Game three of the NBA Finals was one of the better Finals games in recent memory. The Orlando Magic, who upset the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals to make the final round, and in so doing disrupted a couple of expensive advertising campaigns from Nike and VitaminWater, came out hot, setting a Finals field goal percentage record in the first half of 75 per cent.

The Lakers were right with them, though, largely thanks to the efforts of Kobe Bryant, who at one point scored seventeen of the Lakers’ final nineteen points of the first quarter and either scored or assisted on ten of their first fourteen field goals.

Bryant couldn’t keep it up, though. He missed eleven of his last fifteen shots and hit only five of his ten free throws, as well as coughing the ball up in the final minute while trying to force his way through a Dwight Howard/Michael Pietrus double team. Pietrus hit his free throws, giving him eighteen for the night, to round out a balanced scoring night for Orlando, who had five players score fifteen or more points.

Not to labour the point, but the Lakers lost this game while shooting 51 per cent from the field, while the Magic finished with a Finals record 62 per cent. These are otherworldly numbers. A decent NBA team, over the course of the 82 game regular season, would be happy if they hit more than half their shots in about two tenths of their games.

And it wasn’t like these two teams weren’t bodying up on defence, either. As mentioned above, the play of the game arguably came on the defensive end, when Howard, the Magic’s six foot eleven centre and the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, poked the ball away from Bryant on the double team and into the hands of Pietrus, the Magic’s backup shooting guard, who has found himself defending, in the past three rounds, Paul Pierce, LeBron James, and now Bryant.

When the Lakers blew the Magic out in the first game, by twenty-five points, all the talk was that this was going to be a ‘bad’ Finals, that the Magic simply weren’t up to the standard of their opponents, and that fans had somehow been ‘robbed’ of a chance to see LeBron versus Kobe on the biggest stage in the basketball world.

But the Magic played the Lakers close in the second game, which delivered its share of jaw-dropping moments and had to be decided in overtime, and if they can get the next game at home, then this is anybody’s series.