Face It:The Lakers are Soft

I've been following hoop during my entire existence to the point where it has become a religion. I study the game like a science and my emotional ties to the teams I root for are well documented. I admit that I have some skeletons in the closet when it comes to pulling for my home team, the Lakers. In my early years as a die hard fan of the game, my excessive cheering were aimed mostly at the Chicago Bulls. I mean, I liked the Lakers, but Jordan made it very difficult to root for anyone else. As time progressed, my questionable allegiance moved to the team of my favorite player at the time, Gary Payton. I've always liked tall point guards and looking up to my older brother I valued what he valued. He liked the defensive grind it out types of players. Players that would knock people on the floor and give hard fouls. I eventually decided not to continually defy my family and now claim my squad as the Lakers; they will be my favorite team until I'm buried

My point in bringing this all up is that I like a certain brand of basketball. I like players that get technicals for screaming at the refs. I respect the players that give their all on defense and will rather die than to let a player on the opposing team even think about going in for an easy bucket. Teams that have showed this will over the years have been the old Piston teams for the late 80s, the championship Bulls who have had some of the best defensive players in history(Pippen, Jordan, Harper, Cartwright, Grant, Rodman just to name a few). There were the other 90s squads exemplified this style of play like the Knicks, Pacers, Heat and more recently we have the Spurs, Rockets, Celtics and the Cavs. On the other side of the coin there are the high scoring fast paced, cant get a stop when they need one teams like the Suns, Mavs and sadly to say, my Lakers.

Watching the Lakers play on a nightly basis gives me mixed emotions of both joy and pain. The joy is seeing one of the greatest players to ever lace them up in his prime. The pain on the other hand is seeing a team full of soft players who continue to give up easy baskets and have multiple mental lapses on defense. When the announcement of Yao Ming being out for the remainder of the playoffs broke yesterday I was disappointed(sorry Schoop). I'm one of those people who likes to beat a team at full strength. With that being said, I expected the Lakers to come out with the intensity of a champion today. I expected to see a team with the killer instinct of a lion seeing its prey wounded after a long pursuit. What I witnessed instead was a team play with no heart, emotion or toughness. Their opponent on the other hand played like a team possessed. The Rockets came out the gate with passion and fury; they just flat out played harder than the Lakers, a team that has been expected all year to represent the city of Los Angeles in the NBA finals.

I wonder now if I can seriously expect this team to compete for a championship, to get out of the West, or even win this series. Houston was able to do whatever they wanted today; they were constantly left unguarded for wide open threes. I saw them battling for every loose ball and every rebound. That's what I respect about the game and appreciate. Now the Lakers can sit around and talk about the motivation from last years disappointment in the finals, or promise to play better defense and make declarations of increased fortitude, but the fact of the matter is that their actions have to back up their claims. I won't jump ship, one of my mantras will continue to be "Lakers For Life." But it is very difficult to continue to support a team that goes against the very thing that I value about hoop.