Kobe…Tell Me How My (bleep) Tastes!



4

Well, the Lakers have done it again. Once again, they have demonstrated that they are the team to beat in the regular season. Once again they have dropped the opening game of a series against an inferior opponent. Once again the king sized egos and personalities of their star players and coaches appear to be clashing. Once again, two games into a series, another Lakers’ opponent smells what might be the tiniest drop of blood in the water.

The Mavericks? 1

This is not the first time that the Kobe-era, post-Shaq, Lakers have fallen behind in a playoff series. I doubt it will be the last. This time around may be a little different, though, and it may be too deep of a hole for the two-time defending champions to dig themselves out of.


DOWN 0-2

Falling behind 0-2 is a series is a big problem, because the team trailing needs to win 4 of its next 5 games, after being unable to win either of the first two, to win the series. This problem is much more manageable, however, if the team trailing is similarly (or more) talented, the games the team lost were competitive, and its two losses came on the road, to be followed by two games on the trailing team’s home court.

What makes this problem different is that the Lakers dropped their first two games AT HOME. Neither of their losses to the Dallas Mavericks were utter blowouts, but there was little doubt of the outcome in the final minutes of either game. The Lakers may be slightly more talented, on paper, than the Mavericks, but the Mavericks are still a very talented team in their own right, with two elite stars in Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd, and the Mavs are executing much better than the Lakers.

Now the Lakers have to travel to Dallas to play Game 3 tonight. This game, if won by Dallas, will all but slam the door on the possibility of a third straight championship for the Lakers. They will do so without starting small forward Ron Artest, who is suspended for tonight’s game after a Flagrant 2 foul against the Mavs’ J.J. Berea in the final minute. The Lake Show is undermanned and behind the 8-ball.

Now, Ron-Ron...suspensions are BAD! M'kay? 2

KOBE, TELL ME HOW MY (BLEEP) TASTES!
To boot, Andrew Bynum suggested that the Lakers were suffering from “trust issues” and then went into detail that should be disturbing to a pick up team, let alone an NBA team. This flap has a similar feel to the sibling rivalry that Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal had in the first half of the 2000s decade. Once again the parts of the team are being questioned by the man in the middle.

There is a difference. The first difference is that there was a legitimate debate among basketball fans, and possibly within the Lakers’ locker room, over who the on court leader was. Was it Kobe’s team or Shaq’s team? There is no debate in 2011. It is Kobe’s team. The second difference is that Shaq was approaching the twilight of his career, though he was still an All-Star at the time, with one more championship ahead of him, as a team leader, after his Laker days. Nonetheless, Shaq’s days in L.A. were numbered.

Andrew Bynum’s best days appear to be ahead of him. Whereas the Lakers eventually exercised the option of unloading Shaq, the Lakers have made it abundantly clear that they have zero intention of parting with Bynum. There were multiple rumors that the Lakers passed on an opportunity to acquire Carmelo Anthony, unquestionably one of the top 10 players in the league, from the Denver Nuggets in exchange for Bynum. The Lakers’ front office track record with Bynum appears to support those rumors. The Lakers appear to plan on Bynum being a major contributor and more of a focal point of the Lakers’ on-court execution as Kobe slows down in later years.

What the Lakers have on their hands is an emerging star speaking up through the media in alarming detail, a role reserved for the head coach and POSSIBLY an on floor leader such as Kobe (if any player goes to the press at all to air dirty laundry). Granted, Bynum’s concern appears to be centered on winning. He did not, like Shaq, deliver a rap asking Kobe to tell him how his ass tastes, in an effort to promote himself. But Bynum did stir controversy and he has forced the team into a position in which it either irons out any internal differences and rallies around one another or sinks like the Titanic.

"Check it! Check it! You know how I be. Last week Kobe couldn't do without me!"
Yeah, Shaq, but the Celtics didn't do anything with you, either. 3

THE HEART OF A CHAMPION?

True champions rise to the occasion when the chips are down. This is not simply a long-lasting, ubiquitous cliché. The Lakers are “all in” tonight. If they lose, all of their chips are all but gone and they will (likely) NOT be champions in 2011. Only four times in the history of the NBA has a team dropped its first two games at home and come back to win a series: the 1969 Lakers over the San Francisco Warriors, the 1993 Phoenix Suns over the Lakers (best of five series), the 1994 Houston Rockets over the Suns, and the 2005 Mavericks over the Rockets. All but the 2005 Mavs reached the NBA Finals, with the 1994 Rockets winning the first of two consecutive championships.

In other words, the Lakers’ backs are against the wall. However, if they are the team, this year, that they have been over the past three years, they have what it takes to overcome this massive obstacle and still contend for a championship. This recent crop of Lakers teams, as recently as the first round of this season, has fallen behind a lesser opponent, had the series extended to six or seven games, but advanced. This would be the greatest escape act by a Kobe-led team, to date, should the Lakers advance past the Mavericks.

Improbable? Yes. Imopssible? That’s…why they PLAY…the games!

Houston forever became known as "Clutch City" in the NBA world after the Rockets dug deep out of several big holes in their championship years of 1994 and 1995. Do Kobe, Pau, and Lamar and the Lakers have what Olajuwon, Drexler, Big Shot Rob had? 5

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1) Image from thequickanddirtydirty.com
2) Image from The Dallas Morning News
3) Image from TMZ.com via blogs.villiagevoice.com
4) Image from kaboodle.com
5) Image from pbase.com