The NBA Finals, where hard work happens

LOS ANGELES -- The NBA Finals are fun. The NBA Finals are a grind.

Lakers vs. Celtics is fun. Boston vs. Los Angeles, East vs. West, mano a mano, same thing. Getting to watch a championship series played out beneath all those banners and retired jerseys, with legends on the court and even bigger legends back in the hallways and up in the stands, that's crazy, giddy fun with a capital "Ph."

Ron Artest vs. Paul Pierce is punishing. Coping with Kobe Bryant is trigonometry on a 24-second clock. Somebody on the Lakers is going to have to slow down Rajon Rondo, but that somebody's ankles are going to be yelling back at him, "No, you do it!" That's not fun, that's work.

And that pretty much is how The Finals breaks down. For those doing the spectating, the rooting, the analyzing and the criticizing, the 12th showdown between the Celtics and the Lakers figures to be good times, the one thing that could make eight months and three earlier playoff rounds worth it all. No one from that group should want a sweep; this is something to be savored, something that deserves to stretch to at least six games (dare we say seven?).

For those in the trenches, though, this is work. Business. Serious stuff played for the highest stakes. Reputations can be built or ruined. Jobs and contracts can be earned or lost. Names can be made or cursed -- or wind up attached to some stranger's baby this summer if the player does especially well.

That's pressure. That's work. That's hard.

"I have a series to play. I have a series to win. I'll just focus on that," Bryant told reporters Wednesday when asked to wax a little rhapsodic on the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, the history, the emotions and all the other noise that has little do with his or his teammates' immediate agenda. For them -- well, for Bryant anyway, since his will is so easy to see compared to the rest -- this is all about 48 minutes times best-of-seven.

Ask about fun, you risk getting a very different "eff" word back from this guy. It's like trying to sneak "funny" past Joe Pesci.

"I only think about this one match up," Bryant said. "The happy times of Magic winning against Boston or the sad times of Jerry West losing to them has no impact on me whatsoever."

The politically correct thing for a player or coach to say is "Oh sure, this is the fun time of the season. This is what you play for. Be sure to enjoy it, men, because you never know when you'll get another chance." And that is true, up to a point. But there's a zero-sum ending to this all that allows for only one winner. One team won't be able to take much enjoyment from this Finals experience until sometime in the distant future, and the other team won't know that it's OK to enjoy the ride until the ride is over.

It's like getting on a roller coaster but only exhaling when you step off, safe and sound. "OK, now, go ahead, laugh, scream, go nuts!" Nope. See? Too late.

"It's more like the opportunity to have fun," Lakers forward Luke Walton said. "We've given ourselves that by getting to the NBA Finals. Everything building up to it has been fun --looking back on it. Because it was hard, hard work getting there.

"So it's more like satisfaction. You're out there, obviously you love basketball, so that's fun. But it's not like you're just relaxed and partying and all over TV and all that. For family and friends, this is fun. But for us, it's work. If we take care of business, it allows us to have a lot of fun when we get done."

Allows us. To have a lot of fun. When we get done. Ugh. That sounds like someone explaining the punchline to a joke, and we all know how funny that isn't.

How much of The Finals is fun, how much is work for the players? Rasheed Wallace wouldn't go there. "Honestly, I don't even want to answer that," he said, cryptically. "For one, I have too deep of an opinion for it. And I don't want to get fined. So I'm not going to answer that."

L.A. forward Lamar Odom, perhaps telling us more about himself than about The Finals, said: "Basketball's always fun. You compete hard. The games are hard. You're going to be achy. But the game itself is ... a game. This is what I would be doing for nothing. ... Checkers, chess, baseball, handball, badminton -- it's all a game."

No team had more fun in the moments after clinching a championship than the 2008 Celtics, who danced, mugged, tipped Gatorade coolers, kissed the parquet hardwood and generally cavorted like Republicans getting a tax cut. The operative word, though, was "after."

"It's hard," Boston center Kendrick Perkins told me. "You've got to pick and choose how you enjoy it. You don't want to enjoy it too much now because you really haven't done nothin'. Our goal is not just to get to the Finals but to win the Finals. So it's hard for us to enjoy it right now, because we're not done yet."

Said the Celtics' Kevin Garnett, reflective and appropriately grim: "The competiion could be labeled as fun. ... So you pull your fun times out of it. But for the most part, we're here to work and get something done."

The media and the fans in the vicinity around Staples Center seemed to be having fun on the eve of Thursday's Game 1 with the anticipation, the prognostications and the debates. Inside, though, there might as well have been a time clock and cubicles on the court. Men at work. Even Ron Artest has gone serious on us, no dye, no messages shaved into his hair.

Whoa, wait a minute. There's Phil Jackson, working the Lakers practice Wednesday morning in jeans and a pair of flip-flops. Now that looks like fun. Or at least someone who, after working and motivating teams through 12 Finals experiences, would know where the fun might be hiding.

"I think joy is in the competition," Jackson said, "and if you are a player that relishes competition, I think this is what you consider to be fun. Even though it may not be ha ha fun, it's engagement. It's immersion. It's focus, all those things that draw the best out of your attention and your capabilities energy wise. And so I think that is fun.

"I'm reticent a little bit to use this analysis, but you talk to guys that come back from the war and they miss being in the war. They go back and re enlist because they miss that total immersion of life that they have at that particular time. That's some of what an athlete gets, that adrenaline, that immersion of total use of their facilities and all their faculties, that make it hard to leave the game, I think, ultimately at the end of their careers."

Hmm. So maybe it's the George S. Patton-on-combat variety of "God help me, I do love it so" fun. That sense of fulfillment that comes from doing exactly what you want to be doing, precisely what you should be doing, at absolutely the right time and place.

Said Walton: "Obviously it's not life or death like war is. It's not as serious. But you go through a lot. You fight each other, you console each other, you sweat together, you cry together, you celebrate together, you get hurt together. And by the end of all of it, you build that frenzy. In the summertime, you start to relax. All of a sudden, it's August and you're like, I can't wait to get back to doing that again."

Sounds like fun. Sort of. For us anyway.

Let the games and the grind begin.

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA for 25 years. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter.

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