Los Angeles Lakers: Look back at legend taking charge vs. Orlando Magic

It has now been a full decade since Kobe Bryant and the Lakers got over the hump by winning the 2009 NBA championship against the Orlando Magic. It’s easy to forget that there was a lot of trepidation for years before that.

Has it really been 10 years since the Los Angeles Lakers returned to the mountaintop after a seven-year drought against the Orlando Magic in the 2009 NBA Finals?

In retrospect, their road back to what then-radio play-by-play man Spero Dedes called “basketball immortality” may seem like it wasn’t a big deal, or it may even seem preordained.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

After Shaquille O’Neal was traded in the summer of 2004, the Lakers schlepped forward with Kobe Bryant and a decent, but underwhelming, supporting cast in tow.

After a tumultuous season that saw Bryant and new teammate Lamar Odom suffer significant injuries, as well as the stunning resignation of new head coach Rudy Tomjanovich in early February, they missed the playoffs for only the second time in nearly 30 years.

At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. Much of Lakers Nation was cursing Kobe under their breath for supposedly breaking up a team that had recently won three straight world championships and had advanced to the NBA Finals four times in five years.

It seemed like it would take many years for them to get back on track, and that by that time Kobe would either be over the hill or already retired.

With Kobe rebranding himself as the Black Mamba, his dominance, will and intense anger just barely got the purple and gold into the playoffs the next two years, only to be run out of the gym in the first round of the playoffs by the Phoenix Suns both years.

Shortly afterward, Kobe’s anger reached its breaking point, causing him to demand a trade and declare that he’d “rather play on Pluto.”

Now it really felt like the end of the world. The Lakers would eventually have to trade him because there was no way they could significantly upgrade the roster and make it championship-caliber, and Kobe could opt out of his contract in the summer of 2009, depart as a free agent and leave the organization and its fans high and dry.

Against all odds, the Lakers became a good team in the early going of the 2007-08 season, thanks to the improvement of their young players, especially Andrew Bynum. When Bynum suffered a season-ending knee injury in mid-January, the Lakers fell back into their old malaise, until Christmas arrived on February 1 and Pau Gasol stunningly became a Laker.

The team then glided on the good vibes and hysteria that resulted, going all the way to the championship series, only to fall to the Boston Celtics in Chapter 3 of their iconic rivalry.

With Bynum healthy to start the 2008-09 season, Kobe and company knew it was championship or bust. They withstood a second but less serious knee injury to Bynum and cruised to a 65-17 record.

After putting away Utah in the first round, they took a 2-1 lead against the undermanned Houston Rockets in the second round, who lost Yao Ming to a series-ending injury in Game 3. With the series seemingly in hand, the Lakers got complacent and blew a couple of games before putting the Rockets to sleep in Game 7.

Their opponents in the conference finals, the Denver Nuggets, were a team that seemed to believe their time had come. They had traded Allen Iverson for Chauncey Billups, the same Billups who had torched the Lakers in the 2004 NBA Finals en-route to series MVP honors, early in the year. His arrival changed the culture in Denver, making them a team that was suddenly dedicated to defense and teamwork.

That series had its share of high tension. Kobe willed the Lakers to two tough wins in Games 1 and 3, literally playing himself to exhaustion in the process. The two teams played to a standstill until the fourth quarter of Game 5, when the Lakers finally found cracks in the Nuggets’ defense and pulled away for a 103-94 win.

They then clinched a return trip to the finals by embarrassing the Nuggets in front of their home fans in Game 6, 119-92. Kobe played some of the best ball of his life, averaging 34 points, 5.8 rebounds and 5.8 assists for the series against a very strong opponent.

He was on a mission to solidify his legacy and silence the deafening chorus that he had only ridden Shaq’s coattails to win those three rings earlier in the decade.

Thus, the fact that the Lakers’ opponents in the championship series would be not the Celtics or LeBron’s Cavs, but the mere Orlando Magic didn’t seem to matter to him. Even if they were playing the JV squad of Barstow Community College, they had to win the NBA title, one way or another. There was no other option.

Thus, from the start of Game 1, Kobe put his personal fingerprints on the series, and there was nothing Orlando could do about it. He hit contested jumpers, drove to the basket and finished, drew fouls and hit his free throws, and, oh yes, hit the open man when appropriate.

The end result: 40 points, eight rebounds, eight assists for Kobe, and a monster 100-75 win for the Lakers.

Along the way, Kobe displayed a look that would become ubiquitous for him: the Mamba Face.

Suddenly, all the angst and consternation that Lakers fans had felt for several years was melting away, only to be replaced with a feeling of inevitability about the outcome of this series.

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The Magic were a very good team, having finished first in defensive rating during the season, but they just didn’t have the offensive firepower or that true superstar who could at least make the Lakers work to earn their rings.

Even though the next three games were decided in the final minute, the outcome of the series wasn’t really in doubt after Game 1. After taking a 3-1 lead, the Lakers took control of Game 5 with a big second quarter run, and the Magic were done, as Kobe had cut their hearts out and eaten them as if he was Jeffrey Dahmer.

Kobe finally got his ring as The Man, and was named Finals MVP, the one individual honor he hadn’t won yet. He averaged 32.4 points, 5.6 rebounds and 7.4 assists for the series, and by the way, he did all that while playing with a torn ligament in his shooting hand that he sustained the year before.

After getting another ring the next year in a Game 7 triumph over the Celtics that came in true Hollywood fashion, Kobe’s legacy was safe for all of eternity.

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His haters were finally out of ammunition, and in the process, he had truly made the Lakers, the organization and its fans richer for all of eternity.

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