As we sit here anticipating a likely Laker championship, it’s time to predict where this pandemic shortened season will rank among other, non-bubble seasons in the only forum that really matters: barroom arguments. If the Los Angeles Lakers win game 5 tonight against the Miami Heat, it will bring them level with the Boston Celtics for most championships by any franchise with 17.
If you’re a Laker fan, you’re certainly going to bring this up while calmly explaining to your buddy from Dorchester that the Lakers are the best fuckin’ franchise in all of sports. Then he’s gonna tell you that the Celtics have always been in Boston and are therefore “more real,” and that in 1954 the Minneapolis Lakers won the title at the end of a season during which the Indianapolis Olympians went out of business, and any championship that didn’t go through the Olympians is no championship at all!
Now cut to a not too distant or unlikely future where LeBron James has 5 titles, tying Kobe Bryant. You’re three beers into a LeBron vs Kobe debate and you hear yourself telling your friend from Ohio that Kobe is obviously better than LeBron because Kobe has 5 REAL championships, and while we’re at it one of Tim Duncan’s 5 shouldn’t count either because it came at the end of a lockout-shortened 50 game season, and then your buddy from Dorchester, who you didn’t realize was standing behind you, leans in and goes “AH HAAAAAAAAH!”
This history of basketball and the NBA is long and strange. When the Celtics began their impressive run of 8 in a row, there were only 8 teams in the league, the three point line wasn’t introduced until 1979 – the NCAA wouldn’t adopt it until 1986! – and twice the season has been shortened due to labor disputes. The players and teams play the game they’re given, all they can do is go out there and win, and the Lakers and LeBron seem poised to do just that. And this victory will count the same as any other. Unless, for argument’s sake, you need it to not.
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