Lakers look back on a year of pain and triumph
It was a year of joy when the Lakers won the NBA championship and of pain when iconic figure Kobe Bryant was lost.
It was a year of dreams fulfilled and nightmares realized. The year of triumphs and burdens. The year of awareness and social unrest. The year of COVID- 19 and the havoc it wreaked.
The year 2020 reached its conclusion Thursday, leading Anthony Davis and his Lakers teammates happy to leave it behind and hopeful that 2021 brings more joy.
“It’s a lot of sadness in the world,” Davis said after Wednesday’s victory about 2020. “Obviously, we all will remember it because of the coronavirus. But from a basketball standpoint, it will be the year that I won my f irst championship, a year that I reached a milestone in my career and improved a lot. But from a life standpoint, a year that caused so much pain and heartache to the world. And a year everyone is rushing to get over with and start ’ 21.”
The Lakers stood firm through it all, and after almost 100 days in the bubble claimed the franchise’s 17th NBA championship on Oct. 11.
For LeBron James, the events that shaped him and the world are something he plans on telling his grandkids about some day.
“I think it’s something that I will be able to sit down and talk to my grandkids about and say that the year 2020 was one hell of a year — the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between,” James said Wednesday night. “It’s something that us as Americans and people all over the world hadn’t seen before ever, and just with the pandemic and the shutdown of our leagues, not only the NBA but so many of the professional leagues and collegiate sports, things of that nature and businesses. Everything.”
On Aug. 26, the NBA postponed three games, including one between the Lakers and Portland, after the Milwaukee Bucks decided not to take the court for Game 5 of their first- round series against Orlando.
Bucks players had grown upset after seeing the video of Jacob Blake, a 29- year- old Black man, being shot seven times by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wis., about 40 miles south of Milwaukee.
NBA players had already decided to take a stand to use their voices and platforms to talk about social injustices in Black and other minority communities.
James had started More Than a Vote, a voting rights organization that seeks to combat systemic and racist voter suppression.
“A lot of people lost a lot, they lost a lot,” James said. “Either family members or businesses that they’ve put so much work in over the course of so many years. So that’s something that was heartbreaking for a lot of people. And being able to sit back and talk to my grandkids about everything from police brutality to the Black Lives Matters, to the [ systemic] racism, to the More Than a Vote initiative that we was able to do.”
Through all of 2020, Davis said, “we learned a lot from this year.”
“At least I did,” he added. “At least from always checking in with your family, love your family, any bickering or beefs or whatever that you have, just squash it or you never know what can happen and I think a lot of people kind of live by that, just loving their family more and loving the people around them and anything that can be fixed try to fix it because so many people lost their lives to this virus.”
TONIGHT AT SAN ANTONIO
When: 5 PST
On the air: TV: Spectrum SportsNet; Radio: 710, 1330.
Update: It is an early rematch, so to speak, since the Lakers defeated the Spurs 121- 107 on Wednesday night, when James scored 26 points on his 36th birthday.