The 2008-09 season was the first time I ever dropped coin for one of the NBA's "League Pass" products. I was a satisfied customer.

Since I live in the blacked-out Portland television market, having League Pass Broadband proved of virtually no use in helping me keep up with the Blazers. This was little matter, however, since every Trailblazer game was on my TV — either on Comcast, Portland's KGW-TV, or broadcast nationally. I missed 3 or 4 games due to work, these things happen, but I still saw the full season, outside of those very few games.

What League Pass Broadband did allow me to do was to stay abreast with the happenings of my boyhood team and #2 squeeze in the league, the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers are unquestionably the hated historic arch-rival in the view of the Blazers' most devoted, lifelong fans — but that sentiment means nothing to me. I like both teams. It is an unusual combination of objects of affection, certainly, but that's the way it is. I grew up in California during the 1970s, there ya go...

Now, with LPBB, if the Lakershow wasn't on national TV, it would be available to me for viewing via the internet. This ultimately proved to be quite a boon in this particular year.

I saw a great number of games played by Phil's boys, either live or as previously-recorded "archive" games. I'm not exactly sure how many regular season Laker contests I saw this past year, but it was probably in the ballpark of 45 or 50 — plus all of the 23 playoff games, less a couple quarters when I was at work. Suffice it to say that I probably watched enough Lakers basketball this year to kill a small family of native Oregonians. 

One team that I followed — young and on the upswing; the other — fully mature, making a second straight visit to the NBA Finals, and World Champions. It made for some very interesting comparisons and contrasts.

Laker fans, speaking in generalities about a stereotype, are considered to be superstar obsessed: "Kobe-Kobe-Kobe-Kobe." The fans of Team Purple are thought to know that one player's name all too well, but beyond the obvious isolation heroics of #24, the nuances of team basketball are believed to largely escape them. As with many myths, there is some truth at the root: as a high profile and historically successful team from one of the largest media markets in the country, the Lakers are undeniably supported by many casual fans of the game, for whom almost everything beyond the identity and scoring statistics of The Superstar remain a complete mystery.

It does not follow, however, that all Laker fans are shallow and dumb — quite the contrary. There are smart fans of every team in the league, even the Lakers, just as there are stupid fans of every team in the league, even the Blazers. The sooner we all come to grips with this fact and stop mocking fictional caricatures of the followers of opposing teams, the better off we will all be. Peace, love, and understanding, bro...

The widespread bias against the Lakers and their fans has lead to a peculiar myopia. The purportedly superstar-driven team and its allegedly superstar-obsessed fans are dismissed as alien to the "real" NBA experience. The Lakers are reduced in the imagination of those basketball fans who do not like them and do not follow them into some sort of one man show, from which there is nothing of great importance to be learned.

This is, I believe, a tremendous mistake.

Here are some of the things I learned from the Lakers about winning a championship in the NBA.

1. To win it all, you need to have a superstar that performs like a superstar. Let's get past Kobe's personality, shall we? I don't care if you don't like his on-court demeanor, his widely publicized off-court sexual escapade in Colorado, his repeated and changing demands of team management... I don't care if you find him insufferably arrogant or if you think him media-obsessed... I don't care if you think he's an overexposed, hypercommercialized whore... The man can play basketball — he's arguably the top wing in the world, a Hall of Famer, heir to Michael Jordan's throne.

Without Kobe Bryant, the Lakers never would have won a World Championship in 2009-09. "No duh," right?

Here's the deal:  every team in the hunt for the NBA title this year had its superstar. The Cleveland Cavaliers had Lebron James. The Denver Nuggets had Carmelo Anthony. The Orlando Magic had Dwight Howard. Last year's Boston Celtics had two: Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. If a team wants to have a chance to win it all, they need to have a superstar. But more: those guys need to continue to play like superstars, no matter what.

As long as the afprementioned  superstars performed like superstars during these playoffs, their teams advanced. We saw the miracle shots, the 30+ point performances in the face of consistent double-teams. Winning games in the bright spotlight of the NBA Playoffs requires teams' superstars to be able to continue do their things despite the pressure and despite the opposition doing everything in their power to shut off the scoring spigot. Without a superstar, a team was eliminated. When a superstar was stopped, a team was eliminated. In 2008-09, only one superstar was unchecked — Kobe Bryant. For the 23 postseason games the Lakers played, Bryant averaged 30.2 points per game, 5.5 assists per game, and 5.3 rebounds per game.

Let me repeat that: he averaged over 30 points a game despite being targeted by the opposing coaches 23 times in a row. He lead his team in assists — as a shooting guard. He pulled down more than 5 rebounds per outing — as a guard.

It was no accident that Kobe Bryant's team won it all.

For the Portland Trailblazers to be World Champions, Brandon Roy must be able to perform like a superstar — night in, night out — against all comers, against the best defenders in the league, against specific defensive schemes designed to stop him. If he is not able to do this, the Portland Trailblazers will not win it all. 

Bank on that.

2. Depth is swell, but it is quality starters that win championships. If you are foolish enough to pay attention to TV analyst dorks like Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy, you might think that the Los Angeles Lakers were the "deepest team in the NBA." They gushed and they fawned over the extraordinary players and superior abilities of the Lakers' so-called "Bench Mob."

It all sounds very reasonable, does it not, that the "best team" in the Western Conference is its deepest? Well, let me tell you as a most unhomery Laker fan that this is unmitigated and unadulterated horse crap. Spread it on your garden and grow great tomatoes... Don't kid yourself about the Lakers' depth, even for a minute — they were shallow, their bench players were spotty and inconsistent. The Lakers won the championship because they had the best 6 man rotation in the league, not due to having 12 guys on the bench who could play ball with the big kids.

Don't believe me? Take a gander at the scoring line for $5 Million backup Shooting Guard Sasha Vujacic in these playoffs: played in all 23 games, averaged just under 11 minutes per game, scored an average of 3.0 points per game. In the five Finals games, our svelte Slovenian shooter averaged 4.4 minutes and scored .............. wait for it................ ZERO points. Not much production from the back up Shooting Guard there, eh?

Let's take a look at another $5 Million man, Bill Walton's baby boy, Luke. Walton saw action as the backup Small Forward in 21 of the 23 playoff games, averaging 15.8 minutes and ........................... 3.8 points. That was his same average points per game output for the 5 games of the finals. Hmmm, not much output from that position either...

Now how about that backup "Lead Guard" of the Lakers, former UCLA Bruin Jordan Farmar — how did he do? Farmar saw action in 20 of the 23 playoff games, collecting 3 DNP-CDs. He averaged 13 minutes per game and scored .................... 4.7 points per game. In the 5 games of the NBA Finals, PJ had his time down to 11.4 minutes and his scoring fell to 3.4 ppg. Again — precious little production from that backup. Alternate "Lead Guard" Shannon Brown (a fan favorite) contributed little more, kicking in an average of 4.9 points for the playoffs — and matching Sasha Vujacic's ZERO points for the 5 games of the NBA Finals, in which he played a grand total of about 16 minutes spread over 3 games.

The Lakers made use of a 3 man rotation of bigs in which starting Center Andrew Bynum suffered from chronic Foulosis Odeneri. Bynum played largely ineffective minutes reminiscent of the court time of Blazers starting SF Nic Batum. The de facto Center for the Lakers throughout the playoffs was actually Pau Gasol, with 6th man and future Unrestricted Free Agent Lamar Odom the de facto Power Forward for a majority of the team's floor time. 

The long and the short of it — the Lakers were essentially a 6 man team, featuring Kobe Bryant SG (30.2 ppg), Derek Fisher PG (8.0 ppg), Trevor Ariza SF (11.3 ppg), Lamar Odom PF (12.3 ppg), Pau Gasol C/PF (18.3 ppg), and Drew Bynum C (6.3 ppg in an average of 17.3 minutes). Total for the 6 man core — 86.4 points per game average for the playoffs.

The moral of the story for the Blazers is simple: A team does not need 10 guys that can put up numbers in the playoffs to win it all. Quite the contrary. A tight core will do nicely, so long as that team of starters are capable of performing at their highest level under pressure.

The key thing is that the team is not taken off their game by the opponent's defensive schemes and does not lay an egg under the bright lights.

3. Home court advantage is a very, very good thing. With the demise of Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Finals to the Orlando Magic, the Lakers were assured of home court advantage throughout the playoffs. That fact was never far from the surface in these playoffs — the Lakers started each match ahead 0-0, with their opponents having to fight from behind.

It is facile to note that The Great Queen Bitch, Home Court Advantage, is often decisive in the NBA. Yet just because this is such an obvious platitude, it doesn't mean that it is not true. The Lakers had Home Court Advantage throughout and they won the 2008-09 NBA Championship. Draw your own conclusions.

Every year we see the same thing: Teams with home court advantage advance, teams fighting uphill as visitors lose and go fishing. Every once in a while you have your visitors beating the home teams — as the Blazers learned through the school of hard knocks in the 2009-09 season when Houston flipped them off the tracks — but home court advantage is a bankable asset.

If the Blazers are really serious about going all they way, they need to light it up during the regular season in order to defend home court throughout the entire playoffs rather than starting a series in a 3-foot deep hole.Having the home floor for 4 of 7 is not an absolute guarantee of success — but it certainly helps to tilt the odds.

4. Championship teams can win on the road and know they can win on the road. The flipside of having home court advantage throughout the playoffs (i.e. the best regular season record in the NBA) is that a team performs well on the road. Did you know that the Lakers had the best road record in the NBA during the 2008-09 regular season? True fact, they were 29 wins and 12 losses. Put another way, Team Purple was more successful on the road than their playoff compatriots the San Antonio Spurs and the New Orleans Hornets were at home.

Why were the Lakers so good as road warriors? Two factors: absolute confidence and competitive fire. Anyone who paid close attention to Kobe Bryant's eyes when their back was against the wall against Houston knows this story — the man loves to play on the road and to stick it to noisy crowds wearing the wrong colors.

In 2008-09, when the Blazers dropped Game 1 and fell behind to Houston, the series turned. Simply put, the Blazers were a poor road team against quality Western Conference opponents, they knew they were a poor team. They did not win in Houston not because Houston was a better team than them — the Blazers were at least as good as the Rockets, if not better — but because they were unable to execute under pressure in a hostile environment.

When Portland is able to demonstrate throughout the course of a long season the ability to go into any building on any given night and to come out with a win, then and only then will they be ready to win a championship.

The Lakers were not better than the Blazers in 2008-09. They were more.................. experienced.

More on that below.

5. The importance of the Point Guard position is highly overrated. During the 2009-09 regular season, I saw the following Lakers carry the ball up the court on a change of possessions on multiple occasions: PG Fisher, PG Farmar, PG Brown, SG Bryant, SG Vujacic, SF Ariza, SF Walton, PF Odom, and, believe it or not, C Gasol. Hey, I've got a little taste of proof of the truth of the last bit: PAU ASSIST TO ARIZA.

How many times do I recall seeing the Laker ball carrier get trapped with designed pressure? I honestly don't recall it, no matter which of the above-mentioned guys was packing the rock. The fact that the carrier was essentially random seems to have mitigated designed traps on the Point Guard.

This is not accidental. The Lakers' offense is not structured around their Point Guard carrying the ball and "initiating" the offense with a snappy pass leading to a pick-and-pop or dribble-penetration kicking to an open 3-point shooter. Hell, the Lakers don't even call their Point Guard a "Point Guard" — he is the "Lead Guard" in Philspeak... Instead, the rebounder outlets to a ball-carrier of opportunity — who may or may not be the Point Guard. This ball-carrier often initiates the offense with an entry pass to the low post, which leads moving read-and-react passes on one side of the court or the other. Rather than perimeter passes hopefully ending in an open look at 3, the Laker offensive approach is based upon the 2-point shot — the closer and higher percentage, the better. The offense also tires to make sure the ball gets into The Superstar's hands and letting him either shoot lights-out or pass to exploit the double-team, to be sure.

Let's look at Point Guard Derek Fisher's Assist stats, shall we? In 22 playoff games (he was suspended a game for laying THIS HIT on Houston's chippy clutch-and-grabbing Power Forward Luis Scola), Fisher averaged 2.2 assists in nearly 29 minutes of action. In the 5 games of the finals, make that 1.8 assists per game in nearly 36 minutes of action. Such numbers are not to be confused with those of Chris Paul, eh?

Nor is Fisher regarded as a premier perimeter stopper, exhibiting slower-than-average lateral footspeed. During the 2nd Round series against the Houston Rockets, lightning quick PG Aaron Brooks played Fisher like a 2-string banjo. The Lakers lived to tell the tale.

What's the point, if you are the Portland Trailblazers or a fan of the Portland Trailblazers? 1. If you don't have a PG that can run your preconceived offense, change the offense. There is no reason a team has to run everything offensively through a single person at the top of the key. It is boring, it is predictable, and it is easy for the opposition to scheme against it in a long series. 2. There is no objective reason that a designated PG has to carry the ball. Admittedly, this observation might come as news to former PG McMillan and former PG Pritchard, but it is true nonetheless. Varying the ball carrier makes it harder for the defense to trap and easier for the offense to run. 3. A team can win it all in the NBA without a premier Point Guard. The teams built around superstar Point Guards — the Utah Jazz of Deron Williams, the New Orleans Hornets of Chris Paul — fell early and hard in these playoffs. It was the teams buit around superstars at other positions — the teams featuring Small Forwards Carmelo Anthony and Lebron James, Shooting Guard Kobe Bryant, Center Dwight Howard — that had success in the playoffs.

6. Championship teams are able to play well in the paint. You've gotta be big up front, plain and simple. There is no substitute for length. One thing the Lakers have that is shared by few teams in the NBA are two legitimate 7-footers who can score the ball in the paint, with an ultra-athletic 6'10" sixth man that can run the floor with the best of them. The number of teams that can match up directly with this Assault of the Bigs is few. Fortunately, the Portland Trail Blazers are among these teams — or will be shortly with the addition of the final piece to the front line puzzle, a backup 4 that can mash.

The NBA Finals was a classic matchup of Phil Jackson's "hit-em-low and let Kobe pop the midrange jumpers" approach against a team whose offense is predicated upon hammering shot after shot after shot from beyond the arc. We all know how it turned out — in the most nerve-wracking of game situations, against attentive defense, the long bombers went cold. The only game that Orlando won was their Game 3 exhibition of midrange jumper acumen, in which they nailed an astonishing 62.5% of their shots to set a new NBA Finals record.

Doubt me? Spend a few minutes refreshing your memory with this video of 2008-09 NBA Finals highlights, painful though it may be to watch the much-loathed purple team win, and notice where the damage is done. Down low, down low, down low, down low... Again and again, the blood is let with body blows in the paint, interspersed with critical 3-point makes, such as Derek Fisher's game-tier and overtime dagger in Game 4.

The Blazers must learn to get the ball to the rim with authority against any team in any building under any circumstances in order to turn good performance into great achievement. They have the personnel to make this happen. Now it becomes a matter of coaching, game experience, and self-assurance that they can get this done on the biggest stage imaginable.

7. Don't stress too much about the young Center's foul difficulties. One thing I particularly enjoyed about interrelating with hardcore Laker fans vs. hardcore Blazer fans is the way they never put up whiny excuses for the quick hook given every night to their particular Human Foul Machine, Andrew Bynum, he of next year's $12.5 Million contract. It didn't matter that Bynum was coming off two straight seasons of knee surgery, it didn't matter that he is just 22 years old and that he has started fewer regular season NBA games in his entire career (128) than Kobe Bryant had started in the playoffs prior to this year's run (152). There was none of this "boo hoo, he's young, he's been injured, just wait he's able to play 40 minutes and score 25 points a night, THEN we'll be World Champions..."

He stepped on the floor. He picked up his fouls. There was bitching about the perceived bad calls and acknowledgement of the perceived good calls. He left the floor and the Lakers got along with life.

Championship teams can not be obsessed with the prospective possible future potential of this or that player maybe someday eventually. Winning an NBA title is about living in the moment and maximizing in the present. If the still-young-and-learning Human Foul Machine picked up 2 quickies and headed for the bench, the Lakers quickly and seamlessly moved on to Plan B.

And therein lies the rub. There must be a Plan B for the young, foul-prone Center — not just this year, not just next year, but for the foreseeable future. Center is at its root a defensive position, guarding the goal with size and strength, using body work to deny the opposition low post position, using quickness and technique and physicality to garner rebounds. Fouls happen and injuries happen. It is an inevitable part of the game. Whereas a team can fake it at the perimeter positions, riding a starter for 40+ minutes, in the real world of the NBA, there absolutely, positively must be depth at the Center position. Even the Orlando Magic, who have built their team around the NBA's top young Center, All-World rebounder Dwight Howard, had a capable backup available in the person of Marcin Gortat.

The Lakers have a gifted combo Center-Forward, Pau Gasol — a man who is expected to rack up 15 points and capable of putting up 25. The Blazers have an outstanding defender and rebounder, Joel Przybilla, as their alternate when the young Human Foul Machine leaves the floor. On the offensive end he is expected to score maybe 6 points and capable of 12 or 14. The implication here is that the other low post player on the Blazers' roster, LeMarcus Aldridge, must really step up his game in the paint when Oden leaves the floor for the Blazers to remain effective in a Plan B situation.

The key to the Lakers' success down low wasn't Andrew Bynum, it was Pau Gasol. By the same token, the key to the Blazers winning a title isn't some implausible scenario in which Greg Oden can be counted upon to stay on the floor for 38 minutes and to score 25 points every night; it is Greg Oden being able to give 20 or 25 aggressive, effective minutes and LMA being able to expand his low post presence on the offensive end in Greg's absence.

8. "Playoff experience" doesn't mean being old or having played in lots of first round games before. It means nothing more or less than the ability to perform under pressure. Panic kills. Laker Head Coach Phil Jackson is no great x's-and-o's floor general. Quite the opposite. His faith in certain players, allowing them floor time they seemingly do not deserve, can be infuriating. Jackson is also prone to letting his team play through seemingly catastrophic opening runs by the opposition, advocating the philosophy that "NBA games are never won in the 1st Quarter."

It is facile to say that Phil Jackson's 10 World Championships have fallen to him because he had the great fortune of having the two greatest Scoring Guards of this generation on his various teams. Superstars alone, magnificence in isolation, does not win the shiny rings. Ask "Coach of the Year" Mike Brown, he of the Lebron James Franchise, about that idea sometime if you don't believe me.

No, winning in the playoffs requires not masterful floor generalship, not astute substitutions from an ultra-deep 10 man roster — it requires the team to buy into a mentality of winning and to be able to control their emotions so as to perform at a high level under extreme pressure.

In the 2008-09 NBA Finals, the steady hand of Coach Phil Jackson won the day, and the frenzied substitutions and micromanagement of Orlando Head Coach Stan Van Gundy came up wanting. In one of the more astute tweets of the year, former Laker and former Magic big man Shaquille O'Neal, observed, "When the general doesn't panic, the troops don't panic." And there in lies the essence of Phil Jackson's greatness as a coach — the ability to enable his charges to perform at a high level under the media hysterics of the NBA Playoffs.

But it is not just the venerable, grizzled 64 year old coach or the four-time World Champion Laker Guard tandem that exhibited playoff moxie. Hemingwayesque "grace under pressure" was shown in spades by Small Forward Trevor Ariza, a 23 year old who cut his teeth in the UCLA basketball mill before completing short and unhappy stints in New York and Orlando. In the pressure-packed NBA Finals Ariza, far and away the best perimeter defender on the Lakers team, was given the assignment of stopping the most deadly scorer on the Magic team, the 6'10" Hedo Turkoglu[was: Power Forward-In-Name-Only Rashard Lewis]. He did a magnificent job.

Ariza made game-turning steals in the Western Conference Finals against Denver. He did a fantastic job neutralizing Denver's big guns with his steady defensive pressure. In the Finals, Ariza went on to hit critical shots which powered key Laker runs in Games  4 and 5. 

Playoff performance has little to do with the simplistic measures of "experience" like chronological age and the number of playoff games played. Instead, it has a great deal to do the mastery an athlete has over their own body, their ability to perform at peak levels against aggressive opposition without truncating their game through a paralyzing fear of taking risks. Champions must know how to deal with both the physiological impact of pressure and the psychological aspect of pressure. They do not choke; moreover, just as importantly, they are not afraid of choking. They believe.

The 2008-09 NBA season was about a Laker team that knew what they wanted and who ultimately followed the path to get there.

The metaphorical window is now open for Portland to follow their own particular path to the same concrete end — an NBA Championship.