Frank Vogel is putting the asterisk talk to rest. Speaking with The Athletic, the former Lakers head coach defended the legitimacy of the 2020 championship, saying his team was the best in the league all season and would have won the title no matter where the games were played.
“I don’t really subscribe to the fact that teams that lost get to say, ‘We didn’t want to be there,’” Vogel said. “And the thing that sticks out to me, for all the people that want to asterisk this thing, we were the No. 1 team from day one. We entered the bubble as the No. 1 team in the league, the No. 1 seed. We were gonna win that thing, whether it was in the bubble or whether it was in Staples Center. We were winning that thing. We had that belief.”
The 2019-20 season was not a normal one. While it may have started innocently enough, things turned haywire as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged across America. The season was forced to shut down in March, prompting a hiatus that lasted for months.
Things finally resumed in late July, when teams were called back to play in a quarantine bubble in Orlando. It was unprecedented territory for the league, but they had no choice but to make it work in less-than-ideal conditions.
While the NBA routine eventually fell back into its usual rhythm, that season remains somewhat controversial in the basketball community. Mostly, people like to argue that the oddities of that year devalue the Lakers’ title run.
What the critics like to forget, however, is that the Lakers were already leading the West before COVID had even emerged. In the first season with LeBron James and Anthony Davis, they were dominating the league and held a 52-19 record to top the standings.
By the time they showed up to the “bubble” months later, the Lakers were more than ready to finish the job and complete their championship mission. Kobe Bryant’s death that January only helped fuel their drive.
Today, while it’s popular to discredit that title, it wasn’t so easily won. Besides having to stay focused amid worldwide chaos, the Lakers had to stay motivated even though they were cut off from their friends, families, and homes. Other teams, like the Clippers, completely gave up that summer, but the Lakers never wavered.
For Vogel, who was coaching them at the time, that run wasn’t some miracle. Rather, it was the culmination of hard work, dedication, and commitment to the craft that allowed them to maximize their potential. They had everything going their way that season, and it all came together at the perfect time.
So while the Lakers did not want to be in that bubble, they pushed through the discomfort for the sake of winning it all. Asterisk or not, they came out on top, and their place in history is forever marked because of it.
In the end, Frank Vogel’s defense of the Lakers’ 2020 title is a reminder that championships are never given, only earned. The setting may have been different, but the heart, focus, and determination of that Lakers squad were the same, and no asterisk can take that away.
