Despite many who played inside the bubble in 2020 calling it one of the most difficult experiences of their career, there are still some who choose try and invalidate the championship the Los Angeles Lakers won that season led by LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Obviously it was unlike any other season due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown, but every team went through the same situation and it was the Lakers who came out on top under head coach Frank Vogel.
Arguably the most annoying thing has been many players coming out and saying that they and their team didn’t want to be in the bubble and that led to them falling short. But Vogel doesn’t believe any of this at all as the now-Dallas Mavericks assistant reminded people that the Lakers were the top team in the league for most of the season before the shutdown and he believes they would’ve won the championship no matter what, via Dan Woike of The Athletic:
“I don’t really subscribe to the fact that teams that lost get to just say, ‘We didn’t want to be there.’ And the thing that sticks out to be, for all the people that want to asterisk this thing, we were the number one team from day one,” Vogel said. “We entered the bubble as the number one team in the league, the number one seed. We were gonna win that thing, whether it was in the bubble or whether it was in Staples Center. We were winning that thing. We had that belief.
“And we had to go through obstacles and delays, and go into the world’s first biosphere, to get through it. But we were gonna win that no matter what.”
When the season shut down, the Lakers had a sizable lead on the rest of the Western Conference and only the Milwaukee Bucks had a better record overall. But the Lakers were also coming off a weekend in which they defeated the Bucks and Los Angeles Clippers, the other championship favorites, in back-to-back games.
Like Vogel noted, the Lakers didn’t just get hot in the bubble, they were dominant all season long. But regardless of what anyone says about that championship, Vogel still considers it the greatest moment of his coaching career:
“It was the pinnacle of my coaching career,” Vogel told The Athletic on Wednesday after Dallas beat the Lakers in a preseason game. “I haven’t been back on top since, and so I just cherish the opportunity that the Lakers gave me back then with that team. I’ve been talking to Kyrie (Irving) a little bit this year about how we had such a strong coaching staff but also the talent that we had and how the pieces fit. …We were able to do something special.”
Coincidentally, the lead assistant on Vogel’s staff for that championship year was Jason Kidd, but now their roles are reversed in Dallas and they are once again coaching a team with Davis as a centerpiece. But what they accomplished in 2020 with the Lakers was special and there is nothing that can take that feeling away.
JJ Redick discusses what goes into deciding Lakers starting lineup
Of course, the current head coach for the Lakers is JJ Redick who is coming off a strong debut season and now hopes to build on that success in his second year on the job. One thing he must do is figure out the ideal starting lineup for this team and Redick went into detail about everything that goes into that decision.
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