Just call it the Half a Year Ago Finals. As of Christmas Day, it wasn't hard to picture the Lakers and Celtics meeting in the Finals. The two teams both came out of the gate smoking at 23-5, but their late-season fades didn't seem to offer great omens for the playoffs. As nearly everyone has already noted, Boston gave virtually no hint of its playoff dominance between Christmas and mid-April, limping in with a 27-27 mark in its final 54 games. What's less well known, however, is that the Lakers followed a similar path. Like Boston, L.A. ended Christmas Day with a 23-5 mark but was ho-hum from that point forward. The Lakers were only 34-20 in their final 54 games, just 16-12 after the All-Star break. Moreover, their star player exaggerated the trend line even more. Kobe Bryant was at the fore of the MVP discussion entering the new year, averaging more than 30 points a game. But he staggered to the finish line at just 27.0. He had made nearly half his shots from the field and 85 percent from the stripe in the first two months, but wouldn't approach those numbers the rest of the season. His slow start to 2010 was disturbing enough, but the way he closed the regular season had to really have the Lakers faithful worried. In his final three games, Bryant shot 5-of-23, 8-of-24 and 8-of-23, and multiple observers noted that he looked far less explosive than usual physically as a result of injuries to his knee and ankle. Not exactly the way L.A. wanted to enter the playoffs, in other words, and it's why the defending champs seemed so vulnerable when the postseason began. The final seven regular-season games Bryant played for the Lakers included only two victories, neither of which hinged on big efforts from Bryant -- he shot 5-for-23 in a win over Utah and labored to 17 points to help beat Houston. The other five games included home losses to Portland (without Brandon Roy) and San Antonio (by 19); plus a road loss to New Orleans during a stretch in which the Hornets went 3-13, a blowout loss in Oklahoma City and another pasting in Atlanta that ended with the Hawks' bench exploding in hysterics while Jason Collins made his third basket of the season in garbage time. As with the Celtics, they were former champions whose championship run seemed anything but preordained. The Lakers were struggling and, more specifically, so was Bryant. The Portland loss seemed especially worrisome -- the playoffs were just six days away, and Bryant had sat out the previous two games to get better. Instead, it seemed as if he regressed, needing 23 shots to score 20 points and having so little elevation that Nicolas Batum blocked one of his deliveries flat-footed. This all changed, however, once Bryant got a real chance to rest up. He sat out the final two regular-season games and got another two days off before the playoffs started … then, in the first round, he played only once in five days between Games 4 and 6. All told, he played only five games in 18 days. Given that he had a week off before the Portland game, it added up to just six contests in nearly a month. There was a cost to this -- the Lakers had to abandon the pursuit of home-court advantage in a potential Finals rematch with Orlando, and had Boston not staged a playoff renaissance of its own, it could have proved costly in the coming days. Instead, it's a nonfactor. The benefits, on the other hand, have been massive. That time, along with a draining of fluid in his knee at some undisclosed point along the way, apparently allowed Bryant's physical ailments to vanish into the ether. As a result, he's in the midst of an amazing turnaround. After looking so feeble in early April, Bryant was doing his best Michael Jordan impersonation by the end of May. Phoenix was a game opponent in the conference finals, but Bryant simply crushed the Suns with a virtuoso performance -- 33.7 points, 8.3 assists, 7.2 rebounds and an outburst of you've-gotta-be-kidding-me jumpers down the stretch of the clinching Game 6 in Phoenix. His performance against Phoenix continued what's been a dominating 11-game run, one that followed the lightly scheduled 18-day stretch that allowed him to recuperate after the Portland game. How dominating? Consider this: Even Kobe rarely has played at this level. He scored at least 30 points in 10 of his past 11 games, something he hadn't done in the regular season or playoffs since January 2006. More generally, if you permit me the luxury of cherry-picking the 11-game stretch starting with Game 6 of the Oklahoma City series, this is the best he has ever played in the playoffs by any measure you want to use. Highest scoring average, best player efficiency rating, best shooting percentage, most assists, best 3-point shooting … by all of those standards, this last 11-game stretch trumps any other Bryant postseason. In particular, the exact thing that seemed most lacking about his game in April, the elevation on his midrange jumper, has become otherworldly. In the Phoenix series, the Suns used big defenders (Grant Hill and Jared Dudley) and double-teams to take away Bryant's post-up game, and were very effective doing so. But it didn't matter because Bryant just kept facing up and shooting contested long J's off the dribble. Normally, forcing such a shot is a huge victory for the defense, but Bryant made a mind-blowing 58.0 percent of his long 2-pointers against Phoenix (hat tip to TrueHoop Network's painted area for that one); usually players shoot in the high 30s from this range. Additionally, the threat of his J was strong enough that he drew several fouls on shot fakes. Bryant had the rest of his game clicking on all cylinders, too -- playing tough D, finding open teammates in the zone, crashing the boards, even hitting catch-and-shoot 3s, which has never been a great strength of his. As a result, a Lakers' offense that ranked only 11th in regular-season offensive efficiency is second only to Phoenix in that category in the playoffs. What does it mean for the Finals? One could argue that the law of averages will catch up to Bryant on those midrange J's and that a lot more of them will catch the rim against Boston. If so, it's bad news for the Lakers because the Celtics (as we saw in the 2008 Finals) are unlikely to give him many openings going toward the basket. Additionally, there's the possibility that those injuries could come back to haunt him at some point in the Finals. In particular, draining the knee is a short-term solution that might not provide lasting results. However, the more likely conclusion is that he's going to be a handful for the next two weeks, as well. Although he'll be hard-pressed to shoot quite as well against a more stout Celtics defense, he won't have to -- Boston isn't going to light up the scoreboard at the other end the way the Suns did. Moreover, the less demanding playoff schedule probably has benefited L.A. more than any other team, with Bryant able to nurse himself back to health and Andrew Bynum staying more or less upright, and the Finals are even more extreme. L.A. has four days off before playing Game 1, then another two to lick its wounds afterward; all told, the Lakers will play just once in the course of a week and won't leave town for 10 days. In other words, all the issues that had us so worried about L.A.'s prospects in early April are likely to remain nonfactors for one more series. And if Bryant can shoot anywhere near as brilliantly as he has in the past 11 games, that combination should be enough to allow L.A. to defend its title. Much like the Celtics' run through the East, all of that was very easy to envision in November and December … and extremely difficult to imagine in the four months that followed. Source: ESPN
