THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : The Matchup That No One Can Match

You’re Clyde Drexler and you’re in trouble.

You’re matched up against Michael Jordan with the world looking over your shoulder.

If only you were a center, a forward, or a point guard, you and Mike would line up on someone else and you would be apples and oranges. After the Bulls ousted the Knicks, did anyone say Jordan dominated Patrick Ewing? They said Ewing was so gallant, etc. If he’d had to try to stop Jordan, they’d have been pointing at him and giggling.

But no. You play opposite Jordan. People were saying you were the No. 2 all-around player in the game a week ago and maybe they were right. That’s how far No. 2 trails No. 1 in the Jordan era. Be compared to Mike and know embarrassment.

Watching Jordan go for 35 in the first half of Game 1 was like going back in time to the days when giants walked the earth. It was like being in Hershey, Pa., to see Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points.

Maybe it was better than that.

“Wilt had a tremendous advantage in size and strength,” says ESPN commentator Jack Ramsay, once Chamberlain’s general manager in Philadelphia. “He just dunked over them. That doesn’t take away from his skills. Wilt was a monster. But that would be like me playing against my grandchild.”

Only one man prevented Jordan from breaking Elgin Baylor’s finals-record 61 points--Jordan. He took six shots during the second half, though when he found out he had only tied the three-point record shared by Michael Cooper and Bill Laimbeer, he wished he had taken more.

“Laimbeer?” Jordan said. “If you’d have told me that, I would’ve kept shooting them.”

Heaven knows what Jordan might have scored, had he come along in the ‘60s when the NBA was half game, half carnival searching for box-office attractions. Chamberlain was allowed to roam the countryside and once averaged 50 points. In these days of diminished scoring, Jordan still averages 30 and thinks he could get 40.

“If I was just shooting?” he asks. “I’m pretty sure I could, yeah. If that was my only focus and everybody had the same focus. I don’t know how many games we’d win.

“Could I average Wilt Chamberlain numbers? I don’t know. It’s speculation.”

Jordan never claims he’s the best there ever was, which is as it should be. Comparisons across time are even less persuasive than every-day ones. Let’s simply say that Jordan is as far ahead of his time as Chamberlain was of his.

But before Jordan, everyone had peers.

The greats had rivals to measure themselves against. Chamberlain had Bill Russell. Jerry West had Oscar Robertson. Magic Johnson had Larry Bird. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had Wilt in his youth, Moses Malone later.

Jordan stands alone. Ask Drexler.

Jordan has his faults. He’s not entirely selfless, on and off the court. He makes sure he wins the scoring title every year and was a reluctant convert when Phil Jackson started trying to balance the offense. Jordan can be hard on teammates, challenging rather than supporting them, though he seems to have mellowed since winning a title. Image notwithstanding, he’s outgrown Boy Scouts and doesn’t spend his leisure time working on merit badges, unless they have one for high-stakes golf.

Having noted this, we can get to the wonder of Jordan-as-performer.

“Michael has the all-around ultimate game,” Ramsay says. “There’s nothing he can’t do on a basketball floor. He understands the team game at both ends. He’s an excellent defender. He can rebound it. If you tell him, ‘Michael, we can’t let your man touch the ball,’ he’ll go out and do it. I think he’s one in a million.

“Oscar Robertson and Jerry West were both that kind of guy. They could defend you. They were hard-nosed guys. But Michael is just another step above--and we’re talking about great, great players. Magic might do more for his teammates, but Michael has all those skills.”

Of course, Ramsay had to be won over.

Or as ESPN telecast partner Dan Patrick said: “That from the man who could have drafted Michael Jordan.”

As Portland coach in 1984, Ramsay was part of the management team that chose Sam Bowie over Jordan.

Ramsay now does the sensible thing: sit back and enjoy the show. There’s never been one like it.

TRENDS

If you want to know how good a defender Jordan is, check Drexler’s shooting in this series--38%.

Despite John Paxson’s Game 2 spurt, Terry Porter is outplaying him as expected. Porter, bigger and stronger, almost blows by Paxson at will. If Porter starts hitting his three-point shots, big trouble.

Scottie Pippen is still up and down. When the game gets tight, so does he.

Buck Williams and Horace Grant are waging a high-level, tough-guy standoff. The more you see of Grant, the more you like him. The Bulls’ problem is they have never developed him as a scorer. They could use a spare.

Kevin Duckworth is holding his edge over Bill Cartwright. Jackson keeps trying to establish Mr. Bill as a low-post threat but it never lasts; he remains merely an outlet for penetrating Bull guards.

Balance remains a problem for the Bulls. They have three players in double figures in the playoffs. The Trail Blazers have seven.

After two tough series, the Bulls are tired.

When Jackson said “We ran out of gas,” after Game 2, he might as well have said, “He ran out of gas.” Jordan played 50 minutes and took only two shots in the overtime.

Merely asking: Why did Jackson play Jordan for half of the meaningless fourth quarter in Game 1?

Rick Adelman leads Jackson in the war of words. The Portland coach has been funny and hasn’t gotten defensive in the thicket of insinuations that his players don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.

The Bull coach seems to think someone is listening when he says his team doesn’t have an advantage at any position. His players were presumably supposed to start thinking of themselves as underdogs and stop being overconfident. You saw how long that lasted.

BACK TO RIP CITY

Great, a week listening to people ask why nobody respects the Trail Blazers.

And if a Trail Blazer championship wouldn’t finally put Portland on the map.

Does the phrase “shaky self-esteem” mean anything up here?

In Portland, collecting slights is a civic pastime even more popular than booing referees and making banners with TV networks’ initials on them.

The Oregonian had a reporter in Chicago last week, asking the locals what they knew about Oregon. Predictably little, it turned out.

“I more or less draw a blank,” said Henry Tillman, 42, a cab driver. “And in that blank, I insert rural quiet and nature. I never heard a song about Oregon.”

What, he missed “Beat L.A.,” sung to the tune of “Gloria”?

“People are real beautiful and taller than average,” said Richard Heimann, 34, an architect. “There are a lot of yuppies but all of them have deers strapped on the hood of their BMWs.”

In fact, Portland is a beautiful, clean, progressive little city that nobody is down on, although most people still prefer their own home towns. Outsiders don’t spend much time thinking about Portland one way or the other, nor Duluth, Wichita, or Akron. Most people know Portland is more sophisticated than Bend, if less than San Francisco.

Of course, Portland’s fierce pride, and nagging fear that no one else shares it, pre-date the Trail Blazers, who merely serve to help them express the civic neurosis.

“People in Portland are upset by all the Californians moving in,” an Oregonian reporter says. “They also want to know why we don’t get as many as Seattle.”

MORE ON BLAZERMANIACS

AT&T; was forced to take down an advertising billboard in Portland that showed Scottie Pippen, in his Olympic uniform, dunking a basketball above the words: “Barcelona has never seen a Bull like this.” Trail Blazer fans regarded this as an insult to their own Olympic representative, Clyde Drexler. AT&T; got more than 100 calls, some threatening to take their long-distance business elsewhere, and hastily removed it. AT&T; office manager Pat Hickey said company employees were equally incensed and that he “wanted to burn it down.”

FACES AND FIGURES

Honey, I shrunk the power forward: At the Chicago pre-draft camp where players are officially measured, Oklahoma State’s 6-7 Byron Houston, once thought to be a lottery pick, turned out to be 6-4. Move him midway down the first round, or lower. . . . Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?: Said Shaquille O’Neal, vowing to leave negotiations with Orlando to his agent, Leonard Armato: “I’ll be chillin’ with Mickey.” . . . Trade rumor from the pre-draft camp: Dennis Rodman for Miami’s Willie Burton and Brian Shaw. Rodman is 31, flaky and the only Piston aside from Joe Dumars with trade value, so they’re shopping him. . . . Before Game 4 of the Laker-Trail Blazer series in Las Vegas, a writer sharing a cab with two Portland fans told them he liked the Trail Blazers’ major league college-atmosphere scene. Said the cab driver: “We’ve got that here, too.”