by Andre van der Merwe
Daily Lobo
After the NCAA Championships, I thought it would be years before I saw the same amount of blood, sweat and tears pour out onto a basketball court.
And especially not from a player on the Los Angeles Lakers roster - unless of course Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant happened to be sitting near each other or Kobe was in Denver. As an enthusiastic and avid Bryant hater, my mouth and mind are incapable of saying anything positive about Bryant on or off the court. So sadly, I must type it.
Bryant played like a true MVP in Game 4 against the Western Conference No. 2 seed Phoenix Suns. Yes, Bryant made the game-winning 18-footer, but that's not the only MVP move he made. Bryant takes top honors when it comes to scoring - averaging a league-high 35.4 points per game - but only took 14 shot attempts during the entire game. That's about six less attempts than he allegedly took at the woman in Colorado.
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Not only that, Bryant led his team in assists with eight on Sunday. The Lakers also have to thank Bryant's supporting cast of Lamar Odom and Smush Parker - ha ha, his parents named him Smush - for tallying up the points where Bryant left off.
However, just because Bryant had a few good games in the playoffs doesn't make him Dwayne Wade. Wade is quite possibly the greatest thing to happen to Miami Heat basketball in more than a decade. Not only is he unselfish, he knows his team's strengths and weaknesses and utilizes them. While he is averaging 27.2 points per game, he is also dishing out 6.7 assists per game, and grabbing an average of 1.9 steals each match. All of which are team highs, by the way. And those are team highs that eclipse three future hall-of-famers in O'Neal, Gary Payton and Alonzo Mourning.
Although the series against the Chicago Bulls is tied at 2-2, I would say it's almost a fact that we'll see him and the Heat in the next round. So far, Wade is hands down the best basketball player on the court in the playoffs. Period.
Now that we've tallied up the best human players, let's talk about the nonhuman, the bionic, the half-man, half-God in sneakers, the king, LeBron James. If you were to tell me four years ago that I should expect to see the Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs I would have taken you straight to the police and had you charged with possession of hallucinogens, or to an institute where you and all the GMs who passed up Hank Baskett could talk to top-tier doctors about each other's psychobabble.
However, if I had known that the Cavs were going to pick up James in the 2003 draft, I would have taken you straight to Vegas, pronounced you a genius, and awaited my winnings. At the tender age of 21, James is scoring an average of 31.4 points a game. When Bryant was 21 he was averaging 22.5, and Carmelo Anthony is averaging 26.5 at the same age.
What's depressing is everyone wanted to see how James would do in the NBA because a lot of us had seen him play in high school.
As far as I'm concerned, it still looks the same. The only difference to me is now the kids he plays against are just bigger, but he still destroys each and every one of them.
What should be scary to every team he faces is the fact that James can take over a game whenever he deems it necessary. I mean, how do you think the Cavs actually got to the playoffs and are ranked No. 4 in the Eastern Conference? The answer is LeBron James, and I am a witness.
