Karma Bites the Lakers in OKC - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By David Roth

European Pressphoto Agency

Oklahoma City Thunder player James Harden helps build a photographic case that revenge is a dish best served with a giant beard.

In the first of Monday’s two NBA playoff games, the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers played a slack, brick-intensive game that turned on the most prosaic of mistakes: a decisive (and inarguable) moving screen called against Kevin Garnett in the last minute essentially handed the Sixers a road win.

It was not an exciting or beautiful game, but it was miles closer to competitive than the evening’s hotly anticipated match-up between the Los Angeles Lakers and Oklahoma City Thunder. After a week of hype powered by endless replays of Metta World Peace’s elbow to the head of Thunder wing James Hardenâ€"imagine the “back and to the left” scenes of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” with worse haircuts, and even more repetitionâ€"the Thunder enacted their revenge early and often in a 119-90 win. “Maybe the whole World Peace thing served as a little extra motivation, but it certainly wasn’t a distraction,” Royce Young writes at CBS Sports. “The Thunder ignored any impulse to retaliate, instigate or repay the deeds of World Peace. Instead, they let their game do all the talking, and elbowing, for them.”

But just because it wasn’t an especially exciting game doesn’t mean that Monday’s contest didn’t have the feel of significance. In the three quarters that made that conclusion foregone, the Thunder played with a calm, complete and completely terrifying brilliance. “It’s a typical maneuver to overreact to a game like this,” Yahoo’s Kelly Dwyer writes. “[But] there’s nothing wrong with wondering if the Thunder are going to sweep, here. It really appears as if no amount of uptick in drive, effort and sprightly legs could turn this thing around for Los Angeles. Oklahoma City looks that good.”

While no Thunder player had a particularly brilliant game, the team itself played near-flawless basketball, and turned the ball over just four times. “It’s one thing to win a playoff game, it’s a whole other story when you win like THAT,” SB Nation’s Andrew Sharp writes. “And it feels weird to say about a 29-point blowout, but it was fun to watch.”

The Lakers have won a lot of playoff games, and Kobe Bryant in the playoffs is, well, Kobe Bryant in the playoffs. But with Bryant himself acknowledging Oklahoma City’s athletic superiority in his post-game commentsâ€"and with that 29-point thumping still fresh in the memoryâ€"it’s easy to believe that this series could mark a turning point for the Thunder. For all the narrative catharsis and revenge related to that endlessly replayed elbow, the Thunder sure seemed to be serving notice on Monday that the real thumping will involve basketball, and is just getting started.

* * *

A little later than their fans might’ve hoped, the Washington Capitals scored an upset on Monday. The New York Rangers, the team that edged the Caps in a dramatic Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semis, scored a Game 1 victory over the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference finals. But despite the fast-twitch marvel that is Devils goalie Martin Brodeur and in large part thanks to the Rangers’ near-masochistic defense in front of their own goalie, that outcome wasn’t spectacularly surprising. At least relative to the news that Caps coach Dale Hunter was leaving the Caps after just half a season at the helm. The news arrives after Hunter’s team had knocked off the defending Stanley Cup champion Bruins in the first round and nearly beaten the Rangers and New York’s surpassingly strong-willed coach in the second.

Hunter took over after the Caps dismissed coach Bruce Boudreau at midseason and instituted a quick but thorough stylistic and cultural change that very nearly led them to the Eastern Conference finals in the Stanley Cup playoffs. It wasn’t surprising because Hunter, who was signed to a one-year deal, had always made clear his intent to leave at season’s end. But it was shocking because, for all the travails of Hunter’s brief Capitals tenureâ€"which included demoting superstar Alex Ovechkin to the fourth line and instituting a new, defense-minded approach on what had been a notably not-that-way teamâ€"the hard-nosed new coach had gotten results.

“How can you be Dale Hunter, get everybody to ‘buy into’ your brutally painful way of playing hockey, have some success with it and then quit?” the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell wondered. “That seems out of character. Doesn’t he almost have to come back one more year to complete the transition to his methods, then help pick the coach to follow him? Well, obviously not.”

Which means that, despite that late surge, the Capitals find themselves facing the same cultural tear-down they seemed to need at the time of Boudreau’s firing. “The blame lies with Washington’s front office, who brought in a coach with a radically different style, knowing full well he had no intentions of staying long,” Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky writes. “Now it’s time to start from scratch.”

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There’s no such thing as ghosts, and it’s pretty silly to blame a building for the failures of its inhabitants. But going a century-plus without a World Series win and not even reaching the World Series since 1945 will do some strange things to a person’s mind. So, while ghosts aren’t real and Wrigley Field is not to blame for, say, Alfonso Soriano’s 28-year, $4 billion contract, it’s easy to understand where Rich Cohen is coming from when he calls, in the Journal, for Wrigley Field to be destroyed.

“The struts and concessions, the catwalk where the late broadcaster Harry Caray once greeted me with all the fluid liquidity of an animatronic Disneyland pirateâ€"Hello, Cubs fan!â€"the ramps that ascend like a ziggurat to heavenâ€"it’s a false heavenâ€"the bases, trestles, ivy, wooden seats and bleachers, the towering center-field scoreboardâ€"all of it must be ripped out and carried away like the holy artifacts were carried out of the temple in Jerusalem, heaped in a pile and burned,” Cohen writes. “When a house is haunted, you don’t put in a new scoreboard, add ivy, get better food or bigger beersâ€"you move!”

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