by Paul Teetor
One superstar – even if he is 41 years old and in his 23rd NBA season – is better than no superstars.
That was the moral of the story when the Lakers shocked the basketball world Saturday night by beating the Houston Rockets 107-98 in the first game of their first-round playoff series.
No one in the hoops world, including All Ball, gave the Lakers a chance in this series after news broke last week that two of the Lakers three stars – Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves – were out with injuries for at least four to six weeks. That meant the Lakers would be without their 54 combined points a game at least until the second round and perhaps beyond.
But a few hours before game time Saturday night the Rockets dropped an injury bombshell of their own: future Hall of Famer Kevin Durant – and his 26 points per game — was out with a knee injury suffered in practice two days before.
According to the Rockets, Durant had a knee-on-knee collision with a teammate that knocked him out of the practice for a medical evaluation. And while there was no “structural damage” to the knee, it was decided shortly before game time that he should not play that night and take a chance on further stress and strain on the sore knee.
That was all LeBron James – now the only superstar in the series left after Luka and KD were ruled out – needed to pounce on the wounded and leaderless Rockets.
From the opening tip-off, LeBron was playing like it was 2012, when he won the first of his four NBA titles. Shooting, passing, defending – he did it all – while his teammates were inspired by him and the Rockets played with no plan B after Durant was ruled out.
LeBron scored 19-points, dished out 13-assists, and hauled down eight rebounds. He also made history as the oldest NBA player ever to have 10 or more assists in a playoff game. All five Lakers starters scored in double figures, with the big surprise being Luke Kennard’s 27-point night – including a 5-for-5 performance from 3-point country.
That was the difference-maker. Every time the Rockets threatened to take the lead, Kennard would swish a long three and the threat would recede.
The narrative going into this series was about the shorthanded Lakers trying to hold down the fort until Doncic (hamstring) and Reaves (oblique) could play again, and whether an elongated best-of-seven – a 16-day span from Game 1 to a potential Game 7 – might work in their favor if they could just stave off execution long enough.
But the pregame bombshell, one that had been hinted at before Saturday, scrambled that speculation. Durant bumped his knee during practice on Wednesday, and by Saturday he was still experiencing soreness and limited movement.
“Hopefully it’s a one-game thing,” Rockets coach Ime Udoka said before the game. “But he tried it out just a little while ago and it didn’t feel good enough. … Soreness. It’s very tender, tough to bend in certain ways. And so there’s not a lot of swelling, but he hit it in a very awkward spot, I guess, more than anything.”
With Durant watching instead of playing, other Rockets received more defensive scrutiny. They, too, had five players in double figures, but none really broke out. Maybe Lakers players felt liberated by not having to deal with the big guy.
“You’re not going to stop Kevin Durant,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said, interrupting a postgame question about how you re-adjust when the other team’s best player can’t play. “There’s a lot that you have to do with Kevin. And you just kind of scrap that and move on to all the other stuff we worked on.”
These are Redick’s second playoffs as a coach, and the first one – last year’s first-round loss to Minnesota in five games — had some rough patches, especially when he went without subs in the second half of the Lakers’ Game 4 loss in Minnesota and didn’t use center Jaxson Hayes at all in Game 5, when the Lakers were eliminated.
A lot of that was because he didn’t trust Hayes in crunch time. Going into this series there was a question of whether he’d be able to trust starting center Deandre Ayton, either. Too many times this season, the 6-foot-11 Ayton had played like a dog who didn’t care about the game.
In Game 1 the question was answered, at least for the moment. Ayton finished with 19 points, 11 rebounds and a blocked shot. Houston center Alperen Sengun finished with 19 points, eight rebounds, six assists and five fouls.
“I could feel the trust JJ had in me,” Ayton said.
But with Doncic and Reaves unavailable, the attitude has to be for everyone else to make up for it. Saturday night, under the pressure and scrutiny of playoff basketball, the Lakers made it work.
“I mean, we don’t have a choice,” James said. “It has to be that way. It has to be a collective group. When you’re missing so much firepower, like we are right now with AR and Luka being out, we all have to pitch in, and we all have to do our job, and even do a little bit more.”
And James sounded a note of caution, as a veteran leader should.
“I thought we had a great week of preparation, but we got to continue that,” he said. “It’s just one game. We protected our own court, Game 1. We got to get better over the next 48 hours for Game 2.”
If they shock the world again and win game 2 at home Tuesday night, then Lakers fans can start to dream big again.
But for now, as long as Luka and AR are out with injuries and if Durant returns, the Lakers have little or no chance to win this series.
Clippers Shock Nobody
The Clippers 126-121 loss to the Warriors in a play-in game Wednesday night at home ended one of the strangest seasons in LA sports history, amateur or professional.
It was a fittingly bizarre ending to one of the most up-and-down, roller-coaster seasons ever, full of despair, then full of hope, and finally finishing on an ignoble failure flavored with a familiar theme: same old Clippers.
The Clippers started the season on a horrible losing streak. They couldn’t beat anybody except the dregs of the league and stumbled out to a 6-21 record by the end of November. By that time the verdict was in: this was the worst Clippers team in history, and that’s really saying something considering how bad the Clippers were for so long before the Blake Griffin-Chris Paul Lob City era began more than a decade ago.
Only Clippers coach Ty Lue remained optimistic, pointing out that if his team could go 35-20 the rest of the season, they would finish the regular season as a .500 team with a 41-41 record and would probably qualify for the NBA’s play-in tournament, where the teams who finish in ninth and tenth place get a chance to qualify for the real playoffs.
Lue was drowned out by laughter from the press, but he insisted he wasn’t kidding and said he had established a realistic goal for his down-trodden team.
Sure enough, just as the constant losing pattern had been established, a miracle happened: 34-year-old Kawhi Leonard, who had been a shadow of his former superstar self since joining the Clippers in 2019, started playing like the Kawhi of old. Over the first six seasons of his Clippers career, he had missed more than half the games he was eligible for, and even when he played he was just another guy, certainly nothing special.
But for a three-month stretch in the middle of this season, he played at the same level as the best players in the league: Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Jaylen Brown and Shai Gilgeous Alexander – the former Clipper whose trade after one season in LA to Oklahoma City now stands unchallenged as the worst trade in NBA history. And the gruesome details of that awful, dumb-ass trade will inevitably be rehashed once again when SGA is named the league’s Most Valuable Player again next month.
Incredibly, the Clippers actually finished the regular season one game better than Lue’s prediction/goal at 42-40, good for ninth place in the Western Conference. They were scheduled to play the Golden State Warriors in a play-in game. The winner would advance to play for 8th place, while the loser would go home with their season over.
So naturally the Clippers surged out to a double-digit lead over Steph Curry and the Warriors.
And just as naturally, the Clippers folded in crunch time, Curry hit some incredible shots on his way to 35 points, and just like that the Clippers lead was gone and their season was over before they could even make an appearance in the real playoffs.
Same old Clippers.
Warriors Coach Steve Kerr couldn’t help but gloat after the come-from-behind victory.
“Everyone out there who thought Steph should have taken the rest of the year off, this is what he does; this is who he is,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “If he can compete, he is going to compete, and it was incredible to watch.”
And the Clippers alleged superstar, Kawhi Leonard?
He finished with 21 points, none in crunch time.
The moral of the Clippers sad story: Don’t start the season 6-21.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com ER
