Jim Alexander: All right, Laker fans. When the NBA schedule is released, feel free to circle that date when the Oklahoma City Thunder comes to town, because I assume you are going to have a very special welcome (?!) for Alex Caruso, who I assume can now be considered a former fan favorite.
You may have heard, or read, what Caruso said when he arrived in the press conference room Sunday night, after OKC won Game 7 and with it the city’s first NBA title. Caruso was part of the 2020 Lakers’ championship, but his very first words Sunday were: “Now I got a real one, now nobody can say anything.”
(If you want to begin booing right this second, feel free. Just don’t wake the dog.)
Caruso later explained that he was joking, trolling those who had made light of that Lakers title, and that maybe three celebratory beers in the victorious locker room led to a slip of the tongue. (Maybe he should have followed teammate Jalen Williams’ example; Williams tasted champagne for the very first time in that locker room, along with some beer and a couple of shots, and pronounced it “disgusting.” Then again, reports were that he brought tequila and champagne with him to the parade.)
But if Caruso was trying to troll the 2020 critics, it didn’t come out that way. Yahoo! Sports’ headline on that story: “Alex Caruso says Thunder title means more than his Lakers ring.”
This is a sore spot for both Lakers and Dodgers fans, although the latter may not be as sensitive about the difficulty of a bubble title after wrapping up a full-season title in Yankee Stadium last October. (Oh, by the way, anyone heard from Walker Buehler lately?)
Fans throughout the rest of the country, never fondly disposed toward L.A. anyway, were quick to jump on the Lakers’ and Dodgers’ COVID-affected championships as somehow fake or illegitimate. Never mind that in each case the playoff road might have been harder because (a) they no longer had home court or home field advantage once everybody went into the bubble, and (b) you try being confined to one patch of real estate 24/7 for a month and see how well you perform.
Former SCNG Lakers beat writer Kyle Goon, now a columnist with the Baltimore Banner, was in that NBA bubble and could tell you all about how taxing it was for just the scribes and support personnel, never mind those who actually had to play.
So, you think that one-liner struck a nerve?
Mirjam Swanson: Honestly, people need to learn to take a joke. The lost art of sarcasm.
But since you’ve mentioned it, I have been thinking about how different Caruso’s titles must feel.
It’s obviously hard to win a championship, any championship, no matter the circumstances, the year, the sport, whatever. I’ve heard five-time NBA champ Derek Fisher say: “That’s why you see grown men cry like babies” after they’ve won.
But I’d understand why a player would prefer the experience of winning this one with the Thunder to winning in the bubble in 2020.
I can’t think of a harder title to win than that one in Orlando. The experiment of an experience broke teams, got the best of great players, made guys want to check out and go home. I think it’s as much a testament to LeBron’s greatness as anything he’s done, leading a team through that.
An astounding accomplishment, the 2020 title – but with a ton of baggage, considering the confines and everything else happening in the world outside. Plus, no parade. It was all so very far away; there were few family members or friends – and no fans – for the Lakers players to enjoy it with.
Of course this one is more meaningful in that way, it had to be more fun. And maybe a little bit easier, in its way – for the normalcy of the challenge. For the support systems that were in place. For the stress being basketball stress solely.
You know?
Jim: All of that said – and I’ve learned, from experience, that if you’re going to be sarcastic you’d better make sure the joke lands as it’s supposed to – this turned out to be a great Finals, far better than all of those folks bemoaning small markets assumed it would be. A really, really tough ending for Indiana and particularly Tyrese Haliburton, but it was a fitting cap to OKC’s season. They were the best team in the regular year, they were the best team in the postseason, case closed.
(And remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about how people would tune in if the series got to a Game 6 or Game 7? They did. The overall series rating may have been down 9 percent, but Game 7 drew the highest NBA viewership in six years,16.35 million. That was the most since the 18.34 million that watched the Warriors-Raptors Game 6 in 2019 – and also more than all but one game of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series last fall, according to Front Office Sports. (And that series had a 74 percent jump in viewership over the previous year.)
Now for today’s exercise in lunacy: Earlier this week the NCAA Division I Council, according to USA Today’s Steve Berkowitz, voted “to propose that the association change its rules to allow Division I athletes and athletics staff members to bet on professional sports events.”
This would appear to be an immense brain cramp on the part of these administrators … except that the Division I Board of Directors (mostly consisting of school CEOs) and the Division III Management Council also supported deregulation of betting on professional sports. It still has to pass through Division II and Division III governance groups this summer and formal adoption by the Division I Council in October. But still … is there no one on any of those committees with any sense?
Please tell me this is not only a joke but a very poorly conceived one. Anyone with any knowledge of how fixers have taken advantage of those who have run up gambling debts – “Heeey, I know how you can make it right … just cooperate with us” – knows that this is a slippery slope that ultimately puts the legitimacy of their own games at risk.
I am no fan of the current Supreme Court for lots of reasons, none of which we need to go into here. But, in retrospect, the 2018 decision that struck down federal laws against sports betting, by a 6-3 vote, has turned into an albatross. The gambling industry has taken over sports – count the advertising time devoted to betting sites on the average sports broadcast if you don’t believe me – to the point where the tail is wagging the dog.
I feel fortunate I’ve never gotten into that habit. I’m not going to criticize those who have. But we seem to be in the process of removing all of the guardrails, with little thought to what could go wrong. Or am I overstating things?
What do you think, Mirjam?
Mirjam: Awful. Predictable.
These kids are getting paid real money now, officially, which makes them ready marks, no?
Targets for gambling companies to market to, to try to get hooked on the business. Yep, go ahead and set up our most physically fit, competitive young people with the opportunity to experience this unhealthy addiction, all for the benefit of a few.
What could possibly go wrong on such a slippery slope, where nothing remains sacred, tradition is going extinct and everything left is tacky and transactional?
How long until we turn on the TV and find ourselves watching the FanDuel Football Showcase between USC and LSU at bet365 Stadium. How long until everyone’s placing their bets on the DraftKings (formerly the Trojans), who will be representing the Bet MGM Conference, against the Caesar’s Sportsbook Tigers?
What a drag, man. What a dangerous drag.
Jim: It scares me to say it, but that may be exactly what college sports becomes in the insatiable quest for revenue, especially at the top of the food chain. Right now Fox and ESPN are divvying up power conference football … but what happens if (when?) those networks’ money spigots dry up? We already have learned that streaming services have overtaken broadcast networks in terms of viewership, which is why you’ll now have to have multiple streaming subscriptions to watch sports. (Presumably at some point ESPN, the Fox sports networks and what now are cable regional networks will all be available via streaming … and you’ll be paying more for them combined than you are now for cable.)
And at some point … well, we already have the FanDuel Sports Network. Right now it’s just a naming rights deal. What happens if (when?) the gambling industry takes over the sports TV industry as well?
Ah, let’s change the subject. The Lakers and Clippers figure to get minimal help from the draft, although the Clippers added a big man at the tail end of the first round Wednesday, 6-foot-11 Yanic Konan Niederhauser from Penn State and Switzerland. (Personally, this is going to be a challenge to spell his last name correctly rather than succumb to the mental block and call him Niedenfuer or Niedermayer.) At the start, he should become a serviceable backup to Ivica Zubac, but who knows from there?
But for most in the NBA – except maybe OKC, the youngest NBA champion since the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers of Bill Walton and Maurice Lucas – shopping season begins next week. What are you anticipating out of the Lakers and Clippers?
Mirjam: The first domino for the Lakers is whether LeBron opts in or out. It’s been reported he’s simply going to opt in and play out the final year of his $52.6 million deal – and why wouldn’t he?
But he could also opt out and sign another two-year deal that’s just near the max and that could conceivably give the Lakers a little more cap flexibility to build around him and Luka?
I’m not saying he should do that, or that he owes it to the Lakers – but it’s a possibility, at least. And it would tell us a lot about the Lakers’ future and his too, him opting out and signing on for another couple years.
But we’ll see!
As for the Clips, sure seems like they’re planning to stick with the status quo – James Harden and Kawhi Leonard – and hope everyone stays healthy in their 17th and 14th seasons, respectively, while also hoping that that’s enough to compete with the deep, young teams that made deep playoff runs this postseason.
It’s probably their best bet (not that you should bet!), because they’ll be competitive if not top-tier, but it’s not an especially inspiring trajectory following last season’s disappointing first-round exit.
They definitely do need some depth at center – it wasn’t just Shai Gilgeous-Alexander who Clippers fans had to watch win a title for OKC, it was Big Zu’s former backup Isaiah Hartenstein, too! – but I’m not sure the relatively green 22-year-old Niederhauser will be serviceable enough.
But … we’ll see!
How are you feeling about the news in the next few weeks for our local NBA teams?
Jim: As we learned in the postseason, the Lakers need a big man, desperately. (Hey, Anthony Davis told Rob Pelinka he needed to acquire a center.) LeBron and Luka (or is it Luka and LeBron) are a good start to anyone’s roster, and if Doncic has indeed paid more attention to conditioning this summer, as has been reported, that’s a very good start. The rest of the roster is solid, and JJ Redick should be better in his second season as a coach. But the donut alignment didn’t work against Minnesota, and any reinforcements at center will likely have to come via trade.
(Paging JaVale McGee … )
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that the Clippers’ very best chance to make noise in the playoffs this past spring, and maybe even to send the franchise into a different trajectory, evaporated the moment that Aaron Gordon, alone on the baseline with nobody boxing him out, got to the rim and slammed home Nikola Jokic’s miss with a tenth of a second left in Game 4. Do the Clippers win that series in six? Do they give OKC all it can handle in the next round? Who knows.
The risk is that depending on Kawhi Leonard and James Harden … is a risk. There’s age, and potential injury always seems to lurk around the corner. That said, we’ll know Sunday whether Harden opts out or opts in, just as we’ll know then what LeBron decides to do.
And then the free-for-all begins Monday afternoon, though nothing will be official with free agency, sign-and-trades and the like until next Sunday.
Can we wait that long for answers?
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