Playoff Mind Games

In any sport, the playoffs are inevitably the time where teams bear down, focus, and try every trick, ploy, strategy, and maneuver they can to scratch out one more victory. This past Sunday, basketball may have witnessed one of the more peculiar playoff strategies Los Angeles Lakers head coach Phil Jackson reined in NBA-leading-scorer Kobe Bryant, who scored only 22 points in the teams 107-102 Game 1 loss to the Phoenix Suns. In certain respects, the strategy makes a lot of sense. LA is much stronger than Phoenix inside, so Jackson wanted to press that advantage by focusing more on promising power forward Kwame Brown than on Bryant. Also, talented though Bryant is, the Lakers cannot win a championship without strong contributions from the supporting cast, so Game 1 is as good a time as ever to try to get them involved.

But on a much more obvious level the strategy makes no sense at all. Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a single game this season. He is the NBA's leading scorer and may very win the MVP award. He is the most dangerous weapon the Lakers have. In the playoffs, where every game counts, why would you not shoot all your bullets? In Sunday's game, when Bryant was given free range on offense in the fourth quarter, his shots weren't falling because he hadn't been able to establish a consistent flow earlier in the game. It seems that the Lakers had wasted their best asset.

Phil Jackson is not a stupid coach -- after all, he has one nine championships. Which is why I wonder if he's playing mind games with the Suns. Going into Game 1, the Suns undoubtedly had one defensive agenda: stop Kobe. But now after the Lakers nearly beat them in Game 1 without too much help from Bryant, their defensive game plan for the rest of the series suddenly becomes much more muddied. Do they focus on Bryant and get killed inside? Do they ease off on Kobe and risk being the victims of one of his offensive ambushes? Is it possible that Phil Jackson played a risky Game 1 hand by under-utilizing Bryant just to push the Suns back on their heels, to give the Lakers the advantage of surprising them game in and game out for the rest of the series with their offensive approach?

If that is indeed what Jackson has done, it only confirms for me his strategic brilliance. He found a way to turn a perceived weakness (the one-dimensional nature of the Lakers attack) and turned it into a source of frustration, doubt, and anxiety for the Phoenix Suns, a situation that can only improve LA's chances for victory.