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So when Twitter nation was abuzz recently with the flash that the Lakers might subvert the Knicks’ plans for acquiring Carmelo Anthony by swapping their long-armed 7-footer, Andrew Bynum, Lakers management sources didn’t need all 140 characters to issue a quick, emphatic denial.
Phil Jackson, who says he is stepping down as the Lakers’ coach after this season, made his final trip to the arena where he was a part of two championship teams.
Gus Ruelas/Associated Press
With their monthlong slide to .500, dead-on mediocrity, the Knicks are hearing a steady chorus of “We Want Carmelo,” whatever it costs. Not to say that a marriage of Amar’e Stoudemire to Anthony would be a competitive fiasco or even a failure. But the question is whether Anthony would be a difference-maker in the way people want or expect him to be if Donnie Walsh, the Knicks’ president, gives up too much and winds up with the bookend forwards and nothing of substance between them.
The guess here is that D’Antoni, who has returned to starting Mozgov in an attempt to play bigger, who welcomed O’Neal to Phoenix in his last season there, is not philosophically inflexible, unwilling to grow as a coach. He can’t win here or anywhere with the defense these Knicks play.
After Bynum drew two quick fouls on the rookie Timofey Mozgov on Friday, he backed Stoudemire down and dunked over him as if he were a puny guard. “I thought I should have gotten more touches,” he said. In other words, the Knicks are too small and Anthony doesn’t make them bigger.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Probably? Some reports said Jackson and Kobe Bryant were in favor of a deal, but the Lakers would be unwise to make it without getting a quality big man in return. If they are going to send Jackson to his retirement rocker with his fourth coaching three-peat, they’ll need Bynum along for the long playoff ride. More than anything, he frees the most skilled 7-footer in the league, the Spaniard Pau Gasol,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], from enforcer duty he is not made for.
The Lakers, who have won the past two championships, are apparently unwilling to part with the 7-foot center Andrew Bynum for Carmelo Anthony.
Sunday, the Lakers will be in Orlando,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], where Bynum will have to deal with a real center, Dwight Howard. Next season, maybe Bynum becomes trade bait for a positional upgrade with Howard when Howard is a prohibitive favorite to create his own 24/7 news media melodrama.
“I think the speed, the quickness is there but maybe size-wise, they’re one step away from having a companion for Stoudemire,” Jackson said of the Knicks.
Before the Lakers outclassed the Knicks,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], 113-96, on Friday night behind their towering frontline and a Kobe Bryant jump-shooting festival worth 33 points at Madison Square Garden, Coach Phil Jackson admitted that he’d had a chat with Bynum.
Can we allow Miami’s Men of Riley to at least win one championship before becoming a basketball nation of bobble heads?
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Walsh never won a title in Indiana but his 2000 N.B.A. finals team was big, physical and ornery — the kind, by the way, best suited to challenge wing-blessed Miami in the East. D’Antoni never got out of the Western Conference finals with his high-octane Suns when he had Steve Nash, an all-timer at the point, with a younger Stoudemire.
That’s the beauty of being the Lakers. Unless the fault line Los Angeles sits on shifts to the point where the city winds up a suburb of Salt Lake, they can pretty much count on being a destination for elite players wanting out of Small Market America.
He wasn’t talking about Anthony. And if the outcome of a new collective bargaining agreement does not leave Walsh with ample salary cap space after Anthony, how does he fill his team’s most glaring need, an elite big man to guard the rim and protect Stoudemire from wearing down, or out?
Anthony doesn’t quite defend opposing forwards as he would his wallet, so he doesn’t make the Knicks better on that end of the floor. But if Walsh can get him with the ironclad belief that he can do more, by all means, go ahead.
If he doesn’t know that, Friday night was a good time to pause, reflect and remember that the Lakers’ dynasty over more than half a century was not built on jump shots alone.
There is a reason the Lakers are apparently unwilling to trade a young, injury-prone center for the N.B.A.’s most single-minded scorer. It is called history. After 16 N.B.A. championships and 31 conference titles, the franchise of George Mikan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal suspects that defending at the rim is a strategic imperative.
For now,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], their recent slump behind them, the Lakers are fine. They were built to last by General Manager Mitch Kupchak. Franchises in the business of winning multiple titles do not have to subscribe to the growing belief that the N.B.A. standard of excellence will now be determined by superstars who text their allegiance to one another and then order their agents to make it happen.
“It’s worked the last two years, it’s going to work again,” Bynum said.
He grew up long and strong in northern New Jersey and for all the obsession with where Anthony will be launching jumpers after Feb. 24, wingspan still matters more. In Boston on Thursday night, Bynum had 16 points and 9 rebounds as the Lakers reminded the Celtics that as long as they have Bryant backed up by Gasol, Bynum and Lamar Odom, the road to an N.B.A. title runs through them.
“I think he had the right attitude about it,” Jackson said of Bynum. “He thought it was hearsay and he was probably right.”