A lot was expected of Austin Reaves coming into these playoffs as the third-year guard has been tasked with defending Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray while still needing to provide consistent offense for the Los Angeles Lakers.
While Reaves has done an admirable job defensively, limiting Murray to just 37.5% shooting in the first two games of this series, it hasn’t been enough. In fact, it was Murray who capped off a huge Nuggets comeback with a buzzer-beating jumper to give the Nuggets a 2-0 series lead.
Afterwards, Reaves chose not to harp on the loss, but rather focus on what the Lakers need to going forward. “You move on to the next game,” Reaves said after the loss. “They protected their homecourt, and we got to go do the same.”
While it was a heartbreaking defeat, Reaves is right in that Denver simply did what they were supposed to do and now the Lakers must do the same in LA. For much of the night, it looked like the Lakers would be able to steal a victory in Denver, but Reaves credited the Nuggets for their second half adjustments stifling the Lakers offense.
“We came out of halftime and had a couple good possessions with AD-Bron pick-and-roll, and then they made a good adjustment, and it kind of bogged us down,” Reaves added. “Obviously, scoring 40 points in the second half, 20 and 20, that’s not going to cut it.”
Despite the rough second half offensively, the Lakers still had a chance to win the game down the stretch. But as has been the case every time against the Nuggets, they simply were out-executed in the final minutes.
“That’s what you grow to want to do in big games is be in those situations and be competing against a hell of a ball team,” Reaves noted. “Like you said, in crunch time, you’ll have opportunities to make plays to win games, and we just didn’t make enough plays tonight.
“But I thought actually down the stretch the last three or four possessions we got exactly what we wanted on the offensive end and then they would come down and make a couple tough buckets.”
The Lakers had the perfect opportunity to return to Los Angeles with the series tied, but the Nuggets had other plans. For Reaves and the rest of the team, they simply have to learn from these moments and figure out how to finally get over the hump against this Nuggets team that has their number right now.
Austin Reaves: Lakers’ approach doesn’t change despite being down 0-2
Austin Reaves and the Lakers now find themselves in a major hole down 0-2 to the defending champion Nuggets who have now beaten them 10 consecutive games. But despite the nature of their Game 2 loss, Reaves feels the Lakers approach to this series doesn’t need to chance, they simply have to figure out what’s causing the losses and then apply those lessons learned.
“Obviously, if we win this one, we get momentum going home, but I don’t think that changes anything with the way we approach games,” Reaves said. “We can go back and watch the film on both games and see what we did to take command of those games, and then we can see what we did to, in better words, lose those games. So we’ll have to go do that and put a full 48 together.”
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