LOS ANGELES -- On a day the NBA pegged to showcase one of its finest and fiercest rivalries, Miami's beatdown of the Lakers offered important truths for the league, for the Lakers and for LeBron James and his teammates.
The most important being this: The Heat and Lakers have traded places.
Miami is now a force to be reckoned -- not because the Heat amassed a silly selection of talent, but because that talent has embraced the hardships it faced all season and has done the things necessary to get its house in order.
And the Lakers are not the team they were expected to be.
They have an angry star, some internal differences over what's going wrong and a complacency stemming from the success of their past two seasons. That alone has blunted enough of their edge that they couldn't rise to a real challenge on their home court on Christmas Day.
"This is serious stuff. You don't just have two rings and say, 'OK, we're satisfied with what we've got,' " a bristling Kobe Bryant said after the Heat's 96-80 victory over the Lakers. "I'm not rolling with that. I'm not going to let that slide.
"We need to get into gear."
Shortly before Kobe talked, in angry and candid terms, about needing to "kick some ass" among his teammates, Chris Bosh compared the Heat to the Boston team that won a championship a few years ago.
"I think we showed that we can play together," Bosh said. "That's always the question. I think a lot of people questioned it when Boston first got together four years back.
"But it takes those guys to come together and say, 'We're going to do this together. It's not one on five, it's not two on five, it's five guys out there at one time, and we have to play together in order to accomplish what we want to accomplish."
Yes, any doubt about the direction the Lakers and Heat were heading ended at the Staples Center on Saturday.
These two teams -- who do not seem to like each other much -- have traded places.
Now, the most hated team in the league is playing with a kind of verve, harmony and energy unimaginable a month ago. And the Lakers, just 1-4 against teams with winning records, have gone from a team that won its first eight games to one with the issues about team cohesion, effort and living up to expectations.
This was a game in which the spectrum between Los Angeles and Miami couldn't have been clearer.
For the Heat, the night featured the Big Three scoring 69 of their team's 96 points, good for 72 percent of the total. The Lakers' Big Three of Kobe, Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol managed only 48 of the team's 80 points, or 60 percent.
Even each team's dominant personality and top talent were quite clearly on opposite ends of the spectrum.
LeBron had his third triple-double of the season, and he hit five 3-pointers, during a 27-point, 11-rebound, 10-assist thing of beauty. Kobe, on the other hand, had almost three times as many shots attempted as he did shots made.
He scored 17 points, and he was unable to will his team to anything even resembling a close game.
"Disappointing finish for a game as hyped as that one was, but no surprise to us as a coaching staff," Phil Jackson said. "We're just not playing very good ball. We're not surprised by how poorly we played."
The Heat have won 14 of their past 15; the Lakers have gone 8-7 over their past 15 games.
That's the mark of a pretty mediocre team.
Mediocre in the way Miami seemed when Jackson speculated on Heat coach Erik Spoelstra's job security earlier in the season.
Even that -- the arrogance-tinted pronouncements afforded to winners -- have shifted from one team's coach to the others.
Instead of Jackson speculating on Spoelstra's job status, it was Spoelstra offering this up in response to a question about how big a step this win was over the Lakers.
"You can get whiplash if you really follow you guys and your opinions from game to game," he said, "and so we're not concerned, with all due respect, with what you guys are commenting or writing about."
That wasn't exactly the question, and Spoelstra seems to have forgotten that it was one of his player's camps that leaked a story saying the team was unhappy with him just before the 12-game winning streak that turned around his season, but no matter.
Such comments, and feelings, come with being at the top of the hill, a place Miami is closer to after displacing the Lakers on its way up. Boston still waits, as do San Antonio and Dallas.
But it's a good, big, important step for the Heat.
"The balance and poise and trust we've been trying to build is to create a game where we use (the Big Three's) talent to make the game easier for the team, but also for each other," Spoelstra said. "And that is a tough balance, where they can be who they've been for years, and been so successful with that, and yet strike a balance to have the trust and move the ball. And I think tonight was our best game in terms of that."
Those things showed, in Bosh's aggressive and strong play (24 points and 13 rebounds), in Dwyane Wade and LeBron's comfortable balance Saturday with each other, and in how Miami dominated a game in which the Lakers scored twice as many points in the paint.
It showed, certainly most of all, in the defensive effort Miami showed -- a Spoelstra-influenced effort to be about defense first, one that held the Lakers to 40.5 percent shooting from the field and Bryant and Gasol to 0-of-11 shooting in the first quarter.
"The concepts of Miami basketball are about, first of all, defense," Wade said.
That was Miami basketball Saturday. Lakers basketball was an angry Kobe Bryant, a man LeBron James could have related to not all that long ago.
Losing is no fun, especially when you expect so much more.
In the Lakers' favor -- maybe the only positive -- Kobe displayed a pure hatred of losing not seen from LeBron or Wade after their tough defeats earlier in the year.
When a reporter asked a question about how concerned Kobe was about a particular problem with his team, he snapped, "What about this press conference makes you think I'm not concerned?"
The answer was nothing, because Kobe's rage rolled off him, so strong as to be almost physically imposing. It was the only advantage Los Angeles could take way after its debacle against Miami: At the very least, the Lakers star loathes losing in a way The King doesn't remotely match.
What's unclear is whether Kobe still has the physical supremacy to translate his loathing for losing and his will to win into concrete action on the floor.
It's early, and the real test for the Lakers starts when the playoffs begin, and Jackson might have been right when he said: "Just be patient with us. We'll get it back in order, and we'll be fine. And we'll measure this season and come out where we want to be, I think, at the end."
But for now, the story of the day is Miami emerging, Los Angeles sputtering.
As if to drive the point home, each teams' stars saturated their postgame news conferences with a mood similar to their team's play.
First came Kobe, at that podium, still bristling, just able to spit out the words, "I'm going to kick some ass in practice."
Then, a short time later, in the same spot, sat Wade and LeBron, joking, laughing, soaking in the holiday cheer.
When a reporter asked if it was a coincidence the Heat had started winning after adding Erick Dampier, both laughed.
"He's it!" Wade said.
"Big Four!" LeBron cackled.
Yes, everyone learned something Saturday: Kobe and his crew, with their upcoming games at San Antonio and New Orleans, need to get it together.
And the Heat, going home to face the Knicks before heading to Houston, are feeling pretty darn good about themselves.
Amazing how things can change so dramatically in such a short time.
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