The Los Angeles Lakers aren’t a great basketball team; they’re hardly a team at all. There’s Kobe Bryant and some other guys whose names he may or may not remember. But if there’s one group of players that all dresses in the same uniform that has to scare everyone else in the playoffs, it’s got to be the Lakers.
Remember back before the season began, when we were all laughing at coach Phil Jackson for pretending that he never meant those things he said in his latest book about Kobe? Remember how we said the Lakers might be better with Jackson on the sideline, but they were going to run their streak of not making the playoffs to two straight Shaq-free seasons?
Well, here it is playoff time and there are the Lakers. And this isn’t an NBA East kind of playoff team that can get in without playing .500 ball. Although the Lakers are one of the last two teams to get in the Western Conference tournament, they will finish either six or eight games above the break-even point. In the East, that would get them the fifth seed.
In the West, it’s no better than seventh and a first-round match against Pacific Division winner Phoenix, the West’s second seed.Normally, any NBA match between a team seeded eighth or seventh and another seeded first or second is as likely to produce an upset as Theo Epstein is to go to bed wearing pinstripe pajamas. And Phoenix beat the Lakers three out of four this season, with the loss coming in their last meeting April 16.
But the Lakers, as already stated, aren’t a normal team, and, no matter who they face, including the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, they’ve got as much as a chance to pull the big upset as any NBA team ever has.
Give Jackson a little credit for that. Last season, without him, the Lakers finished in the lottery. This season, with him, they’ve defied the skeptics who said that if Jackson didn’t have a great team to coach, he couldn’t win.
But most of the credit has to go to Kobe, the game’s most spectacular — and dangerous — player. He doesn’t have a lot around him, the team’s other mainstays being Kwame Brown, who spent a lot of time disappointing everyone in Washington, Lamar Odom and Luke Walton. All-stars they’re not.
That’s what Kobe wanted, to be the main man on a team of one. With him running the show, Jackson’s vaunted triangle doesn’t have any angles or points or sides, just one brilliant focal point. The offense is to give Kobe the ball and get out of his way.
It shouldn’t work, and with anyone less talented than Bryant, it wouldn’t. It’s doubtful even Michael Jordan could have done what No. 8 is doing for the Lakers, which is winning games all by himself.He scored 81 points in a game, the second-highest total ever. He can do 40 in his sleep. And unlike LeBron James, who has remarkably few game-winning shots to his credit, Kobe can do it time and again when he’s the only guy on the court the other team has to bother defending.
I don’t care who you are, a non-team like that with a player like that is one that has to scare the shoes off of you.
Teams talk about how you can’t control a great player; all you can do is hope to contain him. With Kobe, they don’t even bother saying it. You don’t control him and you don’t contain him. You just hope that the rest of the Lakers — whoever they are — don’t clean up enough slop around him to beat you.
And in defense of the rest of the team, you have to give the players credit for not whining about Kobe never sharing the ball with them, or even saying hello in the locker room. They know what their job is, which is to give him the ball and then say “Nice shot,” and they do it without complaint. It’s not necessarily a system Larry Brown would draw up on the board, but look where Brown is languishing these days.
The Lakers enter the playoffs having won 11 of 14, mostly against second-tier teams. But they beat the Los Angeles Clippers, who have a better record, and they beat the Suns.
That’s a pretty good roll to be on going into the games that really count. It’s the kind of roll that teams get on when everybody knows his job and there’s someone on board who can do the heavy lifting.And nobody carries a bigger load in the game than Kobe. When he held the door open for Shaq to get out of town, he said he wanted to win, to get back to the title game, and we laughed. But here it is just two years later, and he’s back in the playoffs without a single teammate anywhere near O’Neal’s talent level.
He’s not supposed to be able to get beyond the first round. But he also wasn’t supposed to be here at all. If that’s not scary, nothing is.
by Mike Celizic NBCSports.com
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