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Who would win a best of 7, the 2005 Spurs or the 2001 Lakers?

2005 rules/refs. Everyone healthy.

It’s unbelievable how bad the Lakers role players were outside of Fisher during the playoffs despite going 15-1 in route to a title.

35 year old Horace Grant was 5th in playoff minutes and averaged 6/6 on 37% shooting. Horry was 6th in minutes and averaged 5/5 on 36% shooting. Shaw was 7th averaging 4/3 on 37% shooting. Only Fisher shot above 40% from 3 the entire playoffs.

In the 2005 playoffs Ginobili, Bowen, Horry and Barry all shot over 40% from 3. Bowen wouldn’t stop Kobe but he’d make him work and the Spurs have Nesterovich and Muhammad to eat fouls vs Shaq if they needed it.

I haven’t mentioned Duncan or Parker yet. Spurs in 6.

Spurs.

01 LA is probably my GOAT PS team, even more than 96 Bulls. SS3 Shaq with SS2 Kobe is lethal even today!!

LA have a huge split between RS and playoffs. Because of a pretty meh, above average in absolute terms but not "good" RS they had a difficult route to the finals and they did really well on that route. That given as context ...

Lakers are one of those teams that look good if you take RS really seriously for the underlying goodness of a team in a small series but don't take the RS at all seriously for how good they were. Now there absolutely are reasons to say RS Lakers margin is misleading, it's higher in surrounding seasons, champs don't always go all out in following RSes, Fisher was out a lot. At the margin though, if LA performed better in the RS their playoff opponents maybe look slightly less good on paper, maybe are more prepared for them(?), and certainly the playoff don't look as dramatic by things like so-called PSRS (or "playoff SRS" - or things that per above take opponent regular season SRS as great marker for opponents in a small sample, but not for whoever the team in question is at all).

At a glance, and without expertise the Lakers in-conference (don't know about versus 76ers, as finals opponents go ... they aren't great so not a point of focus) 3pt defense looks at first glance really good by the numbers. I think that's something that can be heavily-influenced? If so maybe so of their broader, I think, elite defensive efg% isn't sustainable.

W-L(RS)-wise Lakers seem lucky versus pythag expectations on points diff whilst the Spurs seem unlucky (artificially?) closing the RS appearance gap.

The last image of the Spurs is a tight (indeed they were outscored), defensive series where their superstar doesn't look amazing in terms of production especially in the last game. But bigger picture they'd been really good team and they too have a longer term backing for that.

It depends how much you trust that the playoff Lakers is "real", replicable (unless you're locking in playoff performance and don't care) ... where one is between RS and playoffs.

Lakers in 6