THE SHOTGUN SINGS THE SONG

I felt resentful of Mike Brown from the beginning. It didn’t have that much to do with him really. It was more about the way the season had ended, the way the players had given up on Phil Jackson during his well-publicized last run. It had to do with the way management cleaned house and the way Brian Shaw was treated like a pariah. It felt toxic. And the new boss came along, smiling and affable and filled with reasonable plans. And the summer became a bitter lockout.

He had been to the finals, had been a coach of the year. He had dealt with an outsized ego in LeBron James. He preached defense. I for one, made fun - he wasn’t my choice. As if I had a right. And the lockout-shortened season began and he was thrown into it with a blockbuster trade that was vetoed and a jerry-rigged amalgamation of aging stars and average journeymen. The season didn’t go so well and we weren’t that surprised.

Coach Brown seemed like a nice guy. He had an easy laugh and a love of work. He held long practices and his players seemed to accept it because the intentions seemed good and sincere. And he seemed reasoned when he explained his cockeyed rotations and pedestrian offense. Because they were figuring this thing out, y’know? It took time. And the season ended with another second round exit and there was the usual talk about what he was and what he wasn’t and another summer rolled along and then the lid blew off in the form of Steve Nash & Dwight Howard. Rock Stars! Salvation! Bring on the rings, encrusted with jewels, for surely they are ours to lose.

There was a small matter - the team needed direction and a system. And low and behold the Princeton Offense was brought forth and this seemed good because there were familiar principles involved. It had a lofty name and it was about ball movement and off-ball movement and wasn’t it kind of like the triangle, kind of? And a new crop of assistant coaches were summoned and a smattering of new role players and the table was set. Signed, sealed, delivered.

There were a few minor wrinkles. Dwight Howard was coming off back surgery. The team was somewhat geriatric. This danged Princeton thing seemed awful tough to figure out. Kobe hurt his foot and Nash fractured a shin and Jordan Hill did the same thing to his back that Dwight Howard had done but that was okay because he’d just rest it a little and besides, Dwight himself was coming back after many months of inactivity. No worries.

It was easy to blame Mike Brown and yet it was also reasonable to blame injuries and unfamiliarity and a host of other events on the ground. And Mike still had his smile and his work ethic and his screwy rotations. The team lost three in a row to start the season and finally beat the lowly Detroit Pistons and with five minutes left in the game and a 25-point lead, Mike Brown stood on the sidelines with his hands on his hips, shouting out directions as Kobe and Dwight and Pau huffed and puffed down the floor.

And yes, there was something about this that didn’t quite seem right. Just like there was something lost in translation when Brown explained why he played Pau for such heavy minutes during the preseason. He said he knew Gasol had played a ton of ball during the course of the previous year so he would play him more now because it would be uncomfortable in the moment but wouldn’t seem uncomfortable later.

And then came the fateful fifth game of this almighty season and the Lakers were blown out in Utah. And the needle swiped across the vinyl with an ugly squawk and everything stopped. And Mike Brown talked his talk and the players said it would take some time and Jim Buss said he had every confidence in his guy. And pulled the trigger.

It was a surprise but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Jim Buss is a numbers guy. He looks at percentages, at returns, at stats and data. And he has no aversion to dropping the hammer. He has been handed the keys to a kingdom that’s about winning, about major media market deals and signing superstars and great expectations. There's also talk that the grand patriarch himself wanted Brown gone. To be honest, it's remarkable that he lasted as long as he did.

Mitch Kupchak gave a presser and spoke thoughtfully and pragmatically. They’ll make some calls and sort through the candidates. They’ll probably talk to their superstar veterans about it, he said. Not for validation but just for information – who they know and that kind of thing. The team will take many things into careful consideration and won’t be rushed. I don’t buy it. I think Buss has been running the numbers for weeks. And the winner is.....

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.


(*update: I wrote the above hours after Mike Brown was let go. I felt as so many did, that Phil Jackson would return for one more go-round. It was a wonderfully sweet and toxic 48hr ride until management took a sharp and sudden turn. Mike D'Antoni is nothing like the old boss but he should be just as entertaining.)

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

A lot can happen in a week’s time. Last Sunday, Dwayne Wade broke Kobe Bryant’s nose in the All-Star game. In the three games since, Kobe scored 102 points. He also led his team to convincing wins in all three games, including a victory against Wade’s Miami Heat.

Second impact syndrome is the terminology for what can happen when an athlete receives a second concussion before fully recovering from an initial, even minor concussion. I won’t go into the details but it involves swelling of the brain and unrelieved pressure – not pleasant stuff. Kobe was diagnosed with a concussion on a Tuesday, as well as soft tissue damage in his neck to go along with his broken nose. He was allowed into action the following day. 

Kobe’s game against the Timberwolves was stunningly successful, a masked bandit pouring in 31 efficient points in 33 minutes. Why 33 minutes? Because the Laker lead dipped to a mere 19, late in the 4th quarter. Coach Brown in his infinite wisdom sent Kobe back out to protect this tenuous situation. Not to worry about the broken nose, the concussion and the damage to his neck.

Two nights later, the Lakers are up by 10 with only seconds left against he Sacramento Kings. Keith Smart sees a teaching opportunity and calls a time out. A natural segue for Kobe to take his place on the bench considering the considerable time he’s been logging this season, not to mention that whole concussion/neck injury thing. Nope, Brown sends him back – the Kings foul Kobe hard and he heads back to the line.

Sunday – the Miami Heat come to town, a major storyline considering that it was Wade who did the bloody deed a week earlier. The Heat are widely considered the favorites to take it all this year. The Lakers picked them apart – perhaps their most convincing win this season. Kobe was an assassin and the rest of the team stepped up as well. Andrew dominated inside and Metta World Peace was as dialed in as I’ve seen him in a long time. Pau played well, Steve Blake played well, they all played well - crisply, cohesively, with meaning.

And you may ask yourself, well, how did we get here?

The Lakers ended last season by cleaning house and hiring Mike Brown. An excerpt from a May 27, post entitled This Is Not My Beautiful House:

There are contingency plans of course, in the event that cooler heads prevail and a season is somehow salvaged. For the Lakers, this entailed finding a coach who could follow Phil Jackson, a coach who would bring a fractured team back together and lead them to the promised land. After careful consideration, they hired Mike Brown. Pause for the sound of a gigantic shoe dropping with a loud, dull thud. Yes, that guy from the Cavs, the one last seen with LeBron’s tire tracks across his back. He was on ESPN the other night, grinning huge at the prospect of working with Kobe. I’m sure Kobe’s excited to be working with Brown as well, henceforth to be known as the big bulls-eye.

What was Jim Buss thinking? You probably don’t want to know, I suspect his mind is a soggy and dangerous place. He often talks of learning at the hand of Mitch Kupchak but it’s a crock – the only guy who sat at the right hand of Kupchak was Ronnie Lester, 25 years with the Lakers and the one really responsible for scouting and championing Andrew Bynum. Lester is now joining the exiting conga-line of coaches, scouts, trainers and video staff, courtesy of Jimmy’s sloppily wielded truncheon.

Cooler heads did not prevail – the league would soon shut out its players, resulting in a protracted lockout in which a cabal of owners attempted to shut things down for a season and break the players’ union, it was a time of strangeness and abstractions. That a season was rescued at all was due to lawsuits from the players – a ludicrous checkerboard schedule followed, along with predictable injuries and spotty up-and-down play.

The Lakers’ abbreviated preseason brought them a blockbuster trade that was summarily scuttled by David Stern, the trade of Lamar Odom for financial reasons, and the rupture of some key ligaments in Kobe Bryant’s shooting wrist. And so their season began, with three games in three days - Kobe played with the torn-up wrist, naturally.

The team itself went through a series of lineup experiments as the season progressed, a dizzying array of rotations that baffled most observers, along with the players themselves. The musical chairs lasted until this past week when Brown declared himself settled (notwithstanding the fact that Pau Gasol remains on the block).

You may ask yourself, how do I work this?

A couple weeks ago, Kobe Bryant spoke up for beleaguered teammate Pau Gasol, blasting the front office for keeping the guy dangling. It’s not a good way for management to promote team unity and success. Kobe’s statement however, was a good way to promote team unity and success. Ken Berger was one of many to write about the team’s deteriorating front office.

The Lakers’ front office is an uncommunicative, rudderless fiasco, and the unrest and paranoia that have been festering for years threaten to derail the team’s plans to ride Bryant to his sixth NBA title while they still can. And much of it can be traced to the growing influence of executive vice president Jim Buss, the owner’s bon vivant son, who has helped transform a great franchise into a steaming pool of nepotism and nincompoops.

General manager Mitch Kupchak responded to Kobe’s statement in the only way he really could, preserving the right to make personnel changes when needed. Lakers icon Magic Johnson put himself into the mix via a conference call with reporters, stating that Jim Buss is the one running the show, not Mitch Kupchak. Magic elaborated on television, “I’ve been with the Laker organization for almost 35 years, and this is really the saddest, the most disappointed that I’ve been.”

Roland Lazenby, author of numerous sports biographies, columns and other good writings, unleashes some wonderful threads on his twitter account. During the height of the Buss/Magic/Kobe tempest, he opined acerbically on the subject of the Lakers blowing out the minutes of their most valuable asset:

A season like this could burn Kobe’s candle out quickly. It’s a big price paid for a new CBA. Kobe won’t decide to retire. His knees will make that decision for him. He’s long known that. A basketball player’s knees are like a rock musician’s ears. They wear our and leave you crippled or deaf. That’s the real price of it all.

Race horses are surprisingly delicate creatures. They’re bred for blinding speed, and support themselves on incredibly spindly legs. As they run, their hooves hit the ground independently, 2,000 pounds of crashing weight. Each year about 800 die in the United States as a result of on-track injuries. Somebody could ask Jim Buss about this – the guy running the front office into the ground used to train his dad’s racehorses.

The racehorse analogy’s a tough one for me. I actually love going to the track, or at least I love the memory of it. I bought a fake ID when I was 13 and would go to the Del Mar summer meets until my meager savings were exhausted. It’s a brutal sport though. Ever see a horse break down in the home stretch? They struggle to cross the finish line, ankles sometimes flopping - whether it’s the instinctual drive to win or simply a sad attempt to outrun the pain, who knows. They can’t speak.

Like most of the teams in the NBA, the Lakers have had a jagged up and down season. The common wisdom is that they don’t have the talent to go all the way – hence the nonstop trade rumors. There can be no doubt that the team has been playing better since Kobe spoke out in support of Gasol. A couple days later, after a win against Portland, the team held a brief players only meeting, and further circled the wagons.

A litany of injuries over 16 seasons, from shoulder to knees to ankles, gnarled fingers that no longer grip the ball as strongly, the torn-up wrist that somehow self-healed and now pushing through a head injury that didn’t seem to faze him a bit. Somehow he perseveres. His ability to will mind over matter his astounding – he terms it “adjusting”. Terminator-esque, shedding parts along the way. Muhammad Ali used to will his mind over body, laying on the ropes and inviting punishment, waiting for his moment to counter with dazzling flashes that became fewer and more far between as age and punishment took its toll. As we all know now, he paid a heavy price for the blows to his head.

Throw a dart at the season’s schedule, ask at any random juncture where the Lakers should be. Take fans’ temperatures regarding trades, ask those who ponder such things if Brown was the right choice, if gutting an organization is clear-headed thinking, if Lamar’s trade exception should remain unspent, if anybody thought the team would be in fourth place in the west right now and climbing.

The game against Miami looked different, just as the past few games have looked different – the white light that leaks from the edges, the blurring of age and injury-defying moves, time standing still once more as it always seems to in this game when brilliance unfolds.

The future doesn’t always play out as predicted – LeBron’s Heat lost to the Lakers this afternoon and afterward, he came over and gave Brown a cordial hug. Wade just stared with a towel over his head. As for Kobe, he was giving an on-court interview at the time, relaying how it feels to play with a plastic mask covering his face – this in the wake of three games in which he averaged 36 minutes and 34 points. And I can make no real sense of it except to take it as it comes. Once in a lifetime.

THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL HOUSE

Hibernation has suited me just fine since my last post.  Still, events keep rolling along and I can’t hide forever, my fingers will atrophy from lack of typing.  Dallas is going back to the finals for the first time since ‘06 and they’ll face Miami once again.  Dream scenario - Dallas sweeps.  Speaking of the Mavs, I wrote about J.J. Barea during the second round, something of a scathing lark which I figured on deleting after a day or so. Surprise of surprises, it’s still getting hits - ten times as many as any other SfS entry.  Ironic, bothersome and somehow awesome.  Thanks, evil munchkin.

The finals will begin and they will end and the possibility of a work stoppage will rapidly grow - it doesn’t appear that the league will be satisfied with anything less than a scorched and barren earth.  There’s ample precedent when it comes to undermining labor of course - the disastrous air traffic controllers strike in 1981 comes to mind as well as the decimation of large-scale manufacturing in the United States and the recent state-sponsored union bustings in Wisconsin.  Don’t even get me started on the vast retail workforce, now being systematically snuffed out of existence.  Bring on the warm robots.

Derek Fisher says the latest CBA proposal is very similar to the one the league submitted a year ago and Billy Hunter says it’s worse than the one he tore up in February.  Owners publically protest at the idea of hard salary caps but make no mistake, they’re the ones demanding it - along with decreased revenue sharing for players, a reduction in health and welfare and a ban on all new tattoos.  A lockout could cost the owners $3 billion dollars as well as a billion to the networks.  Why are they so eager to bite the hand that feeds them?  Because they can.

There are contingency plans of course, in the event that cooler heads prevail and a season is somehow salvaged.  For the Lakers, this entailed finding a coach who could follow Phil Jackson, a coach who would bring a fractured team back together and lead them to the promised land.  After careful consideration, they hired Mike Brown.  Pause for the sound of a gigantic shoe dropping with a loud, dull thud.  Yes, that guy from the Cavs, the one last seen with LeBron’s tire tracks across his back.  He was on ESPN the other night, grinning huge at the prospect of working with Kobe.  I’m sure Kobe’s excited to work with Brown as well, henceforth to be known as the big bulls-eye.

What was Jim Buss thinking?  You probably don’t want to know, I suspect his mind is a soggy and dangerous place.  He often talks about learning at the hand of Mitch Kupchak but it’s a crock - the only guy who sat at the right hand of Kupchak was Ronnie Lester, 25 years with the Lakers and the one really responsible for scouting and championing Andrew Bynum.  Lester’s now joining the exiting conga-line of coaches, scouts, trainers and video staff, courtesy of Jimmy's sloppily wielded truncheon.  Bonnie-Jill Laflin though, is expected to stay. 

Is there anything left to look forward to? I hope so.  There’s been entertainment value, even in the lean years. Actually, scratch that, the 2004-05 season shouldn’t be wished on anyone.  There’s always the draft to anticipate - the Lakers have four second-round picks this year and I’m hoping they spend them all on nutcase outside shooters.  Maybe they'll transplant Hubie Brown's brain into Mike's, beg Kobe to pretty-please show human kindness to his teammates and who knows, we might make it to the second round again.