It’s just like I thought.

I’ve said all along that if the Lakers were a stock, Christmas is about the time I’d buy them. Steve Nash is back in the lineup, Pau Gasol looks healthy, and the Lakers are back to .500. Championship, here we come?

Metta World Peace has been a key cog to this star-studded Lakers team all along. By Derral Chen (Flickr: Ron Artest) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The five-game winning streak has included everything Lakers fans have hoped for since Mike Brown was fired, albeit a little late. By the time May rolls around, Lakers fans will have convinced themselves that their team has rounded into a championship contender. Perhaps they will be right.

Steve Nash has returned after missing 24 games to run the point in Mike D’Antoni’s system, Pau Gasol is back from knee tendinitis, and Los Angeles has its swagger back. I think.

And the key is not Nash. It’s not the relentless Kobe Bryant. Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol are great players to have around, but the catalyst for this team is none other than Metta World Peace.

I’ve talked about the MWP signing as being the key to the past four seasons for the Lakers and I stand by that. I even created a Ron Artest Venn Diagram. I want to be clear here: Ron Artest’s play won’t be able to carry the Lakers all season. But if they are to play themselves into championship form, the offensive threat that Metta World Peace can provide needs to be apparent to other teams. He cannot be a non-factor.

Every team with stars needs role players — guys who will do all the dirty work and produce when other options are taken away. Through his first 23 games, MWP was scoring 12.1 points per game. Over the past five games, he’s averaging 18.4 points, including a 19 point, 16 rebound game in Philadelphia.

MWP’s production won’t be this big all year. Pau Gasol will score more than him over the course of the year. So will Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, and Steve Nash. But when MWP is active offensively he’s also active defensively and can be, the Lakers hope, the best role player in the game. Right now it doesn’t seem like it matters, but if the Lakers get deep into the playoffs, it could be the key cog in a championship run.

Or so Lakers fans are hoping — the Christmas spirit abounding in Los Angeles.

What would the world be without MWP’s twitter account?

[tweet https://twitter.com/MettaWorldPeace/status/283765891353698304]