Game Recaps
Behind the Scenes of the Lakers 2010 Championship Celebration
by C.A. Clark on Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM PDT
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Last Thursday, I was able to experience something few people will ever see in their lifetimes. I was able to watch, up close and personal, as my favorite team celebrated winning a championship. It was an experience I will cherish for the rest of my life. Since I'm fully aware just how lucky I am to have gotten this opportunity, I used said opportunity to try my best to capture the event for the people who got me to where I was, the fine members of Silver Screen and Roll.
After the jump, I've created sort of a video diary of events that occurred after the Lakers Game 7 victory. Some of the video is pretty rough (especially the audio), and I apologize for portions of certain videos where my ample belly gets a little too much screen time (it's clothed, mind you, so don't get too scared) while I fumble with the camera, but all in all, I got some pretty awesome footage that you definitely would not be able to see otherwise. Enjoy!!
135 comments | 4 recs |
Lakers 83, Celtics 79: L.A. Still Runs the Game
by DexterFishmore on Jun 17, 2010 11:13 PM PDT
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The title, she has been defended. It took 105 games over nearly eight months, but the Los Angeles Lakers have won their second straight NBA championship and their 16th in franchise history. Their Finals opponents and ancient nemeses, the Boston Celtics, made certain that it didn't come easy. The Celts rallied from a horrific Game Six performance to suffocate the Lakers for well over half of Game Seven, throwing a major scare into all fans of the purple and gold. With a bit over eight minutes left in the third quarter, the Celtics led by 13. To that point, they had allowed the Lakers to score only 36 points all night long. Laker warrior-god Kobe Bryant was suffering through one of his worst-ever playoff outings, and for a while it seemed the team's repeat hopes would sink with him.
What followed were 20 minutes that nobody in Lakerdom will ever forget. With Ron Artest setting a tone of resistance with his ferocious D, the Lakers clamped down on the Celtics with ball pressure and ownership of the boards. Shots finally started falling - from Kobe, from Derek Fisher, from Lamar Odom and Artest, from Pau Gasol on second-chance looks. The Lakers kept hammering away at the Boston lead until it broke apart in the fourth. Exhausted and lacking depth because of the Kendrick Perkins injury, the Celtics couldn't maintain their defensive pressure and started sending the Lakers to the free-throw line. After missing seven of their 16 free-throw attempts through the first three quarters, the Lakers buried 16 of 21 in the final frame to ice the win. 83 to 79 was the final score.
Game Seven was ugly at times. At certain moments the Lakers appeared to be wilting in the June heat. As they've done so often over the past two seasons, though, they marshaled their superior talent, regained their composure and battled until the job got done. Every Laker fan tonight will agree: there's nothing ugly about winning an NBA championship.
703 comments | 1 recs |
Lakers - Celtics Game 6: You can't beat 19,009 Lakers
by C.A. Clark on Jun 16, 2010 9:30 AM PDT
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Just after 8 PM PST, it dawned on me. That's when I realized that everyone fully appreciated the stakes of this game, and this series. I'm not talking about just the players, or the coaches, or the analysts. I'm talking about EVERYONE.
With 6.5 minutes left to play, the Boston Celtics had just scored 4 quick points to cut a 26 point lead down to 22. The game was already well into garbage time, which began once Ron Artest and Sasha Vujacic hit back to back 3s (seriously, just read that sentence again) at the end of the 3rd quarter. Boston's mini-run, if you can even call it that, meant nothing. Considering the score, and the amount of time remaining, it was as insignificant as 4 points can be.
Tell that to the Staples Center faithful. With 6.5 minutes left to play, and their team up 22 points, the Staples crowd would normally be halfway to the parking lot. But last night, with the lessons of 2008 still fresh in their mind, every seat was still filled. Actually, that's a lie. None of the seats were filled, because everyone in Staples was standing. Standing and cheering. Not for a Shannon Brown dunk, not for a Ron Artest 3 pointer, and not because Kobe Bryant had made another spectacular play. In response to a 4 point run by the enemy, which barely made a dent in a huge lead, in a game in which the losing coach admits to looking ahead to game 7 in the 3rd quarter, the Staples crowd felt the need to get off their asses and make some noise, halfway through an entire period of garbage time basketball, to pick up their team's dragging feet and give them the energy to finish strong.
Lakers 89, Celtics 67: That Was Some Mind-Blowing Six, Baby
by DexterFishmore on Jun 15, 2010 10:32 PM PDT
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Yeah, honey child. That's how you play an elimination game. Faced with a win-or-go-golfing scenario for the first time in over a year, the Los Angeles Lakers came up with a defensive performance for the ages. They harassed the Celtics for 48 glorious minutes with length, hustle and a rediscovered ferocity that had gone missing in Boston. The result was an 89 to 67 bludgeoning that evens the NBA Finals at three victories a piece. Game Seven, for all the tacos, is Thursday night.
If you'd forgotten that the Lakers were capable of choking an opponent out with world-class defense, that's understandable. As recently as early March, they led the NBA in defensive efficiency, but a late-season fade, plus points allowed in bunches in playoff series against the Utah Jazz and Phoenix Suns, took some of the gleam off the Lakers' defensive rep. Tonight that great Laker D came roaring back, and not a moment too soon. They allowed the Celtics to score a pathetically low 0.78 points per possession. That's not just the lowest efficiency mark by a Laker opponent in these playoffs. It's the lowest mark of an opponent all season long. To put it in further perspective, at no point in these playoffs or the regular season had the Celtic offense been held below 0.83 points per trip.
Did the Lakers pick the right time for one of the greatest defensive performances in NBA Finals history? Yes. Yes, I'd say they did.
Lakers-Celtics Game 5: That's why you kick a team when it's down
by C.A. Clark on Jun 14, 2010 10:00 AM PDT
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I hope the members of the Los Angeles Lakers failed to get a good night's sleep last night. I hope their dreams were haunted by the ghosts of opportunities past. Opportunities that they could have capitalized on, but failed to do so because, well, because that requires too much work.
Game 5 wasn't a lost opportunity. Game 5 was an expected result. Not expected in the sense that it was how we thought the game would play out beforehand (because I sure as hell could have found a better use of my time if I expected that to happen). But, it's expected that, over the course of a 7 game series, there will be a game in which one team plays well and the other team plays poorly. It's how the Lakers won game 1. That's just generally how basketball works. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. If you don't, and your opponent does, tough cookies.
There's just one problem: The Celtics didn't have it in Game 4, and they still won. If, at some point over the next week, the Celtics raise the Larry O'Brien in Staples Center as the Southland collectively vommits, the Lakers will not look upon last night's game with a ton of regret. They will look at game 4 ... and they will look at game 2, because those are the games the Lakers could have won. Those are the games the Lakers should have won. Those were the games the Lakers failed to win, because, despite actually winning a championship, they still have failed to learn what the phrase "championship effort" really means.
Lakers 86, Celtics 92: Kobe Stands Alone
by DexterFishmore on Jun 13, 2010 9:59 PM PDT
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If you're a Laker, you have but one request for the flight back to Los Angeles tomorrow morning: a seat other than the one next to Kobe Bryant. You don't want to sit by him, you don't want to look at him, you frankly shouldn't be breathing the same air. Just find yourself a spot in the luggage hold, and stay out of his sight. The Mamba's anger has been on a low simmer all playoffs long, and after tonight's calamity, an 86 to 92 Game Five loss to the Boston Celtics, we can officially put Kobe on core-meltdown alert. He did what he could to keep the Lakers alive in this one, ripping off 38 points, but from his supporting cast exactly no one came even close to matching his effort or production.
Brink, meet the Lakers. Lakers, brink.
The Celtic defense put the Lakers on lockdown tonight. They were incredibly sound in their positioning and rotations. They hardly ever blew an assignment and were almost always in the right spots. The Lakers didn't miss a lot of open shots because there weren't a lot of open shots to miss. Except for Kobe, no one was good enough to beat their man one-on-one. The screening wasn't forceful, and the cutting wasn't quick. Had it not been for Kobe's one-man heroics, this would've been a blowout.
Lakers - Celtics Game 4: Desperation is a powerful force
by C.A. Clark on Jun 11, 2010 9:01 AM PDT
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The Los Angeles Lakers were the better team last night. For most of Game 4 of the NBA Finals against the Boston Celtics, the Lakers matched the Celtics defense with their own stellar defense. The Lakers were better at running their offense (not good in any way, but better than the other team), and, when the time came for a possession to be used, the Lakers did a better job of making the shots they took. If this were the regular season, I have no doubt that last night's effort and execution would have resulted in a W for the purple and gold.
But it's not the regular season. It's the NBA Finals. Faced with the prospect of either a tie series or a nearly insurmountable 3-1 series deficit, the Celtics played with a desperation that was borderline manic. They threw every ounce of effort they had into making sure that not a single loose ball didn't end up in their hands. They went after every shot, on both ends, as if their very lives depending on getting the rebound, because their very playoff lives did depend on getting that rebound. They played each defensive possession as if they needed to take the ball away from the Lakers, because they could not risk letting L.A. get a shot that might go in. They played the entire night with a desperation the Lakers had no hope of matching. And when the shots finally did start falling in the 4th quarter, when the execution finally matched the effort, the Lakers didn't stand a chance.
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Lakers 89, Celtics 96: You've Come a Long Way, Big Baby
by DexterFishmore on Jun 10, 2010 11:24 PM PDT
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175 comments
We've all come a long way, from 2008. In drawing contrasts between this year's NBA Finals and the Lakers-Celtics series of two years ago, most of the talk has been of how the Lakers have become a tougher, more championship-worthy team. The Celtics, however, have made improvements of their own. Chief among them is a newfound ability to win playoff games without dominant performances from their Big Three. In tonight's Game Four, a 96 to 89 Boston victory that evens the series at two games a piece, Paul Pierce led the Celtics in scoring with 19 points, and Kevin Garnett had moments of usefulness, but the truly dynamic play came from bench players Glen Davis and Nate Robinson. Those two led a massive Boston surge in the fourth quarter that secured what was effectively a must-win for the Celtics.
As in Games Two and Three, the Laker offense looked dazed and sluggish for long stretches tonight. They had trouble getting into their offensive sets and passing into the post. Kobe Bryant, though he finished with 33 points and made several key three-pointers to keep the Lakers in it, struggled with turnovers and with the general task of finding good looks. There were no out-of-the-blue role player heroics like those of Derek Fisher on Tuesday night. No one stepped forward to energize the attack.
The greater problems, though, were on defense, and in particular on the defensive glass. That's where things got really ugly.
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