All Those Roads Led the Lakers to the Finals

From the aches of a year’s effort, from a life-changing circumstance for Kobe Bryant and career-changing decisions by Karl Malone and Gary Payton, and in the moments before the organization might be forced to rebuild again around Shaquille O’Neal, the Lakers open the best-of-seven NBA Finals tonight at Staples Center.

They are here, after all.

The league’s most decorated and glamorous franchise over the last quarter-century, the Lakers play the Detroit Pistons, champions of the Eastern Conference.

All under the guidance of Phil Jackson, the Lakers will play their fourth Finals over five seasons, which wouldn’t seem so long if Larry Brown, coach of the Pistons, weren’t at work on his second challenger to them.

To that end, Brown said with a laugh Saturday, “Maybe we know too much about them and that’s why I’m wearing all black.”

Fourteen years ago, the Pistons closed Showtime. Now, with the next Laker generation threatening to pull the curtain on itself -- nine of them can be free agents -- the Pistons are back and being compared to their basketball heritage. They defend with the best in the league, an ethic that plays well in Detroit, though these Pistons are no more Bad Boys than these Lakers are Showtime.

The Lakers stand where everyone once expected them to, though in the course of the season their lapses in play and community had convinced many otherwise. The drag of Bryant’s sexual-assault case, the first severe injury of Malone’s career and nagging issues of triangle absorption had them vulnerable until the playoffs came into view.

Prodded by the prospect of a fourth title together, the 15th in their history and the ninth under owner Jerry Buss, the Lakers would also grant the first championships in the long careers of Malone, 40, and Payton, 35.

Of the current Pistons, only Lindsey Hunter is so decorated, and he rode the Laker bus to get it, two years ago.

Malone said he was pleased, “considering what we went through this year and what we are trying to do. But I don’t think it’s any more than that. We realize nothing’s over until it’s over. People are talking about those guys being underdogs. I don’t buy that.”

He is among the few. An Eastern Conference team hasn’t won an NBA title since Jackson’s last walk year, in 1998. Six years later, Jackson can surpass Red Auerbach with his 10th coaching title, his 12th as a player and coach.

So, they’ll play a little for that, and a little for the future Hall of Famers among them who remain ringless, and a little for the scatter potential. They figured out how to live with one another and play for one another and win in fourth-tenths of a second.

And suddenly it was June, the defending champion San Antonio Spurs gone in six, the 58-win Minnesota Timberwolves gone a couple of weeks later, the Pistons the last ones standing.

“We can’t allow a team that hasn’t been there before, can’t allow their passion and excitement to be greater than ours,” Derek Fisher said. “There is something to be taken from when nobody gives you a chance. But they have worked just as hard to get here as we did.”

They know O’Neal does the Finals like no other two weeks, and they’re sure there could be few of them left by the end of the summer. Perhaps, when they see him again, Bryant will have stood trial and, if he prevails, be wearing another team’s jersey.

And that’s just the start.

“We don’t talk about it much,” Bryant said. “We know the opportunity that we have in front of us right now, so we just want to capitalize on that. There is the possibility that this team will break up, won’t have the same nucleus for next season. So yeah, it’s important for us to go out and capitalize as much as we can in this situation.”

Perhaps the Lakers have not seen a team such as Detroit’s, but they hold the Pistons against the defense-oriented teams they played in the Western Conference playoffs -- Houston, San Antonio and Minnesota -- and wonder. Are the Pistons better than the Spurs?

“We’ll have to experience that,” Jackson said. “That’s something you don’t know until it’s first-hand applied to our team. Then we’ll have to deal with the changes. I can’t anticipate they’re going to be any better than San Antonio.... It’s going to be a good defensive team, but we don’t think it’s better shot blockers, better rebounders or anything else than San Antonio had. And Kevin Garnett is as good of a rebounder as we’ve seen, so we anticipate that our challenges up to this point will benefit us and carry us through some of this series until we start adjusting to exactly the idiosyncrasies of this team.”

So they’ll hand it to O’Neal to start -- fine by him -- and see how that goes.

“I can’t right now project that,” Jackson said. “But, every series that we’ve had over the years, where we’ve had to find a way to do it, we found a way to get the best out of what was needed against an opponent.”

Uh, Shaq.

“Shaq often was the individual who was the ultimate answer to what we had to have done,” Jackson agreed. “Kobe played into that well, even though he was the provocateur ... in other series that had led up to that. Yeah, that kind of fits our style, particularly the Pistons without a starter that matches up well with Shaquille.”