The beauty of the playoffs is that there's no hiding who you are. During the regular season, what with the blur of games and varying schedules, a good player who gets enough touches and plays enough minutes can produce the kind of stats and highlights that will fool 78.4 percent of the people who call themselves basketball fans or experts or aficionados or whatever other title looks good on the business card in your mind.

Pau Gasol is a good player. Maybe even a very good player. Great player? Franchise player? Put-a-team-on-his-back-and-carry-them player? I've heard people refer to him in those terms. I've never seen it, although to be honest, I saw the Grizzlies live twice and maybe a dozen times on TV.

Including Game 1 against the Mavericks.

Gasol finished with a team-leading 24 points, seven rebounds, four assists and two blocked shots. In a team-leading 41 minutes. Respectable numbers. Good-player numbers. Maybe even very-good-player numbers.

They were also meaningless numbers, in the context of winning or losing the game. Which is why numbers can't be trusted to assess a team or a player or a game. (Sorry, Hubie.) Gasol was so timid in going scoreless in the first half that his supporters were left murmuring about his foot injury obviously bothering him. That theory was blown up by coach Mike Fratello, who told a reporter coming out of the locker room that his star forward was physically fine but that his "confidence" apparently was shaken. I only wish the reporter had told us how exactly Fratello said it, since I can't think of more damning words by a coach about his star at halftime of a team's first playoff game.

Gasol, of course, then offered more proof there was nothing physically wrong by galloping down court to finish a third-quarter fast break with Bobby Jackson.

The only mystery is that GM Jerry West didn't storm the court right after that dunk and hold a press conference to announce that Gasol had been suspended for not showing up until the third quarter of a playoff game. That, after all, would seem the only appropriate response in light of 76ers GM Billy King going off on Allen Iverson and Chris Webber for showing up less than an hour before the team's next-to-last regular-season game.

Now, anybody willing to dismiss his first half because of his second-half production doesn't understand the responsibility of the star of an underdog team. This is, supposedly, the Grizzlies' leader, their go-to guy. And it's not that he just didn't score. That happens. He wasn't doing anything, other than waiting for the defense to collapse enough for him to get rid of the ball. He looked nervous, or scared, take your pick.

That will happen sometimes to good players. Maybe even to very good players. Great players? Franchise players? Never.

-- Ric Bucher, ESPN The Magazine