Round 1: Lakers vs. Nuggets official Thread

M-V-P!!!

M-V-P!!!

The league knows the MVP winner, and if the rumors are true, it's Kobe by a decent margin. They should announce it tomorrow.

 

Lakers up 2-0

Game 3 is Saturday, in Denver. Do not ease up! Take it!

 

I'm loving the tension that is building up between these teams. I hope it doesn't boil over into a physical altercation, though.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>LOS ANGELES – You think by now the Denver Nuggets would know better. That the 32 points Kobe Bryant hung on them three days earlier would have been convincing enough. That after Bryant began peppering them with jump shot after jump shot they would have heeded the warning. Even when Bryant drilled one last 30-foot, end-of-the-clock dagger the Nuggets had ample time to drop their heads and slink to the locker room without incident.

They didn’t, of course. These Nuggets never go quietly. So there was J.R. Smith standing next to Bryant Wednesday night, yapping away.

Bryant grinned. Then he took the ball and Smith to the rim, bumping the Nuggets guard back as he banked in a tough layup and collected the foul. Bryant simply shook his head as he stepped to the foul line and swished the last of his 49 points.
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“He’s one of those players you don’t really want to make mad,” Lamar Odom said.

The rest of the NBA seems to know this, so the Nuggets have only themselves to blame. Unable to guard Bryant, they choose instead to anger him. Kenyon Martin ran his mouth on Sunday and Smith followed by opening his Wednesday. Bryant punished them both, along with everyone else the Nuggets threw at him, leading the Lakers to a 122-107 victory that gave them a 2-0 advantage in the teams’ first-round playoff series.

The next two games will be played in Denver, and if the Nuggets have any hope of making this a competitive series, they would be wise to follow this advice:

Shut up.

K-Mart couldn’t do that in Game 1. Bryant opened the playoffs by missing eight of his first nine shots and Martin apparently let him know it. Even after Bryant found his shot in the second half, the two continued to trade words. For the next three days, Bryant then had to listen as his 9-for-26 performance was attributed to impressive defense by Martin.

Bryant naturally didn’t see it the same way, and he didn’t need long Wednesday to show why, scoring 20 points in the first quarter alone. He made 10 consecutive shots during one stretch as the Nuggets shuffled through defenders, moving from Martin to Linas Kleiza to Smith.

“The way he was going,” Allen Iverson said, “we could have put 10 people on the court and probably not been able to stop him.”

Bryant instead slowed himself, shifting from scorer to facilitator in the third quarter. After the Nuggets switched to a zone defense that lulled the Lakers into hoisting too many jump shots, Bryant took over the game with his passing. He set up Luke Walton for a three-point play, fed Vladimir Radmanovic for a dunk. Over the next eight minutes, he handed out seven of his game-high 10 assists.

In previous seasons, Bryant would have been more inclined to keep firing. Passing never seemed like such a great option when Smush Parker was on the receiving end. These Lakers, however, have earned Bryant’s trust.

“It’s just that my guys knock down shots now,” Bryant said. “We’ve upgraded.”

The Nuggets, meanwhile, hardly seem to have matured at all. Iverson was ejected near the end of Game 1 for barking at an official then picked up another technical Wednesday, moments after Smith was hit with his own. Carmelo Anthony also committed an unnecessary offensive foul in the sequence, allowing the Lakers to double their lead from seven to 14 in less than a minute.

“As a team,” Anthony said, “I think we lost our focus, lost our composure.”

That didn’t stop Smith from insinuating afterward that the referees have favored the Lakers. “It’s tough going 5-on-8,” he said.

These Nuggets have always talked a better game than the one they played, and that goes for their coach, too. In the first round of the playoffs three seasons ago, George Karl complained that San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili was “difficult to watch” and that his daring herky-jerky style was ruining basketball. The criticism only fueled Ginobili that much more and the Spurs went on to win the next two games and close out the Nuggets.

“I was just trying to shake him a little,” Karl said the following season, “and I picked the wrong guy.”

The Nuggets’ showmanship has continued to get the best of them. Last season’s brawl between the Nuggets and New York Knicks started because Isiah Thomas thought Karl had left his starters on the floor too long in a rout. When Seattle beat Denver this month, Kevin Durant said the Sonics were motivated because of the way the Nuggets had acted while scoring 168 points against them in an earlier game.

If the Nuggets had won that rematch with Seattle? They would have avoided playing the Lakers in the first round.

The Nuggets chirp as much as any team in the league, and yet they have little to chirp about. They’ve lost in the first round each of the previous four seasons and are now on the fast track for their fifth consecutive early exit. They score in bunches, but give up nearly as many points because too many of their players seem too inclined to play only one side of the floor. Smith, in particular, is what scouts like to call an “unwilling defender” – all talent and athleticism, little effort.

Bryant doesn’t have that problem. In the fourth quarter,<u> he scored a staggering 19 points in less than 4½ minutes</u>. “I take it as a challenge,” he said, “when there’s a lot of talking going on.”

Bryant yapped back. After burying a long three-pointer, he blew on his index fingers as if they were twin-shooter barrels.

“We’re going to keep that in the back of our minds when we get home for these next two games,” Anthony said.

“That’s Kobe,” added Smith. “He’s a showboat.”

The difference: Bryant has earned that right.</div>

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=Almm...o&type=lgns

 

The refs need to let the players foul, hard, as long as it isn't over the top. I thought that flagrant they called on J.R. in the 1st game was terrible.