The Golden State Warriors weren’t always elegant in their run to the 2015 NBA title, and goodness knows, Draymond Green frequently approached the line between “aggressive and dirty” on the court. He can be reckless at times. Yet, one would ultimately have to conclude that the Warriors had no knuckleheads on their roster.
Championship teams generally don’t have knuckleheads, certainly not more than one, on their roster. They can protect one weird player who loses his mind regularly enough for everyone else to notice, but teams with two knuckleheads winning titles? That’s relatively rare.
The last team with at least two knuckleheads to win the NBA championship would likely provoke a spirited debate, but for my money, the best answer is the 2010 Los Angeles Lakers.
The reason the 2010 Lakers emerge as a legitimate — though quite contestable — answer is that in 2011, the team unraveled the way you’d expect knuckleheads to unravel. Andrew Bynum wanted no part of the West semifinal series against the Dallas Mavericks. His complete loss of control late in that series presaged the termination of his career as a relevant player, as much as his injury problems did. (Perhaps the two fed into each other, but that’s idle armchair psychology.) Bynum was and is, on balance, a knucklehead. That’s the tougher call to make with the 2010 Lakers, but once you arrive at the verdict that Bynum WAS part of the Knucklehead Club, you don’t have to worry about finding the other knucklehead from that championship team.
Anyone remember Metta World Peace, or The Artist Formerly Known As Ron Artest? Case closed.
It was and is the enduring testament to Phil Jackson’s greatness as a coach: Though he was never good at taking merely above-average players and turning them into champions — that’s more of a Gregg Popovich thing, and it’s also something Popovich’s mentor, Larry Brown, did with the 2004 Detroit Piston team which smoked Jackson’s mercenary Lakers in the NBA Finals — Jackson remains the best coach of all time in terms of getting massive egos to coexist in the locker room, on the practice court, and on game nights. Jackson held together the combustible personalities of Bynum, World Peace, Kobe Bryant, and Lamar Odom. Pau Gasol put his head down and got work done — especially in Game 7 of the 2010 Finals against the Celtics, when he bailed out an out-of-form Kobe. Derek Fisher was the quiet, knowledgeable veteran who acted as an extension of his coach on the floor, providing crucial leadership and guidance (and late-game jump shooting, as shown in Game 3 of those Finals against Boston). The Lakers had just enough veteran wisdom — and Bynum’s body was just healthy enough to absorb the punishment a winning series required — in order to get past the even more savvy Celtics and claim yet another championship.
Knucklehead quotients were overcome by the last great Laker team we’ve seen.
How fascinating it is, then, that the 2015-2016 NBA team trying to win a title with at least two knuckleheads on its roster also hails from Los Angeles and plays its games in the very same Staples Center.
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There is no debate about the matter: Lance Stephenson and Josh Smith are classic NBA knuckleheads. Their propensity for pulling all sorts of stupid stuff on the court marks them as volatile, high-wire-act players whose value is constantly questioned. Are the skills worth the headaches? Is the potential worth the present-tense pain? Are the brief flurries of magnificence able to outweigh the many miserable nights at the office they deliver to teammates and coaching staffs?
The 2010 Los Angeles Lakers endured many headaches to reach the top of the NBA. Now, the 2016 Los Angeles Clippers will try to do the same thing with their soap-operatic lineup.
Doc Rivers will try to play the role of Phil Jackson, but a far better comparison of these teams lies in the “coaches on the floor.” Playing the role of Derek Fisher from the 2010 Lakers will be Paul Pierce of the Clippers. Much as Derek Fisher became an expert at translating Phil Jackson’s vision to the court, Pierce is situated to do the same thing for Rivers. How well Pierce leads will be every bit as important as how he plays this season, if not more.
If the 2010 Lakers had Kobe and Pau, the 2016 Clippers have Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. The CP3-Blake relationship is more harmonious than Kobe-Pau was, but that Clipper advantage is undercut by the twin realities of DeAndre Jordan’s limited low-post offense — he can’t score nearly as well as Andrew Bynum could — and a mindset even more brittle than Bynum’s, as shown in the “(Mark) Cuban Miss-Out Crisis,” also known as “My Dinner With DeAndre,” a wordplay on the 1981 film, “My Dinner With Andre.”
The 2016 Clippers — with Josh Smith, Lance Stephenson, DeAndre Jordan, and Jamal Crawford on one roster — are a walking reality TV show… much as the 2010 Lakers were with their assortment of large egos and free spirits.
Can this Los Angeles team manage to do what another L.A. outfit achieved in 2010? It’s a long way until opening night, and a much longer wait until the 2016 playoffs, but the level of anticipation is already off the charts… in Hollywood, and throughout the Association.
