NBA Butterfly Effect: What if the Blazers took down the Shaq and Kobe Lakers?

The history of the NBA is a tangled web of what-ifs and could-have-beens. This week at The Step Back, we’re going to pull on some of those threads to alternate futures, focusing in on key turning points in the history of players, teams and the league itself, wondering how things could have been different. Welcome to Butterfly Effect Week.

The Lakers established a 3-1 lead over the Trail Blazers in the 2000 Western Conference Finals. Then the Blazers evened the series, only to watch a 15-point lead melt away in the last 10 minutes of the fourth quarter in Game 7. The Lakers defeated the Pacers in the NBA Finals, the first of the Shaq and Kobe era’s three titles. The Blazers, as constituted around Scottie Pippen and Rasheed Wallace, never again advanced beyond the first round.

But what if the Blazers had escaped Game 7 in Los Angeles with a victory? And what if they had also triumphed against the Pacers?

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For one thing, the joint legacies of O’Neal and Bryant would have been branded with the collapse of a 3-1 series lead. Would the world have been any easier on them than it was on Steph Curry or Kevin Durant? Keep in mind that unlike Curry neither O’Neal nor Bryant had won anything as teammates, aside from regular season accolades. O’Neal’s biggest accomplishments were behind him, in Orlando, with Penny Hardaway in tow, and even that duo’s greatest run pegged O’Neal a notch below Hakeem Olajuwon. Bryant, on the other hand, was still synonymous with playoff air balls, even if he was the next Michael Jordan.

Still, O’Neal and Bryant ended their careers near the top of basketball’s pecking orders. They won titles together. They won titles apart. They won enough that maybe the specific number of rings no longer tell the whole story. But, if you are counting, O’Neal fell two short of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bryant fell one short of Jordan. I guess you could hold that against them, but they would still land somewhere in the vicinity of all-time greats if they had fallen three short or two short. The Blazers winning would not have reduced O’Neal in power and size, and the loss would have only fueled Bryant’s competitive fire. Maybe they run off three straight titles between the years 2001 and 2003.

So asking what would have happened if the Blazers had beaten the Lakers in 2000 isn’t really a question about the Lakers so much as one about that team from Portland. The team in red and black arguably had more to gain from not losing a 15-point lead, because in losing that lead they started down the path to Greg Oden and Brandon Roy. But that’s skipping over dominoes and landing amidst broken bodies. We’re not there yet, but stuck in the certainty of Los Angeles’ turn of the century dominance.

How did Los Angeles win the series? How could Portland have won it?

The Blazers built their lead in the third quarter while they outscored the Lakers by 12 points. Rasheed Wallace and Steve Smith combined for 20 in the quarter as O’Neal finished the same stretch with a rare goose egg.

The fourth quarter, however, was a different story. Sabonis, who had prevented O’Neal from gaining inside position for most of the third, could not help but foul the big man throughout the game’s final stages. In these moments, the 7-foot-3 Lithuanian turned to the referees as if he were trapped in a Boris Karloff impression. When he finally staggered to the bench with six points and five fouls, a much smaller sparring partner for O’Neal entered the game. Brian Grant scrapped and clawed and shook his dreads as if O’Neal were a Babylonian garden, but mostly he looked like a kitten herding dinosaurs. The Blazers were tremendously deep, blessed with a plethora of shooters, but their frontline was Sabonis and Wallace and everyone on the roster whom coach Mike Dunleavy did not trust in crunch time.

Watching the game again, one scrambles for strategic solutions. Perhaps if Wallace had opted to guard O’Neal a different result could have happened. But even in 2004, when Wallace’s Pistons defeated the Lakers in the NBA Finals, he was not the Wallace guarding O’Neal. That job fell to his teammate, Ben Wallace.

Another possibility for how the Blazers might have toppled the Lakers would have been to embrace small ball before it was in vogue. Such a plan would have left Grant on the bench. Wallace still would have had to guard O’Neal, and it’s possible either Detlef Schrempf or Bonzi Wells could have been successful at the power forward spot, although Dunleavy’s dedication to positionality makes this an unlikely scenario. It also seems unlikely the team would have considered sliding Pippen, the team’s best defender, off Bryant just as the young player started to find his offense. Lastly, this plan would have left O’Neal unimpeded.

All this is to say that with Sabonis on the bench, there wasn’t a whole lot the Blazers could have done, especially since we already know what they did do. They lost the game.

But what if they hadn’t? What if the Laker comeback screeched to a halt, like a bird flying into a moving window on the highway? This loss may not have been about maps and diagrams so much as physical execution. What if one or two plays could have turned out differently?

Imagine Bryant drives below the left elbow and lofts the ball with his right hand. To some, the movement suggests he is shooting the ball. But he is not. He is setting the table for a thunderous dunk. The ball floats high, almost too high. Only a few people on earth could rein in such a pass. O’Neal is one of them, and he just so happens to be leaving the ground as Bryant launches the ball in his direction. For a moment lasting less than a fraction of a second, the two players share one brain. O’Neal’s arm stretches high and wide. He captures the orange globe in the palm of his hand, and then clank — the ball flies off the rim and into the stunned crowd.

What happened? Well, just as O’Neal’s size and length allowed him to capture the ball in the first place, his size and length is also why the ball landed as it did, with too much force. Looking back on it, one wonders whether Bryant should have simply shot the ball instead of trolling for highlights and knows that this is how comebacks wither and die.

With that one change, Los Angeles’ lead with 41.3 seconds left shrinks from six points in one timeline to four in an alternative timeline.

Then imagine Wallace drills a deep 3, just as he did. Then have Ron Harper make one of two foul shots, just as he did, on the next Los Angeles possession. But now the lead is still just two and not four. Then imagine Steve Smith loses the ball, followed by Bryant grabbing it, followed by Pippen fouling Bryant, only maybe this time the foul is not intentional. Then imagine Bryant missing both foul shots, just as he did. With 25.4 seconds left, the Blazers have the ball, and they trail by two. Imagine Steve Smith misses a shot, just as he did, but then imagine something drastically different but not unknown in the worlds of basketball.

In a scramble for the ball, Wallace, a 6-foot-10 power forward, makes the most important rebound of his life. He dribbles twice, maybe three times. He drifts beyond the arc and realizes no one is necessarily guarding him. He decides to shoot the ball on a whim, and the ball goes in — the Blazers take the lead! Perhaps they win in regulation. Perhaps they win in overtime. Regardless, they win.

And, for the most part, the only changes to the record of events are a missed spectacle by O’Neal, one additional rebound for Wallace and one additional 3-pointer. Maybe the game could have turned in other ways too. But this scenario is a fathomable one.

What happens next?

If the Blazers had won, the easiest what-if to answer is the one dealing with Pippen’s legacy. As long as the Blazers managed to also win in the NBA Finals, his leadership would have been cited as a catalyst. In the scenario I imagined, Pippen still ends up sitting at the end of Game 7, having spent all of his six fouls guarding Bryant all night. Maybe that’s cruel, but I simply can’t shake the idea that his moment of redemption might somehow parallel the moment most often used to shame him.

In 1994, with Jordan playing baseball, Pippen sat out a game-winning play against the Knicks in the second round. He did so because his number wasn’t called. So the story goes. But the story of Pippen always being a Robin and never a Batman becomes more difficult to write if he’s the winner of seven rings or a Finals MVP. And a story that becomes easier to write: Jordan’s sidekick has more rings than even the GOAT himself. Imagine the hot takes. Imagine how such an occurrence might even devalue the importance of rings.

And then forget all that nonsense and inhale the aura of Wallace, Finals MVP. Seriously, what if Wallace had been named Finals MVP in the year 2000?

Always a cult figure, ‘Sheed was, at age 25, a one-time All-star with his best scoring days still ahead of him. Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan were both younger, but not by much. By 2000, Garnett was clearly the better rebounder and more versatile defender than Wallace, although few players defended Duncan as well as he did. Considering how Garnett’s Minnesota teams struggled in the playoffs, one can imagine a debate taking shape about Garnett being the better but less valuable player than Wallace. These people would point to Wallace’s ring and elevate him to a status in the game his career as is never really achieved.

The elevation of Wallace would clearly have impacted how people viewed and remember the late years of Karl Malone and Charles Barkley, when a plethora of versatile power forwards entered the NBA. Basketball fans may always have easy access to the legacies of Garnett and Duncan. So much of the 21st century NBA moves through and around them. However, the play of Wallace and Chris Webber (even a young Dirk Nowitzki or Amar’e Stoudemire) is at risk of being lost to memory and whatever they were as players will be chopped and screwed by the internet’s short attention spans.

A title in 2000 also would have knotted Wallace and Duncan in a race for rings. Think how differently those two were viewed in the century’s early years, as doe-eyed Duncan watched Wallace amass technical after technical. A Finals MVP as a young player in Portland may have given ‘Sheed’s volatility a purpose, at least in the eyes of his detractors. At this stage in their young careers, both he and Garnett were the fire to Duncan’s ice, and one wonders whether the Blazers would have traded him in February of 2004.

The Blazers lost in consecutive Western Conference Finals. In 1999, the Spurs swept them, prompting Portland’s front office to make room for Pippen’s leadership by moving Isaiah Rider and Jim Jackson. Without Pippen’s play, the team probably doesn’t push Los Angeles to seven games. No one would say it now (maybe not even then), but the Spurs teams that bookended the Laker dynasty were not built too differently from the Blazers of the same era.

The similarities between these two teams erupt from the marriages of the team’s big men. Just as the Spurs paired Duncan with a reduced version of David Robinson, the Blazers paired Wallace with a reduced version of Sabonis. One could maybe even dabble in comparisons between Damon Stoudemire and Tony Parker or Bonzi Wells and Stephen Jackson. The Blazers, however, did not respond well to their 2000 collapse, and in the following years they became trapped within first round exits and a haze of bad press.

Would a championship have solved the team’s legal issues, including, but not limited to, their fondness for marijuana? Could the 2000 run have resulted in an ever higher number of championships for this Portland crew? Most likely the answer is no.

As the Lakers continued to win championships and other teams jostled for position, the Trail Blazers transformed into the Jail Blazers. A nickname so effortless and easy it really isn’t an example of cleverness. Anyway, I’m not sure if winning a championship in 2000 would have prevented Damon Stoudemire’s three arrests for marijuana possession or the troubles with Ruben Patterson et al. Still, one could dabble with the idea that the team’s young players simply looked at the rest of the Western Conference after losing to the Lakers and bowed to their Dionysian impulses — to hell with all this — and that was that.

Their place as challengers to the Lakers was short lived, especially as the Kings emerged in their place. Strangely, winning could have reaped the same results, and this team would have still driven with reckless abandon down northwest highways, only now, when stopped by police officers, they could flash their championship hardware. Maybe Wallace sits in the passenger seat wearing a wrestling belt.

But winning can buy forgiveness, and forgiveness can be exchanged for time. While 2000 is probably the only year the Blazers could have won it all, winning it all could have kept Wallace in Portland longer.

And if the Blazers do not trade Wallace, then the Pistons do not beat the 2004 Lakers in the NBA Finals. The possibility also exists that the Pistons would not have even made the NBA Finals without him. That one Blazers title would have drastically altered the 2004 Pacers also and thus dismantled the hierarchy of the league’s Eastern Conference.

In 2000, a 21-year-old Jermaine O’Neal watched as another O’Neal dominated his teammates in the post. Blazers general manager Bob Whitsitt saw this too. Prior to the 2001 season he jettisoned Brian Grant to Miami and Jermaine O’Neal to Indiana. Portland’s front office felt their window was closing and so they panicked. The Grant deal netted Shawn Kemp, and for O’Neal, the Blazers received Dale Davis. But these two players were past their primes and could not turn the tide.

On the other hand, Jermaine O’Neal developed into a player who averaged 20 and 10 for the Pacers. The Blazers let go of him right as he could have actually helped the cause. A possible pairing of him and Wallace between the years 2001 and 2005 is intriguing. This edition of Twin Towers, backed by a young Zach Randolph, would have played next to an emerging Bonzi Wells and might possibly have been the best frontcourt in the Western Conference. They would not have been as flashy as the Kings, but they would have been a handful for either Shaq or Duncan, especially as one aged and the other lost the Admiral to his ship.

Again, though, these Blazers didn’t struggle in 2000’s aftermath due to a lack of youth and talent. The players and front office simply lost hold of the reins. And, in the case of Jermaine O’Neal, trouble would find him even outside of the greater Northwest.

If Jermaine O’Neal and Wallace are teammates in 2004, are Indiana and Detroit even rivals? If that rivalry doesn’t develop, do the words Malice at the Palace mean anything? Does Ron Artest even lie down on a scorer’s table? Is he still Ron Artest and not Metta World Peace? Is he ever even a Pacer? What happens to that press conference he gave after helping Bryant win a title in Los Angeles without Shaq?

Speaking of Shaq, what if Portland never trades Brian Grant to Miami in the 2000 offseason? If that doesn’t happen, who joins Caron Butler and Lamar Odom in the package that sends him from Los Angeles to Miami on July 14, 2004, the summer after Detroit doesn’t win the title? Does this trade happen if Los Angeles wins the 2004 title? What if Los Angeles has just finished running off titles starting in 2001 and ending in 2004? What is the ensuing impact on San Antonio, Miami, Boston and Cleveland? Who does LeBron James score 25 straight points against if not the Pistons? Who are his rivals to defeat in claiming the Eastern Conference throne?

Without ‘Sheed in Detroit and Jermaine O’Neal in Indiana, could the Nets — this time with Vince Carter in tow — have made a third straight trip to the NBA Finals in 2004? While a Vince Carter versus Kobe Bryant matchup would have offered plenty of entertainment, the result probably would have felt and looked a lot like Clyde Drexler taking on Michael Jordan in the 1992 Finals, maybe not even that. The Lakers would have most likely won that series, assuming they still survived the Western Conference in this new timeline.

And that’s the thing, a loss to the Blazers would have probably borne few changes for the Lakers.

In hindsight, the Lakers of Shaq and Kobe can look as if their victories were inevitable. Thus, imagining a loss to the Blazers can be tricky. In our minds, O’Neal always slams home that alley oop with 41.3 seconds left and runs down the court with his mouth wide enough to swallow the whole wide world and all of us with it. The noise reaches decibel levels akin to a jet engine’s flyover. His teammates rise from the bench and rush to greet him like some new golden order, like kids on a playground.

The fact Los Angeles ran off a triumvirate of titles makes it seem like they were an empire destined to happen, but their power over the Western Conference was paved on a tightrope, which, via plenty of Robert Horry and Derek Fisher highlights, they always managed to cross. A loss in 2000 doesn’t change their championship future, so much as remind everyone how difficult winning even one title is.

So the Blazers win the 2000 title, and the Lakers stumble from the wreckage — and whatever dark emotions might result from surrendering a 3-1 lead — to build some form of a dynasty a year or two later than they actually did. But, according to the new timeline, the Blazers still embrace the rapture of oblivion. Only now they are viewed as celebratory rather than mournful. They are the University of Miami football program playing basketball in America’s whitest city, or something like that, and not the team that panicked in the path of Shaq’s dominance. A 30 for 30 that remembers them with fondness would surely be in the works.

Next: Will Antetokounmpo ever develop a reliable jump shot?

And yet the most important aspect in this alternate ending has less to do with basketball and more to do with the cultural tenants of the game. Jermaine O’Neal’s presence in Portland doesn’t so much save the Trail Blazers from themselves or what the Lakers will become. He does, however, save the league from law and order. In short, the world would have far fewer dress codes.