NBA FINALS: Celtics half-way home! Lakers can’t wait to get home

Defense wins championships. The Lakers do not play championship defense, the Celtics do. That has been the story of the first two games of the 2008 NBA Finals.

The Lakers allowed the Celtics to shoot 53%. That is not supposed to happen in the Finals. The Lakers have no one to guard Pierce, and tonight in Game 2 they had no one to stop Leon Powe. They allowed Powe, a reserve forward, to score 21 points in only 15 minutes.

A championship team never allows that to happen in the Finals.

The Lakers back court does not play defense. They were not able to stop the Celtics penetration, putting even more pressure on their beleaguered front line.

With all that, and considering the Celtics got to the foul line 38 times to only 10 free throws for the Lakers, you might think the Celtics won by 24 points or more.

But actually, the Lakers were able to cut a 24-point Celtics lead in the final seven minutes of the game to just two points, 104-102.

It was a lack of focus on the part of the Celtics that allowed their blow-out margin to disappear.

But it was a lack of defense on the part of the Lakers for three-and-a-half quarters that eventually cost them the game, 108-102.

There is no reason why Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom and Vladimir Radmanovic should not play even-up with the likes of Powe, P.J. Brown, and Kendrick Perkins. Their inability to post up will wind up costing them the championship.

The Celtics on the other hand, having played against two good defensive teams (the Cavaliers and Pistons) so far in the playoffs, have had no trouble putting up points against a basically finesse team like the Lakers. They have been able to do just about anything they want, whether it's getting wide-open perimeter shots or driving to the basket.

Their defense, on the other hand, has stopped the Lakers cold in all but those last seven minutes of tonight's Game 2.

Once again the Lakers looked out of sync. They were unable to build any kind of rhythm until those final seven minutes. But is it possible that they can take the momentum from those last few minutes back to Los Angeles for Game 3?

Kobe Bryant said, "I think so. I think we can build on it."

But Phil Jackson disagreed. Jackson flatly said, "No, we can't take it 2500 miles. That's too far to carry it."

Of course, one of the reasons the Lakers were unable to build any momentum in the first three periods may have been the officiating.

Reporting on ESPN, Michael Wilbon said, "The officiating was embarrassingly one-sided."

When a reserve player like Leon Powe gets to the charity stripe 13 times in just 15 minutes and the entire Lakers team only gets to the line ten times in 48 minutes, something is definitely wrong, Mister Stern.

Yes, the Lakers were somewhat passive. But not THAT passive that one team gets to the line 38 times while the other team gets to the line only 10 times—the fourth lowest total in an NBA playoff game.

Phil Jackson called it, "Unbelievable." Referring to the disparity in foul calls, Jackson said, "In the thirteen years that I've been coaching, I've never seen anything like it."

In the several decades that I've been watching NBA games, I've never seen a more disrupting game. Every thirty seconds it seemed there was another whistle. If it wasn't for a foul, it was for traveling or a three-second call. It slowed down the pace and made the game very exasperating to watch.

Just how exasperating? Well, I thought this might have been ABC's summer replacement for "Desperate Housewives," a show entitled "Desperate Three-Pointers."

Anyway, for Mister Stern and anyone else who is interested, here's what some Lakers fans thought of the game. These are just a few of the 964 comments that came in during the game at the Los Angeles Times Lakers Blog edited by Andrew and Brian Kamenetzky at http://lakersblog.latimes.com/

"I just shut off my tv. I refuse to contribute to their rating."

"This game is soooooo not being called fairly...... even the announcers are picking up on the ticky tack/missed calls..."

"...How much of an east-coast bias has there been in the NBA this year? East coast is where the mafia hangs out.

You think I'm being silly? Baseball has been fixed before. Football too. College has it's scandals. Track and Field. Even the Olympics has had its share of scandals.

It has been pre-determined that the Celts were to win it all this year. We're just all being taken for a ride."

"Kobe gets fouled 3 times on on that drive by Ray Allen.  NO CALL."

"Good. Put Rondo on his ass. If they're gonna keep calling touch fouls on us, make em count. "

"A foul on Ray Allen????"

"I thought Ray Allen wasn't allowed to get a foul called on him in this series?"

"I just got home, watched the first 5 minutes on TiVo, said to myself "this is some plain awful officiating" so I switched to the live feed... waddya know, even worse officiating in the 3rd quarter!"

"These refs are gonna get some serious internal fines from the NBA for the way they screwed this game up. If any of them work any more games this year, I'll be extremely surprised."

"Ha-ha these refs are hilarious. NOW they call touch fouls on the celts?"

"How much of a fraud did it seem that they had a story about Powe after his "great first half." It was almost like the NBA instructed the refs to get Powe to the line and get him some points so it looks relevant at half time."

"This is absurd, this is so WWE!!!!!, please don't give ratings to that thieve Stern, stop watching."

"Did anyone else see PJ Brown shove Kobe as Kobe drove around him? Thank kind of crap is more bad officiating that your casual fan won't notice."

And finally, I'll end with a quote that I feel is apropos from a blogger who goes by the handle of WAVEBUSTER.

"i find it funny that people are crying about the free throw disparity. These same people weren’t crying when the Lakers had a 43-16 free throw advantage in Game 2 vs the Jazz this playoff. Also sorry to inform you but the same referee, Dan Crawford, officiated that game as well so don’t tell me that he’s biased against the Lakers.

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Yeah, I am unbiased too. I am (or was) an NBA fan. I don't think the refs are impartial to the Lakers, but I do think they have an agenda to make this series competitive.

Everyone that follows the NBA can see that the league wanted a Lakers/Celtics final from about mid-season on. So yeah, the Lakers did get some questionable calls in the Utah series. As did Boston in all of their series.

I am not a fan of either team, but I can clearly see that the Lakers are the better team, and under normal circumstances, this series would be over quickly. This is the NBA's dream  match-up and they want to extend this series as long as possible.

So look for more one sided calls the next three games in the Laker's favor because, of course, this series HAS to go seven games."