I don't get it either...
What's even funnier is that the local LA reporter just recounted that the Lakers got a little too overconfident after game 4...and when he talked to Kobe after Game 5 loss, "do you think the Suns could try and take this series back and take it to a game 7"
and the reporter said Kobe's response was that he just laughed at the notion..The dude ing laughed, and any comeback was out of the question in his mind.
Way to show your teammates how to approach a playoff series, being an overconfident jackass. Being up 3-1, you don't relax and expect to win.. YOU KILL. MJ would have killed Steve Nash 4-1, by tuesday. The reporter also pointed out that the Lakers were hanging out on Tuesday casually. It showed on the Loss that night. He deserves to lose this series cuz he's partly responsible for influencing his teammates to treat the series against the Suns lightly. KOBE.
__________________
Kobe = over-confident, self-promoting jackass
Great player, but I'd never root for him. , I nearly went crazy when the Suns went after him. While I understood it from a basketball standpoint, it, like Horry and Elie, was going to be a hard pill to swallow.
It was better to see that, than this......................
haha, he's already on first base with that , Brian Cook in that pic...I dont' wanna know what he would have done to the Lakers scrubs if they took game 7....It was better to see that, than this......................
May 7, 2006
Suns 121, Lakers 90
Back From Brink, Phoenix Turns Los Angeles Into One-Team Town
By HOWARD BECK
PHOENIX, May 6 — Southern California's basketball hierarchy was shaken up Saturday night in the Arizona desert.
Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant, who reunited to restore the glory of the Los Angeles Lakers, are out of the playoffs. The pug-nosed Los Angeles Clippers — for the first time in their history — have outlasted their glamour-boy rivals. And to the chagrin of Los Angeles marketers and fans, there will be no Hallway Series at the Staples Center, thanks to the timely rebirth of the Phoenix Suns.
Left for dead, or at least maimed, after losing the All-Star Amare Stoudemire to off-season knee surgery, the Suns made a stand Saturday night. They closed out an edgy seven-game series with a 121-90 rout of the Lakers at the US Airways Center. The Suns now face the Clippers in a Western Conference semifinal series that opens here Monday night.
True to the character that carried them to the Western Conference finals a year ago, the Suns were a picture of balance in Game 7. Seven players scored in double figures, led by the youngsters Leandro Barbosa (26 points) and Boris Diaw (21). Steve Nash, the N.B.A.'s reigning most valuable player, added 13 points and 9 assists while playing on a slightly sprained right ankle.
After turning over much of the roster, then losing Stoudemire and his replacement, Kurt Thomas, the Suns were hardly expected to be here. After losing Game 4 of this series on a pair of controversial calls and two amazing shots by Bryant, the Suns trailed, 3-1. They became just the eighth team to win a series after trailing by 3-1 and the third to win after losing three straight games.
"I just think it's the heart and perseverance of our guys just to overcome Game 4, thinking that we had been slighted and thinking that, you know what, we tried to do the right thing and we kept getting hit," Coach Mike D'Antoni said. "And they had just had enough. Whether they turned it on or thought about it consciously, I don't know. But from that moment, we played the way we played all year."
In other words, they ran the Lakers into the sand. The Suns hit the 100-point mark in all four of their victories in the series but missed it in their three losses while the Lakers successfully pounded the ball inside to Kwame Brown, Lamar Odom and Luke Walton. But Phoenix adjusted, denied the post and watched the Lakers offensive flow dissolve. Odom had just 12 points in the series finale. Brown had 8 points.
"We had jitters today," Jackson said. "Our guys were fumbling the ball, not catching the ball, not shooting the ball in the lane with that kind of decisiveness that had made us good."
And when the Lakers needed to be bailed out, Bryant chose not to. After a record-setting season in which he scored 81 points in one game, 62 in another and averaged 34.5 points, Bryant never turned on the jets with his season on the line. Of his 24 points, just 1 came in the second half. He took just three shots in the final 24 minutes.
It was a curious end to what had been his finest season as a scorer and showman.
"If we were going to get back in this type of a game, we had to have everybody contributing," said Bryant, who scored 50 points in the Lakers' Game 6 loss.
Bryant kept the Lakers alive after they fell behind by 19 points in the first half. He hit four 3-pointers in an 18-point second quarter, but the Lakers never got closer than 9. The Suns led, 60-45, at halftime.
It was a bad omen for the Lakers. They grabbed control of this series by turning Bryant into a maestro playmaker, and getting their points from Odom, Brown, Walton, Smush Parker and Brian Cook.
But Bryant's supporting cast, already wilting in Games 5 and 6, faded further under the Game 7 spotlight. It is a time-tested N.B.A. truism that experience matters most in the playoffs, and matters more the deeper a team goes.
"It's all growth for us; it's all evolution," said Bryant, the only playoff-hardened veteran in the rotation. "At the start of the season, nobody expected us to even be here. The growth that we have, the talent that we have, the upside is good."
Jackson, who returned to coach the Lakers last summer after a one-year hiatus, felt the sting of a rebuilding project. He had been 14-0 in first-round series and 44-0 when leading a series in any round.
"It's a shame we couldn't give them a game today and make this a series that it was, memorable," Jackson said.
He did not question Bryant's passive stance in the second half as the Suns pulled away to a 33-point lead.
"I'm sure Kobe could have screwed up a 50-point game, but that wasn't going to put us in the ballgame," Jackson said. "It had to be a team effect to win this game. I trust his judgment in that ballgame."
So it went. The Lakers could go as far as the kids could take them, and they hit their ceiling hard. Brown missed repeatedly from point-blank range in the first half, going 1 for 6. Walton and Parker shot a combined 3 for 10 in the half. Bryant accounted for 23 of the Lakers' 45 points.
The Suns' youngsters, meanwhile, thrived in the spotlight. Barbosa had a 9-point burst in the second quarter, causing D'Antoni to make this assessment: "Leandro for about 10 minutes tonight was probably the fastest guy on Earth. I've never seen it like that, how fast he was. He was going so fast, I don't think he could catch his breath. He was gone."
And just like that, so were the Lakers.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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