Laker-hate

Hate

I'm not going to ask your pity for my status as a basketball fan. The Lakers went to the NBA Finals six times in the last decade and hoisted the trophy four times. I've gotten to root for a top-five point guard (Magic), shooting guard (Kobe), center (Shaq), coach (Phil), and GM (West). I currently get to cheer for one of the classiest players in the entire league (Fisher), and two of the strangest (Odom and chilled-out late-career Artest). I got to see the team almost win it all while getting major contributions from a Slovenian who nicknamed himself "The Machine". Really, don't pity me.

But still -- why the hate? Yeah, Kobe probably raped a girl, but people hated him long before that. On any other team, he's just the ultra-competitive guy who probably takes too many shots but really does honestly think it's the best thing for the team. On the Lakers, he's the antichrist. Or Kareem -- think about how Bill Simmons talks about him. I'm not even sure what the guy did besides score more points than anybody else in the history of the NBA. (Oh, and win six NBA championships and three college championships too.) On any other team, Simmons doesn't even know who he is, but on the Lakers, he's a "ninny". Pau Gasol is the newest target. He's exactly the same player as he was for years in Memphis, but now, Shannon Penn feels the need to tweet offensive things regarding which part of the female anatomy he resembles.

So: why? The obvious comparison is to the Yankees, but the NBA is not baseball. In baseball, people hate the Yankees as a symbol of the competitive imbalances that come with the MLBPA successfully resisting the imposition of a salary cap. The Lakers have spent and do spend more money than most teams, but not by an order of magnitude.

Is it just because they win a lot? The 49ers won a ton of football games in the '80s, but I don't know anyone who hates them. Nor has L.A. has ever won in a particularly hateable fashion -- everyone loves Showtime, and team has never been a group of thugs like the '80s Pistons. Hell, one of the dirtiest plays in NBA history was perpetrated on the Lakers, not by them:



L.A. did seem to get help from on high in that famous 2002 series against the Kings, but people also think the NBA conspired to put Patrick Ewing in New York, but does anyone hate the Knicks? And, hey, Cleveland happened to win the lottery the year the greatest NBA draftee who happened to be from Akron was in the draft.

I even googled the words "hate" and "Lakers" to see what happened. And I got things like (seriously) "Pau doesn't shave", "Phil Jackson complains about the officials", "the Lakers are just lucky because they won even though Shaq couldn't hit free throws", "Rick Fox wants to be an actor", "Derek Fisher cried after losing in the playoffs", and "the fans put flags on their cars". I don't even know what to say to these. (Of course, by googling this, you also get to read things like, from 2005: "Phil and Kobe will never win a championship together again unless they can get LeBron in a Laker uniform!" Eat it, bitch.)

So basically, I got nothin'. I don't have a clue what it is that sets the Lakers apart as the NBA equivalent of the Yankees, the team that other fans love to hate.

Tonight's game

I'd talk more about tonight's game, but I don't know if this blog is really the place to get into the type of analysis I'm prone to right after I watch a game. There aren't any larger cultural implications of the fact that L.A. worked the inside-out game very effectively, for instance. I will say that I'm getting a little tired of guys fouling Shannon Brown all the time. Sometimes he gets out in the open court and he looks like a wee LeBron, eyes only for the basket, long strides, starts to take the ball up high ... and then boom comes some 6'7" oaf grabbing him by the arms and not letting him electrify the crowd. I think it's happened once in each of the last three Lakers games I've watched. As they say on ESPN, c'mon man!