Tortoise-Like Musings
I'm slow at things...but that fits in with the topic of this entry.

This morning I was driving to work, listening to all of the potheads calling Tony Bruno to tell him how much it will cost recently-retired Ricky Williams to purchase his smokes, and my mind wandered. (Perhaps because of a brief mention of Kareem Abdul Jabbar.)

First, I thought: If the new Bryant/Odom/etc. Lakers is being called Showtime, would the Shaq era Lakers be called Slowtime?

Second, I thought: I can't be the first person who has thought of that.

Well, I obviously wasn't.

The following is excerpted from a Paul Stanford Madera Tribune article written on June 12:

While the Lakers players have been as visible as Jack and the other Hollywood stars who frequent the Staples Center, the Pistons have been flying low under the radar.

Until Game 3 when Detroit turned Showtime into Slowtime.

In the 1980s with Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Byron Scott, the Lakers revolutionized basketball and turned games into track meets with many fast break points

In this year’s NBA Finals, the Lakers have officially scored a pedestrian-like 12 fast-break points - that’s right, four points per game....

All we ever heard was about how tough Detroit’s defense was. But that wasn’t against the Lakers you all protested....

Coaches always say - even Laker coach Phil Jackson - that defense wins championships - even if you never really believed them....

Detroit’s defense is as suffocating as a metal tool shed in Caracas while the Lakers defense is as soft as a down pillow from Nordstroms.

The result is Detroit having a 2-1 lead in the NBA Finals which, without a last minute shot by Kobe Bryant in Game 2 which must have been sponsored by the Rainbow Coalition it brought down so much rain, could easily be a 3-0 lead....