In game 3 of the 2009 West Finals, Kobe Bryant, Trevor Ariza, Lamar Odom, and Pau Gasol, with some help from other Los Angeles Lakers, successfully defended basketball from the team attacking the sport, the Denver Nuggets. (See any of numerous recent reports for details of what the Nuggets have been up to, why it will eventually fail, and why it's bad for basketball.)
1,001 thank yous to Phil Jackson for staying the course and for not allowing Denver to change basketball into something it is not.
Shame on you George Karl; you should know better than this that you can not twist basketball into being a heavily or at least a substantially biased in favor of defense game. And nor of course can you turn it into being a violent sport in the football modality.
The Nuggets threw everything they had into the effort to change the sport, including superhuman efforts from Chris Andersen and Nene, but the Lakers and of course the referees held the line and defended the sport supremely well in game three.
The Nuggets threw every possible defensive action, ones in the rules and ones outside of the rules, in this radical experiment to try to win with defense only. They threw every foul, every push, every trip, every rough defend, every close defend, every block, every goal tend, every pass denial, every paint denial, every easy shot denial, and every easy score off fast breaks off defensive stops that they could come up with. But in the end, both Carmelo Anthony and Kenyon Martin were sitting on the bench fouled out of the game, Kobe Bryant was shooting free throws, and the Nuggets' radical all defense attack had fallen short to one of the greatest players of our day, a player who, unlike Allen Iverson, was meant to play both guard positions at once: Kobe Bryant.
It took them awhile, laugh out loud, but eventually the Lakers made enough free throws to win it.
Sorry Denver, but that is the way it is. You want to play with no offense to speak of? Then get out of the NBA and find another sport!
Thanks LA for getting this series back into the right Universe.
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