The Official Site of Jordan Farmar

Tue, Mar 31st 2009, 13:01

Jordan's Playboy.com Blog - Five on 5: Week 20

Hey, what’s up guys? I’m blogging from my hotel room with two games to go before we head home, and with the NCAA Tournament wrapping up soon. The Final Four are in: Connecticut vs Michigan and Villanova vs North Carolina. President Obama picked North Carolina to win it all. UNC just knocked off Oklahoma and Blake Griffin, who could go number one if he declares. Meanwhile, I heard that Michigan’s Spartans are the first team to play in the Final Four in their home state since Duke in ’94. Who are you picking?

A lot of you have been enjoying spring break. Guess what? I never got to get away because I was playing basketball in college. If you think about the month of March, there’s the end of the regular season, the Pac-10 tournament, and then the NCAA Tournament. Playing basketball in college, there ain’t no spring break for you, lol. I’ve heard stories that sound pretty fun. And now that I’m in the NBA, guess what’s? I still don’t get spring break.

The NBA regular season is winding down. we’ve clinched first in the West and home court advantage through the Western Conference playoffs but we want to finish strong. Getting our big man Andrew Bynum back soon, where he’ll possibly start out with our Bench Mob, is going to be exciting.

Before we left on this seven-game road trip, the team was hoping to renew our focus and our togetherness, heading into the end of the regular season. One of our leaders, Lamar Odom, was talking about how Los Angeles is a place where when “you’re at the practice facility, everybody is their own entity, their own brand.” We have our own websites and our “own thing going on.” But things change up on the road. Lamar says, “It’s just good for us to be able to eat together, to communicate, to see each other. It helps us on the court. It’s part of being a teammate, being a brother.”

We won our first four on this trip before going down in Atlanta. But we’d won six straight on the road overall before that. We’ve still got the NBA’s best road record at 27-10 and we’re proud of it. We were 27-14 overall on the road, and second-best last season. We’ve won 58 games overall so far, more than last season already.

One of the keys personally for me on the road is to keep my routine as much as possible. That means making sure you got all your toiletries, maybe some back-up even, lol.. nail clippers, beard-trimmer, all those little things that you may forget and really need. Enough socks and underwear. A couple of suits. Some interchangeable shirts that you can get dry-cleaned. Thirteen days is a long time, but you don’t want to overdo it with suits and bring too much stuff. You just want to look good going to the game, wear what’s appropriate because you are going to work. A couple of pairs of jeans, if you don’t feel like dressing up. Traveling back east also means taking a coat for the last stretch of cool days. It’s definitely something that you have to plan. You want to make it as easy of a trip as possible, try to maintain your rhythm. I do all the packing myself, no one else is putting it together for me.

With the NCAA Final Four this week, people have asked which hurts the most, losing the college championship or pro championship? Ouch. They definitely both hurt but the NBA was on a much bigger level. The NCAA disappointment was tough because you only have one chance, only one night, only one game to play, no do-overs. I was so excited and ready, feeling that my Bruins had a great chance to win it in 2006. Now, winning a championship at UCLA, with all its rich history and success, is different from winning it anywhere else in my opinion. Putting a banner up in Pauley Pavilion is very special. We don’t put up conference championship banners or Pac-10 tournaments, we only put up national championship banners. You can go to other school and they’ll have conference banners up, all that stuff. But that’s expected at UCLA. Same with the Lakers, where you’re going to see NBA championship banners. When you have a chance to go down in history and do something like that, especially when I was growing up and UCLA was struggling through a bad patch, and we were so close to doing something special again to continue the school’s tradition, so that’s why that disappointment hurt. In college, it’s about being the best team on that actual night.

Being outplayed in a long series hurts a little bit more. In a seven-game series, you have chances to come back and redeem yourself. Think about it, last year against the Celtics, we were twenty minutes away from it being a completely different series. In game four, we gave up a 24-point lead to lose. If we’d won that game, we could’ve gone back home up 3-2 and it’s a different series. They’d have to win two games in a row to win the championship. It’s part of the game, it happened, it hurt. But we remember and hopefully it’s what makes you better and makes you work harder. That’s why we’re on a mission this year.

Thanks to shoutouts from Playboy.com readers Socalgirl, Elisabeth, Jennifer, Hector and Brian. I’ll be blogging from home next time. Speak L8R.

— JFarm