Doug’s Sports Rap: NBA Finals

The NBA finals start tonight and its not surprising that LeBron James is on one of the teams, the LA Lakers will take on the Miami Heat in the pandemic riddled shortened season.

I don’t think anyone is too surprised that the Lakers are the last team standing in the western conference, but with four other teams in the eastern conference finishing better than the Miami Heat, it could be one that analysts didn’t predict.

The extended season which started in late July with the 22 top teams playing a shortened season round of qualifications has come down to these two teams, both had lottery picks last year.

The irony of this series is LeBron will face the team he led to two NBA championships in 2012 and 2013.

Going up against his old coach Erik Spoelstra, and Heat president and basketball genius Pat Riley. This will be the first time they have ever faced each other in the playoffs.

Many people thought that the Milwaukee Bucks would be in the finals but the Miami Heat took them down in just five games.

The Boston Celtics fought through six games to beat the former NBA Champion Toronto Raptors, and then the Miami Heat took down the Celtics in six games.

I said before and it���s not surprising that these teams played their hearts out and both deserve to be here.

In normal conditions, these two teams would have to travel approximately 2,745 miles back and forth in this series, but these are no normal times and the bubble is a fan-less venue unless you count the virtual recorded fans on the screens.

There will be no cantankerous crowd booing LeBron in Miami, only the recording crowd cheers and chants of Defense.

We know what LeBron James and Anthony Davis can do, but how will they match up with Jimmy Butler and Goran Dragic.

There are many key factors to this series and you can break it down in many ways, offense 3-point shooting, defense, rebounding its all fundamentals and I think each game will be different, and could easily go the distance of seven games.

I don’t want to make a choice on who wins it all, but its clearly the Lakers series to win or lose, if they play up to their potential.

[via NBA.com] [via NYpost.com]