NBA Time Capsule: Ranking every NBA Finals series since 1990
23. 2004 – Detroit Pistons over Los Angeles Lakers (4-1)
This series isn’t particularly good, but it’s surprisingly nostalgic and earns extra points for that. This is an iconic Pistons lineup of Billups, Hamilton, Prince, and the Wallace “brothers” vs. the Shaq + Kobe duo and the super-weird additions of the ghosts of Gary Payton and Karl Malone.
The Pistons are the perfect team for early-2000s basketball in the NBA. The pace is slow, teams don’t yet value shooting in the way they do today so spacing is poor, and they are so athletic across the board that they make it nearly impossible to score.
On the other side, the Lakers are pure dysfunction by 2004. The Malone-Payton experiment is a bust, and at this point, Kobe and Shaq are one side-eye away from getting into a fistfight on the court. It’s their last series together and both of them are just happy to move on from the other.
That tension reaches a tipping point in Game 4 when Shaq is having a vintage performance down 2-1 in the series and Kobe refuses to stop shooting despite not being able to make anything. Shaq needed the ball every possession and Kobe wasn’t going to do that. They lost the game and all but rolled over in the following elimination game.
The two of them needed to go their separate ways, and this series was the final straw
22. 2020 – Los Angeles Lakers over Miami Heat (4-2)
It’s hard to get a good grasp of the historical context of a series that just finished up a couple of months ago and rank it against so many other NBA Finals series. With more distance from it, I’ll probably rank it somewhere other than 22nd, but I don’t know if it’ll be higher or lower.
Despite going six games it never felt like the series was really in doubt for L.A. due to Miami’s injuries, so I could see ranking it lower in the twenties. But I also think there is a possibility that the novelty of being the only (hopefully) NBA Finals to be played in a bubble might make it more historically interesting and move it higher up the list. It’s automatically re-watchable because it has circumstances that no other series can rival. I don’t know, ask me in five years.
If you’re reading this I would assume you probably watched these Finals as they happened and don’t need a detailed recap, so I won’t harp on it. But even just a few months later, Game 5 is still worth re-watching just to watch the 1v1 battle at the end of the game between LeBron James and Jimmy Butler. It’s one of the great mano-a-mano stretches in NBA playoff history.