Just when it seems like the Los Angeles Lakers are on the cusp of figuring things out, everything just goes wrong once again. An impressive 5-game winning run has been followed up by 3 straight losses, but the latest one of those could have easily turned out differently.
The Lakers welcomed the red-hot Philadelphia 76ers on Sunday night and gave the visitors all they could handle. After forcing a stop down 113-112 with under 15 seconds remaining, they had a chance at winning the game, but Russell Westbrook couldn’t even get a proper shot up on Joel Embiid, and the Lakers fell just short yet again. LeBron James was asked about Westbrook’s play after the game, and here’s what he had to say.
"We got the stop, gave ourselves a chance to win and didn't execute." @KingJames on tonight's loss. pic.twitter.com/urLyDsq7ck
— Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) January 16, 2023
“We got a stop, gave ourselves a chance to win the game (and) we didn’t.”
He wasn’t going to explicitly call out Westbrook there for deciding to go at Embiid, even though it was clearly the wrong idea. Embiid is one of the best defensive bigs in the league, and they could have easily gotten a better shot than that there. You also have to wonder how differently things would have panned out if head coach Darvin Ham had called a timeout there, as he had two left.
Russell Westbrook Claims He Was Fouled By Joel Embiid
Fans were outraged that Russ went for that play while ignoring LeBron, as you might imagine. He tried to play hero ball in that instance, and it backfired spectacularly on him. Russ is not going to change, though, and he had an explanation for why things ended in that fashion.
He claimed that Embiid fouled him by grabbing his hand, which meant he couldn’t bring it up to shoot the ball. Unless it’s really egregious, we have seen that referees won’t call fouls in late-game situations and they sometimes look past obvious fouls as well, as the Lakers saw in their game against the Dallas Mavericks. The league will put out their L2M report for the game, and we’ll find out then if Russ really had a case here.
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