When you ask a player to do something beyond his abilities, there are only two possible outcomes.
Either he has a sudden burst of inspiration and pulls it off brilliantly.
Or, he does an even worse job, failing to even complete his original assignment.
And more often than not, it's the latter.
In the second half, Jackson placed a greater demand on Artest, asking him to help defend Nowitzki and rotate over in time to provide cover.
For Artest, this was asking the impossible.
He was a single-track mind. If you told him who to guard, he would pounce like a ravenous wolf and tear off a chunk of flesh.
That's why his one-on-one defense was elite.
But asking him to play help defense—to look both ways, worry about the positioning of the man he was supposed to cover, a multi-threaded task—was more than he could handle.
He began to be frequently out of position, leaving his man open.
