After a string of frustrating losses against the NBA's best teams in which Boston held -- and then gave up -- comfortable second half leads, the Celtics finally hung on for a W -- in the defending champions' barn, no less.
Boston played three good-to-very-good quarters and then one wretched one. Leading 76-69 after three periods, Boston extended their edge to 80-71 before giving up the next 13 points. But the Cs then dug in on the defensive end, holding the Lakers to just two points over the final 7:13, and won despite their own offensive struggles.
As I was leaving the pizza joint near USC's campus where I watched the game, a Lakers fan spotted my "Beat LA" shirt and pointed out to me that Boston won by just a single point despite the fact that Los Angeles was without Kobe Bryant, who sat out his fifth straight game with a left ankle injury. This is something I talked about extensively with a Laker fan friend of mine before the game, and I want to address it here, too.
The point I want to make is somewhat subtle, and so I'm going to use a little bit of a dialectical method to make it. Here are the points I'm not trying to make: The Lakers are as good without Kobe as they are with him; the Lakers are better off without Kobe on the floor; the Celtics would have won Thursday night even if Kobe had played.
The point I do want to make is that the Lakers are still a very good team without Kobe. They are a different team, to be sure, but they are still very good. Without Bryant dominating the ball, the focus shifts to Pau Gasol, perhaps the most skilled big man in the game today, and Lamar Odom, an extraordinarily talented point forward, who, at 6-10, has the skill set of a guard. Pair those two with young Andrew Bynum, an at-times dominant seven-footer, and Ron Artest, and you've got an almost impossible team to defend that controls the boards and guards very well, too.
Bryant famously doesn't sit out very often, so empirical evidence of this point is rather thin, but consider the Lakers' four games prior to tonight's, all without Kobe: a 17-point win at Portland; a 12-point win over San Antonio; a 15-point win at Utah; and a 10-point win over Golden State. It's even more impressive than that brief treatment makes it sound. Utah currently has the third-best record in the West; San Antonio has the fifth-best record; and Portland owns the eighth-best -- although just three-and-a-half games separate the Jazz and Blazers in the standings. Moreover, Bynum played just ten minutes against Portland before injuring his hip, and didn't play at all in the wins over San Antonio and Utah.
My point is that removing Bryant from the Lakers is not the same as, say, taking LeBron James off of the Cavaliers. Sure, if you take Bryant away completely, LA probably isn't leading Denver by six games for the top spot in the West, but aside from those Nuggets, there isn't a Western team you can point to that is clearly better than a Kobe-less Lakers team. It's fallacious to unilaterally say that if Bryant played Thursday night, the Lakers would have won comfortably. Remember, Bryant played 45 minutes the last time these two teams met, when the Lakers eked out a one-point victory.
With that said, it'd also be fallacious to ignore Los Angeles' major offensive struggles in the last half of the fourth quarter. I can't imagine that there have been very many times over the years where the Lakers have managed just two points in more than seven minutes with Bryant on the floor. And given Bryant's prowess for scoring in such situations, it's not a stretch to say that with him in the lineup, they'd be a favorite to get a bucket on at least one of their final four possessions, rather than the 0-fer they ended up with. And that illustrates best what I mean when I say that the Lakers are a different team without Bryant: At least in a single-game situation, they are capable of being as good without him as with him for the first 45 minutes or so. But down the stretch, when nerves tighten, the defense intensifies, and the officials tend to put the whistles away, they sorely miss the services of the best assassin in the game today.
The upshot of this whole sidebar is that, just as it's almost always wrong to draw any conclusions from a single regular-season basketball game, it's wrong for Lakers fans to take solace in comments like the one made to me after the game tonight. The Lakers who did play Thursday night played well, and Boston won -- despite a 25-13 free throw discrepancy, despite a terrible night from Rasheed Wallace, despite the fact that the bench was a non-factor, and despite the fact that the Celtics were without both the recently-deposed Eddie House and the newly-acquired-but-not-yet-in-uniform Nate Robinson. The Lakers would still be the favorite in a seven-game series, but the Celtics wouldn't be too long of a shot. We're right there.
2 comments:
pierce, kg, and ray all went scoreless in the 4th. 11 points in the 4th.
I thought Phil gave this one away, and Doc tried to give it back.
We certainly didn't do ourselves any favors in the fourth on the offensive end. Nothing from the bench, and then we again rode Pierce despite the fact that he was having a meh game. I've given up complaining about this latter point, though, because it's clear we're not going to change.
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