Should Lakers' 2020 bubble title ‘forever be marked by an asterisk'? Our staff weighs in

New York Times

4 days ago

Five years later, do you believe the Los Angeles Lakers' 2020 bubble championship should have an asterisk attached to it? Daryl Morey, the Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations, says so.
'Had the Rockets won the title, I absolutely would have celebrated it as legitimate, knowing the immense effort and resilience required,' Morey, Houston's former general manager, told The Athletic's Joe Vardon in a piece this week reflecting on the NBA's Orlando bubble experiment five years later. 'Yet, everyone I speak to around the league privately agrees that it doesn't truly hold up as a genuine championship. Perhaps the lasting legacy of the NBA bubble is that the NBA should be proud of its leadership at both the beginning and end of the pandemic, even though the champion will forever be marked by an asterisk.'
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Maybe Morey is just poking fun at Lakers fans or LeBron James, trying to get the goat of a potential GOAT.
But the legitimacy of the Lakers' 2020 title still generates debate among NBA fans. So we asked our staff where they stand on the conversation. Should the Lakers' accomplishment be looked at with skepticism, like Morey suggests? Seventeen Athletic NBA writers weighed in and, well, every single one voted no on whether the Lakers title should be considered in any way invalid.
That said, several of them argued the 2020 record books should carry a different kind of asterisk — just not for the reasons you might think.
Vardon: There are no asterisks in any record book, in any major professional sport. Why would we apply one here? The Lakers didn't cheat. Rather, they won the game played by everyone else under the same rules.
Dan Woike: The notion of 'asterisks' in sports should only apply if something cheapens an accomplishment due to things that are controllable. The bubble title is no better, no worse than any other in league history. It is the most different — and it was played under the same rules for the rest of the league. Under those conditions, the Lakers were the best.
Eric Koreen: The 2019-20 NBA season was different than others, sure. There was a giant four-month break in the middle of the regular season, and no travel or crowds in the playoffs. Everybody faced the same obstacles, though. The teams played more than 70 regular-season games — more than a few lockout-shortened seasons in the last three decades. If anything, teams were healthier than usual. Unless a team cheated, I'm not going to claim 'asterisk.'
Tony Jones: The Lakers started that season 24-3. Right before the COVID-19 shutdown, they were 49-14. They breezed through the playoffs. Los Angeles was the best team in the NBA from Game 1 to Game 82 and from win 1 in the playoffs to win 16. The best team won the NBA title in 2020, without question.
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Josh Robbins: The notion there should be an asterisk next to the Lakers' title is hogwash. The Lakers entered the postseason as the Western Conference's top seed and entered the NBA Finals with a better regular-season win total than their finals opponent, the Miami Heat. If anything, playing in the bubble disadvantaged the Lakers because it robbed them of having four playoff series with home-court advantage. Granted, they didn't have to play postseason games in Denver when they faced the Nuggets in the conference finals but I think losing home-court advantage throughout the playoffs made the Lakers' road tougher, rather than easier.
Jon Krawczynski: I actually think the Lakers deserve a different kind of asterisk. I think the bubble title needs an asterisk because it was harder than people want to acknowledge, not easier. It is well-documented how miserable teams were. Sequestered from family. Isolated. Doing something for society at large by going to work under very murky circumstances, with so many unanswered health questions, to try to give a shaken country some sense of normalcy. It was an mental endurance test the likes of which we have rarely seen.
Sam Amick: Absolutely not. As someone who spent eight weeks inside the bubble, I can personally (and strongly) attest that the experience was mentally taxing in ways that are hard to explain unless you were there. So while I get the physically-based argument that the Lakers, and LeBron in particular, benefited from the lack of travel and increased rest time during that title run, I would counter that they handled the psychological aspect of the challenge far better than any of their counterparts (see: the LA Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks, etc.). That key factor, one that will always make this title even more impressive in my mind, should not be forgotten.
John Hollinger: This title was harder than all the other ones, not easier. In addition to (gestures at everything going on at the time), consider this: Winning games meant you couldn't leave!
Jay King: If the NBA appointed an arbiter of championships, Morey would not qualify for the position. As unique as the bubble was, the Lakers won under the same set of rules and circumstances every other team encountered that season. On their way to a championship, they beat Nikola Jokić, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, Damian Lillard, Jamal Murray and Jimmy Butler, just to name a few. The Lakers' path was only made tougher by the mental challenges they faced while living away from civilization for months. Though I suppose Morey himself made that path a bit easier by building a center-less team that Los Angeles was able to easily dispose of in the second round.
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Mike Vorkunov: Putting an asterisk on the Lakers' championship borders on lawlessness. Let's put an asterisk on the 2021 Bucks too, since they played in a season where fans were mostly missing. Let's put an asterisk on every champion in a lockout-shortened season. Let's put an asterisk on every season where a title contender lost a star to injury. It's a slippery slope. Every title lives in a vacuum-sealed season, played out under its own conditions. Respect that and move on.
Christian Clark: The best team won the championship in 2020. The Lakers were 49-14 before the shutdown. Someone trying to poke holes in their run might point out that Anthony Davis shot the ball unusually well (49.6 percent on midrange shots and 38.3 percent from 3) without fans in the stands. But again, every team was playing in those conditions. As long as the rules are the same for everyone, it's foolish to diminish the winner's accomplishments.
Shakeia Taylor: The same way teams can only play who is in front of them (injuries, etc.), in this case, teams can only play in the circumstances in front of them.
Eric Nehm: Given the context provided and the framing given to me for this question, the answer is clearly no. All championships count the exact same. At some point, though, we're going to need to have a conversation about what an asterisk means. It doesn't have a positive or negative connotation, it's just a symbol used in text to inform someone looking at a record book that there is more context needed to explain whatever precedes that asterisk. Whether we're talking about seasons shortened by a pandemic or lockouts, seasons played before the 3-point line or the NBA-ABA merger or early seasons that featured less than 10 teams, there are a lot of NBA championships that could use some more context.
Kelly Iko: It's easy for front-office executives, the majority of whom were privileged to remain in the comfort of their homes during a global pandemic, to downplay and essentially discredit the bubble. I've spoken to enough players who went through it to know it was one of the most difficult experiences of their professional careers. Between COVID-19 and heightening racial tensions from the outside world, NBA players were put through an awful lot in a relatively short period of time. The Lakers should be celebrated for winning it all — we're talking about a team that was on a 65-win pace prior to Orlando — they were elite and fully deserving of the Larry O'Brien.
Law Murray: Congratulations to everyone involved in the 2020 bubble, but I'm good on never talking about this season again. It was a terrible time for everything, including basketball, and here we are discussing salty executive opinions. Yes, the season was different. It certainly benefited some teams more than others to get a four-month break, then have no travel while the postseason played out. But every team knew the circumstances going in. The Lakers got the 16 wins that no one else could get. Asterisk talk is always insufferable, and it all started with a Lakers coach trying to invalidate what Gregg Popovich and the 1999 San Antonio Spurs achieved. At least that team won another title within five years.
Fred Katz: It happened. We saw it happen. There were 30 teams. There were 16 playoff teams. The Lakers competed in the same conditions as everyone else. They won. Stop trying to minimize other people's extraordinary accomplishments. Bringing them down to your level won't make you happier. Don't be toxic to society. Everyone, move on.
Jason Quick: I mean, what are we talking about here? The champion emerged out of an environment everyone was part of. No advantages. No hidden challenges. Just basketball.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Matt Rourke/AP Photo, Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)