As the regular season winds down, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers are in a heated race to keep themselves as a top-four seed in the Western Conference.
Heading into play on Sunday, L.A. had the hardest remaining schedule with five games remaining, including a two-game mini-series against the first-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder.
Shockingly, the Lakers drilled 22 3-pointers and played motivated on both sides of the ball, which led to a dominant 126-99 win. After the game, James acknowledged that the team is trying to build good habits ahead of the playoffs, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Obviously we know it’s the final stretch into the postseason, so we’re just trying to rack up great habits. Obviously sometimes the game goes the way goes and sometimes you play a great game and still lose and sometimes you can feel like you didn’t play well and win. It’s about habits. We’re just trying to build our habits right now going into the final stretch of the regular season.”
Every year is a championship-or-bust season for L.A., especially with Luka Doncic in town, so each game presents an opportunity to get better as a whole. And James was looking for positive results in Sunday’s game regardless of who their opponent was:
“It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. We’ve been kind of good against some of the better teams this year and we haven’t been as good against some of the teams that are below .500. But this is a great team to test it and see who you are. But ultimately, it’s about our habits. We have to continue to push our habits. (The Thunder) know who they are. They know what they’re gonna be in the postseason. We’re still trying to figure it out with our lineups, with us all getting acclimated to what Luka wants to do. AR, myself, make sure we’re all getting keyed in on what everyone else wants to do and make sure we hold each other accountable. We understand that coming down the stretch we have to play some really good basketball, but we still are working on our habits.”
Unlike previous seasons, the Lakers do not have to rely on other teams in terms of seeding, as they control their destiny in these final four games. But, playing a team like Oklahoma City presents plenty of challenges and the four-time champion was pleased with how the Lakers stuck to the game plan:
“Yeah. We know they’re very good when it comes to one give into the paint, attracting a lot of attention. They do a great job getting to the free throw line, they dod a great job of getting offensive rebounds and second-chance points. And those are some of the controllables that you control. Not putting your hand in the cookie jar when a lot of those guys were driving, Shai, JDub, some of those other guys. You got to just live with the contest make or miss and I thought we did a great job of paying attention to detail with that and then when they missed, they did get a couple of offensive rebounds in the first half, but I thought in the second half we sured that up. So we were very keyed in on what we needed to do.”
As previously mentioned, another date with the Thunder looms on Tuesday and it is the first night of a back-to-back. It’s unlikely the Lakers shoot as well in the second game, but they need to find a way to build off of what they did on Sunday.
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