The 2019-20 NBA season will be unlike any other in basketball history.
The season came to an abrupt halt in March 2020 due to the pandemic, but resumed in July in “The Bubble” in Orlando, Florida, with 22 teams competing for the NBA title.
People have long debated how to frame a title run, given the lengthy breaks, quarantines, condensed schedules, play-in competitions, lack of travel and fans.
Some would argue it should have an asterisk because, unlike other seasons, it was arguably easier since there were no road trips and no fans in attendance.
Speaking on the Draymond Green Show, former Laker Kentavious Caldwell-Pope tore that theory in half and infuriated the public.
“They just hate each other. It's one of the hardest championships to win. You play one season and then it's over. You don't know if you're going to come back and play basketball. Watching them play in the regular season, we were like, 'Oh my God.' The season is over. Damn it. What if we don't come back? Because we already thought in our minds, 'This is our championship,' even if it gets canceled because of COVID. But then the season stops, and boom, the season starts again and we have to go back in the bubble… When we found out the season was going to start again in the bubble, we were excited. We were ready to win a championship like we wanted to.
Then the season was stopped again in the bubble. All of that messed with people's minds and made them feel like, 'I'm ready to go home. Let's forget about basketball.' I'm so grateful and I'm so grateful to all my teammates at the time. Their mindset was to win that championship. They were ready. They were here for a reason and we wanted it.
In 2020, people will forget all of these details. Hopefully, the Disney/ESPN documentary on “The Bubble” will come to fruition and finally bring closure to this story. Sure, it was different than other titles, but it's hard to start, restart, and start again. The season started in October 2019 and ended in October 2020.
Throughout that time, the Lakers have been a consistently top team and have had to stay that way despite all the obstacles.
Did the lack of fans help? It hurt, because the Lakers' only reward for being the best team in the Western Conference was the chance to decide Game 7 on the court that bore their name, rather than a raucous showdown in a packed stadium in Los Angeles.
Despite all of this, the Lakers fought through and won, and Caldwell-Pope further explained how they did it:
“We wanted this game so badly that we would have gone through all the obstacles. For me, it was the hardest, the shutting down, restarting, shutting down. This game changes a lot of people's mindsets: 'Enough. I'm not doing this anymore.' I've always been grateful for that and I'm grateful that everyone on my team at the time had the same mindset. They just weren't ready.”
No two titles are the same. Like snowflakes, each one is unique and cannot be duplicated or reproduced. The Lakers won the 2020 NBA title. Love them, hate them, ignore them, or praise them, they won. They were the #1 seed in the Western Conference and with all the top teams competing against each other that year, no one could beat them.
Not the Hoston Rockets, Portland Trail Blazers, Denver Nuggets, Miami Heat or even the collapsed Los Angeles Clippers, which Caldwell-Pope made sure to mention on his podcast.
They won it all, despite everything and overcoming everything, which is why banner No. 17 hangs in the Crypto.com Arena.
Caldwell-Pope knows a thing or two about winning championships, both as a current NBA player and as someone who won one with the Denver Nuggets after the 2020 season in 2023. When he says it's one of the “hardest” championships ever, I'm inclined to take him at his word.
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