said, ‘Hold up, I’m shooting too fuckin’ good. I want to save some of this for the game.’ And I shot the hell out of it that night. The final score was 124-98, and it was one of the biggest wins in the history of the franchise. It was definitely the biggest win since the Sonics won it all in 1979. It was also a high-water mark in a way, because the team slowly started going downhill after that.
You were
traded to the Phoenix Suns on December 7th, 1990. How hard was it to leave
the team you called your own for more than five seasons, and what was like
starting over in Phoenix?
It
wasn’t a tough adjustment. Tom Chambers was in Phoenix, and he used to pick
me up every day on the way to practice. The media would always start stuff,
and write stuff, but me and Tom never had a problem. We may have had a
problem on the court from time-to-time, but that’s only natural. Larry Bird
and Kevin McHale used to have those type of on-court problems. You aren’t
always gong to agree with what I do, and I’m not always going to agree with
what you do. But me and Tom got along very, very well. When I got to
Phoenix he just opened his arms to me. It just wasn’t a good fit on the
court, because I was used to being a primary option – in other words, I was
equal to Tom Chambers and Dale Ellis in our offensive schemes. The three of
us averaged over 20 points-per-game in the same season. It worked because
the coach did differentiate. While Tom and Dale might get the majority of
the plays called, I was still free to do my thing. If I got the rebound, I
could bring the ball up the court. Or if got open, I could take my shot.
It the shot was there, and not forced, then I had the green light to shoot
all night long.
When I got to Phoenix, they basically put me out there and told me to shoot jump shots. And that’s what I did. The rest of the time it was Tom and Kevin Johnson running screen-and-rolls. If you watch tape of the games back then, you’d see Tom and Kevin doing their thing on the screen-and-rolls, you’d see Mark West slashing to the basket, and you’d see Jeff Hornacek up top, shooting the three. Then, you’d see me in the corner shooting jumpers. That wasn’t my game. I wasn’t a spot-up shooter. It detracted from my strength – I was more of a slashing rebounder. I was better going to the glass and battling for the ball. Even at that, I think I averaged 15.8 points-per-game and over 7 rebounds-per-game. So I think I fit in well, but I felt like I was limited in what I could do. They didn’t want me to get the rebound, come up the court and take my man to the hoop. They wanted me to kick it to Kevin Johnson and let him go one-on-one.
I finished the season in Phoenix, but that was it for me. Pat Riley had just signed to take over the New York Knicks, and I think Pat Riley talked to Jerry Colangelo and Cotton Fitzsimmons. Basically, he told them that I would be a better fit in New York. So I guess they worked something out. I got back to Phoenix following a trip – my girlfriend and I had been driving, and we were going through some places where the phone didn’t work that well. Jerry and Cotton were looking for me. I explained that I’d just gotten back into town. They sat me down and told me that I’d been traded. I made a couple of phone calls, and then I jumped on a plane and flew to New York.