NBA Finals- Celts/Lakers (Page 5)

Down year in the West...San Antonio (who I picked to beat Boston in the Finals at the beginning of the season) finally showed their age, Dallas and Phoenix are in flux, and the other teams, incl. the Lakers, are really still maturing. Lakers were just the team in the West that peaked at the right time.

But, as I said to a friend at the beginning of the Finals, any team that starts Vlade Radmanovic has zero chance of winning a title. Along with Tim Thomas (for whom he's--not coincidentally--been traded previously), arguably the biggest tease in the league.

Lakers were and are soft as shite and Kobe (the only legit defender they have besides Turiaf and Ariza) has always operated in a bubble...never as a teammate or leader. MJ-level talent, but he'll never be an MJ-level winner, because he clearly doesn't care about anyone but himself and never has. (Doesn't even give a crap about his dad, for heaven's sake.)

I gave the Lakers little chance going in--despite what all the starry-eyed pundits had to say (forgetting, as they always do, that the better defensive team almost always wins the Finals)--and they did well to make it to six games.

Who cares about down year? A team gets to the Finals by winning three other teams in the conference playoffs. That is how they prove they belong there, that is how they prove they deserve it, it doesn't care if every other team in the conference that year is .500. You win, you get in, you deserve it.

How can anyone say the team with the best regular season record didn't deserve to be in the Finals, anyway? That just makes zero sense. They were the best in the regular season and the best in the conference playoffs. They didn't peak at the right time, they peaked all year.

Dude.  Easy.  It's an anoynous comment on a message board

no need to get all worked up and italicized about it

(and the irony, I originally said they deserved to be there, but the conspiracy theorists said it was a league creation, now suddenly thy're a west powerhouse.... [sigh])

Edited by ChrisM 2008-06-19 12:47 PM

Oh, I don't think the conspiracies made for an uneven playing field... it seemed to screw over everyone equally on the road. They didn't care who won so long as each series went as long as was credibly possible.

Umm...they were 9-8 in early December...

8-1 finish after a shaky March saved their seeding/season.

And the Celtics had a losing streak too. Does that mean they didn't deserve to be there either?