Kobe Bryant has now done something that Tim Duncan never did: lead his team to back-to-back Finals appearances. That thought startled me a little when it first entered my brain, but it’s true. Since MJ and the Bulls faced off against Karl Malone and the Jazz in ‘97 and ‘98, it’s been exceedingly difficult for [...]

So today Kobe did the team thing and it paid off. Not without being a “gamble” in his eyes, which he admitted after the game, but rarely has such a huge gamble paid off. Not just because of the win, but because of what it means. Kobe had his second lowest shot-total of the entire [...]

My lingering memory from Game 3 of this series will not be Kobe’s clutch three or Ariza’s steal. It will be Pau Gasol’s fourth quarter performance and the Lakers persistence in running their offense through him. That Gasol needed more touches was painstakingly obvious through the first two games of this series, because as was [...]

This series is one Ariza steal away from being 2-0 in the Nuggets favor, and one Kobe fumble from being 2-0 in the Lakers favor. It’s almost impossible to split these teams over the first two games, but here’s two things we’ve learnt:

The Lakers are incapable of stopping Melo, not because they don’t have suitable [...]

AP Photo/David Richard
Could you have asked for a better start to the Conference Finals? The two games so far were decided by a total of three points, we saw 40 point games from Kobe and Lebron (and a just as impressive effort from Melo), a broken shot-clock by Dwight Howard, a 70-foot hail Mary from [...]

It was only a few weeks ago when we were claiming the Lakers as unrivaled Western Champions, the Nuggets seemingly filling up the #2 spot by default because everyone else was playing more crap than they were. How things have changed. Not only have the Lakers come off an extremely shaky looking series against a [...]

How seriously do we take this Denver team? As I alluded to a couple of weeks ago when I was in New York, we need to take them very seriously. They have the ingredients needed for the championship recipe, and they’re ready to be cooked up now. The Lakers have the ingredients, but they’re still [...]

3 votes - The entire Denver Nuggets team. Such a lop-sided contest like this defies conventional anaylsis. The idea that a team can lose in the playoffs by 58 points is completely foreign to me. So I will let Denver coach George Karl explain it: “Every coach talks about playing a playoff game, every possession [...]

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
I had to go back to LA. When planning my trip and looking at the games schedule, I knew I had to keep moving East to get to my eventual goal of reaching New York. But there it was, Nuggets @ Lakers, too hard to resist. Especially given the Nuggets new-found identity [...]

Foxtel achieved one of its rare NBA scheduling miracles by letting us watch the Pistons v Lakers game today. Couldn’t think of a better game to watch right now than the undefeated Lakers vs the Iverson-lead Pistons, and as a Pistons fan you can imagine I was pretty happy with the result. Here is my [...]