17 of 21 ain't all it's cracked up to be

the reason I think people need to read this is because I’m tired of reading about favoritism and what not in the league. We have enough problems with the Donaghy accusations…people need to keep their mouths shut and refrain from tarnishing the NBA’s name unless they legitimately know what they are talking about.

awards and stuff
alot of it happens at staples and LA live so that explains why our schedule is so road heavy at those points…

There you guys go again, ruining everything by introducing facts into the argument.

Sore winners, sore losers. Pathetic. Even SternfluffsKobe was getting into the bash true_lakerfan act.

I think he is someone who got banned from this site and has come back as a new user just to talk trash.

its not like we get 60 home games or something. the end of the season with a bunch of games on the road is going to be tough for us. its a foolish argument

The whole thing is not meant to argue against the Denver Stiffs post. Only the first paragraph was. It was supposed to be like a footnote, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job of signifying that. Format Fail. I made some changes that hopefully make that a bit more clear.

So yeah, I’m not really trying to combat the “favoritism” argument very much, because I don’t even think of it as worth the time to combat. Most of the piece is combatting the idea that the Lakers schedule has been easy, something that EVERYBODY has been saying.

The Denver back-to-backs thing is quite interesting, and a clear cut advantage for the Nuggets, but like you said, that’s just how things work out. I wonder if the NBA schedules the Nuggets for more of their own back-to-back games (something Nuggets fans are quick to complain about) in order to combat the fact that the Nuggets have such an advantage when playing opponents on the 2nd end of a back to back.

But I’ll do the best I can. For me, analyzing scheduling advantages and disadvantages is extremely difficult to do on a macro-scale because what constitutes and advantage/disadvantage is relative to each team. As I mentioned in the post, if a team like Denver, or Utah, or even a medium/bad team like Minnesota or Oklahoma City, had a schedule that looked like the Lakers’ to start the season, I could understand why somebody would call it very favorable, even within the context of the overall schedule. The momentum built by a fast start, the confidence of having a good run of basketball, these are all real, plausible advantages that SOME teams would gain by having a home heavy tilt to start the season. But for a veteran team, especially the defending champion, I think the corresponding advantage is far less. That was my main issue with the post on Denver Stiffs. He was making an argument for why the schedule was blatant favoritism for the Lakers, but the logic he was using to make the argument didn’t correspond to the Lakers, it corresponded to the Nuggets.

The best example of this I can provide is the exact opposite scenario, the long road trip. Most would consider a long road trip to be a big disadvantage to your schedule. Having to go for a week or even two without playing once in a friendly environment could be a recipe for disaster. And for some teams it is. Look at the Bulls performance on their annual Circus trip, and tell me that that long road trip, at the beginning of the season, isn’t detrimental to them as a young team that isn’t very good.

But then, you look at other teams (usually veteran teams) and see that for some, a long road trip can actually be a big advantage. Kobe has said that he looks forward to a long road trip, and machismo of “looking forward to a challenge” aside, the results back him up. Right as the Lakers picked up Gasol two years ago, they were on a 9 game road trip, which I believe was the longest road trip in the league’s past 5 years or something like that. They went 7-2. Last year, they had that 6 game road trip with Cleveland and Boston at the end, and went 6-0. Going away from L.A., how often have the Spurs used their mid-season Rodeo-trip to successfully springboard themselves into position for a deep playoff run? For these teams, a long road trip can help to focus the team, galvanize the roster into playing purposeful ball because they know what it takes to win on the road.

And that’s my point. Every team is different, so what is advantageous to one team could be disadvantageous to another. In this case, what seems like a very advantageous early schedule to most is, in my opinion, only a marginal advantage, because L.A. isn’t buoyed by playing at home as much as other teams. You say the value of playing at home doesn’t change, only the detriment of road games is lessened, but I think that pretty much proves the point. If playing on the road isn’t a very big detriment, how can it be considered an advantage to play a bunch of games in a row at home? The advantage of playing at home is relative to the disadvantage of not playing at home. And while the Lakers road success is a short term trend, the schedule itself is also a short term trend. If the Lakers started every season with 17 of the first 21 at home, this would be a different argument.

For a team like the Lakers, who are good at home and good on the road, analyzing advantages or disadvantages from how they have their home and away games split is pretty pointless to me. It’s been made clear over the past couple of years that the Lakers are a good team home or away, so for them the quality of their opponent is far more important, and even analyzing that as an advantage or disadvantage is pointless, because too many factors (injuries, improvements or regressions of other teams, current form) go into the quality of an opponent that can not be determined before the season when the schedule is made.