The quote of the night, as I'm sure you'll all read about tomorrow morning, comes from Kobe Bryant, in response to a question about how the Lakers are going to keep from dwelling on the mistakes they made in Game 6.

"Well, you just put it behind you. There ain't nothing you can do about it, you know what I mean? After you go to the bathroom, you don't stand there and look at what you just dropped in there. At some point you gotta flush it, man."

What an amazing game. Every possession was intense, and both teams did a clever job of exploiting matchups in halfcourt sets: the Suns worked the screen-and-roll to perfection with Steve Nash and Boris Diaw, mostly getting the desired switch of Nash on Kwame Brown or Diaw on Smush Parker; and the Lakers used their size advantage in the frontcourt to work Lamar Odom down low on Shawn Marion (whom Odom has abused all series) or Brown on Diaw, although they really strayed from this strategy in the final minutes of the 4th quarter and in overtime. This is what's made the series -- the uniqueness of the Suns' lineup, and the strategies that've been employed around it by Phil Jackson and Mike D'Antoni. I can't wait to see the types of adjustments that are made for Game 7. . .

It seemed to me that Raja Bell's absence from Game 6 had a pretty minor impact on the game. Kobe got a few easy buckets in the paint because he was able to overpower Barbosa, but for the most part, the size disparity between the two didn't seem to matter, since the Suns' defensive strategy on Kobe for 80% of the series has been to double him. Besides that, Kobe mainly settled for jumpers and only took six free-throw shots in Game 6, so I don't think the one-on-one matchup really meant anything in regard to Kobe's performance. Kobe took 35 shots from the field tonight because this was the fastest-paced game of the series and because the game went to overtime, not because of the defensive decline between Bell and Barbosa.

It should also be noted that Barbosa scored 22 points on 7 of 9 shooting, basically equaling Bell's top performance of the series, 23 points on 8 of 15 shooting in Game 2.