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Phil Jackson faced the journalists' questioning with a sense of unspoken difficulty.

When the California media asked him why he hadn't arranged the most critical offenses for Kobe, he couldn't say that at the time the Supersonics had adopted the strategy of "We choose to let James get the ball".

"I know this is hard to understand, but please believe us, we equally wanted to get the ball to Kobe, but the situation was far more complicated than we imagined," Jackson said, "In the game, you can't simply do whatever you want, and moreover, letting LeBron get the ball was not a bad decision for us."

But what were the results?

James' performance almost reduced the Staples Center to ashes.

"It's just..." Jackson said helplessly, "LeBron is not skilled enough in the low post."

That was already an extremely tactful way of putting it.