Tim Legler was on SportsCenter giving his take on the series:
“…really were only seriously challenged in one series, the Houston Rockets, who surprisingly took them to a seventh game. They did it with relative ease.”
Really? So one Orlando win and two Laker wins in OVERTIME isn’t a serious challenge?
I wrote the following last night after the game…
Unfortunately for the Magic, the competitiveness of these Finals is going to fade as time goes on. The Lakers’ ability to clinch in five games seems dominant on paper and people are going to forget that if not for two plays — Courtney Lee’s missed alley-oop in Game 2 and Jameer Nelson’s failure to contest Derek Fisher’s game-tying three in Game 4 — this series easily could have gone into Game 5 with the Magic leading, 3-1. But by losing tonight the way they did, most people are going to forget how evenly matched these two teams were.
…but I had no idea that the revisionist history would start so quickly.
Then there was Magic Johnson, talking about Kobe:
“Kobe proved all the doubters wrong and all the Kobe haters wrong.”
While he certainly proved those that doubted his ability to lead a team to an NBA championship to be wrong, how exactly do you prove a “hater” wrong? The New England Patriots have a lot of haters, but how does a Super Bowl win prove them wrong? The same goes for Duke or the Yankees. People don’t hate those teams because they can’t win a title, they hate them for reasons that are intrinsic to the franchise or program.
For Kobe, it is his insular, “above-it-all” personality early in his career, the perception that he ran Shaq out of town, the way he acts/acted towards his teammates, the alleged rape in Colorado, the $4 million dollar ring he bought for his wife so she’d forgive him for the alleged rape/cheating, and the carefully constructed public relations campaign we’ve been subjected to over the last few years.
Oh, and of course, there’s this face.
Kobe haters didn’t think that he couldn’t win a title, they just think he’s a dick. How does last night’s win against the Magic prove them wrong?
