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You can’t kick dirt in their grave if they’re not dead yet, but in your modern sportswriting biz, we like to cover all eventualities just in case, starting with the most spectacular.
It doesn’t come more spectacular than the Lakers, who now resemble a centuries-old redwood toppling over, picking up speed as it goes.
I’ve been fortunate to have covered these guys for the better part of 20 years.
Aside from being great most of the time, they were gourds most of the time, managerially as well as on the player level (it’s not every team whose coach lives with the owner’s daughter and publicly zings the owner’s son) and more fun that a barrel of inmates.
The wacko days actually ended circa 2007, after Kobe Bryant came down from the orbit he’d gone into, when he demanded to be traded.
After that, there was nothing like the good old days, like training camp in 2003 when newly arrived Gary Payton and Karl Malone assured us that Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal would stop sniping at each other in the papers, after which Kobe went home and announced through Jim Gray that Shaq was a malingerer, a fake leader, a fake friend, etc.
In a crushing blow, Kwame Brown left in 2007. How do you replace someone who capable of hitting a fan in the face with a birthday cake on the sidewalks of El Segundo?
I bring this up because if the Lakers aren’t actually over, they’re in the greatest peril they’ve faced since trading Shaq and showing Phil the door in 2004, after which they went 34-48 and saw their new coach, Rudy Tomjanovich, light out over the hill in January, leaving his five-year, $30 million deal on the table.
You can’t kick dirt in their grave if they’re not dead yet, but in your modern sportswriting biz, we like to cover all eventualities just in case, starting with the most spectacular.
It doesn’t come more spectacular than the Lakers, who now resemble a centuries-old redwood toppling over, picking up speed as it goes.
I’ve been fortunate to have covered these guys for the better part of 20 years.
Aside from being great most of the time, they were gourds most of the time, managerially as well as on the player level (it’s not every team whose coach lives with the owner’s daughter and publicly zings the owner’s son) and more fun that a barrel of inmates.
The wacko days actually ended circa 2007, after Kobe Bryant came down from the orbit he’d gone into, when he demanded to be traded.
After that, there was nothing like the good old days, like training camp in 2003 when newly arrived Gary Payton and Karl Malone assured us that Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal would stop sniping at each other in the papers, after which Kobe went home and announced through Jim Gray that Shaq was a malingerer, a fake leader, a fake friend, etc.
In a crushing blow, Kwame Brown left in 2007. How do you replace someone who capable of hitting a fan in the face with a birthday cake on the sidewalks of El Segundo?
I bring this up because if the Lakers aren’t actually over, they’re in the greatest peril they’ve faced since trading Shaq and showing Phil the door in 2004, after which they went 34-48 and saw their new coach, Rudy Tomjanovich, light out over the hill in January, leaving his five-year, $30 million deal on the table.
