Lakers on the Brink: Globetrotter Fans Despondent

We’ve complained a lot about this Lakers Celtics match-up from the start; about the Sea Monkey (just add water) nature of this Celtics team, the overblown claims of Kobe's greatness, and the seeming inevitability of David Stern's big media made for TV dream match-up that reinforced our most disturbing and unprovable conspiracy theories about the league. But we’re finding more to like about this Series with each passing game.

First we were reminded about Paul Pierce, realized that his story is much more compelling than we'd noticed, and discovered how much we could enjoy pulling for him here. Along with this came the peace of better understanding these Celtics and how they fit together.

Then we saw how this series could show that Kobe is not, in fact, “the best player in the league.”

And now that the Lakers are on the brink, we’re glad that the Celtics are helping to put to rest the notion of Western Conference superiority. Note that both the Hawks and the Cavs played the Celtics better than the Lakers have. We’re also glad to see that the defensive-minded Celtics have kept the Lakers at or below 91 points in three of the four games so far. Folks might say that these games are ugly. This doesn’t bother us. Sometimes when two NBA forces collide, the teams play defense better than they play offense. Just because one of these results is more pretty to some than the other is does not mean that the result is more correct. And some of the most memorable NBA playoff moments come when an individual rises above the wreckage – like LeBron’s 48 point one-man demolition derby in Game 5 of last year's Eastern Conference Finals against the Pistons. In the first four games of that series, the 90 point barrier was broken only once, by one team, yet that ugly series gave us one of history’s greatest NBA Playoff moments.

The self-styled “purists” who believe that a 135-125 Suns victory over the Nuggets or Warriors is so much more preferable to a Cavs/Pistons game, or one of those good old 71-68 Knicks/Heat/Pistons slugfests from the 90s tell us about “basketball the way it was meant to be played.” If these people feel so strongly about this, they should take comfort in the fact that they’ll always have the Harlem Globetrotters. We do love the Trotters.

And of course, there’s Donaghy. People want to dismiss his charges that the league fixed and manipulated games through referees as a criminal playing on conspiracy theories in an effort to avoid jail time. Maybe they’re right. But there are millions at stake in the outcome of these games. If you believe that everyone has a price, it’s much harder not to wonder if there’s something to Donaghy’s charges. Also, it would only take a few people strategically placed in the most important games to have a big influence. If more funny business was going on, we assume that it would have involved referees much smarter than Donaghy apparently is, so what Donaghy knows might only be the tip of the iceberg. And to this end, we learn that federal agents are interviewing veteran ref Dick Bavetta.

In the above linked Free Darko piece, Shoals says that "Tim Donaghy's not a shock, he's confirmation that basketball's like everything else. . . . [a]nd if we've learned to cope with that, or at least suppress it . . . then we should be able to sit the f*ck back and enjoy these Finals." This sounds like postmodern bullsh*t to us ("everything is like everything/nothing means anything/blah blah blah"). We prefer to think of our sports as not like everything else in an important way. And we're not sure how we can cope with something that hasn't played out yet. There’s a long way to go here, and a lot to think about. How this plays out will have major consequences in every major sport. One consequence that’s already occurred is that, with the refs under the microscope, we can all feel better about picking the Celtics today to close out the series in LA. We’ll call this a gift horse and not look it in the mouth. The pick: Celtics +7 over the Lakers.

2008 NBA Finals, Stakes is High: Can Celtics Bring Order Back to "Best in the League" Discussion?

So far this Finals series looks like it might provide us with merciful relief from the insulting chorus of claims that Kobe Bryant is “the best,” or worse, “clearly,” or “unquestionably the best” player in the NBA.

Best we can figure out, people think that Kobe is the best player in the NBA because he has the prettiest jump shot. Or is it because he’s a Laker? A combination of both? What else could it be? His obsession with dominating the court (obsessive compulsive disorder)?

If the Lakers don’t at least take the Celtics to game 7, how is Kobe any “better” than LeBron? LeBron played hurt throughout these playoffs, and still came within one shot of a game 7 overtime with these Celts. Would he have been able to do more with this Lakers roster? If the Lakers don’t win this thing, anyone who wants to say that Kobe is better than LeBron has to also say that the Cavs roster minus LeBron is better than the Lakers roster sans Kobe. Could the latter be true? Are, say, Gasol, Odom, and Fisher worse than Ilgauskas, Delonte West, and who? Szczerbiak? Joe Smith? Tough one, but we don’t hear anyone asking these questions when they tell us that there’s no question that Kobe’s the NBA’s best. Oh, where have you gone Kelly Dwyer?

And are either Kobe or LeBron better than Paul Pierce? Probably. But we owe a special debt of gratitude to Free Darko’s Shoals for reminding us that Pierce is the Celtics’ guy. For all of the attention that’s focused on Garnett -- he’ll get 20, he’ll get 10, he’ll D your face off, and he’ll do it every day -- he’s not the guy like Pierce is the guy who will make plays to take over a game and win it. And this is how it played out against the Cavs. Thinking about the Celtics in this way -- with Pierce as the guy, and Garnett as the most solid of supporting cast members, or even with Pierce as the leader at one end of the court, and KG as the leader at the other -- makes them seem a lot more dangerous. And so does the fact that everybody’s favorite Celtic, Eddie House, should be getting more burn due to Sam Cassell’s injured wrist.

We’re not going to pick this one because it will hurt too much to feel like we’ve walked into another one of Mr. Stern’s traps, but; GO! CELTICS! Help us turn this “Kobe is the best” noise OFF.

2008 NBA Finals Preview: A Pierce-ing Analysis

The much ballyhooed NBA Finals matchup between the Celtics and Lakers starts tonight in Boston. We’re not crazy about either of these teams, or the idea of either of them getting a title, but we have to pick one of them. We’re picking the Celtics for three primary reasons.

1) Selfish crybabies shouldn’t get to win Championships. We realize that Kobe has matured as a person and a player. We also realize that life isn’t fair. But, and we’re not going to get into a detailed history here, what should have been a Lakers dynasty that should have won two or three more NBA titles was broken up because LA wasn’t big enough for both Kobe and Shaquille O’Neal. Kobe wanted the Lakers to be “his team.” This is similar to when Stephon Marbury left the Timberwolves because the team wasn’t big enough for him and Garnett. So now the Lakers are Kobe’s team. Because Kobe got what he asked for, and because he has so much to lose by not winning one without Shaq, there might be an element of added pressure on him in this Series. There’s also a Ray Allen/Kobe Bryant feud at play here, which favors the Celtics if only because Allen’s been dead-on in predicting how Kobe’s career will play out. And we’ve been reading lately about how Kobe Bryant cannot stand to lose; how he has for his whole life been “obsessed with dominating the court.” How does this play out? Is this the result of an inferiority complex? An obsessive disorder? These things don’t generally play out well.

2) If these games are fixed or manipulated in any way, and, as we’ve discussed, there is a tremendous perceived financial incentive for the league to fix these games, this favors the Celtics. If each game means millions more for the league, then we’re more likely to see a Game 7. Game 7 would be in Boston.

3) We think that the Celtics have better roster chemistry than the Lakers. We think that the Kobe/Lamar Odom/Pau Gasol troika has a similar skill set, and we compare Odom and Gasol to a poor man’s Larry Hughes and Drew Gooden as those two players fit with LeBron (see Venn diagrams here). These three are all primarily scorers. The Celtics should have a drastic rebounding advantage against the Lakers in this series, despite Odom’s and Gasol’s size. And finally, as explained in the best piece that we’ve read about this Series, by Free Darko’s Bethlehem Shoals, the X factor in this series is not Kevin Garnett, it’s the perpetually underrated Paul Pierce:

“Underrated on draft night, almost died from a stabbing, excelling with a relative lack of fanfare, suffered through some doldrums just as Garnett did, dealt with criticism, and now, is the real moral center of this series. He should be the pride of the Celtics, and as a Los Angeles native, this series couldn't have higher stakes for him. Checks the stats; as Nate Jones reminded me, dude's always energized by playing in front of the city he still loves. Pierce is about to hijack these finals the way Tony Parker so often with the Spurs, making himself into the marquee name when there's a surefire Hall of Famer defining his legacy.” (Read the rest here).

The Pick: Celtics +150 to win the 2008 NBA Finals over the Lakers.