Character Driven (31 page)

In the end, Larry Miller, the Jazz owner, agreed to release me from the contract. To his credit, he didn’t hesitate. He knew that I had to do what was best for my family. Again, I can’t thank the Jazz organization and the people of Salt Lake City enough for what they did for my family and me. Walking away from the security of that long-term deal was difficult. I was going to be leaving a great group of players and an organization that treated me wonderfully throughout my time there and really stepped up with big-time help when we all needed it the most.

Being a free agent was a bit scary. I felt that I still had a lot of basketball life left in me, but you can never be too secure in this game. With our list of cities in hand, we started discussions with a lot of teams. Not all of them needed my services as a point guard, and not all of them were likely to value what I brought to the position. I knew that going in, but as I talked to more and more teams, Los Angeles and the Lakers remained a prime choice. Dr. Abramson had said that another expert in the field, someone he knew well and would feel comfortable handing over treatment of Tatum to, was in Los Angeles. Dr. Abramson was reluctant to just turn over treatment to anyone, and he insisted that he continue to be consulted and remain actively involved in treatment decisions. I appreciated that about him. He was going to both stay home and help, just as we all were. We’d developed a strong relationship, and even though ultimately Tatum’s treatments and evaluations would take place at Childrens’ Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Abramson remained an active presence in our lives and in Tatum’s care.

Los Angeles made sense for another reason. We were all familiar with the city, and Candace’s family lived there. I’d still also be close to my daughter Chloe. I wanted to be as active a presence in her life as I could possibly be. We had to consider proximity to our support system, and that factored heavily into our decision. I can’t lie and say that we didn’t think about finances as well. We had walked away from a lot of money, and we had college tuition and retirement to think about. Of course, I also wanted to go somewhere that was a good fit for me on the court. In my discussions with Mitch Kupchak of the Lakers, I was encouraged to hear that if I signed, chances were I would see big minutes. The Lakers definitely needed a point guard, and I was a known quantity to them and they were a known quantity to me as an organization. The team, however, was vastly different from the one I had last played for. While Phil Jackson had returned from his one-year sabbatical and we would be playing the same offensive and defensive schemes, the roster had completely changed.

All that said, I was looking forward to be heading back to Los Angeles. You can go back home again, and the 2007–8 season proved that not only could you go home again, you could thrive. Much has been made of my decision to walk away from the big money I would have earned in Utah. No one likes to take a pay cut, but I never questioned if I had done the right thing. All the factors I talked about—doctors, quality of life, proximity to family—trumped everything else. The Lord does move in mysterious ways, and I’m grateful that He saw to it that things worked out so well for us off the court in returning to the Lakers, and on the court as well.

As the saying goes, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” and that’s how it was for me at first. Of course, Kobe was still the main presence on the team, as he had been when I last played for the Lakers, but the only other players remaining from our 2003–4 team were Brian Cook and Luke Walton. I’d played against most of the guys, but being a teammate is another matter. As a point guard, you are a kind of coach/leader on the court, but I knew that I couldn’t just walk into the locker room and take command. I fell back on my skills as an observer in those first few weeks back with the Lakers, noting our strengths and weaknesses and the various temperaments and tendencies of our guys. I liked what I saw. I liked it a lot.

Though the team had struggled the year before, finishing with a 42-40 record and getting bounced out of the play-offs in the first round, I sensed a real commitment to excellence. I also noted that Kobe was taking a more active leadership role. I knew that he hated losing as much as anyone I’d played with, but I think that he’d been in the league long enough and grown up enough to emerge as someone we all respected and looked to who could take us where we wanted to go. The promised land of an NBA championship is always out there for every player; it just seems as if you can get to it more easily from L.A., despite its legendarily awful traffic. I liken my return to L.A. and having to deal with road congestion to what it was like on the court as well. I was familiar enough with everything that had to do with Los Angeles and Lakers basketball that I knew some of the ins and outs of the game the way I did the freeway system. When I was first with the Lakers, we were clearly going to get to the finals and win by taking the Shaq or the Kobe freeway.

Last season, I think we all recognized that we needed another major option besides Kobe, and our in-season acquisition of Pau Gasol gave us another avenue. Though not as dominating a physical presence as Shaq had been, Pau was a versatile player with a floor game typical of a big man from Europe. His ability to play both inside and outside was crucial to his meshing with the team, and with all five starters averaging in double figures for the regular season, we won fifty-seven games. We won the Pacific Division and headed into the play-offs as the number one seed in the Western Conference. Kobe earned the Most Valuable Player award and was more than deserving of that honor. As much as his critics have got on him, I don’t see how anyone can question his desire to be the best and to win, and in my mind, 2007–8 demonstrated again how his fierce determination could provide the kind of leadership that brings out the best in everyone around him.

In 2007–8 I had the opportunity to do what I’d always wanted to do with the Lakers—to be the starting point guard running the show through thick and thin. As always, expectations were high in Los Angeles, and losing the first game of the season against the Rockets and only going 9-6 in November had people outside the organization on edge. They were thinking that we could just dominate, but a 10-4 December and a 9-5 January didn’t have people dancing in the aisles. We were playing solid but unspectacular basketball, and though we didn’t run off a long string of victories as we had in my earlier glory years with the Lakers, we were making good strides at becoming a better basketball team at both ends of the court.

Our front line was banged up, and then when Andrew Bynum went down with a knee injury, we clearly needed some help in the front court. That help came in the February 3 trade that brought Pau to us in exchange for Kwame Brown, Jarvis Crittendon, and two draft picks. It was no coincidence that we had our best month of the season in the wake of that trade, going 13-2. Pau brought great energy to the team and he fit in well. Knowing that the organization was going to do whatever it could to ensure our success also gave us a boost. And believe it or not, the brief break for the All-Star game helps.

The NBA season is no sprint, and the marathon requires you to go to different places to tap various energy reserves. The inevitable “slump” hit us in March and had our critics crying foul. I’ll admit that a 9-6 March isn’t the greatest, but while someone once said that April is the cruelest month, for me it’s always been March that has fangs. By that time, we’ve been at it for seven months, the play-offs are still six weeks away, and that dip in energy seems inevitable. You can’t sustain the kind of high we were on in February for the whole season, and that little slip was offset by a 7-1 end of the regular season in April. We were like runners who saw the finish line, and that ray of hope was enough to bring us home strong.

One game in particular gave notice to the NBA and to ourselves what our new lineup was capable of. We traveled to Orlando on February 8, 2008, to face the Magic. Our records were similar, 31-17 for us and 32-19 for them. Dwight Howard, one of the bright young superstars in the game, was having a terrific year, and we knew we had to contain him if we had any hope of victory. Orlando came out smoking in the first quarter and put 44 points on the board. It wasn’t as if we’d been run over by a bus, but it had gone past our stop without us getting on board. We did put up 33 ourselves, and the up-and-down action of that game was admittedly fun, but the basketball purists and defensive preachers weren’t happy with that 77-point display in the first twelve minutes. The Magic were raining down threes on us, making seven of them from beyond the arc. Everyone was getting in on that action, and when a team is shooting that well from outside, even when you’re putting a hand in their face, you just have to tip your hat to them and know that eventually they are going to cool off. For my part, I had four assists in the first quarter, all to different players. It was nice to have other options, and for the first time since his acquisition, I was getting a better sense of where Pau wanted the ball and where he could score from. His ability to hit those midrange jump shots as a seven-feet-tall player was impressive.

And the Magic did cool off. We held them to only 19 points in the second quarter while we put up 31 to lead by 1 at the half 64–63. We also saw Pau’s floor game and his ability to get up and down the court, which led to a couple of fast-break layups and a particularly emphatic dunk. No knock on Shaq, but Pau’s versatility was something very different from what I’d experienced before. That game gave us a glimmer of what was to come the rest of that month and the rest of the regular season and into the play-offs. We played dynamic up-tempo basketball and won 117–113. We had an 11-point lead after three quarters and were outscored by 7 in the fourth, but we managed to hold on. That pattern of nearly letting leads get away would eventually catch up to us. With Kobe scoring 36 and Pau adding 30 and the rest of the starters in double figures, we were an offensive juggernaut. We all knew that come play-off time, defensive stops were going to have to come more into play.

In the play-offs, a similar pattern of what our critics called our “coasting” was best exemplified in the second round. We faced my old friends at Utah once again, and in the first five games each team held their serve on the home court. We narrowly lost both games in Utah, losing the second there in overtime, and heading into game six at the EnergySolutions Arena, we were riding high confidence-wise. We demonstrated that confidence in the first quarter, jumping out to 13-point lead 33–20. We followed that up with a strong second-quarter effort to go up by 19 at the intermission 62–43. None of us thought that Utah was going to roll over in the second half. Jerry Sloan’s teams just didn’t do that kind of thing, and we knew that with their backs against the wall in a potential elimination game, they were going to get after us hard in the second half. We held them off and they trailed by 16 going into the fourth quarter.

Kobe, who had tweaked his back in game four, wasn’t feeling great, but he was playing that way and, bad back and all, helped us to hold off a furious Jazz rally that saw them cut our lead to 2 with less than two minutes to play. Kobe’s 12 points in the fourth helped us to hold on. Fortunately for us, we hit 31 out of 38 free throws, many of those down the stretch when the Jazz took to fouling us to preserve the clock. That old fundamental skill made the difference in our 108–105 escape.

What can I tell you? The rest is history. We took a hard-fought and close series from the Spurs, winning in five games, with both teams winning a blowout game and the others being tightly contested. That set up the dream matchup that everyone on the coasts was looking for: Lakers-Celtics. I don’t have to tell you about the storied history of the two franchises, and if you didn’t know any better, you would think that MagicBird was a rare type of species found in the Amazon that picks fruit from the trees and drops it into its nest in spectacular fashion to feed its young. We were both top seeds in our conferences, and that was the first time since 2000 that both number one teams had reached the finals. In fact, it was the first time since 2003 that either top seed had made it to the finals. This was our first time in the finals since 2004 and the twenty-ninth time overall. This was the first time for the Celtics since 1987 and their twentieth overall.

Okay, enough with the history and the numbers. The only numbers and the only history that matters is that we lost four games to two. You know all that. You also know that game one was the wheel-chair game, in which Paul Pierce was taken off the court in one, then returned in the third quarter to score 15 points and lead them to a 98–88 victory. When he hit consecutive three-pointers to give them the lead for good, I thought the building was going to collapse around us from all the noise the Boston fans were making. Even though we lost that first game, the thrill of being in the NBA Finals after so long an absence and after having been through so much personally was not diminished by the outcome. Standing in the new Garden and literally feeling my rib cage vibrating from all the noise and my own excitement made all the years of hard work more than worth it. That sea of green and white wasn’t threatening to drown me, but buoy me to the surface and carry me. There is nothing like knowing that you are playing the game on the biggest stage in front of the largest audiences with everything on the line.

Game two was our turn to experience from another perspective the roller coaster of a big lead nearly vanishing. We had been down by 24 with less than eight minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Our second unit was out there to start the fourth, with Jordan Farmar hitting a pair of threes and Ronny Turiaf making a couple of baskets in the first few minutes of the quarter. I came back in with about seven and a half minutes to go, and I could sense that the tide was turning after about a minute. The Celtics committed two turnovers, and Vladimir Radmanovic hit a three for us. I was fouled and hit both free throws to draw us within 16 at 96–80. We still had a long way to go, but we’d cut into the lead by 8 points in minutes. We weren’t playing particularly amazing basketball, but we could all sense that an opportunity was there for us. With solid contributions from the role players, we knew that we didn’t need to (and couldn’t) rely solely on Kobe. We knew that we were onto something when Sasha Vujacic and I sandwiched three-pointers around a Ray Allen putback and Boston called a twenty-second time-out.