And its easy enough to buy the notion that the Lakers are suddenly vulnerable. On Tuesday night, they got routed by the Dallas Mavericks, with Kobe Bryant’s feeble 12 points on 4-for-18 shooting particularly notable. Then on Wednesday, L.A. got poleaxed by the San Antonio Spurs, with David Robinson and Tim Duncan harassing the supposedly unstoppable Shaquille O’Neal into a mortal 2-for-10 evening. On this Texas swing, L.A. looked half-hearted on offense and clueless on defense, surrendering an average of 110 points per game. The back-to-back losses left the Lakers just one game out of fourth place in the tight scrum that is the Western Conference playoff race. L.A.’s championship challenge could require it to dispose of what appears to be a murderer’s row of Portland, Sacramento and either Dallas or San Antonio before it reaches the finals against some patsy from the Eastern Conference.
And all that ahead with Shaq slightly hobbled by an arthritic toe that will probably require postseason surgery. All that with Kobe more than slightly broody, far moodier in marriage than he was when he occupied a kid’s bedroom in his parents home. All that without the departed Tyronn Lue. Just making a joke. Which is, of course, exactly what this whole regular-season Laker charade, posing as a mortal team, will ultimately prove to be. To quote my favorite rock band of my youth, “Won’t get fooled again.” Even with what is becoming their perennial case of the winter blahs, the Lakers are still on pace to win two more games than last season. And 2001 was when they blistered the same batch of pretenders–Portland, Sacramento and San Antonio–in the playoffs without losing a single game. They finally lost a single game to Allen Iverson and Philly, perhaps as a sop to fans who prefer the fantasy that L.A. can be beaten to outright surrender.
The Lakers lack the Jordan factor, a singular player who is as driven as the coach and who can instill honest-to-God fear in his teammates when they fail to measure up on a daily basis. Jordan was the rarest of players, one for whom every game, indeed every second on the court counted. Shaq leads by example, but he remains too much a kid to bully or terrorize his teammates into accomplishments that they regard as meaningless. And the Lakers are hardly alone in that. Who remembers what teams boasts the best regular season record? The only meaningful measure of NBA prowess is that championship trophy.
L.A. coach Phil Jackson understands every nuance of the long march that is the modern NBA. He knows that it would be nice to boast the best record and carry home-court advantage into every round of the playoffs. He also knows that home-court advantage is ultimately irrelevant to a veteran team with the awesome talents of the Lakers. Jackson is an NBA scholar. He can recall Celtics teams of the late ’60s, with aging, player-coach Bill Russell scrupulously pacing himself through the regular season. In 1968, the Celtics finished eight games behind a powerhouse Philadelphia squad, but won the seventh playoff game in Philly on its way to a title. The next year the Celts finished fourth in their own conference, which back then was the final playoff entry. But Boston breezed to the finals, where it again won a seventh game on the road–this time in L.A.–for its 11th championship in 13 seasons.
It’s unlikely L.A. will ever have to worry about a seventh game. That there is no real suspense in today’s NBA, only the manufactured variety, is unfortunate, though it didn’t seem to dampen fans’ enthusiasm during the Bulls reign. Still, in many ways this has been an intriguing season. There was, above all, the remarkable comeback of Jordan, who by dint of will remained dominant while a pale shadow of his former self. It will take time to determine whether he will have contributed more to his Washington Wizards team than some extra zeros on the bottom line. One thing Jordan certainly did was to puncture the notion that Vince Carter was his “air” apparent. Head-to-head in a December matchup in Toronto, with, as they like to say, no love lost between the two North Carolina alums, Jordan kicked Carter’s butt. Carter may have led the league in all-star balloting, but that’s strictly the domain of fans of “Sports Center” highlight reels. Carter is the reel thing, but he is decidedly not the real thing yet, particularly as his Raptors have crashed and burned behind him during this season’s stretch run.
By contrast, take Tracy McGrady. And how many coaches today might not take Tracy over his cousin Vince? When McGrady left Toronto two years ago for the warm climes of Orlando, it was said that he didn’t want to labor in his cousin’s shadow. Now he casts his own huge shadow. He leads Vince in just a few categories–namely points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game. And, of course, in the most important stat: his Orlando Magic are seven games up in the standings on the freefalling Raptors.
This season has also witnessed the welcome rebirth of some long-dormant franchises: the Boston Celtics, slumping since Larry Bird’s ailing back sent him to the sidelines since the first Bush administration; and the New Jersey Nets, deader than a Soprano family stoolie since way back in its ABA incarnation on Long Island and Julius Erving. Both teams boast legitimate MVP candidates in Jason Kidd and Paul Pierce and both team’s coaches, Jim O’Brien and Byron Scott, should be on any short lists for NBA coach of the year.
Unfortunately, it is far easier to enthuse about McGrady and his Magic, Kidd and his Nets, Pierce and his Celtics and, of course, the one-of-a-kind Iverson and his 76ers as long as they stick to their own kind in the East. But one of these teams will have to step up against the Lakers (it won’t be George Karl’s self destructing Bucks, the conference’s most talented team) in the NBA finals and it won’t be pretty. But then again neither will the fate of the putative powers, in the West. The whole playoff exercise, several months of hoopla, will only serve to give jest to the notion that a semblance of competitive balance has returned to the NBA. There are only the Lakers. The rest are fodder–and fool’s gold.
