Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, Ron Artest paint Jimmy Kimmel purple

Kobe Bryant has his NBA champion LA Lakers are on Jimmy Kimmel tonight for a group guest appearance also including Pau Gasol, Ron Artest, and other Los Angeles teammates. The victorious Lakers claimed the 2010 NBA title last night in the closing seconds of the seventh and final game against the Boston Celtics. Lakers coach Phil Jackson, whose return next season is questionable, has not yet been spotted in the building. Jimmy Kimmel films his show on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, making his show an obvious destination for the victorious Lakers while also being on the same ABC network which just finished airing the 2010 Finals. The Specials are also performing.

Update: Gasol surprisingly wasn’t a part of the seven Lakers who sat down on Kimmel’s couch.

Lakers championship: celebs weigh in on Finals victory over Celtics

Tonight’s NBA Championship victory by the Los Angeles Lakers saw responses from several celebrities who had a rooting interest one way or the other. Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan revealed that he was at the game, which he said was great for drama, but that he “didn’t like the end of the movie.” Pop star Colbie Caillat simply tweeted “Ahhhhh yeaaaaa Lakers!” while American Idol winner David Cook, known to be a Celtics fan, cleverly exclaimed “well… (expletive laden rant)” [his redaction not ours] and went on to say that Lakers-Celtics 2010 “was exciting to watch. congrats to both teams on a great series and season. get ‘em next year, Green!”

Lakers win 2010 NBA Championship title in low scoring affair

The Los Angeles lakers have won the 2009-2010 NBA Championship after defeating the Boston Celtics in game seven of the Finals. The surprisingly low scoring affair saw neither Kobe Bryant’s Lakers nor Paul Pierce’s Celtics team reach ninety points, with Lakers playing some of their best defense of the season after the Celtics had held the lead to varying degrees for much of the game. A block from behind by the Pau Gasol with under two minutes left seemingly ended any hope for the Celtics after Rasheed Wallace was unable to save the deflection. Gasol’s two pointer seconds later appeared to seal the deal before Wallace struck back with a late three pointer, but Ron Artest immediately answered back for the Lakers with a three pointer of his own. Ray Allen then countered with a three pointer of his own for the Celtics, suddenly turning on the offensive spout for both teams after what had been a mostly offensive-averse affair. Kobe Bryant finally appeared to put the Celtics out of their misery with a pair of successful free throws after Wallace fouled out, with the crowd chanting MVP. Rajon Rondo then drained yet another three pointer for Boston bringing it back within two, with sixteen seconds remaining in the season. Sasha Vujajic then became an unlikely hero when he sank a pair of free throws with eleven seconds left to finally put the game out of reach and hand the 2010 NBA Championship to the Los Angeles Lakers for the second time in as many seasons and their fifth in the past eleven. Here’s another take on the latest chapter in the Lakers-Celtics rivalry.

Lakers – Celtics 2010: the joy of having no rooting interest

As the Lakers and the Celtics battle it out for the 2010 NBA Championship, many basketball fans are already bound by fanhood as to whom they’re rooting for in the best of seven series. If you’re a part of Laker Nation, this series only ends happily for you if your team pulls it out; if a player on the Celtics serves up one of the most heroic outings in NBA history, you’ll have no choice but to view it as a bad thing, even if you do marvel at it. I went through this scenario myself four years ago when my long suffering Miami Heat managed to make it to their one and only NBA Finals, a series which they came very close to losing before narrowly eking it out. I attended every one of the home games in that series, sweated out every Shaq free throw, cheered every Dwayne Wade bucket, and winced every time someone from Mavericks missed a shot (and admittedly, cheered when Dirk Nowitzki attacked that exercise bike in the hallway out of frustration). But it was like walking a tightrope for six games, because it would only end well if my Heat won, and if they didn’t, an entire postseason of rooting for them would have felt like a waste.

Not so with the current Celtics-Lakers series. I know enough about these two teams that I can name all their star players, meaning that I can enjoy watching the series without feeling like I’m watching a bunch of strangers (which is why I just can’t watch the NCAA Final Four anymore, by the way). And although I’ll probably get around to watching game two, I’m not sweating the fact that I inadvertently missed game one while working late; no seven game series was ever won in game one anyway. Would I rather my Heat were in the Finals this year? Of course. But we’ll worry about that next year, after LeBron James and Chris Bosh and Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul Jabbar all sign with the Heat as free agents this offseason and the team becomes unstoppable. For now, I’m comfortable with the fact that the 2010 NBA Finals are a comfortable viewing experience for me. I may indeed develop a rooting interest for one player or another (or even one team over another) by the time it’s over, but that would be less out of pre-destined loyalty and instead out of pure merit – the latter being something of a rare quantity when it comes to rooting interests on the part of sports fans.

NBA playoffs: Lakers aren’t the team I grew up with

Lakers look good this season – they always do these days – but when I look at that team, I catch myself wondering who these people are and what they did with my Lakers. See, when I was growing up in South Florida, we didn’t have a basketball team. In fact we didn’t have any pro sports teams but the Dolphins, which are where my primary loyalties lie to this day. But for reasons I can’t specifically recall, we were a Lakers household. This was the Magic-Kareem-Worthy era (okay, so now maybe I remember why we were Lakers fans), and I was young enough to have no concept of players changing teams or retiring. I could name the whole roster, from Byron Scott to Kurt Rambis right down to a guy named “Lamp” who never played much, and boy were those playoffs fun to watch – it’s not like their regular season games aired in Florida all that often.

Then the NBA awarded a franchise to Miami, and at first it was easy to be loyal to both teams because the Heat were such a joke that they weren’t in contention for anything anyway; I remember watching one early game between the two teams in which “rooting” for one team over the other would have had no context anyway, as the score at the end of the first quarter was something like 24-6. But then one by one the faces I knew from the Lakers began disappearing, moving to other teams, and “my Lakers” became just some group of guys wearing my team’s uniforms. So I became a full time Heat fan, and stopped paying attention to the Lakers. Even once they acquired Kobe and Shaq and once again became a championship team, they still weren’t my team and my loyalty never shifted back; nor did it when I moved to Los Angeles. I’d have had the perfect excuse to “become” a Lakers fan at that time, but it just didn’t feel right. Even though they’re not really contenders, the Heat are my team and that’s not likely to change.

So as I look at the television schedule for tonight and decide what to put on in the background while I’m working, that first round playoff game between the Lakers and whoever they’re playing against (Oklahoma City has a playoff team? I guess I haven’t been paying much attention to any aspect of the NBA that doesn’t directly relate to the Heat), I can’t figure out who those guys are wearing the purple and gold uniforms. They’re not my Lakers.

I have no problem with roster turnover in general; it’s a fact of a sports fan’s life. I don’t think there’s a single player on my Dolphins today that was with the team a decade ago. But the reason I find it just as easy to root for the Dolphins now as when I was a kid is the fact that I’ve paid attention the whole time and seen the roster turn over so gradually that I could live with the evolution. Every new season, more than half the players wearing Dolphins uniforms had been wearing them the year before, so you always find a way to continue feeling like it’s your team.

But try taking fifteen years off from rooting from a team or even paying attention to them; you’ll find suddenly tuning back in for one of their games to be startlingly awkward.