By the way, with all the offseason hype about the Miami Heat, the Lakers have won back-to-back championships and is coming off a summer of adding NBA veterans Matt Barnes, Steve Blake, Theo Ratliff and resigning Derek Fisher and Shannon Brown. Not a bad summer for a s team that also has Pau Gasol, Ron Artest, Lamar Odom and arguably the best player in the NBA–Kobe somebody and a Hall of Fame Coach Phil Jackson with 10 rings.
This is an unusual moment even by the considerable standards of Lakers, with the best team in the league two seasons in a row loaded for the three-peat quest even if no one is noticing them like before. The biggest spotlights are aimed toward Florida and the leftover preseason and Carmelo Anthony hype. The Lakers remain the stable group, so grounded after not flinching through two elimination games against the Celtics, so understated.
The season will open Oct. 26 against the Rockets and the outcomes will count, not the perception. But imagine being the Lakers. Two All-Stars, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, one key member of the national team–Lamar Odom that just won a gold medal at the world championships, Lamar Odom, 57 wins in the regular season, 16 more in the playoffs, Ron Artest on defense, Derek Fisher in the locker room, Phil Jackson on the bench — and somebody has the Heat as preseason favorites to win the NBA title ?
“We’re a confident group, and no matter other teams are saying or what other people are saying about who’s gonna win and all that, we know we’re the defending champions and winning the championship comes through us,” said reserve small forward Luke Walton. “Just like when Boston beat us a couple years ago and people were saying how much better we got. We still had to go through them to win a championship. So we’re not concerned with that at all.”
“I think there will be maybe times during the season where [the Heat are] the toast of the town and everything is focused on them and people won’t be talking much about us, and that’s fine,” Fisher said. “But with Phil’s experience and myself and Kobe and a lot of our guys… we have a lot of guys that have crossed over into another part of their career. With that type of maturity, there’s really not much concern about what other people are doing. The concern for us is within our own locker room and within our own gym. Those will be things we need to remain focused on throughout the season.
“Who’s the favorite? Well, we’re the champs so we view ourselves as the favorite. I don’t think that will ever change as long as we have the guys that we have. It doesn’t matter what other teams have been able to do. We feel confident about what we can accomplish as a team, but we know there will be hard work behind it.”
No other team will handle potential distractions better, mostly because the Lakers are so practiced. No other team has a historic closer like Bryant. No other team has the lure of winning three in a row for the first time since L.A. ’02 or being the first since L.A. ’85 to reach four consecutive Finals.
There has never been a start to a season like it in the Kobe-Phil era, or even the Kobe-Shaq lovebird years before that. This low-key bit may take getting used to, but think if it works. Think of what the Lakers could do with all the extra energy that used to go to living the soap-opera existence.
The Lakers playing with a clear head — no one has had to contemplate the ramifications before.
Now the entire league does. They’re uncommonly settled, as prone to running down as before in the obvious concern but also bolstered by the summer of free-agent spending and retaining Jackson, and letting others deal with distractions for a change, all with the comfort of knowing who won the last two titles.
“People know where we’re at,” Jackson said.
Of course. They’re the Lakers, still.
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