Little Things That Can Make a Trip or Ruin a Playoff Team

Just imagine. Little things. That’s what people don’t realize about playing on the road in the National Basketball Assn., that it’s the little things that kill you.

It has been shown dramatically in this NBA finals just how vital the home-court advantage is, but a lot of people don’t understand why.

Aren’t both courts the same size? Ah, but it’s not the courts, or the arenas. It’s the travel. It can really wear on you at the end of a long season.

Nothing big, understand. Little things.

Like lost luggage. The Celtics fly into LAX Friday, the airline loses Greg Kite. The Celtics backup center is too big to fly in the passenger cabin and he usually rides below, with the baggage.

The Celtics get to LAX, no Kite. So the team trainer has to wait in a long line and fill out the lost-luggage forms, and answer the routine questions. “Was he wearing a luggage tag? Look at these pictures--which of these suitcases does he most resemble?”

It never rains but it pours, know what I mean? Kite was carrying the team’s bag of basketballs.

So Saturday morning, Red Auerbach runs down to a sporting goods store to buy a few balls for the Celtics’ shootaround. The store is sold out of basketballs. Red can’t believe it. No Boston sporting goods store would ever be so poorly stocked. Red is livid, he is in disbelief.

The Saturday shootaround goes poorly. The bus driver misreads his destination sheet and drops the Celtics at the Mark Taper Forum.

Not only is there no court, and no basketballs, but Celtic Coach K. C. Jones hasn’t had a chance to go over game films and work on strategy.

Friday night he is showering in his hotel room, singing a song he wrote to the tune of Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” (“You can do what you want, but stay off-a my parquet floor . . . “)

The walls are thin. In the next room, a record producer hears K. C., knocks on his door and offers him a contract. K. C. spends Friday night cutting a demo tape with Petty and Dylan.

Little things.

Home cooking, for instance. You miss it. Dennis Johnson gets hungry late Friday night, hops a cab and goes out for a snack. At home, he’d probably settle for fish sticks and cocoa. Here he goes to Tommy’s, then Fatburger, then the Original Pantry, then Art’s Chili Dogs. The grand slam of grease.

Five pounds heavier and a step slower, DJ returns to the hotel. He’ll probably run it off by game time, but still . . .

And no matter how nice the hotel, things happen, little things. At the Lakers’ hotel in Boston, fire alarms kept going off. At the Celtics’ hotel Saturday during nap time, alarms go off, fire trucks drive up, army tanks rumble up, SWAT teams arrive, space vehicles land, a 50-foot alien being climbs the front wall of the hotel.

A director with a bullhorn yells “Cut! Beautiful! That’s a take.”

Great, done in one take, but you know how tough it is to get back to sleep after something like that.

On the road you get bored, you look for ways to kill time. Danny Ainge goes to Disneyland with the Osmond family and gets sick on the tea cups.

Robert Parish takes a bus tour of the stars homes. When the bus stops in front of Pat Riley’s house. Riles himself is out front and he invites Parish into the backyard for some friendly one-on-one on Riley’s outdoor court.

At game point, Riley drives to the hoop, using his son’s tricycle as a screen, and Parish wrenches his bad ankle. The home-court advantage is a subtle one.

Little things. Late Saturday night Larry Bird decides to check out the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. He arrives after closing time. “What the heck,” he reasons, and scales a fence.

Larry is down on all fours, his hands in John Wayne’s, when the cops arrive, wearing Detroit Lions warm-up jackets.

The cops don’t buy the “I’m Larry Bird” line. They ask Bird where he’s from, he says French Lick, they shake their heads in disgust and haul him down to the station.

Larry’s one phone call is to the Celtics’ traveling secretary, who knows a prank phone call when he hears one, and hangs up.

At 4 a.m., Bird bails himself out with money he wins playing Nerf basketball with a desk sergeant and four pimps.

He hitch-hikes back to the hotel and is asleep by 5, but the phone rings at 5:30. It’s the public relations man from the Chinese Theater, wanting to know if Larry will come over and put his handprints in cement.

If the Celtics seem sluggish today, I doubt you’ll hear them complain about the things that happened. It’s routine stuff.

Still, they wear you down, the little things.