Why the Lakers are not Worried About a Slow Start and What's Going on When Phil Jackson gets a Little Upset with Kobe Bryant

Recently reporters have been trying to scrape up any little piece of controversy or strife in Los Angeles Lakers land. After all, the Lakers are only 25-10, gasp, and they have been routed in LA by the Memphis Grizzlies recently, gasp (who, however, are much better than they have been on average over the last, what, 30 years?). And they were also routed by the Milwaukee Bucks in Los Angeles, gasp. And they have lost ten games out of 35, double gasp! So the reporters want any little bit of strife between any two Lakers personnel they can get their hands on. With that they can juice up their stories about how the Lakers are coming apart at the seams. After all, the Lakers are only 25-10, gasp again, and they are doomed this year and it’s all over for them. Put a fork in the sorry ass Lakers.

Laugh out loud! Silly reporters!

This may sound funny, but I am going to tell you that a team defending its Championship in a new season is not going to automatically be able to compete at top intensity every game. The regular season is nothing compared to the playoffs and it can be very, very difficult for a defending Champion to get the competitive juices running night in and night out against regular season teams, many of which have no chance in hell to win the Quest.

I know this will sound peculiar, but the defending championship team has earned the right to have a few off nights if they insist on them; just because they are defending Champions doesn’t mean they are perfect; neither they nor any other team is perfect. If the Lakers just can’t get the competitive juices flowing on a few occasions in the regular then they will have to pay the penalty: they will lose home court advantage to the Spurs, the Celtics, and, gasp, the Heat. Home court advantage is nice but it’s not a big deal unless a series goes the full seven games, and even then the team that by not showing up in some regular season games forfeited home court advantage has one last chance to win the series anyway, but now they are paying the price and they have to win game seven on the road.

If anyone can win game seven on the road it’s Kobe Bryant, or Phil Jackson.

THE LAKERS AREN’T GOING TO WORRY ABOUT THE SPURS (OR MAVERICKS) ANYTIME SOON
Guess what? Spurs Coach Greg Popovich has been hammered by Phil Jackson in the playoffs almost every single time they have met up. In 2004 for example, in round two, Popovich and the Spurs had home court advantage and were supposed to defeat Phil Jackson and the Lakers either 4-1 or 4-2. What happened instead was that Jackson and the Lakers flipped the script and handled the Spurs 4-1. In 2002 round two the Lakers had home court over the Spurs but the teams were razor close and the Spurs should have been able to at least take the series to seven games. Instead, Jackson and the Lakers won easily 4 games to 1. The ultimate drubbing of Greg Popovich and the Spurs by Jackson and the Lakers was in the 2001 round three (the West Conference Final). In this series, the Spurs were a much better team than the Lakers and should have won it by approximately 4 games to 1. Instead, Jackson and the Lakers wiped out the Spurs 4 games to zero!

Since those drubbings of the Spurs and Greg Popovich by Jackson and the Lakers, the Lakers have been busy winning Championships. All in all, can you understand why Jackson and the Lakers may not be worried about the Spurs right now?

LARRY BROWN AND PHIL JACKSON COMBINED TO INSURE THAT ALLEN IVERSON WOULD NOT WIN A RING
After Jackson and the Lakers humiliated the Spurs in the West Final in 2001, they went on to play the Philadelphia 76’ers led by Allen Iverson. That was the year that Iverson made his only NBA finals appearance. Now you know that Iverson and the 76’ers really should have been playing the San Antonio Spurs for that Championship. Iverson and the 76’eers might have possibly beaten the Spurs. So it’s very possible that there were two coaches rather than one who made it destiny that Iverson would never win a ring.

First, 76’ers Coach Larry Brown made the 76’ers offense less effective by making one of the all time greatest coaching errors, moving Iverson from point guard to shooting guard and telling Iverson to not worry about the point at all but instead to fire away. But no amount of Iverson “firing away” was going to enable the 76’ers to win the NBA Championship, since the 76’ers did not have a star point guard. Their only chance was to have Iverson satisfy the position, but several years earlier Larry Brown decided he could not stand the idea of Iverson as his point guard so he told Iverson he wasn’t the point guard anymore. After that the 76’ers were effectively neutered offensively and doomed to lose assuming they ever reached the Championship. The fact they even made the Championship is truly remarkable and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iverson is one of the very best guards of all time.

The second coach who helped ensure Iverson would never win a ring was Phil Jackson, who defeated the team who Iverson really should have faced in the 2001 Championship (the Spurs) and then of course defeated Iverson and the 76’ers in the actual Championship. So in a way, two coaches ganged up on Iverson which resulted in his being denied a ring. Anyone who thinks either coaching errors don’t matter or that great coaching doesn’t matter should remember what happened to Allen Iverson

NOTHING IS PERFECT INCLUDING A CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM
It’s great to have a great regular season and to win every possible regular season game. But it’s far, far greater to have a great playoffs season. Sometimes, you have to excuse a Championship team for not being able to “bring it” to every last little old regular season game. I’d be much more worried if the Lakers had lost close games to Memphis and Milwaukee rather than being routed. If they lost by a little it would suggest they really were having a problem beating a mediocre or poor team, which is a much more serious problem than taking a game off.

When they were routed they were essentially forfeiting those games. They were what, gasp? You read it correctly: the Lakers were for all practical purposes forfeiting those games. I’m not saying that’s good, but again, no person and no basketball team is perfect, and sometimes the juice just isn’t there. Sometimes Kobe’s brain doesn’t decide on the correct mix between point guard and 2-guard. Sometimes Derek Fisher is especially useless. Sometimes Pau Gasol is seemingly in dreamland. Sometimes Andrew Bynum is playing slightly injured. Sometimes Ron Artest is jacking up really bad threes and/or committing really dumb fouls. Sometimes Shannon Brown is a star athlete and sometimes he’s shooting bricks and running around like he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he is doing.

In other words, sometimes the Lakers have two or three players malfunctioning. And then the rest of the Lakers can be thinking (unconsciously mostly):

“Oh hell no; I’m not going to kill myself to try to beat Memphis when we’re hobbled like this; who cares whether we beat Memphis or not anyway? And so what if we don’t care whether or not we beat Memphis or Milwaukee? The relevant question is whether we are going to care about beating Dallas, San Antonio, or Oklahoma when round two of the playoffs come. And we sure as hell will care about that and we will be ready and capable to do that”.

I’m not saying that way of thinking is good; I’m just saying that it is understandable that a Championship defending team could think like this, since for one thing human nature is not perfect and since for another thing the Lakers have learned what QFTR teaches all the time: that neither teams nor players have to have “perfect natures” or perfect personalities” in order to win the Quest. Instead, you win it warts and all.

HOW THE LAKERS DO THE POINT
Point guard and center are the two most important positions in basketball. It’s far harder to win playoff games with a mediocre point guard and a mediocre center than it is if you have one of the best centers and one of the best point guards along with, say, mediocre to good players at the other three positions.

If a team does not have any outstanding point guards and still wants to win a Championship, the next best thing the team can do to cover the position is, assuming it has a star or superstar shooting guard (2-guard) who can play the point guard position and specifically can make rock bottom minimum six assists per 36 minutes playing time, and preferably more, is to use that player as the point guard. The general public is vaguely aware of the importance of the position but most of the general public underestimates the importance of the point guard. The position is too important to settle for a mediocre player who everyone agrees is a point guard when you have a star shooting guard who can be shifted over to play the point.

Currently as I write this, the Oklahoma Thunder, the best young team in basketball, is following this strategy. The Thunder use Russell Westbrook as their point guard even though Westbrook was mostly a shooting guard historically. This is a very smart thing to do considering that the Thunder lack a star or superstar point guard on their roster. Westbrook can and does make more assists than any of the actual Thunder point guards. Westbrook has responded brilliantly to the call and has ramped up his playmaking to the point where he is a better point guard than most of the point guards who were always point guards. You see, labels sometimes don’t mean anything.

But it is not just the Thunder who have to make use of a star or better 2-guard for the point guard position. No less than the current defending Quest for the Ring winner Los Angeles Lakers follow a variation of this strategy. Obviously, the strategy has to be workable and very effective (if done correctly) given that the Champions use it.

Although the Lakers start Kobe Bryant at 2-guard and Derek Fisher at point guard, Bryant is a superstar whereas Fisher is not even close to being a star. If the Lakers were foolish enough to think that they could actually rely on Fisher to really be the starting (and primary) point guard, there is no possible way they could win the Quest because Fisher is nowhere near good enough to be able to satisfy the point guard position for a Championship team.

So what the Lakers do is share the point guard responsibility between Bryant and Fisher. But since having two point guards is about as bad as having none, someone has to decide who exactly is going to be responsible for the position for every particular game (and sometimes just for a particular half or even once in a blue moon just a particular quarter). It’s apparently Kobe Bryant himself who decides in particular games to what extent he will be the actual point guard for that particular game.

Unlike the Thunder who officially designate Westbrook as the point guard, the Lakers use an innovative and flexible strategy. Bryant is more the actual point guard in some games than in others, and how the point guard role is going to be split up between Bryant, Fisher (and the back-up point guard Steve Blake) seems to depend on Bryant. But since Phil Jackson is one of the best and probably the best pro basketball coach in history, it would not be at all surprising if for particular games Jackson helps Kobe Bryant determine to what extent he should play point and to what extent he should play off the ball and go for a very high scoring night. The Lakers make half time adjustments as necessary and this may often be one of them.

The way the Lakers handle this is tricky and by no stretch of the imagination could any old run of the mill team meet the point guard requirement in the rather complicated and definitely tricky way the Lakers do it. In fact, despite winning Championships doing it, the Lakers themselves fairly often have trouble operating this tricky strategy.

You can think of it as a tightrope. If Kobe is in 2-guard mode but it is a game when he should have been in point guard mode (because for example Derek Fisher is almost completely useless) and assuming he doesn’t score about 30 points or more, the Lakers can look like, and more importantly can actually be, a poor offensive team, and so they can very easily lose games to even mediocre and poor teams.

Note that in this scenario Phil Jackson sometimes gets ticked off with Kobe Bryant. Every once in a blue moon Jackson will get so ticked off that he will be caught by some reporter criticizing Kobe Bryant for taking too many shots and/or for causing the Lakers’ offense to be too predictable and stagnant with too many isolation plays. Note how Derek Fisher escapes criticism; the fact that Fisher is not blamed helps to prove that Jackson and the Lakers do not really think of Fisher as the real, go-to point guard. Instead, Kobe Bryant has ultimate point guard responsibility even though he is not officially the point guard.

If on the other hand Kobe Bryant is too much of a point guard then the Lakers can have great flow, good organization on offense, and make plenty of assists, but still lose the game if the big players up front don’t score a lot and/or if at least two guards can’t score (among Derek Fisher, the 2nd string point guard Steve Blake, and the backup 2-guard Shannon Brown)

Aside from the risk that Kobe Bryant makes the wrong choice about how much to cover the point guard role, the other problem the Lakers always face with how they work their offense is that Derek Fisher is always to one extent or another a point guard who isn’t really the real point guard. Arguably, Fisher has never been a real point guard. Last year and now this year, Fisher is no longer scoring enough to be a quality 2-guard either. So quite honestly, more and more these days Fisher is becoming dead weight out there.

But it’s extremely unlikely that Jackson will ever start Steve Blake over Fisher as the official point guard even though that might possibly be a smart thing to do since Fisher is now indisputably in the twilight of his career. Kobe Bryant has perfect chemistry with Fisher whereas the whole Laker set-up at point guard could come crashing down if Kobe was unable to work with Blake as well as he has been able to work with Derek Fisher year in and year out. Due to Fisher not being as productive as years ago, the inescapable conclusion is that Kobe Bryant is going to have work even harder and smarter this year to win the Quest than he did in years past.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that Steve Blake’s assists have dropped through the floor since he became a Laker this year. This is yet more evidence that Kobe Bryant is the true, real point guard on the Lakers. This in turn is evidence that the one and only way to have a high quality offense is for a star guard who can make a lot of assists to have responsibility for the position, regardless of whether that star guard is a point guard or a shooting guard.

As difficult as it is for Kobe Bryant, Phil Jackson, and the Lakers to meet the point guard requirement in the way they do it, the fact they have won two Championships while doing it in this way proves that if you do it exactly correctly you can make this strategy work very well.

So when Jackson criticizes Kobe Bryant, it’s not really a big deal; it’s just the old timer getting nervous and cranky about whether he and Bryant will be able to once again, in the playoffs for the umpteenth straight year, pull the rabbit out of the hat. Because the way the Lakers make lemonade out of the lemons they have at point guard is nothing less than pure magic. I for one expect to see that rabbit come out of the hat one more time this year.