Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports: “They’re winning 1-0, and Bryant played the part of unimpressed coach when it was over. Oh, the Magic will be back. Oh, they won’t go away. He’s right. Orlando is resilient and it will play well. Eventually, the Magic will test the Lakers in this series. Bryant was paying the Magic professional and polite tributes, but don’t believe for a moment that he thinks Orlando will stand between him and the Larry O’Brien Trophy again. Hell no. He’s been going hard for two full years of long playoff runs and long summer stays with Team USA, and yet Bryant, 30 years old now, has had legendary trainer Tim Grover traveling and working him out for the entire season. Grover was Michael Jordan’s fitness guru, and Bryant has turned to Grover to give him the strength, the edge, to go the distance this season. He’s been with him for years, but he’s barely let Grover leave his side this year. This is why he still feels so strong, why he wanted to send a message to the Magic late Thursday night, when Bryant said, ‘This is the best I’ve felt late in the season in my whole career. I feel outstanding.’ When it was over on Thursday night, Bryant walked out of the interview room and started down the corridor with his fitness savior. Grover slapped Bryant on the back and started walking with him. No words on the walk, no small talk. Just eyes ahead, just Game 2 now.”
Ramona Shelburne of the Los Angeles Daily News: “He is in a different place now. It’s darker. Bleaker. The kind of place you can only go for a couple of weeks at a time before it changes you forever. In the six days since the Lakers eliminated the Denver Nuggets to advance to the NBA Finals, Kobe Bryant has retreated within himself, to a ferocious, angry place. His expressions have become snarls and sneers, his answers are clipped and cliched. Everything else is wasted energy. All his power and fury are being saved for the task at hand, which he clearly wants with every shred of his being. ‘I just want it so bad, that’s all,’ he said, offering a brief glimpse into the tempest brewing within him. ‘I just want it really bad.’ Within seconds, the door closed back up again. The storm bottled so it can roar again in Sunday’s Game 2. In Thursday’s 40-point rage against the Magic, Bryant seemed to generate his own solar wind. ‘Well, he had the smell,’ Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. ‘He found the angle of what he wanted to do out there on the floor and carried the game his way.’ For the past year, Bryant has obsessed over this title. His sleep patterns have suffered, his focus on everything else in life clearly distracted.”
Dave McMenamin of NBA.com: “They blew it open in the second quarter by thwarting the Magic on 10 of 11 possessions in one stretch, turning a five-point deficit into a seven-point bulge. By the end, Orlando shot just 29.9 percent, the lowest rate for any team in any game during this year’s postseason. It’s easy to point to live-by-the-three, die-by-the-three as the reason for the letdown. Bt Orlando finished 8-for-23 from downtown. That’s 34.8 percent — just a shade off its 38.1 clip in the regular season. It was actually the twos that hurt them. The Magic shot 27.7 percent from inside the arc, as the Lakers were able to unhitch Dwight Howard’s anchor in the middle. If you cut the head off the beast the rest of its body will flail. ‘When I caught the ball in the post, they really sat in my lap and they forced me to pass it out for guys to shoot and they mixed it up,’ Howard said. ‘They forced me baseline and when I tried to turn baseline they had somebody waiting for me right there.’ Before the series started, Phil Jackson said he planned on checking Howard with single-coverage. But on Thursday, you saw Lamar Odom following a cutter from the wing to the lane and letting the offensive player continue to run free to the other side of the court as Odom parked himself in the paint as a surprise second defender on Howard.”
Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo! Sports: “The Jameer Nelson saga? Some tried to spin it, after the game, talking about how Rafer Alston missed the entire second quarter, and how that somehow turned off the Orlando offense. Really? I just saw a lot of missed, open-to-easy, shots. I saw Rashard Lewis miss a ton. I saw Dwight Howard(notes) miss some chippies. I saw Mickael Pietrus(notes) miss a few. Courtney Lee, as well. Marcin Gortat, near the basket. And that’s all in the second quarter! That’s not on Nelson. He set these guys up, and the guys set themselves up. Rafer Alston on the bench has nothing to do with Rashard Lewis missing an eight-footer on a post-up, on a play where Nelson didn’t even make the entry pass. Or Lee missing an open three-pointer. And the second biggest thing, to me? Dwight Howard was horrible. Absolutely horrible, on either end. There was plenty of talk about Howard missing one of six shots. Only taking six shots. Only making one. Having no real impact in the scoring column. We love to talk about offense. But it was his defense that was the absolute worst. He was a step slow on his help, all game. With or without foul trouble, and usually without any chance at picking up an actual foul. Late in contesting shots, and late in getting to rebounds on both ends.”
John Schuhmann of NBA.com: “Early on, the Magic didn’t go to Howard in the post. And when they did, after a timeout late in the first quarter, he picked up his second foul for barreling through Pau Gasol. That put him on the bench for the next eight minutes. His teammates tried to get him the ball down low after he returned midway through the second period, but that task was difficult all night. With two 7-footers on their front line, the Lakers can come at Howard with more length than any other team in the league. Even if Andrew Bynum left Howard to help on a screen-and-roll, Gasol was there to help out. In general, the Lakers crowded Howard down low. When he got the ball, the defense sagged and didn’t give him space to operate. When he tried to make a move in the paint, there were extra bodies waiting. After a lefty hook on a move across the lane early in the first quarter, he went the final 46 minutes of the game without a bucket. ‘They really sat in my lap and they forced me to pass it out for guys to shoot,’ Howard said afterward, ‘and they mixed it up.’ The Lakers also came with a double-team on occasion. But it wasn’t from the direction that Howard was accustomed to. ‘They forced me baseline, and when I tried to turn baseline, they had somebody waiting right there,’ Howard said. ‘I just wasn’t patient enough to pick it apart.’”
Ben Q. Rock of Third Quarter Collapse: “The Magic failed to execute in the first game of the season, a 14-point loss to the Atlanta Hawks at home. But here, at the NBA Finals, the highest level of basketball competition in the world, nobody can afford to make those mistakes. Work the pick-and-roll more diligently, find more open looks, convert them… and maybe this game is closer. But, in a 25-point game, it’s hard just to point at one thing and say, ‘well, if the losing team did that better, they’d have won.’ There are a lot of things for coach Stan Van Gundy to sort out in the next two days. He’ll certainly be busy. There’s the issue of finding better–but not necessarily more–touches for Dwight Howard. Decry his getting only 6 shot attempts all you like, but he still shot 16 free throws and committed 2 turnovers. He had his share of touches. And the defense definitely needs work, particularly on the interior. Odd as it sounds in a game in which they only mustered 75 points, their defensive effort and intensity might be the bigger problem than their offense. Consider that the Magic were +6 on free throws and +15 on three-pointers. That means the Lakers outscored them on two-pointers by a staggering 46 points. Orlando had no answer for Los Angeles’ high-low game with any combination of bigs, but especially when Pau Gasol played center with Lamar Odom at power forward.”
Kerry Eggers of The Portland Tribune: “I could be way wrong, but I think Kevin Pritchard has that itch. And Paul Allen will be right there to scratch it. So if the opportunity arises for the Trail Blazers to move up in the draft and secure a lottery pick, don’t be surprised if they’re on it like a mosquito on a bare bottom. Thanks to a 54-win regular season and the franchise’s first playoff appearance since 2003, Portland owns the 24th pick in the June 25 draft. ‘But just because we’re not at the lottery, it doesn’t mean we won’t be in the lottery,’ Pritchard said two weeks ago. ‘I’m not making any promises. What I will tell you is, we are always open to all the possibilities. We’re not afraid to take chances and have some fun with the draft.’ During last week’s draft combine at Chicago, members of Pritchard’s executive team interviewed Stephen Curry, the Davidson guard whose stock has shot up enough in recent weeks to make him a likely lottery selection. … Curry told reporters several lottery teams – Oklahoma City, Golden State, New York, Washington among them – have shown serious interest. And that Portland seemed ‘really hot’ for him.”
Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star: “Bryan Colangelo, the general manager, is in the midst of making a tenure-defining read of the tea leaves, to either bank on Bosh re-signing next summer or to engineer an asset-salvaging trade before Bosh leaves for zilch. Complicating it all is the reality that trading an all-star rarely yields equal value, which is why so many NBA teams give franchise-player contracts to second-tier all-stars. Certainly Bosh, centrepiece of a squad that has won exactly zero playoff series since he arrived, has cemented himself in the latter category. And more and more he comes off as a delusional duper-star. Alert observers still cringe at the season finale in Chicago, when the Texan – needing 18 rebounds to average an even 10 boards a game for the season – pulled down 19 caroms. Too bad his season-high binge came for selfish purposes on the last night of a lost campaign. Yesterday, when Bosh insisted he is worthy of the same money that LeBron James and Dwyane Wade will surely receive next summer – ‘without a doubt,’ he said, no matter that a team built around him won 33 games this year – he pooh-poohed the idea of taking less for a chance at building a contender. That’s fair, but Bosh certainly needs to get better if the Raptors are ever going to.”
Rick Bonnell of The Charlotte Observer: “Charlotte Bobcats coach Larry Brown — arguably the team’s greatest asset at this point — said he’d be anxious about an ownership change that results in Michael Jordan no longer running the basketball operation. Brown also said he needs Jordan fully engaged by running the team. Jordan wasn’t in Charlotte Thursday, when the Bobcats worked out lottery picks Stephen Curry of Davidson and Gerald Henderson of Duke. ‘He’s special and great to be around. We need him engaged and involved,” Brown said of Jordan Friday. ‘If he’s gone, he’s the guy who hired me. You don’t know who’d be coming in here (to run the team) and how they feel abouu the job we did, our capabilities. ‘But I have no control over that. I’m going to do the best I can. Our staff’s going to do the best it can to get us better.’ So would Brown be less comfortable coaching the Bobcats in Jordan’s absence? ‘It depends on who it would be,” Brown said of new management. ‘But I came here because of Michael.’”
Howard Beck of The New York Times: “Stern has expressed a desire to raise the age limit to 20 in the next round of collective bargaining. The union wants to repeal the rule. The issue drew renewed focus this week when Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, issued a news release assailing the age limit. In an interview Wednesday, Cohen called the policy ‘a vestige of slavery,’ because most of the players affected are African-American. ‘Not like the slavery of 150 years ago,’ Cohen said, ‘but it’s a restraint on a person’s freedoms and liberties.’ In defending the policy, Stern noted that Congress itself has a minimum age of 25. ‘I don’t know why our founders decided that age 25 was good for Congress, but I guess they thought that was about maturity,’ Stern said. ‘For us, it’s a kind of basketball maturity.’ Critics of the rule say it prevents players from making a living and forces them to go to college for a year. Stern disagreed, saying that players can choose to attend college or junior college, or play in the N.B.A.’s Development League or in Europe.”
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: “‘Our revenues will likely be down some percentage, I can say maybe as much as 10 percent [next season],’ Stern said in his annual pre-Finals media address. ‘But that’s a small amount in the landscape here.’ Stern has been discussing the economy’s impact on the NBA business for months, but it was the first time he’d assigned a number to the projected percentage decline in revenue for next season. Perhaps he deliberately chose a high number, because he backtracked in a more intimate session with reporters afterward. ‘It’s funny, I say 10 percent, but of course I’m going to work as hard as I can to make it not 10 percent,’ Stern said. ‘If it’s 5 percent or 7 percent or 3 percent, don’t hold me to it.’ Asked how this doomsday estimate might affect collective bargaining negotiations that are scheduled to begin after the Finals, Stern said, ‘We’re going to share numbers and then we’ll both make our own judgments about what the impact of that will be. … That’s not, ‘The sky is falling,’ because we really do believe that our business is actually quite robust.’ Stern already has admitted that the salary cap – which is calculated each year based on the previous season’s revenues – is going down slightly in 2009-10 based on this season’s revenue. But Stern’s worst-case projection of a 10 percent decline next season would cause the 2010-11 cap to be slashed significantly.”
(Photo by Andy Hayt NBAE/Getty Images)
