Can you dig it? Can you hear it?
They’re getting louder, the echoes from 2002, when Lakers flags flapped above car doors all over L.A., and for a third consecutive year, residents paraded, gleeful and triumphant, with another championship to celebrate.
As well as any place, Los Angeles understands: Great teams win championships. Exceptionally great teams repeat, back-to-back it up. But only the greatest teams three-peat.
We haven’t witnessed a successful trifecta in North American sports since those Lakers beat the Indiana Pacers, Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets in successive NBA Finals.
But can history three-peat itself now? Can the Dodgers hit the three?
Take a look at the blueprints of former Laker coach Phil Jackson’s three three-peats, especially the one in L.A., and tell me, do you see it too?
Do you recognize the familiar notes and similar focus? The symmetry in what both teams say about what it took and will take to pull off the fifth three-peat in their respective sports? You see all the signs pointing to yes?
“The mistake that championship teams often make is to try to repeat their winning formula,” Jackson wrote in his 2013 book, “Eleven Rings.” “The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new.”
Funny, Dave Roberts said much the same thing: “There’s a core group of players, but things play out so differently every year. I think it’s to be able to separate it and look at it by itself.”
It helped the Lakers, of course, that they had two of the greatest players who ever lived, in Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. And that the Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani, the greatest singular baseball talent ever — flanked on all sides by baseball A-listers.
Yes, they produce. They also spur production.
“It was about winning championships, that was the expectation and I think everyone in that locker room felt that pressure,” said Mark Madsen, whose first two NBA seasons were on Lakers title teams. “I felt that pressure as a role player, and that made me better.”
“It’s easy to come here and work hard,” said Ben Casparius, the Dodgers’ 27-year-old third-year reliever. “I want to perform well for Freddie (Freeman) and for Mookie (Betts) and for these guys who’ve been doing it for a long time, who deserve that level of focus and adapting to be able to win.”
The Lakers always had stars in their roles align: Big-shot makers like Horry and Derek Fisher. The Dodgers have big-hit-makers like Kiké Hernández and Miguel Rojas.
The Lakers had Jerry West set things in motion then; the Dodgers have Andrew Friedman doing it now.
The Lakers had Jackson, the Dodgers have Roberts — championship players who’ve excelled as managers of men.
But, listen, that’s only toeing the edge of the rubber.
“It has to do with management,” said Robert Horry, one of seven players who was part of all three of those Lakers’ title teams. “If they find the best massage therapist, the best trainers, the best nutritionist, all those things play a part. You want to feel like you’re being taken care of … and athletes, we want to be pampered, we want to be loved, you want to be appreciated, and I think both organizations strive to do that.”
Only a jumpball to open play.
“There’s a lot of glitz and glamour around the Dodgers and L.A.,” Casparius said. “But I don’t think people really understand the amount of work that goes into (it). From our nutritionist to our trainers to our head of strength and conditioning to our pitching coordinators, everybody’s working hard. People aren’t happy when we lose spring training games. People aren’t happy if we make a couple errors or pitchers aren’t throwing strikes. The bar is high everywhere.”
Sure, it’s basketballs to baseballs, and not a perfect comparison; just imagine how high Ohtani’s usage would be if you could spam the pick-and-roll with him.
And the Lakers’ three-peat was almost a quarter of a century ago; their entire player payroll was $53 million — about $4 million less than Kyle Tucker will earn this season.
Oh, but tomayto, tomahto.
If those Lakers — combustible and bored but built better than every other team on the planet at the time — could turn the triple play, so can Roberts’ drama-free superteam.
But the first rule about three-peating is that you do not talk about three-peating, or as third baseman Max Muncy surmised: “The biggest challenge of a three-peat is not treating it like it’s a three-peat.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Horry said. “When we were going for the three-peat, we didn’t talk about it. We just said we wanted to play the best ball that we could.”
The Dodgers understand, Hernández said, because “whatever happened last year and the previous year, that’s already paid for, that’s already history. You’re not trying to win three championships in one year, you’re just trying to win this year.”
The beauty of that thinking is that it transcends three-peats and starts to be about life more broadly.
“I remember,” Madsen said, “what George Mumford would always say, our team psychologist: ‘Don’t live in the past, don’t live in the future, only live in the present. If you make a mistake, don’t dwell on it. And don’t get consumed with thinking about the future. Only be in the present, be the best version of yourself in the present. The rest will take care of itself.’”
Of course, opponents are also going to want badly to be the best versions of themselves in those moments they’re facing the Dodgers.
“Each and every night, you are the measuring stick for every team you play,” Horry said.
Echoed catcher Dalton Rushing: “You have teams that come to town and they could’ve lost their last 13 games, but if they take two from the Dodgers, their whole month’s complete.”
Gotta love that, though, these guys say.
“I take it as a compliment,” Hernández said. “I take it as a privilege.”
The privilege is pressure, pressure is a privilege and the possibility of making such rarefied history, with folks at FanGraphs giving the Dodgers 27% odds to win this World Series, is anything but automatic.
“We can see why the third time is the hardest,” Fisher said on June 12, 2002, after the Lakers swept the Nets to win No. 3, capping a season in which they finished tied for second in the Western Conference.
“This started as a foregone conclusion. It didn’t look that way as we went forward. So, for our basketball team, the fact we didn’t give up makes it special. We fought.”
L.A. remembers it. L.A. appreciates it.
“(The Lakers) had some great teams, and this city loves winning,” Hernández said. “And we’ve done pretty good at winning the last couple years, so we’re trying to keep doing it.”
L.A. digs it.
The post The Dodgers are chasing a three-peat. They can take some cues from the 2002 Lakers appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
