Defense hurts.

From http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=neel/040614

By Eric Neel
Page 2

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- Defense is a mother.

Defense hurts.

There's no glory in it. There's no rest. There's no air in your lungs and there are all kinds of burn in your legs.

Defense measures you, from scrambling feet to searching eyes to beating heart. It takes all you have and asks for more, and it won't reward you until you're spent, and sometimes not even then.

You want to play defense -- I mean really play it -- then you have to make like the old-time saints, maintaining faith and be willing to sacrifice and endure anything and everything with nothing but the promise, the hope, of deliverance.

Scoring says what you can do. Shutting the other team down, closing lanes, contesting passes and shots, and letting them know, by the way you breathe up into them and stare right through them, that you're in it for the long haul ... that says who you are.

...

"It's tough to come out of your comfort zone," Dumars says. "We all live in a box in this world. We are who we are for the most part, and to have somebody come in and say, 'I want you to do, and to be, something different and I want you to do it in front of 20 thousand people every night,' that's not easy, man."

Eric Neel is a regular columnist for Page 2. He will file daily from the NBA Finals, and his "On Baseball" column appears weekly during the baseball season.