Lakers, unlike Clippers, don’t ask you to wait until next year
Five days later, his parting words still scrape on the eardrum.
Did Paul George really say that the Clippers’ 2019- 20 season wasn’t a matter of “championship or bust?”
Technically, he is correct. There is no record of either George or Kawhi Leonard promising that the Clippers would be this year’s champions.
Practically, it is one of the alltime cop- outs, since it came a few minutes after Leonard and George combined to miss 28- of38 shots at the end of the Clippers’ listless Game 7 farewell.
The events of last summer certainly weren’t billed as the beginning of a two- year plan. The other Clippers did not spend nearly every day of that summer scrimmaging among themselves because they were shooting for 2022.
Yet their season of promise was just that, a constant plea for patience that finally cratered in Games 5- 6- 7, when they were immobilized by Denver’s refusal to surrender.
Contrast them with the Lakers in Game 1 Friday night. Granted, the Lakers are better built to handle the Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, but they made sure they saddled him with fouls, and as the game progressed they contested not just shots but passes and dribbles. They made every possession a problem until the Nuggets cracked.
That doesn’t guarantee anything for the rest of the series, but it was the first time in a week- and- a- half that Denver was made to feel uncomfortable.
The coldest and best epitaph for the Clippers was pronounced by ESPN’s Mark Jackson: “They say pressure produces diamonds and busts pipes. I see the Clippers and I see a lot of busted pipes.”
And so here come the rumors. The same internet that tells you COVID- 19 is a hoax also tells you the Clippers are considering trading George to Miami for Tyler Herro, Duncan Robinson, Andre Iguodala, Kendrick Nunn and two first- round picks.
Since the Clippers’ Official Reason for the loss is they haven’t spent enough time together, this is garbage until proven otherwise.
Meanwhile, the Lakers plead guilty to a sense of urgency, and why not? You can’t replace seasons. Ask the Dodgers if there is any real space between championship and bust.
The Lakers envision only one true outcome. That’s why they got Anthony Davis with no guarantees past this year, and it’s why they reeled back the years and picked up the forgotten Rajon Rondo and the damaged Dwight Howard.
They did not see Rondo as a ball- usurping threat to LeBron James but as a championship playmaker whenever James had to sit. Once they explained their terms to Howard, they saw him as a luxurious big man on a team that already had two, and thus were equipped to punish a league that thought the future lay in transistorized lineups.
The Lakers are 5- 1 once Rondo got healthy in Orlando. Howard, a former MVP, was terrific in the parts of Game 1 that mattered. So was Markieff Morris, who arrived at the trade deadline.
The Lakers were supposed to be hurting without Avery Bradley’s out- front defense, but coach Frank Vogel’s teams have generally demonstrated that defense is a mentality. They held Jamal Murray to 21 points, permitted him only 12 shots and hassled him into three turnovers.
Afterward, James was asked whether he agreed with the MVP voters who anointed Giannis Antetokounmpo for the second consecutive year. James made it clear he did not, especially when only 16 of the 101 voters favored him.
This was reminiscent of
Wayne Gretzky becoming gloriously offended when Toronto journalists said he had a “piano on his back” in the 1993 conference finals, or Jack Nicklaus clipping an Atlanta writer’s dismissal of his chances to win the 1986 Masters and putting it on his refrigerator.
The great ones think every season is a championship season and love to bust the critics. The Clippers may yet borrow that mindset, but it seems odd that they weren’t as driven to reach their first conference final as the Lakers are to win their 17th NBA championship.