The bubble
The impact of the NBA’s bubble will be the elephant in the room when the 2020 Lakers are debated for years to come. Some say it’s the hardest championship ever, some say the easiest. If you want my opinion, and I hope you do because if you’re still reading then you’ve come pretty far, the bubble is irrelevant to the discussion.
Call me old fashioned but I like to form opinions based on evidence, and there is nothing that definitively tells me that the bubble was any harder or easier than any other year. There are too many unanswerable questions.
Did the neutral court help or hurt? You can say not having to play four out of seven games on an opponent’s floor helped a team like the Heat, but they had a great record at home and a terrible record on the road all season long. How did playing every game in Orlando with no fans transform them into a team that could beat the best teams in the Eastern Conference in six games or less?
Did the condensed schedule favor younger teams? I don’t know, let’s ask 35-year-old LeBron James. And if you want to say the Clippers lost because of the bubble, then you also have to explain how they got a 3-1 series lead and had multiple second-half double-digit leads in closeout games in the very same bubble. The bubble didn’t lose those games, the Clippers did.
The bubble is ultimately just a tool for fans to express their confirmation bias. Lakers fans will use the condensed schedule and lack of homecourt advantage to say it was the hardest championship ever. Lakers’ detractors will use the parity of the bubble games to invalidate the championship and say it was easy. Both are wrong.
The 2020 NBA playoffs were different. Different doesn’t mean they were easier or harder. It just means they were different.