L.A. Lakers: A Lack of Outside Shooting Will Doom the Lakers

You can point at Pao for not having the right stuff.  Maybe the Lakers have the wrong Gasol in their midst.

You can call Kobe old and tired, but for any who saw his amazing dunk-after-the-bruised-ankle against the Hornets, we all know he still has the hops to succeed.

You can say the Lakers are complacent and bored and just a tired (yawn!) championship team that just doesn't have the drive to win...again

Where's that vaunted "switch" they turn on whenever they need to win a game or a series?  Or has Dallas, after one game and an amazing comeback, already put them in the dark? And does Phil have his eyes on the blue skies of Montana and a home-away-from-the court at last?  Is he just Zenned out already?

What is keeping the Lakers from pummeling the competition? 

They surely have what it takes to beat Dallas, whose history of losing in the playoffs is well documented.  They have psychologically beaten them many times in the past. Now they have opened a treacherous door to success.  Dallas has regained whatever confidence they may have been missing, and are prepared to stomp the wayward Lakers.

What plagues the L.A. team most, though, is what has hurt them from the beginning, and they will not get away with it much longer.

They have no reliable outside shooting.  Wouldn't you double the post and Kobe to see what the likes of Artest, Fisher, Shannon Brown and Steve Blake can do?  Because that is what Dallas is doing. 

They are plenty big inside—big enough in the middle to squash a weak-willed Pao and weak-kneed Bynum—and they have the quickness and the guile with Kidd and Co. to rattle Kobe.

Then all they have to do is let the chips fall—or, in this case, the bricks...