The Lakers are just individuals wearing the same color

Hath-Time

By Nathan Hathaway

There’s no “I” in team. But there is one in “Shaquille.” And there’s a “me” in “Malone.” And there’s a “ry” in both “Bryant” and “Gary,” and maybe this one’s a stretch, but ry sounds a lot like “my.”

Before this NBA season began, people everywhere were already handing the Los Angeles Lakers the title, saying owner Jerry Buss and General Manager Mitch Kupchack had assembled the best team ever.

I turns out, instead, that the Lakers put together the best group of individual players. There’s a difference between a team and a collection of players. You need only to look at the Lakers’ competition in the conference semifinals currently underway.

The San Antonio Spurs are perhaps the classiest organization in professional sports. They play as a team, execute as a team and win as a team.

The team concept is what has the Spurs up 2-0 in the series. San Antonio has been able to use a balanced attack to go on a 17-game winning streak, including 6-0 in the playoffs.

The Spurs were long thought to be a one-trick pony, relying only on Tim Duncan to beat teams. But by surrounding Duncan with quality talent, the Spurs have turned themselves into one of the best teams in the league.

Third-year guard Tony Parker has turned into an exceptional player at the point, showing he’s extremely capable of both scoring (22.3 points per game in this year’s playoffs) and running the offense (eight assists per game in the playoffs).

As a testament to the Spurs’ ability to bring together good players and mold them into a great team, nine of the 15 players on the Spurs regular-season roster (and six of the 12 on the playoff roster) didn’t play on last year’s championship team.

It says a lot about the Spurs’ front office and coach Gregg Popovich that they can assemble a team of players unfamiliar with one another and turn them into a championship contender.

When the Spurs marched through the 1999 playoffs, going 15-2, one newspaper in Portland, Ore. wrote that the Spurs were “systematically dismantling teams like a well-oiled machine.” Not much has changed.

It looks like, in San Antonio, they may get to party like it’s 1999 (and 2003).

Lakers coach Phil Jackson, on the other hand, has had trouble getting his players—not his team—on the same page. Gary Payton hasn’t found his role in Jackson’s famed triangle offense. He’s clearly unhappy with his situation in Los Angeles and will probably bolt after this season.

Karl Malone has done a good enough job, though he certainly hasn’t turned out to be the superstar L.A. had hoped he would be.

Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant have gone through their usual “No!-You-pass-me-the-ball-because-I’m-the-superstar” squabble. Bryant may even be gone after this season. He’s supposedly entertaining offers from other teams.

The Lakers have proven in these playoffs that “I,” “me” and “my” (or “ry,” as the case may be) turn out to spell “disjointed” and may just end up spelling an early summer vacation for the Lakers.