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Bullet-quick pint-y point guards are, of course, naturally disposed to tear the Lakers defense at the seams as the cruelly underrated Ty Lawson does with such relish. As Game 2 of last year's finals showed, however, melting-point gunners (hello Ray Allen, the members of last night's Suns) are the second most likely suspects for a degrading of the Lakers' 101.8 (8th best in the league) defensive efficiency.
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Pau Gasol and the very good Lamar Odom had their way with the tissue paper suns in the paint (68-28), which is usually the way to extinguish the Suns. But, as everyone here knows, the three point shot is other most efficient method of scoring. Add the Lakers' (to this point) intractable turnover issues (Kobe had 9) and we are faced with this loss.
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Who didn't recall T-Mac's off the backboard in-game all star game dunk when Kobe pulled his move? Oh the days when the creak of T-Mac's knees didn't make one whimper and wish that there was a Turkish team giving him an Iversonian offer he couldn't refuse. It's time to put T-Mac away.
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Lamar Odom was never Scottie Pippen and Lakers fans will never forgive him for it (this comparison only holds given the not-at-all-but-kinda-true claim that Kobe is MJ which is by no means a given). What they don't understand is that even with a healthy Andrew Bynum (ha!), the Lakers will not be able to win without the best no-stats All-Star this size of the slowly recovering crucial cog Luke Walton. Of course, Lamar excels in traditional i.e. terrible statistical categories but his adjusted plus minus is where he truly shines. Walton, Odom and of course, Bryant are the forces that elevated those D-League worthy post-Shaq Lakers mercenary crews into multiple playoff appearances and a near win against a historically offensively potent Suns team.
Odom put his sore shoulder down and rammed the USA Basketball team to the Gold Medal and a wave of patriotic fervor. It's quite amazing that a man his size can move the way he does and not have his cartilage resign in protest. He hasn't been truly healthy for a long time and plays through numerous injuries for the Lakers that would've sent him to the suit-tie-and-an-occasional-cheer brigade if he was still on the Clipper's (e.g. Baron Davis, Griffin last year, and way too many other victims to list).
Upshot: Crummy novelist and aging lonely man Denver Tyrone Foster declares that if Lamar Odom's MRI on his sore foot is positive and he hobbles through the rest of the season, the Lakers will not win anything worth mentioning. Hell, they might not even make it past the Nuggets without his flashes of all-world talent to put them over the top a la 2008-9 playoff run.
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To conflate nebulous critical evaluations with the objective rubric of an NBA win-loss column, our Lakers are essentially the first three episodes of AMC's The Walking Dead. Promising, frequently good but the cracks are showing. Hints of the trite, shock-value, teenager-on-cartons-of-adderall plotting of the godawful Robert Kirkman comic book or the let's-torture-the-fans-and-not-our-bodies 2009-10 Lakers regular season are beginning to surface. I will now go on record as endorsing, in principle, Lakers/Celtics aging/coasting strategy, but I worry about the three headed Miami Heat beast slouching towards Bethlehem/Staples center.
We need home court advantage. We need this regular season. Please get back to the 60 win plateau. Remember how you rode the wave of revenge and were out for post-2008 blood in '09 on the way to 65?
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Next: Lakers v Bucks 11/16/2010
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