Now that the NBA bubble is over, we get to know more details about what happened during the most important moments of the season in Orlando. One of the most surprising things we saw in the bubble was the Los Angeles Clippers meltdown against the Denver Nuggets, blowing a 3-1 lead in the series as well as several 15+ point leads in Game 5 and 6. This was seen as the biggest fiasco in the league seeing how dominant they were during the first four games.
When everybody believed we were going to see a Lakers-Clippers Western Conference Finals, the Clips collapsed and let the Nuggets destroy them without any mercy. Now that things have finished, we get to know what the Lakers actually did while watching the Clippers losing the chance to get to the WCF, meet them and try to dethrone LeBron James. Jared Dudley joined the Bill Simmons podcast, where he said a couple of interesting things about the Lakers and how they reacted to the situation.
“We were laughing. We were laughing like, I picked them to win Game 7. There is no way I thought they were gonna lose. Our whole mind was ‘we gotta beat the Clippers, we want the Clippers, they wanted us,” Dudley said. “We went to practice every day, there is a Kawhi billboard. We see this billboard every single day. … We were looking forward to that matchup. But you know what? It was just crazy, you see Paul George hits the side of the blackboard, Kawhi not having that, but those boys, they didn’t wanna be in the bubble. They didn’t wanna be there and I don’t blame them for certain times but the world needed to see the Clippers and Lakers and it’s unfortunate we didn’t get to see that.”
This was the perfect time to see these two going at it. No. 1 against No. 2, the battle of Los Angeles in a place where all you can think of is basketball. There was no better scenario for that, other than the Staples Center sold out. This was the moment for the Clippers to show they were about to change things in LA but they blew it and now the jokes and the memes won’t stop.
Next year they’ll have another chance to show the world they can beat their city neighbors, but right now the Lakers watch them from the top of the world.
