Category Archives: Los Angeles Lakers

Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers, Mike D'Antoni, NBA, Pau Gasol, Rasheed Wallace, Steve Nash

Ball Don’t Lie


Ready for an understatement?
This isn’t Showtime. And this isn’t fun.
This isn’t even the 2007-10 Los Angeles Lakers that made three straight trips to the finals and captured two NBA titles.
It’s a Hodge-podge group of veterans, past primes and no names. The Lakers have an egocentric star, and his name is not Kobe Bryant. Another player’s psyche is highly susceptible to breakdowns. Their coach has a warped sense of reality and apparently doesn’t see the roster like the rest of us does.
If this weren’t the Lakers, we’d ignore them, tell them to blow it up and check back in a year or two to see if they’ve made any progress.
But this is Los Angeles and these are the Lakers. The Yankees of the NBA. And drama and theater go hand-in-hand with the purple and gold.
The media will keep talking about them, but even Jack Nicholson’s waved the white flag.
The Los Angeles Lakers are a 16-21 team.
Can we stop talking about them now? If not, just let me know when, because it’s at that moment I’d love to talk about the NBA with you.
The most interesting, dynamic and contending team in Los Angeles is the Clippers. There’s a better story in terms of collapse in Boston with the Celtics. New York finally has a decent Knicks team. The Thunder are rolling in Oklahoma City, the Pacers have saved their season in Indiana, the Heat are bored in Miami and the Spurs keep fighting off father time in San Antonio.
But everywhere you turn it’s the Lakers, who frankly, just don’t matter. Lack of depth on the bench, old age on the court, chaos in the front office. Jim Buss is calling the shots, more and more frequently, if that tells you anything.
You already knew most of this. It’s nothing new. But for some odd reason, they won’t go away.
The players keep talking. Everyone involved is trying to stay relevant and pretend the Lakers matter right now. But it’s just an act.
Maybe it’s their coach, Mike D’Antoni, who continues to say outlandish things on a nearly daily basis. The man touted the return of Showtime when he took the job in November, promised things would get better when Steve Nash returned and just yesterday said the Lakers season was just starting.
D’Antoni has turned into a walking, mustachioed cliché. One game at a time? Season just starting? You’re 16-22! There’s just 45 games left in the season and it’s reasonable to suspect that in a difficult Western Conference, the Lakers need to go around 30-15 the rest of the way to make the playoffs.
Can this team win 30 of it’s remaining 45 games?
It can. But it won’t.
Which means all of this is just a sideshow. It’s window dressing on an embarrassing season. To preach to the masses to not give up hope is an affront to the masses. We all might not have made it to the NBA, but we can tell when we see a train wreck on the court and in the locker room.
We were asked to give it time, to exercise patience while this group figured it out. Many pointed to the way the Miami Heat started two years ago with Chris Bosh and LeBron James. By this point in the 2010-11 season, the Heat were winning games, not losing six straight. The Heat struggled with things like who’ll take the last shot. The Lakers struggle to get their shot at the end of games.
This isn’t a team that’s close, on the cusp and showing potential signs of greatness.
It’s a mediocre team. Kobe Bryant wants it, Dwight Howard just wants his. Steve Nash wants it, but can’t use it the way he used to. And Pau Gasol just wants to be wanted. There’s too much noise in Lakerland.  
Now, for all the poking and prodding on D’Antoni, what is it that I expect him to do? Hold pressers with a drink in his hand and say things like the uncle in Home Alone: “Horrible, just horrible.”
No, Mike D is doing just what anyone would, trying to paint a face of hope and optimism on a dire situation. And Kobe can tweet staged photos that make light of reports he and Dwight are sparring behind the scenes. And the Lakers can claim a 10-point home win over a 9-29 Cavs team is righting the ship.
They can do all those things. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. But it doesn’t mean we have to watch.
What do we typically do when we see a proverbial sports train wreck? We watch until it’s over. Well, this is over. We pay attention to things only as long as they are interesting. Most people pay attention to politics the six weeks to two months before an election. Within days of the election being over, we’re not watching Hardball, Morning Joe or CNN as much.
We needed to see how this would play out: Kobe, Nash and Howard on the same team. How it would go, what egos would get in the way, how they would run D’Antoni’s offense, if they complemented one another (both with their play and their words in the media).
We wanted to see if this was as fun as everyone said it would be (like on the NBA preview issue of SI, above).
It’s not.
And that’s the thing with sports, you watch until you’re spinning your wheels and wasting your time. We know what’s going to happen from here on out. Is success possible? Well, as Mike D and many of the Lakers players will try and tell you, anything’s possible.
Our eyes see a different story. And it’s just not one worth paying attention to. Let’s just close the curtain on this season and focus on other things, other storylines and teams that are worth our time.
Remember Rasheed Wallace’s famous line about how the “ball don’t lie”? Meaning, if you’re given the ball and you shouldn’t have been, the story will be told with the next shot. If it doesn’t go in, the ball told the truth. 
The ball isn’t lying on the Lakers season. Whether it’s turned over, bouncing off the rim and careening into the stands from a bad pass, the ball don’t lie.
And there’s no talking around that.
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David Stern, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Lakers, Metta World Peace, NBA, Ron Artest

End the Era of World Peace

And that settles it.
The NBA – and David Stern specifically – have no spine.
There is no other conclusion to be made regarding the league and the man in charge after they took more than 48 hours to decide that Metta World Peace (the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) should receive a pathetic seven-game suspension for his vicious elbow to the head of James Harden on Sunday.
I read one columnist describe it as an “incident that was as ugly as they come in sports. Vicious, violent and wholly unnecessary.”
Man, that sounds oddly familiar.
Oh, right, World Peace was anything but peaceful during the Malace at the Palace in 2004. He was, however, vicious, violent and wholly unnecessary.
When are people going to get it? Rometta World Peaceatest is certifiably insane. And he has no business in a public forum to display his crazy.
Remember the speech from Nicole Kidman to Tom Cruise in “Days of Thunder” when he’s chasing the taxi cab? After she tries to bail out of a moving vehicle traveling at high speed, he follows her on foot and she breaks it down for him: He’s an infantile egomaniac and he’s scared. Control is an optical illusion that most people learn to cope with. And once you get a glimpse of it, the fear of the unknown sets in.
And Ron Artest is one scared individual.
He thanked his therapist after winning an NBA championship. My immediate question was: which one?
Forget all this crap about emotion and being excited he dunked over Kevin Durant. He violently jacked some dude in the side of the head, knocked him out and didn’t even offer to help him up.
Seven games? How about seven years? Ban this guy – for good.
And I’m a Lakers fan.
I’m also a fan of not wanting to see someone seriously hurt or injured at the hands of a man who’s been suspended 11 times in his career for over 100 games. Everything Artest does is unnecessary, just like his forearm shiver to JJ Barea last year that looked like a wrestling clothesline. I know it was the highly annoying JJ Barea, but still, we have to draw the line somewhere.
Punishment should fit the crime, in both civil and sport arenas.
Except if this was a civil issue, and Artest had a violent history like he does in the NBA, he’d be getting worse than seven games (or the equivalent of 15 days in jail and community service).
But the NBA does not think about morals, justice, right and wrong. It thinks about dollar signs and TV ratings. So it took 48 hours to decide that seven games was appropriate – because that amount of time won’t totally derail the Los Angeles Lakers title hopes.
If you are the Lakers, you can totally win a first round series against the Denver Nuggets without Metta World Peace/Ron Artest.
Can you get past the Oklahoma City Thunder in a potential Round 2? What about the San Antonio Spurs, Los Angeles Clippers or Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference Finals? Probably not.
And what looks better for the league? Lakers-Thunder in Round 2 or Nuggets-Thunder? How about Lakers-Clippers in the conference finals? Or Lakers-Grizzlies? Or a classic Lakers-Spurs series? What about the NBA Finals? More fans tuning in to see Lakers-Celtics or Lakers-Heat than, say, Grizzlies-Celtics? Spurs-Heat?
I’m not suggesting the playoffs are fixed. What I am suggesting is the NBA isn’t stupid. It sees the match-ups and it knows the Lakers – even with Artest/World Peace being a washed up has-been – stand a better chance of going deeper into the playoffs with World Peace than without him.
So let’s not pretend the punishment fit the crime and that seven games is supposed to deter The Artist Formerly Known as Ron Artest from doing, well, Ron Artest like things in the future.
There’s crazy and then there’s crazy.
And Metta World Peace is and always has been crazy.
He can change his name, dress up his charitable work, be an advocate for mental health awareness (ironic, since he has none) and pretend he’s not that same guy who charged into the stands eight years ago, but he is.
People who cover him in L.A. routinely mention you can see a different person in Ron Artest each day, you can see his inner conflict. He’s got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, constantly battling each other.
He doesn’t know who he is. He responds to both Metta and Ron. When you’ve got dueling banjos upstairs, how do you that comes out when someone gets involved in an emotionally contested game against an upstart rival who wants to overthrow your team’s reign as the Western Conference dynasty?
I’ll tell you how it comes out: with one of the most vicious and nasty physical acts against another player I’ve seen since Kermit Washington decked Rudy Tomjanovich decades ago.
And the longer you let him have an opportunity to display his crazy, the more opportunity there is for him to play a game in his mind: how can I top that last one? How can I get more attention?
C’mon Stern, show some fortitude. 

End the era of World Peace in the NBA.
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Chris Paul, Dan Gilbert, David Stern, Dell Demps, Los Angeles Lakers, NBA, New Orleans Hornets

Obey Your Master

It’s official, NBA commissioner (czar, dictator, whatever you feel most comfortable with) is drunk with power to the point his ego is running the NBA. And to clarify, I literally mean David Stern’s ego in running the NBA now, now David Stern himself.
How did we reach a point where an American professional sports league is ran by a man who believes he is so powerful he can control everything? Can anyone stop him? He reminds us of any run of the mill movie villain, who has the crazy eyes and drives the car 180 miles towards the cliff, demanding, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it! And I’ll do it because I can.”
Stern was willing to set his own league afire this past summer and fall. In fact, he poured the gas and held the matches. He even lit a couple and waved them near the rubble that had become the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations.
He did this despite knowing how that worked out for the NHL several years ago. He did this despite the fact that the country is still in a recession and was just pissed off enough from the NFL lockout (one that did not miss any games but was still irritating) that everyone thought it was stupid. He did this in spite of a growing and shared belief that the NBA has been overpaying players for years.
The rationale for the lockout was not much better. “Hey, we know our teams can’t manage money very well and often give out 6-year, $60 million to the likes of Eddy Curry, but help us out of this jam.”
That’s like buying a mansion, not making the payments for a couple years and then right before foreclosure, asking your 70-year-old parents for money.
Ironically, this isn’t even about the NBA lockout and how Stern has lost his foothold with league owners who are no longer scared of him. It’s about how Stern is perhaps scared of them.
How else does one explain the blatant collusion involved with blocking New Orleans’ trade of Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers last week? By all accounts, Hornets general manager Dell Demps had been given full authority to execute a trade. Teams had contacted the league to check if deals for Paul would be blocked. Everyone did their due diligence. And so they proceeded in putting together a trade that took many days and man hours to pull off.
It didn’t take long for Stern to squash it. Coincidentally, everybody’s favorite moronic owner, Cleveland Cavaliers whiner Dan Gilbert, wrote an e-mail to Stern demanding that he stop the trade. The e-mail was leaked to the media shortly after the NBA blocked the trade.
The league may own the Hornets because basketball can’t survive in New Orleans, but they did themselves a huge disservice. Demps nearly resigned, reportedly. He was undermined in this whole thing and now his authority has been undercut, his team micromanaged by Stern.
As has been pointed out before, there’s no way Chris Paul is resigning with the Hornets when his contract expires at the end of the season. They will get nothing for him if he stays. By all accounts, most around the league felt the Hornets had won the purposed trade with the Lakers and Rockets.
But not Stern apparently.
All this on the heels of his posturing during the lockout, demanding the players had chosen a “nuclear winter.” And on the heels of reports that Stern belittled stars like Dwayne Wade and Paul Pierce during the negotiation sessions.
And let us not forget Stern’s changing the rules as we go style of leadership, the dress code, the headband rule (where you can’t wear your headband any way but right side up, logo facing forward).
I enjoy the dress code and the professionalism, as do others. But that’s not the point. Stern’s ego is driving the bus now. He doesn’t oversee a league and try to ensure balance, he enforces what he believes is fair and right and just. Too much hip-hop flavor? Dress code! Too many guys showing creativity in wearing arm bands or headbands, let’s get a rule out on that. Memo-style, double-spaced.
The league berated the players during the lockout with a hard line agenda that meant to imply they would not become Major League Baseball, where a few teams spend tons of money and have dominating rosters while two-thirds of the league meanders through the season in mediocrity ever year.
There’s just one problem: the NBA has always been that way, whether they pretend to want parity or think they once had it. From the period of 1980-2005, only seven teams even won NBA championships. And that list grows to only nine when you expand from 1980-2011. Thirty-one years, just nine different franchises have won championships. That’s quite a bit less than Major League Baseball during the same period.
The small market owners are trying to fight the power and demand they should compete with the big markets. They actually believe superstars want to play in Milwaukee and Cleveland and Indianapolis. Forget the lack of state income taxes in places like Florida, factors like weather and big cities like New York and Chicago. Who wants to play in a state that has beaches and sunshine 300 days a year when you can play in a gray, dreary place?
You can’t control free agency, David. You can’t control players like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade taking less to play together. If Chris Paul really wants to play in L.A. or New York, he might take $10 million less to do it.
You can be mad that the Heat’s trio (James, Wade and Bosh) chose to all play together instead of fight against each other. You can be mad the Celtics pulled off trades and signings that netted them Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (along with Rajon Rondo) four years ago. You can be mad that the Lakers are always a draw to superstars who love the media, Hollywood, sunshine and being a star in a town of stars.
You can be mad. You can hope to change it.
But you can stop none of it.
That is, unless your name is David Stern and you believe yourself to be the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. Are we gonna have to zap him like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man one of these days?
His ego has overtaken his once strong and level-headed mind. Stern is no longer the same man that brought the NBA out of tape-delay and made it global. He’s an egomaniac who thinks everyone is a puppet whose strings he can pull.
It’s time to step away, David.
And if you won’t, then somebody needs to cut the strings.
With you.
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Andrew Bynum, Dwayne Wade, Indiana Pacers, J.J. Barea, Jermaine O'Neal, Lamar Odom, LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers, Rajon Rondo, Ron Artest

Something About Stones and Glass Houses

As sports fans, the collective lot of us sure have selective memories. How we define dirty play and label people has become mesmerizing.
It’s really a psycho-analysis of deeper issues. Take this past week in the NBA, for example.
Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum and forward Lamar Odom are facing somewhat deserved backlash following their actions that resulted in ejections during the Lakers Game 4 loss to the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference semifinals.
As the back-to-back defending champions went out with a whimper, Odom and Bynum decided to take their frustrations out physically on their opponents.
First, Odom body blocked Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki and was ejected with a flagrant foul – grade 2. Then, less than a minute later, the 285-pound, 7-foot Bynum delivered a nasty forearm shiver in the chest of Dallas guard J.J. Barea – while Barea was in mid-air. Naturally, Bynum was booted for his actions.
The NBA suspended Bynum for five games at the start of next season and fined him $25,000. Odom will likely receive a similar fate, only reduced in the number of games and fine.
Was it wrong? Yes. Was it dirty? Yes, absolutely.
But there is a growing number of people who are outraged by Bynum and Odom, calling them dirty players and the Lakers a classless franchise.
In fact, here’s a quote from a friend of mine:
“These guys are classless, embarrassing, and horrible examples to all the kids out there playing ball. I now officially HATE the Lakers.”
Really? Do we really want to go down that path?
Because I think we’re entering a dangerous area as fans when we start generalizing and making disingenuous blanket statements about people.
Bynum and Odom’s actions were certainly in poor taste, they were dirty plays and were uncalled for. They deserved to be fined and suspended. But until that moment, neither had shown anything remotely similar in their on-court behavior.
It’s ironic that the immediate media and fan backlash was nearly the exact opposite when compared to the infamous Indiana Pacers-Detroint Pistons brawl in November 2004.
The “Malice at the Palace” began with about 46 seconds remaining in the game, when Pistons center Ben Wallace was fouled from behind by Pacers forward Ron Artest. Wallace took exception and shoved Artest. As you would expect in the NBA, this led to a lot of pushing and shoving from the players on both teams.
Artest went over and laid down on the scorer’s table and put on a radio headset to speak with Pacers radio broadcaster Mark Boyle and a fan threw a cup of Diet Coke at Artest while he was laying on the table. Artest responded by bulldozing his way into the stands and punching the wrong person. Shortly behind him was teammate Stephen Jackson, who went into the stands, fists flying.
More players – from both teams – headed into the stands, with fans running onto the court to escape the frenzy. Artest was confronted by two fans on the court and teammate Jermaine O’Neal took a running start and decked one of them in the jaw. The game was called off, as the scene was complete chaos, with folding chairs and debris being hurled onto the floor. Nine people were injured.
Shall we reassess what we determine as classless and an embarrassment to an organization?
Not yet? Well, then by all means, let’s keep going.
The Pacers-Pistons post-game commentary was certainly interesting. Studio analysts John Saunders and Tim Legler laid the blame on the Pistons fans, with Saunders calling the fans “a bunch of punks.” Rarely at a loss for words, Stephen A. Smith said that some of the fans should be arrested. He made no mention of the players.
We all lose our cool, the difference is how far do we take it? Is either of these situations, Bynum/Odom or the “Malice at the Palace” acceptable? Of course not. But the point is there are varying degrees here and apparently it only took us seven years to forget that.

Within 48 hours, Bynum had called Barrea several times to apologize. He issued a public apology during his exit interview on Tuesday. 

“My actions…don’t represent me, my upbringing, this franchise or any of the Laker fans out there that want to watch us and want us to succeed,” Bynum said. “Furthermore, and more importantly, I want to actually apologize to J.J. Barea for doing that. I’m just glad that he wasn’t seriously injured in the event and all I can say is, I’ve looked at [the replay], it’s terrible and it definitely won’t be happening again.” 

Take that in contrast to this, from Jermaine O’Neal following the Pacers-Pistons brawl in 2004:

“We all knew the league is 80-85 percent black; we all know that,” O’Neal told the Indianapolis Star. “We didn’t talk about the baseball player [Texas Rangers relief pitcher Frank Francisco] just breaking a lady’s nose with a chair because she was talking. They didn’t talk about that for weeks, did they? Every day for six weeks, you see something on TV about it. They didn’t talk about [former St. Louis Blues player Mike Danton] trying to kill his agent. These are people that are not black, and that touched me a little bit because that’s totally unfair for this league to be judged off one incident.”

Race should have little to do with it. 

I said should, because on some level, it might. That brawl in 2004 brought some issues that had been bubbling for years to the surface, most notably, the declining relationships between fans who were (and are) mostly white and a league full of players who were (and are) mostly black. In addition to a league covered by a mostly white media and owners of teams who are white. So I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there could be some truth to what O’Neal said at the time. 

But race was used by O’Neal in the wrong way – as a distraction from the point at hand. Maybe the fans shouldn’t be throwing cups and maybe the players shouldn’t go charging into the stands looking to lay a Mike Tyson hook on someone. 

Just a thought.

Dirty plays have always been a lightning rod of conversation. We always want to know how mad the person on the receiving end was. We call the dirty play disher a cheap shot artist and embarrassing. But when it goes too far, it makes us uncomfortable, so we just write it all off as one and the same. 

It is not the same.

We call it dirty and classless when it happens on the court – when everything is at a distance. Remember the Miami Heat and New York Knicks brawls? Jeff Van Gundy wrapped around the legs of players? How about Charles Barkley fighting Shaquille O’Neal, or Kermit Washington decking Rudy Tomjanovich? 

If those situations happened post-Palace brawl, we might have reacted differently. Perhaps the outcry would have been much like it has been this week for the Lakers, Bynum and Odom. 

What can we take away from all of this? That we’re more sensitive now to on and off court physicality?
That may explain why nearly every game, if two players get wrapped up or someone goes down, there’s an overreaction – and then a chain reaction. 

Case in point: Boston Celtics guard Rajon Rondo gets hurt (dislocated elbow) after getting tangled up with Dwayne Wade in Game 3 last Saturday night. The fall is ugly, the injury nearly vomit inducing. Rondo comes back later in the game, is limited, but guts it out. When he returns, many members of the Heat, including Wade, check on him to make sure he’s OK. Game continues, Celtics win.

After the game, someone asks Wade, who’s sitting next to LeBron James, about the play and mentions the word “dirty”. James scoffs and mumbles, “That’s retarded.”

Boom – new controversy: LeBron James is insensitive to those with mental disabilities.

Sure enough, James started off his Game 4 post-game press conference issuing an apology. 

Sure enough, that story will grow. Someone will call it classless and embarrassing. 

The cycle will just continue until we’re all oversensitive to every little thing. 

On second thought…too late.

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