Superman has replaced Captain Marvel for the Lakers 2013 season. Just days before we find out whether our Olympic Men’s Basketball team can pull out the Gold Medal, the Lakers have acquired self described, self indulgent, Superman hooked on Krptonite – Dwight Howard. The Lakers gave up “Conflicted Mr. On or Off” Andrew Bynum. The Lakers had also acquired another…. ageless point guard Steve Nash.. about a month ago. The face of the LA Lakers is changing and in no small way. We still have Pau Gasol…..but for how long? The Lakers are starting to look like a night on “Dancing with the Stars – The Celebrity Series”.
If life is imitating art…..it looks like we are going down that road. Do we still have Kobe? Thank God! The Lakers seem to be flipping the light switch off and on as fast as they can. The Oklahoma Thunder have the Los Angeles Lakers all in a Twitter (no pun intended!). Watching Kevin Durant play in the Olympics is rather impressive. Russell Westbrook for a little guy is totally amazing. Le Bron looks like he is being pushed to amaze at the Olympics… with his thoughts that the Miami Heat next season NBA are going to find it harder and harder to win the big one against those Oklahoma Thunder. Prohibitive favorites for next years finals.
Back to the Lakers. Captain Marvelous – Andrew Bynum was starting to become a tiresome one. His attitude and terrible mood swings were not very attractive. So, what do we do? We take Superman – sans his cape! Superman having a fit of depression. Superman unexcited and uninvited…till the last minute! Which Dwight Howard are we going to get? Are we going to get humble Dwight Howard that scores 17 points a game, makes every free throw, makes 17 blocks and never makes a foul? Or are we going to get the Dwight Howard that scores 7 points a game, makes bearly 50% of his free throws, makes 4 blocks a game and usually fouls out by the 3rd quarter? Please don’t tell us that Dwight is going to start hanging out with Meta World Peace….please! We don’t need Dwight Howard and Meta World Peace wearing those Clark Kent glasses and playing grab ass at the aftergame press conferences. Dwight better pay attention to the way Kobe acts instead.
We wish Andrew Bynum all the luck in the world. Hopefully, Andrew with do well. Of course our wish was for Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom to both land on their feet with the LA Clippers! That would be very cool. Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and those crazies….whew…..nice group of guys. But we were talking about the LA Lakers…..and how in the world they think they can deal with those Oklahoma Thunder and the dreaded Miami Heat. Well, the deal is done….we are down the road and now what? We still need a Coach! What? Stan Van Gundy will finally be able to come to the Lakers now that Howard is here? We don’t know, but we do know that the Lakers cannot win with Mike Brown. We need a huge “Leader Man” for the LA Lakers. We need a huge personality, someone we can all enjoy and jibe and laugh at, think about, adore and pull for! Mike Brown ain’t it!
OK, Laker fans…..congratulations. The chances are that all the trades are still not complete. All bets are still off and what team we find ourselves with in 2013 is going to be a very exciting issue for sometime to come. Hopefully, Kobe has found about 10 new guys he wants out to bring out of the International pool of players he has seen while over there in London. So, what will it take to beat the Oklahoma Thunder for the Western Conference title? More…..a lot more!
Thunder Road…it seems we have been down this road before! When we say Celtics…..doesn’t it still give you a cold shiver?
*Kobe’s comments regarding Dwight were great….after last nights win over Argentina –
“We know he is strong and he brings a lot to the team!” “Being drug tested the other night was a real bummer…had to wait two hours and drink 10 bottles of water!”.
He’s following in the footsteps of Shaquille O’Neal, who left the Magic for the Lakers as a free agent in 1996. The Magic was determined not to lose another franchise player for nothing, and Orlando managed to get Howard to waive the early termination option on his contract so that he remained with the team through next season. And after frantic and often frustrating negotiations, the Nets held out hope they could re-engage the Magic once Lopez was eligible to be traded midseason (he signed a four-year, $61 million deal with Brooklyn last month, and the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement dictated he couldn’t be sent elsewhere until Jan. 15). The deal to the Lakers kills that hope. Although Howard will become a free agent next summer, he’ll have monetary incentive to re-sign with the Lakers (and the Nets won’t have the cap space to make such a purchase without a massive overhaul of the roster). The Lakers hold Howard’s Bird Rights, meaning he can re-sign for five years instead of going elsewhere next summer for four years.
I don’t care if this is spam, Vern — I found it interesting!
silver acct. – good stuff…appreciate the insight. Lot’s of variables will have to come together in a nice neat gordian knot. Can Steve Nash work well with Kobe? Can Howard get out of himself enough to be the great player he was five years ago? Can we garner enough really strong bench players to come to the party mid-game? Can all of those very strong egos deal with the simplistic Mike Brown? Lot’s of still unanswered Laker questions.
Congrats to the USA Men’s Basketball Team for their Gold Medal. LeBron was actually not offensive and that was pretty amazing in itself. Chris Paul really impressed. Kevin Durant missed a lot of three’s but all in all – huge! Kobe laughed all the way to the Gold Medal Stand……Tre Cool……Coach “K”…..God would he be great as the Lakers Coach or what?
You guys are talking to a robot, a very sophisticated one.
I think it has figured out how to excerpt passages of related articles on other blogs and post them onto this blog, along with its links which Greg removed. So the comments seem to make sense but they’re never directly to the point of anything that was said in our article.
When the robot has an insightful comment, the robot’s insight should be published! It keeps the Winships happy and given that I take out the commercial link I don’t think it harms anything. (But I’ll stop if you prefer!)
Sure… I prefer the other robots that spew out very surrealistic nonsense though. I have sometimes removed those links and approved them, just because they make me laugh.
As for this:
It’s not only the robots who know how to do this!
*Chairman Vern and Dr. D., glad you have plenty of time checking reports of robot activity. Are you doing the same nonsense for every blog entry?
Get a new idea…please.
Other people (commercial spammers) have the idea to send us robots. Usually we send them away. But when they are smart robots, sometimes we will play with them.