This Rockets-Lakers series has got a little silly. I mean, it just seems fate is wiggling its fingers with these guys a bit. The Lakers have zero heart. But wait! They have no-sweat-beat-you-by-40 swagger. Uh...what? And c'mon. If you wanted to call this series a roller-coaster for the Rockets, you'd have to get Dante to write you the highs and lows. They steal homecourt. Then they give it back. And Yao goes down for the rest of the playoffs. But then they win game 4 with a team featuring Ron-Ron and a lovable bunch of statistical misfits (that's a good thing. see: Aaron Brooks). Then they lose by 40. What my father would call an old fashion dursting. Then they come back and win game 6. Really, this has been more like Hawks-Heat than anything the Celts have done since picking up Ray Allen.
But what's kept it from being quite the sullen, sordid affair of uneven play and inconsistent competitiveness has been the extra-curricular affairs of this series. Shane Battier's facial defense on The Machine; Yao's premature Willis Reed moment; D-Fish going deep dish on Luis "Lanks" Scola; Kobe's un-defining of the term "going for the jugular" and Artest responding with, "What does Ronald William 'Ron' Artest Jr. look like?"; Ron-Ron's childhood friend taking a chair leg through the chest; and, now, Carl Landry getting his 'Zo on (watch the dunk again) and re-inventing the finger wag. You click on all those links? Sweet.
But what really tops the crop of silliness and makes it a set of antics that should go down in history is Artest's goading Kobe into a tech. (vid above. jeez, took me long enough.) Why is this important? Because, what with the NY Times article, the solid 'D' on Kobe all series long, and the several irrefutable screenshots of Battier with all kinds of legal finger-to-face interactions with Mamba...well, we're forced to think of this as the blossoming of a legit rivalry. If the Rockets win game 7, then even more so. What's important is Ron-Ron used his craziness to get to Kobe. And he fooled the refs too. The League office is another question, with their retro hand-downs of late. Still, it reminded of another player who used to worm his way under the skin of another 13th overall pick who never could quite measure up to MJ. If Artest has actually turned the corner to making his idiosyncrasies work for him instead of against his team, then we might have a truly scary player on our hands. Maybe we can even hope for a WWE match between Kobe and the Gila Ron-ster.
You can catch Ron-Ron trying to catch flies at about the 1:17 mark. This occurs after he successfully coaxes the tech out of Kobe. What do you think Ron's saying? Last time these two got into a verbal sparring match, their asses got parodied. My money's on, "Landry's gonna dunk on your boys in the 4th. You'll be waiting to come into the game, and you'll flinch your face like I did this to you," and he sticks out his tongue.
