What a finish to the 2007-08 NBA season this past Tuesday night! A thirty-nine pointing romping of the Lakers, courtesy of the Boston Celtics, helped end an exciting season of basketball on rout to their seventeenth championship. The Celtics proved naysayers like your friendly neighborhood F-Bomb once and for all, that in the regular season and playoffs, that THEY WERE THE BEST TEAM.
Congratulations to Finals MVP, Defensive Player of the Year Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen, along with head coach Doc Rivers. Truly an amazing season by gang green. Now let us look at some of the great occurrences and ones not so much this past season...
We saw the emergence of the next generation of great point guards in Chris Paul and Deron Williams, who helped their teams reach the Second Round of the playoffs, before falling to the Spurs and Lakers. Not to be outdone, shooting guards Kevin Martin of Sacramento and Joe Johnson of Atlanta stepped up their game. Dwight Howard emerged as a perennial All-Star, should he continue to dominate the boards and make slight adjustments.
Hedo Turkoglu also increased in every statistical category, winning this season's Most Improved Player award. However, this season was not just about the remarkable seasons of the Atlanta Hawks, Orlando Magic, Los Angeles Lakers and New Orleans Hornets. Nor is this season just about the Rockets' 22-game winning streak (15 of them without Yao Ming!).
This season was also about what teams didn't do. It was as much about teams' success, as it was another team's failure. Two glaring examples of that are the Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns. The Mavericks made a lopsided trade by sending Devin Harris, DeSagana Diop, Trenton Hassell, and the retired Keith Van Horn for Jason Kidd. The Suns traded their best defensive and disgruntled player Shawn Marion for the injury-prone Shaquille O'Neal.
Much like the Lakers who traded Kwame Brown and the draft rights to Marc Gasol for former All-Star Pau Gasol, the Suns and Mavs wanted to make a move that could give them that extra boost. It wasn't that Dallas was a bad team this year, but that the Western Conference was too good for them to make it out of the First Round.
Not only was the Western Conference too good, but as was Chris Paul, who outplayed Jason Kidd and led his Hornets past the Mavericks four games to one in the opening round of the playoffs. The Suns didn't have much luck themselves, dropping to the defending champion San Antonio Spurs four games to one. Soon after both series, Mike D'Antoni and Avery Johnson were on the way out. Johnson was fired, while D'Antoni surprisingly joined the New York Knicks.
Of course, who could forget the NBA's most improved team, the Boston Celtics? They not only won sixty-six games after only winning twenty-four last season, but won their first division title since 2005. What Gang Green would do in the postseason is what really mattered, though.
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