NBA rumors: Allen Crabbe to G League
April 26, 2024 | 10:16 am EDT Update
LeBron James on being down 3-0 vs. Denver: 'You play until the wheels fall off'
James, who has a career of firsts, said the key to achieving the impossible and coming back from a 3-0 series deficit is focusing on one game at a time. “It’s one game at a time, at this point,” James said. “You lose, you go home. So we’re going come in with the mindset of, ‘Let’s get one.’ Force a Game 5 and then we go from there. So as long as you still have life, then you always have belief. I just think you play until the wheels fall off.”
Asked if the Lakers were overwhelmed by the Nuggets’ level of execution, James said, “You’d have to ask the individuals that question and see how they feel. It’s hard for me just to be like, ‘This is what I think that guy feels.’ … I can’t do that. I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know.” No one was able to ask Lakers point guard D’Angelo Russell that question. After going scoreless in Game 3 on 0-for-7 shooting (0-for-6 from 3), he declined to speak to reporters after the game, according to a team spokesperson. “We’ve been — me and this guy [Davis] have been playing together for six years,” James continued. “We’ve been to the mountaintop. We’ve been close to the mountaintop. We’ve played a lot of games. We know what it takes to win. We know what it takes to win a championship and how damn near perfect you got to be. That’s not like something that’s so crazy to obtain.”
The Lakers are averaging just 102.3 points in the series. L.A. averaged 124.4 points in the 12 wins it had in its final 15 regular-season games plus the play-in tournament leading into the Denver series. The Nuggets, meanwhile, are staying on high alert. “I think every game is tougher and tougher,” Jokic said. “They were up 20 in Denver; they were up 12 today in the first half. I think it’s really hard to play against the same team over again. You can’t get bored with the style of the play or whatever. You just need to keep doing you, especially for us — because we won the last three — and just trust what we are doing and don’t get bored with success because it can go wrong really quick.”
The Lakers aren’t making excuses, and acknowledge they need to try harder and are being outworked. “I think Denver’s just beating us, to be honest,” Austin Reaves said. “You can talk about adjustments, you can talk about this and that, but at the end of the day, we got to go put our best foot forward in basketball games. You can talk about all the, everything else outside the talks of everything, but at the end of the day, you got to man up and go win games.”
Denver has beaten Los Angeles 11 consecutive times. And, if we are being truthful, it’s tough envisioning this dominance not continuing in Saturday night’s Game 4, without some help from the Nuggets themselves. “Quite frankly, my expectations were championships,” Gordon said. “I thought this was a great fit when the trade happened. I think what everyone is seeing is that there isn’t a lot of overlap in our starting five. The first year I was here, we were making a run. But then Jamal goes down. Next year Mike goes down. Injuries are always a part of the game, but if you take the injuries out, I feel we would have already won a championship. It’s just so great playing with these guys. They are so damn talented and amazing to play with. At this point, it makes the game look easy.”
In Game 2, it was Gordon who switched on to Davis, when Davis was cooking Jokić offensively. Gordon held him without a made basket for the final 19 minutes of the game. “What’s amazing is how much he accepted his role when he was traded to us,” Jokić said. “He knows that every game is going to be different for him, and he is fine with it. He knows that there will be nights when he scores 10 points. He knows there will be nights like tonight where he gets a lot of touches and is amazing. But he does whatever our team needs, and out team would not be the same without him.”
“I gotta be honest with you,” Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon said in the hallway when I asked if they were privately reveling in all of this Lakers sadness. “It’s never about the other team. It’s always about the guys in our locker room. It’s always about our group of guys. So we don’t really think about our opponents.”
Players say they like trash talking in the playoffs. Mitchell and Banchero both said it’s fun. “They were talking a lot in Game 1 and 2, and I was talking a lot tonight,” Banchero said. “But I’ve got a lot of respect for both of those guys, Morris and Tristan. Morris, he’s one of the guys who, he kind of gave me the work my rookie year. So after that, I kind of always had respect for him. He’s an older guy, too, so he kind of talked to you like an old head. But it’s fun going back and forth. I have words for those guys, and they got words for me.”
Justin Kubatko: Paolo Banchero in just 29 minutes last night: ✅ 31 PTS ✅ 14 REB ✅ 5 AST He’s the only player over the last 55 seasons to record at least 30 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists in a playoff game while logging less than 30 minutes. Read & share: statitudes.com/p/nba-game-not… pic.twitter.com/5SErLNl4fT
Between Carter’s physical presence in the lineup and the pressure the Magic applied to Mitchell and Garland, Orlando had a ton of juice to attack Cleveland’s interior defense in a way that did not seem possible through two games. “You could tell that (Magic coach) Jamahl Mosley did an excellent job planning for this game,” said Jarrett Allen, whose 15 points and eight rebounds were good but not nearly enough. “There’s times when I was just in the corner, I stood in the corner last game, but, just overall, you could see tiny differences that accumulate into a lot.”
