I'm not a conspiracy theorist. With regards to basketball, I have never subscribed to the idea that this or that external force is to blame for one team losing or another winning. I believe that in any championship campaign, things will go wrong, and that great teams are not the ones who would have won if things had gone right, but those who do win despite the things that went wrong. Great teams overcome adversity.

That's why I don't buy the theory that the suspensions of Amare Stoudamire and Boris Diaw were why the Suns lost to the Spurs. In the game in which they were suspended, the Suns enjoyed a comfortable lead, up 11 at halftime, eight with less than six minutes remaining, and leading until the three-minute mark – only to give it up in the final minutes of the game. Should a team good enough to build such a lead not be expected to hold such a lead? But even more than that, Game 6 seals the deal for me. You want me to believe that the presence of Amare and Diaw would have equaled a win? Then that should have been the case when they came back, nice and rested from their one-game break. Instead, the Spurs controlled the entire game, and the Suns never had a chance, even with Amare and Diaw.

Great teams play through adversity.

Remember Magic Johnson's first championship? He was a rookie point guard, and was playing in the Finals when center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar went down with a sprained ankle. Magic started at center, and also played guard and forward at different times during the game, and he tallied 42 points, 15 rebounds, seven assists, and three steals while leading the Lakers to victory.

Great teams play through adversity and win anyways, and that is exactly what the 2009 Los Angeles Lakers did.

Click on through for a look at the various challenges and obstacles the Lakers overcame in winning their 15th championship...

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Remember that Lakers team that struggled to put away an injury-riddled Houston Rockets? Remember how unlike a championship team they seemed, and what a frustration they were to their fans?

Yeah, me neither.

If there is one thing that we've learned from LeBron James (regular season MVP) and the Cavaliers (regular season best record), it's that once the playoffs start, the regular season doesn't matter. If there's one thing we've learned from last year's Celtics, who barely hung on against weaker opposition through the early rounds of the playoffs, only to dominate in the Finals, it's that it's now how you start that matters, it's how you finish.

In the end, the 1996 Chicago Bulls, who went 72-10 in the regular season and 15-3 in the playoffs, finished with the same result as the 2009 Los Angeles Lakers: an NBA Championship. No more, no less. The basketball historians know the details, and sometimes it's fun to rehash them, but in the end, Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, and their Chicago Bulls are remembered primarily for one thing, and it's not any advanced measure of the specific degree of their dominance. It's simply the championships – six of them, to be about as precise as we need to be.

And so it is that the Los Angeles Lakers became the 2009 NBA Champions, and when all was said and done, a truly great team.

Read on...

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The Lakers' series victory over the Orlando Magic was most striking in its thoroughness. Which is to say - from a stathead point of view, whatever the superiority that the Lakers demonstrated over 455 possessions may have lacked in historic, shock-and-awe magnitude, it more than made up for in impressive breadth. Across nearly every performance metric that determines which team wins a basketball game, the Lakers were meaningfully superior, even if they weren't dominant in any one of them.

It's almost impossible to point to any single thing and say that for the series the Magic were better at it than the Lakers, or even the Lakers' equal. The cumulative effect of this across-the-board L.A. supremacy is that on average, the Lakers outscored Orlando by 0.11 points per possession. Given that the Lakers did not, as it turns out, have home court advantage in the series - a majority of the games were played at Amway - this is a resounding margin, unequivocal evidence that despite two overtime games out of five, the contest wasn't really all that close. A lot of light shines through the gap between these teams.

Standard protocol around here is to save the aggregate series numbers for the very end, but we're going to change that up today. (Try not to fall out of your chairs in astonishment.) After the jump, I present a special expanded version of the final series stats to see exactly how our boys got them rings. And don't worry.... the Game Five numbers are in there too. Come on - you know I wouldn't do you like that!

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It was a pleasure doing business with you, Otis Smith.

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In Game Four, Derek Fisher had a Robert Horry kind of night. This is a more complicated notion than you might think and, as hoops compliments go, is both enormous and enormously qualified. It invokes a sense of role player yin-and-yang that manifests equally in long stretches of ineffectual play, on the one hand, and historic, era-defining big shots, on the other. It describes a performance that screams out for big-picture context and perspective.

History remembers Horry primarily for the long threes he hit to change the course of many a playoff series. Those of us with doctorates in Advanced Horrysian Studies, however, know that this is but part of his tale, as in spite of his postseason heroics, he was among the more infuriating players to have on one's team. The fourth-quarter daggers were great, but they were often preceded by thirtysome minutes of GM-worthy underproduction. For the first 85 possessions of a game, Horry would wander the court without presence or direction, notching maybe three points and two boards and leading an angry Laker nation to ask the musical question, Why the hell is this guy playing?

But then, the answer, in the form of the shots that we all remember. The daggers that, yes, changed NBA history and rearranged how we look back on seasons and entire careers. I dig seeing the clips of Horry's classic bombs, but I also remember thinking, That win would have been a lot easier if he hadn't waited until the last second to do something useful.

Fisher's Game Four performance shares the same contours. Not the classic Horry fecklessness, of course; Fish is one of the all-time, try-hard badasses and one of the rare athletes who actually earns the overused adjective gritty. But let's be honest with each other: how many of us groaned irritably at his first five three-point misses and, through the TV, demanded his benchitude? And the thing is, we weren't necessarily wrong to do so, strange as it sounds. Up until there were four seconds left in regulation, Fish wasn't that great, and his not-that-greatness was a reason, one among many, the Lakers needed a historic comeback.

This isn't meant to disparage Fish's performance in Game Four; honestly, it's not. (Making three-pointers, after all, is actually difficult, especially against the Orlando Magic in their gym.) I mean only to observe that we as sports fans tend to focus overmuch on sequence. Whatever happened last seems most important, even though baskets made in the fourth quarter don't count any more than those made in the second. There were hundreds of tiny moments and interactions that led to Fish's bombs, so as we lavish praise for the shots that will likely lead to a Laker championship, let's not forget love for those who kept the Lakers in it until Fish could find the range.

For Pau Gasol, for instance, whose defense turned Rashard Lewis into a 6'9" version of J.J. Redick. For Luke Walton, unassumingly finding his role and his game after a season in the wilderness. For Trevor Ariza, who ripped third-quarter holes in the Orlando D and did some unsung work on the glass. For Otis Smith, who somehow saw fit to trade Ariza to the Lakers for - ahem - Maurice Evans and Brian Cook. And for Nick Anderson, who still carries with him the gypsy curse that makes the Orlando Magic miss free throws in the NBA Finals.

The Game Four numbers await you after the jump. Tick tock, Clarice....

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Hmmmm maybe that NBA Finals experience paid off? Derek Fisher came through with two HUGE threes, one of which tied the game at the end of regulation to send the game to overtime and the other put the Lakers ahead for good in overtime. While everyone is sure to talk about Fish's two threes, Dwight Howard's missed free throws and possibly Michael Pietrus' foul at the end of the game, what many will forget is Trevor Ariza's nine consecutive points to get the Lakers back in the ball game in the third period.

This was a game the Lakers probably shouldn't have won. The Orlando Magic were far better in the first half as they shot over 50% while the Lakers shot 33%, but a strong third quarter got the Lakers back in it. There are two numbers the Magic will look at as keys in them letting the game get away. One if the 17 Magic turnovers to 7 for the Lakers. The other is their 59.5% free throw shooting.

The play that will stand out in my mind came from Kobe Bryant, as per usual, but it wasn't a big shot that stands out. Following a Dwight Howard offensive rebound, Kobe stepped in, ripped the ball from the Orlando center and held on strong as he got fouled. That play right there showed the toughness the Lakers have this year that was missing last year. That right there is a leader stepping in and doing the dirty work. That game right there is the Lakers taking a 3-1 series lead in these NBA Finals, one win away from a NBA Championship and party on Figueroa.

This is your postgame thread so share all of your thoughts and comments below.

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Reversion to the mean is a powerful force. In principle, it holds that over time, the outcomes of uncertain events will reflect their underlying probabilities. Take the most basic example of such an event: a coin flip. If you flip a quarter, say, eight times, it may very well turn up heads six times. Keep flipping, though, and as the iterations pile up, the ratio of heads to tails will eventually settle at 50-50. That early run on heads will be offset by a tails comeback at some point, guaranteed.

This is also the principle on which Las Vegas was founded, and on which the non-gentleman's club portion of its economy operates. The underlying probabilities of casino games always favor the house. This doesn't mean that you can't win some nice cheddar in the short term - you could get a run of hot cards at the blackjack table or a friendly bounce of the roulette ball - but if you keep putting your winnings on the line, the house edge will eventually win out. Like a giant magnet, it will pull the average outcome over time to the loss that's hard-wired into the game.

Game Three of the NBA Finals left me pondering reversion to the mean for a couple of reasons. The first is Kobe Bryant and his free-throw shooting. As you've no doubt heard or read 17 times already, Kobe missed five of his 10 free-throw attempts last night, a statistic of obvious significance in a game decided by only four points. In one sense, you can assign partial blame for the loss to his misses, and I suppose you'd be right as a purely technical matter.

Really, though, when it comes to Kobe's free-throw shooting, we were overdue for a correction. Coming into Game Three, Kobe was hitting 92% of his freebies in the playoffs, significantly in excess of his 84% career rate. We know that he didn't wake up in April and suddenly become a 90+% free-throw shooter. No, the Lakers had simply been enjoying the equivalent of some nice cards from an especially generous blackjack dealer. It's nothing to apologize for, and it's not "luck" per se - that's where I draw the line on this Vegas metaphor - but it's definitely been an outlier run for Kobe, and it was bound to correct itself sooner or later. Nobody should agonize over a few shots bouncing out, as that's the ineluctable nature of probabilities.

The second reason I'm thinking about reversion to the mean today should be of further comfort to Lakers fans. In Game Three, Rafer Alston posted a 73% True Shooting mark on 14 shooting possessions (SPs), and Mickael Pietrus posted a 71% True Shooting mark on 13 SPs. Anyone want to give odds on this happening again? The Magic needed every bit of these outlier performances to hold off the Lakers, and if that's what it's going to take for them to win games in this series, then the odds are most certainly in L.A.'s favor. Put another way: Orlando is the guy putting chips down on the roulette grid and praying for an unlikely bounce of the ball, while the Lakers are the smug croupier just waiting to rake everything in.

So when you look at the Game Three numbers after the jump, be of good OK cheer. Yes, it was a loss, but Orlando's current business model is unsustainable.

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SS&R is having a local watch party for Game 3. If you are in the L.A. area, come to ESPN Zone across from Staples Center. Come early, because I'm sure we're not the only ones in Los Angeles who had this idea!

I will be there, but the wife will not. She will be at our Game 4 watch party, on Thursday. When you get there, look for me. Here is a picture I just took of myself, and I will be wearing this hat:

If you cannot find us at ESPN Zone, it may be that too many other Los Angelenos beat us to it. In that case, try The Conga Room (upstairs in the adjacent building), or the Fox Sky Box (the Staples Center bar).

Bring as many friends and family as you want. See you all there!

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