Bay Area Sports Blogging

The NBA Finals will start Thursday night with the LA Lakers visiting the Boston Celtics for game 1. There has been a lot of comparisons to the historical match-ups between these two teams in the 80s and even earlier. But all that talk is just filler to sell newspapers. These two teams have their own identities, and they will need to build their own legacies.

Legends are born in the playoffs, but they are immortalized in the Finals. So far this year, the Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant has proved to the league just how clutch he is, making shot after shot in the fourth quarter to send the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs home in five games. It is a great run, for sure, but without the championship, Kobe's great run may well be forgotten.

Those of us who watched the Lakers and Warriors meet in back to back games knew they were two of the most exciting games this season. The first game, played in Los Angeles, came down to Stephen Jackson making love to pressure. The second game was spoiled by a bad call that went against the Warriors with seconds to go in the 4th quarter of a close game. And the NBA has admitted that the call was incorrect.

Stu Jackson, executive vice president of basketball operations, has reviewed the play and has stated that "After looking at the play, the foul was on Fisher and not Ellis. It appeared that Fisher pulled Ellis down."

The loss to the Blazers was a real letdown. In the game, we saw all three of our captains--Baron Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Matt Barnes--lose their composure when the refs didn't call things their way. With sloppy defense and a tendency to jack 3s, the Warriors lost a game which they should have won.

The Warriors have not won in the Staples Center for the past two and a half years. Their troubles with the Center does not occur with just the Lakers, they are snake bit even when they face the Los Angeles Clippers.

Besides not having even sniffed a win in the center, the Warriors star point guard, Baron Davis, does very poorly playing in his home town. Whether it's trying too hard in front of his friends and family or just plain awestruck by the stars down there, Baron becomes just a pedestrian player.