NBA Season 2004

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The NBA was turned on its ear during the summer of 2004. The unbeatable foursome of Gary Payton, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal were getting blasted by a bunch of role players in the NBA Finals. When did teams start winning basketball games!? I thought superstar laden groups of individuals won championships; well that’s what Jerry Buss and Mitch Kupchak thought before they got blasted by Larry Brown and his Pistons that bought into the team first idea. That’s right; the biggest name on the team didn’t play a single minute in the NBA Finals the biggest name with the Pistons was Brown. The Pistons were a good group of guys that played tough defense and got hot when they had to like the Tampa Bay Lightning in the NHL, the Florida Marlins in MLB and the New England Patriots in the NFL. If that wasn’t interesting (or as amusing) enough to see the Lakers get humiliated at the highest level in the NBA, writers speculate that Kobe pushed to get Phil Jackson and The Big Aristotle out of LA LA land superstar trades started, and the free agent opening day came and made everything crazy.

The Lakers were more of a soap opera then they were a basketball team during the 2003-04 season and it didn’t stop when the season ended. Kobe became a free agent and started shopping around the league to see if he would play somewhere else. The Lakers management wanted to show him that it was going to be his team, so they shipped Shaq to South Beach and told Phil that he could take his Harley back to Montana. The team brought in Lamar Odom Caron Butler and Brian Grant in return for O’Neal. The people of Miami are throwing flips to be getting the most dominant force in the NBA and didn’t have to give up their best player Dwyane Wade. The Lakers also let go of Derrick Fisher and then turned around and traded Gary Payton, Rick Fox and a conditional first round pick for Chris Mihm, Marcus Banks and Chucky Atkins. The team also brought Vlade Divac to come in and replace Shaq. Incidentally, Divac was the man who replaced Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when he left the Lakers after the 1988-89 season.

Shaq wasn’t the only big name to change his address in the off-season; Tracy McGrady told the Magic that he wanted out of Orlando and didn’t want to be part of the Magic’s rebuilding process. The team fulfilled his wishes and moved him, Juwan Howard, Reece Gaines and Tyronn Lue in exchange for Steve Francis, Cuttino Mobley, and Kelvin Cato. The Rockets are hoping that a guard-big man combo of McGrady and Yao Ming will bring back memories of Shaq and Kobe, without all the bickering of course since Yao doesn’t speak a great deal of English. The Magic will be legitimate contenders in the next coming seasons with a core of Francis, Mobley, Cato, and their draft picks of Jameer Nelson and Dwight Howard.

Free agency was also ridiculously eventful too. The Mavericks point guard Steve Nash went back to the desert in Phoenix because they gave him a six year contract in the $65 million range. Most experts believe that the Suns overpaid for Nash but sometimes a team has to go all out to get the missing piece in the championship puzzle. In yet another bizarre occurrence, the Cavs forward Carlos Boozer was released from his contract under the idea that the Cavs would extend his contract but Boozer was pulled away from that deal by the Utah Jazz, who made out of the off-season like bandits this year, for six years and $68 million. NBA general managers were very willing to overpay players this year with guys like Hedo Turkoglu signing contracts for six years and $38 million. Other players that joined the fat wallets club during free agency were Marcus Camby, Kenyon Martin, Mehmet Okur, Manu Ginobilli, Stephen Jackson and Derek Fisher.

Outside of the Jazz and the Heat the best teams seemed to not make many moves. Detroit, Indiana, San Antonio and Sacramento have all made few moves but the moves they made will be huge for their team and help them get into the NBA Finals. Detroit got rid of Okur brought back Rasheed Wallace and got Antonio McDyess to back up their big men. Indiana moved Al Harrington out and brought in Stephen Jackson. Sacramento let an aging Vlade Divac go and brought in Greg Ostertag. The Spurs let Turkoglu go and brought in Brent Barry. Of all those teams the two teams that seem the most improved are Detroit and San Antonio. McDyess, if healthy, is a huge improvement to the champs. The most underrated move in the off-season has to be the Spurs acquisition of Barry. Barry is one of the NBA’s sharpshooters and if the Spurs could’ve hit a jump shot in the last four games of the Lakers series they would’ve given the Pistons a run for their money. So look for Detroit and San Antonio meeting up in the Finals for an ugly battle between two teams.