When Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and the Lakers’ supporting cast carried LA past Orlando in Game 5 to earn the NBA title, it marked the end of another wild and wacky NBA season. In this article, I’ll take a quick look back at just what happened during LA’s run to the title.
The NBA is not like other leagues. In the NFL, it’s not unusual to see a team come from nowhere to earn a victory in the Super Bowl. In the last decade, we saw virtually unknown teams like the Baltimore Ravens and Carolina Panthers, or perennially losing squads like the Tampa Bay Bucs and Arizona Cardinals all reach the big game and cover the pointspread when it counted most. In baseball, we’ve seen bottom feeders like the Rockies, Rays and Marlins all reach the World Series in the last half dozen years.
For an NBA team to win the title, they need to win 16 times over an eight-week span of playoff games. NFL teams can win the Super Bowl with as few as three playoff victories; baseball teams need 11 wins in the span of less than a month to earn a title. Even an elite college basketball squad like North Carolina needed only a relatively modest six-game winning streak over two and a half weeks to cut down the nets as NCAA Champions.
A postseason hot streak goes much further in football or baseball than it does in the NBA as Denver Nuggets and Cleveland Cavaliers supporters found out the hard way in the Conference Finals. Both teams looked unstoppable in the first two rounds of the postseason; each lost their Conference Finals matchup in six games after cooling off in a hurry.
Meanwhile, an NBA team that is not playing their best basketball at the start of the playoffs has ample opportunity to get into a better flow as the weeks pass and one series fades into the next, as LA Lakers faders found out the hard way. And injuries can take even the mightiest contenders out of the equation – just ask those with future tickets on the Rockets, Spurs or Celtics about how much of a chance their teams had without Yao Ming, Manu Ginobili or Kevin Garnett respectively.
The Lakers and Celtics met in the Finals last year, with Boston earning the title in six surprisingly easy games, covering the pointspread all six times. LA and Boston were the preseason favorites to return to the Finals this year; and the betting marketplace had those two teams 1-2 on the future board all year long; ahead of Cleveland, San Antonio, Orlando and the other contenders.
Boston lost their heart and soul when Garnett went down. And the veteran team ran out of gas, needing a full seven games to dispense the Bulls in the first round and seven more before they fell to the Magic. The Lakers stayed healthy and they got better as the postseason progressed. Like Boston last year, LA played their best basketball in their last two games of the conference finals and into the NBA Finals, earning their first title since the Shaq-Kobe three-peat dynasty last won in 2002.
