If the Los Angeles Lakers win the 2020 NBA Finals, should there be an asterisk next to their name?
“There’s no asterisk,” Fox Sports’ Chris Broussard told me on the Heavy Live With Scoop B Show.
“I don’t believe in asterisks. Now, what I do believe in is that say in baseball, they should have vacated the title that the Astros won with the cheating. I do believe, not an asterisk but take the titles and strip them of the championship. But outside of that, I don’t believe in asterisks because we can come up with something almost every Finals; maybe not every one, certainly not every one but I could name off the top of my head several Finals that we could come with an ‘asterisk’ if we wanted to.”
That line of thinking is similar to Lakers Vice President of Basketball Operations, Rob Pelinka. “I’s not an asterisk,” he told Spectrum Sports.
“It’s a gold star. That’s how we see it. The team that comes out of the bubble with the trophy, what that team is going to have to endure to reach that finish line, history has not seen. So, yes, anything but an asterisk. It’s a gold star. That’s the way we look at it.”
The Lakers currently hold a 2-0 lead over the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals.
Guided by head coach, Frank Vogel, the Lakers finished in first place in the NBA’s Western Conference standings with a 52-19 record behind the play of LeBron James, Anthony Davis and their supporting cast of Dwight Howard, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Rajon Rondo, Danny Green and Alex Caruso.James was a runner up in the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award race and averaged 25.3 points, 7.8 rebounds and 10.2 assists in the NBA’s regular season. Davis averaged 26.1 points, 9.3 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 1.5 steals and 2.3 blocks per game for the purple and gold.
GettyAnthony Davis, left, of the Lakers got the better of now-injured Bam Adebayo in Game 1 of the Finals.
An asterisk has nothing to do with this year’s Lakers squad says Broussard.
“Obviously, you have the two lockout years — so that’s [Tim] Duncan’s first ring in ‘99 and LeBron’s first ring in ‘11,” he said.
“You got the fact that when last year with Kawhi winning it for Toronto. Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson were hurt you know? You got Golden State’s first title over LeBron; Kyrie and Kevin Love are hurt. Isaiah Thomas’s first title; Magic Johnson plays 75 minutes in the whole series because he was hurt. Like, you can always come up with typically maybe every three or four championships with something that is awry. And when I look at this, the reasons beyond those reasons, I don’t — like, an asterisk is when everyone is not playing by the same rules. Like when you play with baseball, they want to put asterisks by the PED records — the guys who broke the records with the Performance Enhancing Drugs; well because they weren’t playing by the same rules. With this, everybody’s in the bubble. The Lakers aren’t getting any type of advantage OR disadvantage that no other team is getting. All the teams are enduring the same and exact thing. So it’s not what’s normal but it’s abnormal for everybody. So, if the Lakers were going through something different and they had an advantage over other teams that were in the bubble, or if the Lakers were in a bubble and no one else was or everybody was at home and doing normal stuff then, you might have an argument for an asterisk, but everybody’s under the same circumstances. Naw. No bubble — no asterisks at all. We’ll remember 2020 as the pandemic, EVERYTHING is going to have an asterisk; a mental asterisk for 2020; sports, politics… everything.”
Lakers Asterisk Belongs to MLB Not LeBron James—Anthony Davis Says Pundit