A Crown Without a Crowd: A Deep Dive Into the 2020 Championship

English feature · same subject as above · Team: Los Angeles Lakers / Star: LeBron James

I The Night

October 11, 2020, AdventHealth Arena, inside the Orlando bubble. The horn went and the board read 106-93. There wasn't a single person in the stands. No twenty thousand people losing their minds, no crying strangers, no noise at all — just a few hundred staffers, media and players breathing in a gym. The confetti came down anyway, and it looked a little lonely.

The game itself wasn't much of a contest. Los Angeles led 28-20 after one, then outscored Miami 36-16 in the second quarter and went to the locker room up 64-36. That's the second-biggest halftime lead in Finals history, behind only the 1985 game everybody calls the Memorial Day Massacre. The margin hit 36 in the third. Miami never led for a single second.

LeBron James finished with 28 points, 14 rebounds and 10 assists — the 11th Finals triple-double of his career. At 35 years old, in an empty building, he closed out the title everyone had already agreed would be the hardest one to win.

Rajon Rondo was the surprise. Nineteen points on 8-of-11, and he went 6 for 6 in the first half, something he hadn't done since November 2007. He'd helped Boston win its 17th championship in 2008; twelve years later he helped Los Angeles win its 17th. He's the second man ever to win titles with both franchises.

Anthony Davis had 19 and 15 for the first ring of his career. Bam Adebayo went for 25 and 10 for Miami. Jimmy Butler finished with 12 — the man who'd spent the whole series running on fumes had finally run out of them.

It was the 17th championship in Lakers history, tying the Boston Celtics for the most the league has ever seen. The last one had come ten years earlier, with Kobe Bryant holding the trophy.

The celebration looked strange and sounded stranger. Players hugged, someone sprayed champagne, and the sound bounced off empty seats. Nobody had a playbook for winning a title in a room with no crowd to share it with.

When they handed him the trophy there was nobody there to roar over it. He stood holding it and the cameras caught him looking up into the empty seats, which is the image that stays with you. He said later it all felt like a dream he couldn't quite place. A championship won with no one watching counts exactly the same in the record book, but he's never pretended it was the version he'd been picturing since he was a kid in Akron.

II The Finals MVP

The 2020 Finals MVP was LeBron James, and it was unanimous — all 11 votes. It was the fourth Bill Russell Trophy of his career, after 2012 and 2013 in Miami and 2016 in Cleveland.

That put him next to Michael Jordan as the only players in league history with four Finals MVPs and four regular-season MVPs. It also made him the first player ever to win Finals MVP with three different franchises. Before that night he'd been tied with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kawhi Leonard at two teams each.

Over six games he averaged 29.8 points, 11.8 rebounds and 8.5 assists. Here's the part that shouldn't be possible: it was his best Finals MVP series of the four. Highest scoring average, highest rebounding average, best field goal percentage (59.1%), best three-point percentage (41.7%). A 35-year-old playing his tenth Finals and producing his most efficient one.

He also joined Bob Cousy, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and Scottie Pippen as the only players to lead their team in assists in the Finals for four separate championships. Everybody wants to file him as a scorer. His rings were built on passing.

The Game 6 triple-double was his fifth of that postseason and the 28th of his playoff career, second only to Magic Johnson's 30. His 11 Finals triple-doubles are already the most ever, and they came in 20% of the Finals games he's played.

What made the award hard was the timing. He was 35, in his second year with a franchise that had missed the playoffs six straight seasons before he got there, in a year that got cut in half and then finished inside a bubble. He said it himself afterward: this was probably the toughest of the four.

He'd spent the whole postseason hearing about how the Lakers were too old, too thin on shooting, too dependent on two guys. Winning the thing at the end of the strangest season the league has played didn't settle every argument. It just made most of them sound silly.

There's a detail from that regular season worth setting beside it. He'd moved to point guard full time and led the league in assists for the first time in his career, averaging 10.2 a game in his seventeenth season. Most players are hanging on by year seventeen. He was adding a whole new job description, and then three months later he went out and played the best Finals of his life.

January 25, 2020 deserves its own line. That's the night in Philadelphia when he passed Kobe for third on the all-time scoring list, in Kobe's hometown, with Kobe still alive to send him a message about it a few hours later. Three years on he'd pass Kareem for the top spot. But that night in Philadelphia is the one this group kept coming back to all season.

III The Bubble and Kobe

The real backdrop here is January 26, 2020. Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash that killed all nine people on board. The Lakers found out while flying home from Philadelphia.

The night before, in Philadelphia — Kobe's hometown — LeBron had passed him for third place on the all-time scoring list. Kobe's last tweet before he died was a message congratulating LeBron. That timeline has been told a thousand times because there isn't a way to tell it that makes it feel less brutal.

The Lakers dedicated the rest of the season to him. Black and yellow KB patches on the jerseys. Every huddle breaking on "1-2-3 Mamba." None of it was marketing. They did it in every game of the restart, in an arena with nobody watching, which is kind of the point.

Then the pandemic. The league shut down on March 11. Everything stopped. On July 30 it started again at Walt Disney World, twenty-two teams sealed inside a campus for more than three months. No home courts, no fans, no families. It was the longest season in NBA history and the strangest by a mile.

For an older roster, the bubble cut both ways. The travel was gone and the recovery time was generous, which suited them. What LeBron kept talking about afterward wasn't the basketball, though — it was the mental load of being locked in one place for ninety-plus days.

So when it ended, the first thing everyone said was about Kobe. LeBron said he hoped he'd made him proud. Every win in that run carried weight that had nothing to do with basketball, and the players never pretended otherwise.

Dwight Howard, who'd been Kobe's teammate through a famously ugly season in 2012, was the one sprinting across the floor afterward yelling that they'd gotten one. Seven years after leaving Los Angeles in disgrace, he came back as a backup center and got his ring.

The bubble asked things of these players that nobody had prepared for. Three months sealed in one place, no family, no outside world, and the sport that normally provides the escape suddenly providing none of it. Several players spoke openly about the mental strain. What kept an older Lakers roster steady was the routine — film, treatment, practice, game, repeat, with nothing else available to do.

IV The Road

Before the shutdown the Lakers were 52-19, the best record in the West. They'd opened 17-2, the best start in franchise history. They clinched a playoff berth on March 6, their first since 2013. Five days later the season stopped.

Inside the bubble they were steady. Portland took Game 1, 100-93, and then lost four straight — Davis went for 43 in the closeout. Houston went out in five. Neither series was ever really in doubt after the opening stumble.

The conference finals against Denver produced the image of the whole season. Game 2, tied at 103, Davis catches it in the right corner, rises, and buries it at the buzzer. 105-103. He landed, looked up, and yelled one name: "Kobe." The Lakers took that series in five.

They finished 16-5 and won every round before the Finals in five games or fewer. They came into the bubble as the No. 1 seed in the West and left it holding the trophy.

There's a what-if hanging over that run. The Clippers, who most people picked to come out of the West, blew a 3-1 lead to Denver in the second round, so the Lakers never had to play them. Fair to mention. It doesn't change what Milwaukee, Houston and Denver found out about this team on the floor.

What stood out every round was how little the opponent could do about the paint. Denver had just come back from two separate 3-1 deficits and had no answer for what Los Angeles was running. Neither did anybody else.

That opening loss to Portland is worth remembering, because it was the last time anybody seriously doubted them. LeBron said afterward that they'd been rusty and would figure it out, and then they won sixteen of their next twenty-one games. The version of this team that looked old and slow against Damian Lillard never showed up again that postseason, and the Lakers never trailed in a series after it.

V The Roster Puzzle

This team went against the grain. The league had spent a decade taking more and more threes. The Lakers ranked 21st in three-point percentage and 23rd in the share of their shots that came from out there during the regular season. They shot worse from deep than their opponent in 12 playoff games and won seven of them.

They won in the paint instead. LeBron and Davis shot 220 for 287 in the restricted area across the postseason — 77%. The Lakers led the league by a wide margin in both restricted-area field goal percentage (69.9%) and the share of their shots taken there (33.6%). In Game 6 they scored 25 baskets in the restricted area, and it was 44-14 in there after three quarters.

Rondo was the second conductor. He missed the first five playoff games after hand surgery, then came off the bench and handed out 105 assists — a reserve guard putting up that number in 16 games, and then scoring 19 in the clincher.

Howard's year is its own story. He'd left Los Angeles in 2013 in a way nobody enjoyed, spent seven years bouncing around the league, and came back willing to set screens, box out and play twelve minutes a night. When it ended he ran at LeBron yelling that they'd won one.

Caldwell-Pope, Danny Green, Alex Caruso, Kyle Kuzma, Markieff Morris, JaVale McGee — not one of them is a clean fit on paper. What Frank Vogel did in his first season was put all of them in narrow, specific jobs and build a defense that finished near the top of the league.

The shooting numbers were the joke all year, and they never got fixed. What happened instead was that the Lakers figured out they could win without fixing them, because they had two of the best paint scorers alive and a defense that traveled.

That defense is the part that gets lost. Los Angeles finished near the top of the league in defensive rating that season, and it held up in the playoffs because Davis could protect the rim and switch onto a guard on the same possession. Houston, Denver and Miami all ran offenses designed to punish a slow big man. Not one of them managed it in a single game that mattered.

VI The Gamble

The bet was placed in the summer of 2019. Los Angeles sent Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart and three first-round picks — including the No. 4 pick that year — to New Orleans for Anthony Davis. Just about everyone agreed the Lakers had massively overpaid.

The argument was simple and not unreasonable: Davis had one year left on his deal. If he walked the following summer, the Lakers would have traded three homegrown young players and three firsts for a single season. The whole thing had a twelve-month expiry date on it.

He stayed, and then he had the best postseason of his life. In the Finals he averaged 25.0 points and 10.7 rebounds while shooting 57.1% from the floor, 42.1% from three and 93.8% at the line. He made his first 27 free throws of the playoffs and didn't miss one until Game 6.

Around the two stars, the front office filled the roster with short-term bets on veterans past their prime or carrying bad reputations: Howard, Rondo, Morris, Dion Waiters, JR Smith. It got mocked all season. Inside a bubble, with nothing to do but work, it turned out to be exactly the right kind of roster.

One thing that rarely gets mentioned: Avery Bradley, their starting guard, declined to play in the restart because of his family's health situation. JR Smith took his roster spot and gave them very little. What actually covered the minutes were more minutes for Caruso and Caldwell-Pope, and Vogel's willingness to change the rotation mid-series.

Vogel deserves more credit than he gets. He was a first-year coach taking over a team with two stars, a pile of veteran egos, and a season that stopped for four and a half months in the middle. He kept all of it pointed the same direction.

The trade also reset the argument about timelines. Before it, the Lakers had a young core that looked like it might be good in three years. After it, they had a window measured in months, and everyone said they'd burned the future to buy it. Winning the title in year one is the only answer that actually settles that kind of argument, and it's why the deal is judged completely differently now than it was in 2019.

VII The Tuition

Miami's year was remarkable on its own. They went 44-29, fifth in the East, a year after missing the playoffs entirely. Jimmy Butler arrived and dragged them into contention immediately. Then they swept Indiana, knocked off Milwaukee — the best record in basketball — in five, and put Boston out in six.

Then the injuries hit. In Game 1 of the Finals, Bam Adebayo strained a muscle in his neck and Goran Dragic tore the plantar fascia in his left foot. Those two had averaged 37.7 points combined in that postseason. Dragic played 34 minutes total in the Finals. Bam missed two games and wasn't himself when he came back.

So Game 3 happened. Everybody assumed a sweep, and Butler went for 40 points, 11 rebounds and 13 assists — the third 40-point triple-double in Finals history, after Jerry West in 1969 and LeBron in 2015. He didn't attempt a single three, the first player to score 40 in a Finals game without one since Shaquille O'Neal in 2002.

He scored or assisted on 73 of Miami's 115 points that night, second-most in Finals history behind Walt Frazier's 74. He also became the first player ever to out-score, out-rebound and out-assist LeBron James in a Finals game. LeBron's response afterward was just: "Jimmy was phenomenal."

Then he did it again in Game 5, a 35-point triple-double to keep them alive. For the series he averaged 26.2 points, 9.8 assists, 8.3 rebounds and 2.2 steals. By Game 6 he had 12 points left in him, and that was it.

What Miami proved is that a team without top-end talent can get to the last step on system, discipline and one man burning himself down. They just couldn't take the step itself. Butler played 45 minutes a night for two weeks and still nearly pulled it off.

Erik Spoelstra got more out of that group than anybody had a right to expect, starting Tyler Herro and Meyers Leonard in a Finals game — two guys who hadn't started a single playoff game before that series.

And there was a kid on that roster worth flagging. Tyler Herro was twenty years old, starting in the Finals, fourteen months out of college. Duncan Robinson went undrafted. Miami had built a contender almost entirely out of players other teams had passed on, which is the reason nobody was especially shocked when this group found its way back to the same stage three years later.

Butler's line in that series is one people will be quoting for years. He played heavy minutes across six Finals games against a team with two of the best defenders in the league, guarded mostly by LeBron and by Davis, and still averaged 26 points and nearly 10 assists. There is no version of that series where Miami stays competitive without him doing precisely what he did.

VIII The City and the Map

Los Angeles never really got to celebrate. No parade, no floats down Figueroa, no chaos outside Staples Center. The Lakers ended a seven-year playoff drought and tied Boston at 17 titles, and then had to cheer for themselves in an empty room.

That's part of why this championship gets an asterisk in conversation. No fans. A season cut in half. Opponents hurt. All true. But the bubble was the same for all 22 teams that went to Orlando, and the Lakers were the steadiest one inside it.

For LeBron, it changed the argument. For a year and a half he'd been told he'd gone to Los Angeles for the movie deals. Four titles, three franchises, four Finals MVPs later, the question stopped being "what does he need to win" and became "how many more can he get."

It also put the franchise back level with Boston. West to Magic, Kareem to Shaq and Kobe, now LeBron and Davis. The line held, which is not a given over seventy years.

And it comes back to Kobe. The season opened with his death and closed with his team winning it all. His number was on the wall in that bubble locker room, and the huddle call never changed once. LeBron's line afterward summed up the whole year better than any stat could: he hoped he'd made the man proud.

There's a smaller detail worth keeping. Danny Green and LeBron both won rings with a third different franchise that night, joining Robert Horry and John Salley. LeBron is the only one of the four who averaged 25 in the playoffs for all three of those championship teams.

The asterisk argument never fully goes away, and the Lakers stopped arguing about it years ago. Here's the case they'd make: they were the No. 1 seed in the West when the season stopped and still the No. 1 seed when it restarted. They went 16-5 against playoff teams in a format with nowhere to hide and no crowd to lift anybody. That holds up fine.

Related Reading

More NBA championship deep dives:

• 2024 Celtics Championship Deep Dive
• 2015 Warriors Championship Deep Dive
• 2017 Warriors Championship Deep Dive
• 2018 Warriors Championship Deep Dive

Video Recap

Official Finals MVP highlights: