• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Roster
  • Schedule
  • Forum Blue?
  • About Forum Blue & Gold
    • About FB&G
    • Forum Blue?
    • New Hoops Stats 101
    • Commenting Guidelines
    • Privacy Policy
  • Support FB&G

Forum Blue And Gold

A Lakers Blog. Thoughts, reflections, and the odd rant on the Los Angeles Lakers and the NBA (even the Clippers).

  • Lakers News
  • Lakers Analysis
  • Laker Film Room
  • Cranjis’ Corner
  • Lakers Data
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Around the World (Wide Web): Game 6 Reactions

April 29, 2011 by Phillip Barnett



[The above is a video compilation of Ron Artest’s season of muscle flexing. (h/t to The Basketball Jones)]

From Brian Kamenetzky, Land O’ Lakers: Before the game, I wrote about the need for Chris Paul not just to play well, but at a level approaching the upper edges of elite (as he was in Games 1 and 4) for the Hornets to have a chance. Fair to say he didn’t get there. For the first time in the series, the Lakers almost completely eliminated Paul as a factor. CP3 finished the first half with only one field goal, four assists, and two turnovers as the Lakers crowded him on the ball, and when he gave it up L.A. did a great job denying him opportunities to get it back. The third quarter wasn’t particularly kind, either, as Paul had more turnovers (two) than buckets (one). He’d finish with 10 points on 4-of-9 from the floor, and while he had 11 assists also turned the ball over five times, a ratio the Lakers could more than live with. All series long, Paul has been called the head of the snake. Take it off, and the whole thing dies. Thursday, the Lakers not only decapitated the slithery reptile, but turned the skin into a boots and barbecued the meat. L.A. was very strong inside, pressuring nearly everything near the bucket (six blocks), forced most of New Orleans’ possessions deep into the clock, and successfully executed their plan to keep the Hornets operating away from the paint and at mid-range.

From Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: The Hornets season ended today in uninspiring fashion, as they fell apart early in the fourth quarter yet again against the Lakers, losing 98-80. The loss ended hope of extending what can only be described as a successful season. The crowd showed their appreciated with a late game chant of “Thank You Hornets”, well after the game was out of hand. Heading into this year it was expected that Chris Paul would leave, and that the Hornets would miss the playoffs. Once they got in it was expected that they would be just a cake-walk for the reigning champions. Instead we got to see a full season of Chris Paul, who proved that his knee injury is not as hobbling as many thought it would be. We witnessed a Hornets late season push to secure a postseason spot despite the presence of their leading scorer. Then we got to see the team take the Hornets to six games, which were all competitive for the majority.

From Dexter Fishmore, Silver Screen and Roll: In the end, there was little drama. The New Orleans Hornets fought a scrappy insurgent war against the reigning champs, but their season has concluded much as we thought it would, under the grinding boot heels of Kobe Bryant and the Laker big men. By the time the Lake Show’s 98 to 80 victory over the Hornets in Game Six wrapped up tonight, that Game One upset seemed distantly in the past, and both teams had reverted to the roles we cast for them at the outset of this series. The Lakers once again resembled a championship-caliber force. The Hornets once again looked like a team that needs a little more from Chris Paul and a whole lot more talent around him. The last couple years, in nearly every Laker playoff series, there’s come a moment when you can see the opponents’ fighting spirit seep out of them for good. The Celtics in last year’s Finals are the one exception: they never stopped battling or believing. But every other series the Lakers have played en route to their back-to-back titles has ended with an opponent bowing its head in defeat before the final buzzer sounds. Tonight that moment arrived for the Hornets some time in the third quarter.

From Ramneet Singh, Lakers Nation: The Lakers were welcomed by a hostile New Orleans crowd, and the “Beat LA” chants began well before tip-off. However, the veteran Lakers team embraced the negative slurs and used that to fuel their play. Neither team started the game strong, nor were they able to hit their open looks. The Lakers were attacking the paint, but they failed to convert when getting close to the rim. Kobe Bryant took more of a facilitator role in the opening stages of the quarter, and he looked to give the big men the ball down low. The Lakers started the game missing six of the first eight shots and at the 7:22 mark of the first; Los Angeles trailed 8-6.

From Rohan, At The Hive: In a few days, we’ll look back on this series in a largely positive manner. I’m sure of it . That the Hornets took the L.A. Lakers to six games is remarkable in and of itself. But it doesn’t change the fact that this concluding game marked a return to those things we grew to so vociferously despise over these last five months. Chris Paul’s passivity. The almost hilarious absence of perimeter shooting. Mis-evaluation of bench players. Those three things, probably more than anything else, define the 2010-2011 Hornets. And they most certainly defined them in their obliteration at the hands of Los Angeles. It feels strange to criticize Chris Paul after the series he’s had, but Paul absolutely failed to show up in the first half. It’s one thing to have an off half (which, quite frankly, is an apt description of Paul’s second half anyway). It’s quite another to not only not shoot the basketball, but to literally avoid the ball entirely for possessions at a time. Where the national audience may have been somewhat shocked, we could do no more than sigh knowingly. It’s true that Los Angeles pulled away in the third quarter, but the number of opportunities New Orleans left on the floor in the first half thanks to CP3’s vanishing act was staggering.

From Kevin Ding, OC Register: The Lakers are called soft but unquestionably are getting harder with Andrew Bynum doing his new thing. They have a killer instinct that starts with Kobe Bryant and wafts through the entire locker room, as seen by another close-out Thursday night that had Derek Fisher saying with satisfaction: “We smelled an opportunity to finish it out.” But what isn’t much talked about but is a precious commodity in this budding dynasty is that they are pretty smart guys. Bryant, Fisher, Bynum, Pau Gasol … all unquestionably smarter than your average NBAer. Obviously Phil Jackson. Ron Artest is actually sort of a defensive-basketball mad genius, too. That is actually part of the killer instinct: learning over the course of a series how to kill. It wasn’t Bryant’s tide-turning dunk that Fisher was raving about after the Lakers’ Game 5 victory. It was that Bryant, wobbly on that sprained left ankle, playing calculatingly and not crazy: “When to attack, when to move the ball,” Fisher said, “he played a really smart game.”

From Mark Medina, LA Times: The Lakers’ makeup doesn’t make practice time ripe in preparing for the pick-and-roll offense no matter what they do. Sure they can dissect film, mimic opposing team’s tendencies and run pick-and-roll sequences until it’s drilled into their heads. But part of the practice time also entails running the triangle offense, which operates without the traditional point guard and stresses off-ball movement and balanced spacing. Add the Lakers’ veteran-laden roster, and it becomes the main area to try to exploit against them, a dicey scenario when they matched up with the New Orleans Hornets in the first round. But if the Lakers’ 98-80 Game 6 victory Thursday over New Orleans taught us anything besides the fact the defending champs survived their first-round series in six games and face the winner of Portland-Dallas in the West semifinals at Staples Center on Monday, it’s that the matchup featured an evolution in how they guarded the pick-and-roll and eventually succeeded. “It’s been our weakness in the past,” Lakers Coach Phil Jackson told reporters in New Orleans. “We learned a lot about it in the series and we got better.”

Below is the TV Schedule for the Lakers’ second round series with Dallas:

Game 1 – Mon May 2 Dallas at L.A. Lakers 7:30PM TNT
Game 2 – Wed May 4 Dallas at L.A. Lakers 7:30PM  TNT
Game 3 – Fri May 6 L.A. Lakers at Dallas 6:30PM  ESPN
Game 4 – Sun May 8 L.A. Lakers at Dallas 12:30PM  ABC/R
Game 5 * Tue May 10 Dallas at L.A. Lakers TBD TBD TNT
Game 6 * Thu May 12 L.A. Lakers at Dallas TBD TBD ESPN
Game 7 * Sun May 15 Dallas at L.A. Lakers 12:30PM 3:30PM ABC
*If Necessary


Previous Post
Next Post

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Mimsy says

    April 29, 2011 at 11:18 am

    That is an awesome video. 🙂

    One of the things I really liked seeing last night, aside from winning and advancing to the next round, was a bunch of little details.

    Ron did a bicep flex (always great to see), Lamar did a finger waggle, Kobe smirked and stared, Derek Fisher snorted contemptuously, Pau gasol sneered and glared, and Matt Barnes manhandled Carl Landry and then strutted across the court looking for all the world like a pitbull that just took out a doberman.

    The swagger is back. It was long overdue.

  2. Aaron says

    April 29, 2011 at 11:31 am

    From the last thread… I really don’t think we should legitimize Plaschke by mentioning his name. But okay. The problem is he is a guy who doesn’t know sports and can’t write. Besides that he is great at what he does.

    I love Kobe Bryant. I am biased. He does it for me. We have this young, smart, nice, new, charming 23 year old talented big man right here blossoming into a star right before our eyes. Many organizations would sell their soul for that or worse. Here we hardly notice. On the Clippers he was a franchise savior… Here he is just our sixth man. In Memphis he was that skinny niche soft perimeter PF with surprising athleticism. Here he is known as the best PF in the NBA. Around the world he was known as the one two way star that was one of the best defensive weapons of his era. Here he is that guy who replaced Trevor Ariza.

    It’s all that way though because of Kobe Bryant. You could argue he has made many of a career. How many rings did Shaq have before playing with a mature Kobe? How many dollar bills will Luke Walton sleep on tonight while having nightmares of what would be if he didn’t start next to Kobe in a contract year?  Okay… He would still be living in a Bill Walton mansion. And I’ll tell you what Bynum, Artest, Gasol, and Odom would be without Bryant… They would be ringless. Kobe brought up how interesting it was that Bynum was all of the sudden a permitter jumping shooting big man in the middle of a playoff run. Kobe of course was half praising Andrew… But the other half was disturbed at the lack of killer instinct. Kobe could never hold back at that age. Not for a game… Not for a quarter, and not for a play. He couldn’t hide a beautiful midrange game and unveil it for the playoffs.   Kobe was always going a hundred percent like it was the last percent he would ever be able to give.  For all of the coasting we see on a occasion from Kobe now and then as a more advanced in age veteran… Several years ago and hundreds of games ago…When Kobe had it he gave it. And he just keeps on giving. Even sometimes when we don’t want him to. But that’s just Kobe. He is a warrior. He is a basketball phscho. 

  3. Funky Chicken says

    April 29, 2011 at 11:32 am

    One of my favorite compilation videos of all time. Interesting to note, but hardly surprising to see, is that when Ron is playing defense like that the Lakers are at their best. Each of those clips (maybe save the Kaman-facial) showed Ron at his best against quality opponents, and with the Lakers comfortably ahead as a result.

    I love that about Ron. Playing with that kind of intensity even with a big lead is what the killer instinct is all about, and nothing epitomized that more than last night’s game where he bullied Chris Paul after a Laker made basket, steals the ball, lays it in (does the flex), then hustles down the floor to block a shot on the defensive end to lead to another Laker runout. That is awesome basketball.

  4. Chownoir says

    April 29, 2011 at 11:40 am

    We always talk about the journey and how Phil builds the team for the ultimate goal. i love the fact that the team got a full series of practice against the pick and roll against one of the best there is in Paul.

    These are all building blocks for the next challenge. It might have been a blessing in disguise to be pushed this hard by a team everyone expected to get swept. If the Lakers had just rolled over NO with simple inside dominance, they might not have learned some valuable lessons.

  5. Funky Chicken says

    April 29, 2011 at 11:54 am

    Aaron, I generally agree with your post, and there is no doubt that Kobe has made guys around him better at every stage of his career (even in his less disciplined youth). If Luke isn’t paying Kobe a commission then Kobe is getting ripped off….

    However, I find it hard to believe that Kobe feels any frustration over Bynum’s failure to assert himself offensively (especially with jump shots) when Kobe is among the Laker perimeter players who routinely ignore Andrew in the low post and jack up contested shots instead of pounding the rock inside to the big guy….

  6. PalaNi says

    April 29, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    I will sing some praise for Fisher. In this series:

    avg 9.33 points, 52.6% FG, 55.2% 3PT, 3.2 Ast.

  7. Craig W. says

    April 29, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    Can’t we please, please stop citing statistics as a way to point out someone had a good game.

    You just have to watch the game. There is a real limit on what statistics can illustrate.

  8. Chris J says

    April 29, 2011 at 1:01 pm

    God forbid this next series goes seven. A Sunday afternoon game at Staples, Lakers facing elimination… the white uniforms.

    I want to see none of those things come together, ever again.

  9. Darius Soriano says

    April 29, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    #7. It’s not like statistics are useless. I mean, Fisher’s ability to hit shots at the rate in which he did would indicate that he played well, no? It’s not the entire story but it’s surely part of it.

  10. Darius Soriano says

    April 29, 2011 at 1:23 pm

    A new post is up.

    http://www.forumblueandgold.com/2011/04/29/a-second-round-sneak-peek/

  11. Craig W. says

    April 29, 2011 at 2:07 pm

    Darius,
    Statistics are not useless. It is just that people constantly shortcut their thinking by stating a statistic as being proof of some kind of point. Bruce Bowen was more valuable than any of his statistics ever showed.

    I think citing statistics is just a lazy way of viewing a sport.

  12. Darius Soriano says

    April 29, 2011 at 2:15 pm

    #11. I guess my point is rather than saying we should stop citing them as a way to prove a point, we should also ask what was done beyond the numbers or mention things that were done (or not) to either add to or disprove the point made. I’m looking to expand the converation rather than shut it down, you know?

Primary Sidebar

laker-film-room-podcast
Tweets by @forumbluegold

Archives

Categories

Donate to FB&G

Footer

© 2023 Forum Blue & Gold · Partner with USA Today Sports Digital Properties · WordPress Support by WP Site Care