Saturday night’s matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets followed an all-too-familiar game script. The Lakers controlled the flow of the game until about the four minute mark of the fourth and final quarter. Then, as the Nuggets have always done, they put together an impressive run in the final minutes and walked out of L.A. with a double-digit victory. It’s something that Austin Reaves, LeBron James, Anthony Davis and the Lakers have seen much too often over the past two seasons.
With 4:11 remaining in the fourth quarter, James hit a bucket to give the Lakers a 110-108 advantage. From that moment until the final buzzer, the Nuggets outscored the Lakers 16-4. It was done by a balanced attack of the team’s closing lineup, which on Saturday included Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr. and Justin Holiday.
Reaves, who saw this story in just about every game of the Western Conference Finals and has seen it in multiple regular season games during this campaign, discussed the frustration of losing to the Nuggets the same way every time.
“I think even if you go back to last year in the playoffs, other than Game 1 maybe, I think we had leads late in games, third quarter and fourth quarter,” Reaves said. “It gets down to the last three, four or five minutes and it’s a team that really executes and you know that going into the game, so you have to be really sharp with what you do on both ends of the court. Ever since the playoffs last year they’ve for the most part beat us in those last four or five minutes. We have to figure out what we have to do to flip that and make that our last three or four minutes.”
The Nuggets have plenty of talent, but it also comes down to the ways in which Jokic can singularly dominate a game. Reaves spoke about what he does that makes him so impossible to beat.
“Same way he takes over every game. You go into every game, I would assume, playing Denver, whoever you are, you go in obviously wanting to make it tough for him,” Reaves said of Jokic.
“But at the end of the day, you are not going to speed him up. It’s hard to block his shot. He’s going to get to his spots. He’s super strong. Hell of a passer. Like I said, you try to make it tough for him, but you kind of expect these things going into games from him. We got to figure out what we can do to slow him down enough to win these games.”
At this stage, Denver remains L.A.’s biggest hill to climb in the Western Conference if they want to have team success in the next couple seasons.
“I don’t know how many games they’ve won against us in a row now. So yeah, to beat them you have to be really, really good in the fourth quarter,” Reaves admitted. “Obviously, Jamal [Murray] and [Nikola] Jokic are mainly what they run through the fourth quarter obviously. Tonight, MPJ going 10-for-10 from the field, 25 points. They have a beautiful system around those two guys, and so yeah, it’s tough to beat them. But at the end of the day, nobody is going to feel sorry for us. We’ve got to figure out what we’ve got to do and tighten up.”
Against a team like the Nuggets, late-game execution is really all that matters. And the Lakers struggling to hold leads when the game tightens up shows that they may be a step behind Denver as the Western Conference postseason picture takes shape.
Darvin Ham praises Austin Reaves for taking on defensive assignments
Recent games have seen Reaves do his best to bother the likes of Devin Booker, James Harden and Stephen Curry, and Ham appreciates the effort Reaves is putting in on that end of the court.
“It’s great,” Ham said prior to the Lakers’ victory over the Washington Wizards. “I think it’s a lot of responsibility to be a two-way player and he embraces that challenge. He had some great one-on-one situations yesterday in the game, just his defense on James [Harden], his defense on Norman Powell, he’s competing.”
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