Magic Johnson Claims Lakers Big 3 Beats Miami’s

We’re still experiencing the aftershock of yet another big trade to the Los Angeles area. Last year the big trade was Chris Paul moving from the Southeast to the big lights, big city of L.A. to play for the Clippers. This year it’s Dwight Howard heading out to play for that other L.A. team you might have heard of.

And already the critics are leaping from one side of the country to the other with Howard and Magic Johnson is one of them.

Don’t act so surprised, Johnson spent his career with the Lakers and had it not been for his abrupt retirement in 1992, Johnson could have very well played into the mid-90’s and possible even overlapped with the Kobe Bryant era. But Johnson nevertheless went on Mike and Mike in the Morning to be the first NBA talking head to go on record as saying the Lakers will beat the Heat in the Finals next season.

“It’s going to take some time to get to know each other and really know how to play together,” Johnson said on the radio show. “But the difference (from when Miami’s Big 3 came together) is you get a real leader in Steve Nash, who gets the Lakers in their offensive set, who can be a penetrator and make everybody better.”

Johnson goes on to explain that the Miami Big 3 are perimeter shooters while the Laker offense won’t be. He didn’t elaborate any further than that.

The hot matchup to watch now in the West will be the Thunder and the Lakers. It’s amazing how quickly tones can shift in the NBA. Last year LeBron James was still the villain and the most hated man in the NBA. Now, if the Lakers make it past the darling Thunder in the West, LeBron will be the anti-hero, someone the whole basketball world gets behind to stop this menace from the West.

Dwight Howard made absolutely no friends in this process, whining from the start and leading the Magic on like a hot girl leads on her best friend in high school. Howard is that girl, and even though the Magic are completely incompetent when it comes to making good trades, you have to feel sorry that they had to go through all the Dwight drama and end up with one of the most lopsided NBA trades ever where they didn’t even get Andrew Bynum.

Then again, you don’t feel too sorry for Orlando for that long. After all they did reject a pretty decent trade (in comparrison) from Brooklyn and they totally ignored what would have been a great trade from the Rockets.

Houston was offering to not only take on Dwight and all of the Magic’s bad contracts, but they were willing to serve up just about everyone on their team, recent draft picks included, not named Asik or Lin.

So Orlando can pretend to be the victim here but they knew the drink was poison when they drank it.

At the end of the day, at the very least, the basketball fan in all of us is the true winner. Like Magic Johnson said this morning, we finally might get the Finals we’ve all been waiting for with Kobe vs. LeBron and all the weapons to boot. So at the very least, this upcoming NBA season is going to be one of the most entertaining in a while.