LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers picked up another signature victory on Saturday night, going on the road and blowing out a Denver Nuggets team that had won nine straight games.
The story of the game was Luka Doncic having his first big performance in the purple and gold, but something also worth praising was the Lakers’ defense. They were swarming all night and made things difficult for Nikola Jokic, in particular.
“Our attention to detail, our game plan defensively. We were locked in for 48 minutes,” James said. “We found a lot of keys that our game plan had and we executed that.”
When it came to defending Jokic, James credited the whole team for coming together to slow down the reigning MVP.
“Trust each other and if anything ever broke down, we had to cover for one another and I thought we did that tonight,” LeBron added.
Lakers head coach JJ Redick revealed that he spent two days putting together the game plan for this game, and his team executed it to perfection.
That hasn’t always been the case in the past, but James feels they now have the personnel to execute whatever vision Redick has for the team on a given night.
“We have to. In order for us to be successful, in order for us to win long-term, we have to trust our game plan,” James said. “We have to trust and be so dialed in on attention to detail. We have the personnel now that we can really lock in on a game plan and really lock in and be super strategic about how we want to execute offensively and defensively. That was great to see tonight.”
The Lakers still have a long way to go to build chemistry, but it’s clear that everyone is on the same page right now and results are starting to come because of it.
LeBron James pleased with Lakers’ ability to answer Nuggets run
The Lakers have lost 13 of their last 14 games against the Nuggets coming into this one and a lot of those losses have had a similar script. The Lakers have had no problems jumping out to leads on the Nuggets in the first half. Usually though, Denver comes roaring back in the third quarter and eventually closes out the win in the fourth.
It started to look like that was the case in this one as L.A. had a nine-point lead at the half and Denver came out scoring eight straight in the third quarter. The Lakers quickly answered back with an 11-0 run though, which LeBron James was pleased with.
“We kept our composure and then we hit some shots,” James said. “I think Rui hit one and AR hit one and then Luka hit one to bump the lead back up to I believe 11 and they called a timeout. But more importantly, we got stops. When they made that run to cut it to one, we scored, got a stop, scored again, got a stop. So we were able to bump it back up. We’ve been in a lot of games this year where we were able to hold our composure throughout adverse times on the road and at home. I think that worked to our advantage tonight.”
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