Michael Wilbon writes for The Washington Post, hosts “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN, and provides halftime commentary on the NBA for ABC, so he’s obviously a busy guy. Like most of us, he picked the Lakers to win the Finals, and now that they’re down 3-1 and on the verge of losing the series, he sees a number of reasons why we were all so wrong to pick against Boston.
The vast majority of us should be ashamed for being so blinded by the glare of the Lakers because it was all right there in front of us even before the championship series began. The Celtics aren’t just better than the Lakers; they’re superior.
The Celtics are going to win because of stunningly obvious reasons, because they have more good players, because they’re bigger and stronger up front, because they play infinitely better defense, because they kill the Lakers on the boards. We knew this coming into the series, in part, because Jackson told us all season long what the Lakers’ areas of vulnerability were.
It’s funny how exaggerated things become when a team goes up 3-1 (as opposed to being tied, 2-2) in a seven-game series. The Lakers are one comeback (Game 4) and one near-comeback (Game 2) away from being up 3-1, so all this talk of Celtic superiority is unfortunate.
It’s true that Boston is the better defensive team, but they aren’t “infinitely better,” as Wilbon puts it. During the regular season, Boston led the league in defensive efficiency (that is, the points per 100 possessions), while the Lakers were sixth. In the playoffs, the Celtics again are first in that statistic, while the Lakers are third. I think everyone would agree that the C’s play better defense, but “infinitely” better? I don’t think so.
With young Andrew Bynum unable to play because of his continued knee issues, the Lakers’ front court consists primarily of Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom. But they aren’t the most aggressive players even in optimum conditions, and there’s nothing optimum about those two having to go against four absolutely great Celtics players who are bigger, stronger and more aggressive: Kevin Garnett (the NBA’s defensive player of the year), bruising Kendrick Perkins, long Leon Powe and a professor of defense, 39-year-old P.J. Brown. It’s been a mismatch.
Did he just call Kendrick Perkins, Leon Powe and P.J. Brown “absolutely great”? I’ll admit that they’ve all had their moments in the playoffs, but don’t “absolutely great” players bring it just about every night? I wouldn’t use that term for Lamar Odom, or even Pau Gasol for that matter. The absolutely great players in this Finals are Paul Pierce, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett.
We looked at the Celtics needing seven games to beat Atlanta, seven games to beat Cleveland and six games to beat Detroit, and figured any team that needed that many games to simply reach the NBA Finals wasn’t good enough and didn’t have enough energy left to win. Instead, we should have concluded the Celtics had been battle-tested in ways the Lakers hadn’t as they waltzed through the first three rounds of the playoffs.
All due respect to Mr. Wilbon, but Celtic fatigue wasn’t the reason I picked the Lakers in the Finals. I picked them because Boston looked so out of sorts against Atlanta and Cleveland. It wasn’t until midway through the Detroit series that the C’s started look like the team that won 66 games during the regular season. Even then, they didn’t inspire that much confidence.
As the Finals started, it’s almost as if they flipped a switch and turned that vaunted chemistry back on. Suddenly, Ray Allen’s jumper returned in full force and bench guys like Leon Powe had career nights that swung the momentum of the series.
The bottom line is that if the Lakers had pulled off that comeback in Game 2 or held the Celtics off in Game 4 – two games that down the stretch could have gone either way – we’d all be writing about a Finals locked up at two games a piece. Instead, we’ve got the normally calm and composed Michael Wilbon freaking out about how superior the Celtics are and how we should have all seen this from the start.
The truth is that the only part of the game where the Celtics are vastly superior is in the area of chemistry. The Celtics have it and the Lakers have struggled with it.
