Posted on Tue, Jun. 07, 2005
John Smallwood | Nobody had Shaq's back
MIAMI - For most of the past year, Kobe Bryant has taken a lot of heat as the guy who forced Shaquille O'Neal out of Los Angeles and caused the demise of the Lakers.
And if O'Neal was looking for vindication, the Lakers' going from a team that had won three NBA titles, with four trips to
the Finals in the last 5 years, to
a lottery team as soon as he
headed East gave it to him.
But to all of those who try to belittle Bryant by saying he has never won a championship
without O'Neal, I'll point out
that Shaq has never won a title without Kobe, either.
So while it's clear that Robin needs Batman more, maybe the Dark Knight Detective isn't so bad without the Boy Wonder, either.
Look, I'm not saying it's O'Neal's fault that the Miami Heat lost to the Detroit Pistons, 88-82, last night in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals.
The guy scored 27 with nine
rebounds and three blocks.
And if Heat guard Dwyane Wade had been healthy instead of playing with a painful rib-cage injury, maybe Miami would have advanced to its first NBA Finals in franchise history.
But that's the point.
For all the criticism directed
at Bryant, much of it coming from O'Neal himself, you'd think the Lakers' success had been 99.997 percent due to Shaq.
What Games 6 and 7, if not this entire East finals, have shown is that while O'Neal
might indeed still be the most dominant player in the game,
he is not a one-man team.
He needs help to win a championship, whether that help comes from Bryant or Wade.
When he was younger and
capable of putting up 35 or 40 points on a whim, whenever he wanted, O'Neal could carry a team on his back.
But now at 33 years old, with a decade-plus of NBA wear and tear on his body, he's not that type of player anymore.
"If you don't win the whole thing, nobody is going to remember us winning and sweeping [their other series]," O'Neal said. "We just had to go out and play. We had a lot of opportunities to get it done and we just fell short."
It's not reasonable to think Miami could dethrone Detroit with its second-best player not healthy. Despite scoring 20, Wade clearly was not the player who had
dominated most of the playoffs.
Fair or not, O'Neal had two chances to win one game to get the Heat into the Finals, and those were specifically the kind of situations for which he was brought to Miami.
However you want to cut it, he couldn't get it done.
On Saturday with Wade unable to play, O'Neal had 24 points and 13 rebounds but Miami scored a franchise playoff-low
66 points in a 25-point loss.
Last night, despite O'Neal
having his best offensive game
of the series, the Heat came up short at home.
And it wasn't as if Miami didn't have opportunities.
The Heat took a 73-68 lead when Shaq scored with just more than 8 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.
At that point, a trip to San
Antonio for the Heat and a meeting with the Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday was only about closing out the game.
Shaq and Miami didn't hold serve.
With 1:45 left and the score tied at 78, O'Neal had a chance to put the Heat up by two, but he made just one of two foul shots.
The big man didn't touch the ball again until he scored on an alley-oop from Wade with 12.6 seconds left and Miami down, 84-80.
In between those two moments, Detroit got four straight points from Rasheed Wallace and two straight free throws from Chauncey Billups.
And after O'Neal's alley-oop, Billups made two more free throws for Detroit.
"We had an opportunity to win," O'Neal said. "Just maybe, they had more experience than we did...
"I don't think anybody expected us to get this far, but you know we had a lot of opportunities to get it done. We almost had it. We had the lead in the fourth, but they had more defense and hustle."
Maybe it's just a Detroit thing with O'Neal.
Last season, the Pistons
initiated the breakup of the
Lakers by upsetting them in the NBA Finals. Now they've rained on Shaq's parade down in South Beach.
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