Nevertheless, there shall be an NBA Finals, although it should be called Post-Finals or Finals Appendix. It will be a victory lap for the Lakers of Los Angeles, as it would have been for the Trail Blazers of Portland.
How much more final it can get than those two teams in a mutual death grip is far beyond the facility of the thick-ankled relics from Indiana.
We have seen the NBA after Michael, and even if it did have part of Jordan’s old supporting cast invigorating it into raw, edge-of-the-seat melodrama, it managed to make an evening worth archiving.
That was one great Game 7. This is where the NBA season should end, right now, with the Lakers anointed champions, the Trail Blazers given the silver medal and Larry Bird a soft chair and a rear-projection TV.
How does it get better? It does not.
How do the Pacers make anyone keep from offering them a last meal and a blindfold? They do not.
Indiana is an intruder on a party already over.
I make it L.A. in five, giving the Pacers a game because Bird does not deserve to leave the NBA again in complete humiliation and because the Lakers, in spite of all the splendid hoo-hoo of Phil Jackson, have too much muscle memory of how to play beneath their talent.
At least one game Kobe Bryant is going to careen like a loose lid in the wind and Shaquille O’Neal is going to sulk about being battered and Glen Rice is going to have to stop and ask somebody directions to the basket.
The Lakers are in the flawed beginnings of the next great NBA dynasty, and it will begin with Indiana only because of geographical bracketing. Where it really started is with Portland, a team that earned a better fate than to now have to watch Reggie Miller imitate Scottie Pippen.
Before the NBA playoffs a friend asked whom I wanted to see fail more, Pippen or Phil Jackson. The answer was harder than the assumption because, let’s face it, no one in Chicago really wants to see either of them do well. Old loves are supposed to suffer, be more miserable without you, end up pasting you back in the album and speak achingly into your answering machine. Instead Jackson, surrounded by his old coaching crew, and Pippen, far removed from his Tonto days next to Jordan, made all that happened in Chicago seem like it was just a prelude to a Game 7 out west.
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Except for, and I couldn’t help but notice, a familiar absence when needed in the fourth quarter, Pippen was extraordinary, his energy and passion fueling the Trail Blazers into near-survival of the Lakers.
Pippen will not need an independent championship ring to separate himself from Jordan, for no one can now doubt his individual significance. He is and hereafter shall remain his own man.
This is what Pippen has earned by being the player of the playoffs, east and west. In his tussle with his old coach and with the ghost of Jordan, Pippen succeeded much more admirably than did Jackson.
Pippen retained a dignity that Jackson did not, though the results are as Jackson manipulated when he questioned Pippen’s courage, when he sent Rick Fox out to sucker Pippen, when he toyed with Pippen’s admittedly toyable head.
It was Jackson who seemed the more desperate by the end, resorting even to suggesting it was not Pippen who brought the Trail Blazers back “from death’s door” but the league and NBC. The Jackson theory is that a Game 7 on a Sunday night between the two best teams was preordained, the unspoken part being that such a thing is impossible to manipulate with any subtlety with Indiana.
So, to answer my friend’s question–whom did I want to see fail more?–I answered almost instantly Pippen.
I will always believe that Jordan did not need Pippen as much as he did Jackson. He could have been who he was and done what he did with other players but maybe not with a different coach. If Pippen could have carried Portland into the Finals, it would have been Jordanesque, and the nearer Pippen came to doing it, the more I rooted for him to pull it off.
And when he didn’t, when Bryant threw that lob to O’Neal, who slammed the ball and the door on the Trail Blazers, I realized I felt worse for Pippen than I did good for Jackson.
As it turns out, Pippen and Jackson both win. I’ll get over it.