Alexander: A full calendar year later, the Lakers will play for a title
Sunday is a year, to the day, since the Lakers held their media day at their El Segundo training center to ring in the 2019-20 season. One year, to the day, since the official beginning of the LeBron James/Anthony Davis combo, and the intrigue over whether the organization had put enough other pieces in place to make a run at championship No. 17.
One calendar year later – after the most tumultuous 366 days of their lives, or yours, or mine – they are back in the NBA Finals.
And if you are the type whose internal calendar is set to the rhythms of the various sports seasons, do you also find yourself thinking that if the Lakers are competing for a championship, this should be late May or early June rather than September bleeding into October?
If so, you aren’t alone.
“Very much so,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said in his Zoom conference before Saturday night’s game. “Especially because we’re in Florida and it’s 90 degrees every day still. Somebody told me that this is fall the other day, and I didn’t really believe them. It’s just very unusual to be playing playoff basketball in the fall in 90-degree weather.
“It’s the bubble. It’s a very unusual circumstance. But we’re embracing it.”
They’ll be in the Orlando bubble for a while more, at least four games and maybe seven. The Lakers, who went six straight years without making the playoffs and haven’t been to the Finals in a decade, got back there Saturday night by ending Denver’s Cinderella story, 117-107.
This will be, if you need a reminder, the Lakers franchise’s 32nd trip to the Finals. LeBron James will be going to his 10th overall and ninth in the last 10 years, and I think we can establish that the one he missed, last year in L.A., really stung.
He said he watched every single minute of last year’s Golden State-Toronto series, either at home, on vacation in Cabo, or at a hookah lounge (he said he didn’t smoke, but he was there).
“I’m just a fan of the game,” he said last night via Zoom.”I love the sport. I love the competitive nature. I love the playoffs.”
Rest assured that during those games he was thinking about what he would have done if he’d had the chance. Saturday night he had his opportunity to put theory into practice, pretty much willing his team to the finish line down the stretch. James scored nine straight Laker points during a 12-2 run that turned a 103-99 lead into a 115-103 edge with 1:57 left.
This came after the Nuggets, persevering even with Nikola Jokic in foul trouble and Jamal Murray dealing with a bruised knee, had wiped out most of a 16-point Lakers second-half lead. Stop us if you’ve heard that before in these playoffs. This time, though, Nuggets Stubbornness ran into Laker Exceptionalism.
James finished with his 27th playoff triple-double: 38 points, 16 rebounds, 10 assists. The only player in NBA history with more? Earvin Johnson with 30, just another reminder of all that has come before in purple and gold.
And those ghosts of championships past, the ones that burdened the Lakers during the seasons the franchise couldn’t get out of its own way? They are again inspirational, reminders of not only what’s possible but what’s expected.
That tradition “means a lot,” Kyle Kuzma said. “It’s the greatest franchise of them all. You talk about basketball, so many Finals appearances, to be a part of that, that’s history. That’s crazy.”
That heritage will take on even greater meaning over the next couple of weeks. When we refer to that 17th championship, it’s a reminder that the Lakers have made up a lot of ground since the days of Bill Russell’s hegemony, and now they have a chance to catch the Boston Celtics on the all-time championships list. They might even be staring down Gang Green face to face in the Finals, though Miami – overseen by old friend Pat Riley – could close out the Eastern Conference final Sunday night.
If you’ve been a Laker fan for a while, you might remember when May and June were the best times of the year, the times when championships were decided and your team was involved.
Those days may be long gone, since this year’s upheaval could lead to a permanent change of the NBA calendar. But the feeling is back, in both the delicious anticipation of games that really matter … and the emotional insanity within those games of what the late Chick Hearn used to call “nervous time.”
And no, a 2020 title will not deserve an asterisk. Whoever wins it will deserve a gold star, instead, for not only being the last team standing but surviving three months in the bubble.
” … It’s been a mental challenge to be in here this long and to have to endure what we’ve endured,” Vogel said. “Nothing’s normal in a pandemic. But this has been one of the most unusual seasons in NBA history. And to see that we’re at the one-year mark … it’s surprising and it’s – it’s just weird, to be quite honest. It’s been a long year.
“The excitement at that time (when they first convened last September) was about what we could be. We knew we had assembled on paper a really talented team. It really came down to whether we (were) going to be able to come together and how quickly. That was kind of the mindset at that time: How quickly can we come together?”Those fans who always knew, somehow and some way, that their team would eventually make it back to the top are savoring the moment, but there’s still one thing missing.
“The one thing I can say, I wish we was at Staples Center tonight with our fans, with our Laker faithful,” James said. “They deserve this just as much as we do, because they went through the last so many years of not being in a postseason run, feeling like their franchise would never get back to this moment, but they continued to stay faithful. You know, it’d have been great to celebrate with them tonight.
“So hopefully we can continue to give them something to smile about in the next round as well. That’s what our mindset is.”
The Lakers in the finals … somehow it just feels normal, no matter what the calendar says.
jalexander@scng.com
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter
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