Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett team up to make the Celtics relevant and drastically change the way we will remember their career
Kobe Bryant leads the Lakers back to prominence, gets the first seed in the West, captures his first MVP (not totally deserved but consider it a reward for being ripped off in 2006 and 2007)
The final year of the Pistons incredible stretch as the dominant team of the Eastern conference. This could be taken two ways in this context and neither one is wrong
The Pau Gasol Trade, and the hilarity that ensued with the whole league freaking out and the Chris Wallace jokes that went along with it
The last year of the comedic goldmine/car crash that was Isiah Thomas’ reign as GM/Coach of the New York Knicks. Now he’s just the invisible hand maneuvering everything our team does. That’s an improvement right?
The Anucha Browne Sanders case. You know it was a great year when it’s post-1991 and Isiah makes a list like this twice
Manu Ginobli, super sub, wins his first Sixth Man of the year award even though he should have won the previous year as well (I know that Leandro Barbosa had better stats on a arguably better team, but you can’t tell me that Barbosa was better than Manu, who was the second best player on the Spurs behind Tim Duncan and the French guy who some how ended up with the Finals MVP trophy that year because Tim Duncan some how didn’t deserve it as the only Hall of Famer who was in his prime on his team, and yes that was sarcasm)
The Rockets lose Yao Ming but somehow Tracy McGrady leads them on the longest win streak of the modern era, a shocking 22 game spree in which included defeating 10 playoff bound teams before losing to the eventual champs. Seeing as T-Mac was on the team and active, can you guess how far they went in the playoffs?
After spending the previous regular season on cruise control before turning it on in a run to the Finals, 23 year old, Pre-Decision LeBron gave us a rollicking regular season where he showed us what his peak numbers would look like submitting a stunning 30-8-7-2-1. Absolutely carried his beloved Cavs on his back and I haven’t even gotten to his playoff heroics yet
At the precocious age of 21, Dwight Howard and Chris Paul had their respective coming out parties and established themselves as the premier players at their positions. Dwight put up 20-14 with two blocks, stellar defense, and absolutely blew us away with his dunk contest win. Chris Paul was the most valuable player (but not in the award winning sense) in the league, put up a 21-4-11.6 with a league leading 2.7 steals, carried his team to the second seed in the West in a historically stacked division (Spurs-56 wins, Rockets-55, Mavs-51), and played like a cross between Isiah Thomas and Tiny Archibald on their best days
Shaq and Jason Kidd are traded to the Southwest as the Mavs and Suns desperately try to compete with the Lakers after the Gasol trade goes down. Me likes blockbuster trades.
The 2008 Dunk Contest was the first dunk contest in years with any sort of relevance. Dwight Howard came in as the favorite, much like Blake Griffin in 2011. Unlike Griffin, Howard fulfilled our wildest expectations and exceeded them with his slap it off the backboard dunk and his legendary Superman dunk. Gerald Green prevented it from being totally one sided with his entertaining cupcake candle dunk but the night was clearly Dwight’s
The Kevin Durant vs. Greg Oden conundrum, in retrospect, is settled quicker than any other draft day “Who To Choose?” drama in NBA history as Durant wins Rookie of the Year and Oden precedes to miss as many games that season as he has played in to this point
The last great Allen Iverson year, where at 32 he put up 26-3-7-2 despite at one point diving for a loose ball at the same time as Melo which lead to a rough wrestling match for possession and them having to be separated like toddlers by the rest of the team. Best of all they were teammates. Anyone surprised that the Lakers swept them in the first round?
Final season for Robert Horry, Chris Webber, Antoine Walker, PJ Brown, Sam Cassell, Alonzo Mourning, Eddie Jones, Penny Haraway, and the immortal Damon Stoudemire. Crazy amount of what-if? Scenarios that could have drastically changed most of these guys careers. This was the ultimate sign of the end of the most underachieving era of basketball players in history
Amar’e Stoudemire cements a career year for him by going on a blistering scoring tear after the Shaq trade goes through and frees him up to actually play his natural position at PF for the first time in his NBA career, averaging 28.5-9-2 while shooting 59% from the field. In my NBA watching lifetime I’ve never seen a stretch of more dominant scoring by a power forward including KG and Duncan at their peaks
A young Hawks team, suddenly intriguing Magic, LeBron lead Cavs, Big 3 Celtics, and the “Good Old” Pistons breathe some much needed intrigue back into the East for the first time since MJ left Chicago
The West is so incredibly stacked with talent that the Golden State Warriors, a year removed from pulling a 1st round upset over the #1 seeded Mavs, win 48 games and still miss the playoffs
The Greatest Playoffs in History of the NBA. Big statement. Especially given that I was born a year before Magic Johnson retired. I can only provide the truth I know but I am willing to give mountains of evidence and context to back it up.
Post Season
In the Cavs-Wizards series, the third in as many years, the 6 game battle is fueled by true hatred between the teams, hard fouling of LeBron, the meteoric rise of DeShawn Stevenson and the subsequent feud between Soulja Boy and Jay-Z over Stevenson’s “feud” with LeBron. In the pantheon of rap feuds this ranks pretty damn low on the list.
In the Hornets-Mavs series, Chris Paul cements his status as most valuable player in the league (once again, not in the award winning way) by putting up a 35-10 and a 32-17 in his first two playoffs games (both New Orleans wins) and a 24-11-15 in the clinching game 5. Since I’ve been born, LeBron is the only younger player to record a triple double in the playoffs and in those two games Bron played all 48 minutes
The Spurs and Suns have a rematch of last years controversial Tim Donaghy assisted win by San Antonio. Sadly this was during the 2 year hiatus from the 7 Seconds or Less era and the Spurs rolled through in 5 games. Game 1 was an alltimer for Tim Duncan who posted a 40-15 and hit a rare 3-pointer, which crushed the Suns’ emotionally, to send the game into a second overtime in an eventual series defining win.
The Lakers sweep the Nuggets and start serious Title Favorite buzz. Funny stat I figured out about that Nuggets team: as far as I can tell, they are the only team to ever lead the league in both steals and blocks, yet they gave up the second most points in the regular season. This is due to perimeter defenders who put in little effort other than to gamble for steals, and Marcus Camby who averaged a league high 3.6 blocks per game. Poor Camby was the only defender on the least active defensive team in the league not coached by Don Nelson. And they eventually traded him to the Clippers! What did Marcus do to deserve this?
The most exciting matchup of the first round ended up being the 1 seeded Celtics taking on the number 8 seeded Hawks. Atlanta barely made the playoffs with 37 wins and losing the last three games of the regular season. Thankfully for the 457 Hawks fans not related to the players, the New Jersey Nets lost the last game of the season to, essentially, the Celtics’ scrubs allowing the Hawks to play that same Boston team in the first round. The Celtics had cruised to a league high 66 wins and it was assumed they would make short work of the lowly Hawks. However, the Hawks made there stand and forced the Celtics into a game 7, winning all 3 of their games in Georgia, and giving the Celtics everything they could handle.
In the second round, the Celtics continued fighting for their turf tooth and nail-style in an epic 7 game series against Lebron and the other guys on the Cavs. Once again, the home team won every game as Lebron equalized the talent disparity in a series that is cool to look back at, but in reality was one of those sloppy, rough, defensive battles that the NBA was trying to get away from. We forget that now because Game 7 was a doozy. Lebron and Pierce went for 45 and 41 respectively while guarding each other and down the stretch were trading incredible basket for incredible basket. Especially given how these two had more or less contained each other for 6 games and the fact that ever since Lebron came into the league these two haven’t liked each other, it was great TV. The Celtics managed to squeeze out a 5 point win and advance.
The other great series of the second round was the Hornets-Spurs series. I’m biased on this one. The Knicks still were paying Isiah, Marbury, and Eddy Curry (who will get his due on this site) so I had shifted to being more a fan of Basketball than a Knick fan. And I was convinced that the Hornets were the team of the future. Chris Paul was that good all season. It was a battle of the up and comers versus the old guard. With the Hornets holding home court advantage I felt confident CP3 and co. could pull it off. The Hornets ran off to a 2-0 lead after their home games and it seemed like it was time to put a nail in the Duncan-Popovich era but then the Spurs held the homecourt and forced Paul to try and win solo by shutting down his passing lanes. They traded Games 5 and 6, homecourt prevailing each time, setting up a final showdown in New Orleans where the Spurs experience won out and I was forced to realize that other than West and Chandler, Paul had no teammate who was going to be able to take him past the second round.
Once the Conference Finals started everyone was whispering the same thing: Could we quite possibly be heading to a Lakers-Celtics Finals? It had been the hope of the League since the Winter when the two teams were tearing through their schedules and building up the buzz. But despite the Lakers being represented by Lakers lifer Kobe and the Celtics with their own home grown hero Pierce, both of these teams were very green. And both were pitted up against teams that had made the Conference Finals more times than you could count on your fingers the past 10 years. The Spurs-Pistons Finals in 2005 was memorable but was also one of the lowest rated Finals in the Modern Era and nobody wanted to see them go at it again. Everyone wanted at least the Lakers or the Celtics to make it and if you had no affiliation with San Antonio or Detroit, you probably wanted both.
The Lakers-Spurs series was surprisingly short considering the circumstances. Kobe and Duncan were both sensational as expected and in the elimination Game 5, Kobe prevailed with 39 points over Duncan’s impressive 19-15-10. Most impressively though, Kobe was excelling across the board while lighting up the scoreboard. Other than Game 3, he held Manu Ginobili to 10 points or fewer every contest. He contributed in the rebounding effort. And he used the Triangle brilliantly to keep his teammates involved. After blowing through a historically great Western Conference with surprising ease, Kobe earned a long awaited return to the Finals with possibly his best series ever. Lamar Odom was at his best, providing great all around play in the wingman role as a rebounder and secondary scorer. The one blemish for the Lakers was that Pau Gasol was almost eaten alive by Duncan. His scoring was low throughout the series due to being guarded by TD and in retrospect, he took a big confidence hit in this series. More on this to come.
As with the rest of the playoffs, Boston refused to make things easy for themselves. In their defense, the Pistons were coming off a great five year run with a team that had stayed intact throughout. However, with the Celtics talent it should have never been this close. After the Pistons stole Game 2, for the first time the Celtics, who hadn’t won a game outside of Boston all Postseason, didn’t have home court advantage. Rather than crumble, this forced the Celtics to play with their backs against the wall and take Game 3 in Detroit before finishing the series in Game 6 on the Pistons home floor. I have a really distinctive memory of that Game 6. My girlfriend at the time had her senior prom that night and I had no way of watching the game. This was about 9 months after the iPhone had come out and you had to use Safari to look at scores since the Apps hadn’t taken off yet. Throughout the night, I’d sneak off to the bathroom and check the score on the way out. Unfortunately for my date, we had to leave early because someone in our group sharing our hotel got sick. An hour or so after we got to the hotel I snuck to the TV room of the penthouse and got in just in time for the 4th Quarter. As the Celtics slowly turned an 8-point deficit into an 8-poin lead to win the game it slowly dawned on me that we were going to get what we wanted. Lakers. Celtics. New Generation. Then I forced myself to ignore Basketball for a few hours and enjoy Prom Night.
The Finals seem to rush by in a matter of minutes. Coming in, the Lakers were the favorites, partially because Kobe was coming off an incredible series and partially because up until late in the Pistons series the Celtics seemed to just be squeaking by inferior teams. I won’t go into a blow-by-blow description of the games but here’s what I took away from it. Pierce played better than anyone else and was invigorated by his success on defense against Kobe. After getting chewed up by Duncan, Pau was a mess and was bullied by Garnett to the point of barely impacting games. Other than his work on an already shook up Gasol, Garnett famously underachieved. People let him off the hook because he posted a 26-14 in the Game 6 finale but it was in a 39 point drumming of the Lakers and he did it against a shell of Gasol while Bynum sat on the bench in street clothes. I still see it as stat padding. Kobe fell apart in Game 6, a toll of having pushed so hard thinking he finally had the supporting cast to go all the way and then the anguish when he realized that the team just wasn’t there yet. Kobe detractors point to this as a time when if Kobe were really worth his stock he would have emboldened his team. I prefer to think that spending the last 3 years with Kwame Brown and Smush Parker traumatized Kobe and that this supposedly favored Lakers team was the ultimate tease. That’s not to take away from the Celtics. They had the better team thanks to one of the most dominant defenses ever. Ray Allen and Paul Pierce were incredible, peaking when their team needed them most. Rondo began to show flashes of his impossibly high ceiling. In the end the better team won.
So there’s my evidence. Let my opinion be filed away with those of everyone else who takes time out of their day to write about professional basketball. All I can say for certain is that this was a major turning point for the NBA. People want a balance of traditional dynasties and up and coming superstars, I believe, and this season had it all. I just remember looking at the league leaders and seeing Lebron, Dwight, and Paul leading in points, rebounds and assists, looking at the standings and seeing the Lakers and Celtics at the top, and it all felt right. Like that’s how things are supposed to be. Can’t ask for much more from a season.
