One of the weirder and, turns out, more cynical non-stories of the NBA playoffs is the hoo-ha surrounding the three-pointer Sasha Vujacic took — and made — in the last second of the Lakers’ 100-92 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 on Thursday. Media people are still talking about it a day […]

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Yeah, Derek Fisher landed on Brent Barry just before Barry hoisted a hopeless three-pointer at the buzzer in the lakers’ 91-89 victory. Should Fisher have been called for a foul? I know this argument is two days old now, but I’m going to weigh in.

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I’ve been a Lakers fan for a long time. Since the middle 1960s, at the very latest. They tended to be on TV rather often, back then, in an era when sports-on-television was a luxury kids rarely missed. They won, a lot, even when they were something like fifth or sixth in the L.A. sports […]

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If you’re a Lakers fan going back into the 1960s, you wish only defeat and disaster for the Boston Celtics. They inflicted a lifetime’s worth of misery on the Lakers franchise in that decade; the Russell-Jones-Havlicek Celtics defeated the Lakers no fewer than six times in the NBA Finals between 1962 and 1969. And three […]

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Well, several somethings. You don’t get to hear the national anthem. Often that’s no loss. But when Davis Gaines (of Phantom of the Opera fame) does it … and just nails it with a voice both supple and powerful … that’s a treat. And this whole pregame thing the Lakers have been doing with the […]

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A big story in the second round of the playoffs has been the total domination by the home team. Everyone plays better at home, but this is getting ridiculous. To the point that the home teams are about to be 18-1, if the Celtics can hold on to any part of that 10-point fourth quarter […]

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Good thing newspapers are dying. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get all these folks into the “press” room. I’m in the Chick Hearn press room, as it’s officially named, at Staples Center, and we basically are out of space here in the working area of the place. Every single work space has someone sitting […]

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The Lakers are a rising tide. Every time you think their popularity has crested … it washes over us again and rolls to greater heights. During their last stretch of serious playoffs runs — 2000-04 — I finally realized, as a sports editor, that the Lakers’ status in the newspaper was this: There is no […]

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It can’t be this easy, can it? Lakers up 2-0 vs. Utah, and NBA history indicates something like 94 percent of all teams that take a 2-0 lead go on to win a best-of-seven series. It’s not over, but it’s close. They defeated the Utah Jazz 120-110 tonight, and it never really felt in doubt, […]

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I just watched the Utah Jazz close out the Houston Rockets, with extreme prejudice (as they say in the CIA), in Game 6 of their first-round series, 113-91. And now things get difficult — very — for the Lakers. The Denver Nuggets were a test, in theory. But not in reality. They were over the […]

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