The Los Angeles Lakers continued on their winning ways by beating the Denver Nuggets 127-125 in an overtime thriller at Crypto.com Arena on Saturday. The Lakers needed a bit of luck to get this win, as Austin Reaves pulled off a miraculous play to send this one to overtime.
Reaves had to intentionally miss a free throw with the Lakers trailing 118-116 with 5.2 seconds remaining, and what followed was something extraordinary. The 27-year-old missed to the left and managed to secure the offensive rebound himself. Reaves then hit a floater to tie the game, and we probably won’t see a repeat of this for a very long time.
The fact that it took a sequence like this for the Lakers to get the win led to Shaquille O’Neal making some interesting comments on Inside the NBA.
“If you have to rely on a hefty diet of that, you’re not going to win, and you’re not going to be a contender,” O’Neal said. “I’m used to playing for coaches that wouldn’t be happy with that game. Yeah, we won the game, but when you up 15 early in the game, [Charles Barkley] and Kenny [Smith] knows this, that’s when you got to put teams away.”
The Lakers had led by as many as 17 points in the second quarter, but allowed the visitors to come back in the game. The Nuggets even took an eight-point lead in the fourth quarter, but weren’t able to hold on to it.
“When you talk about championship, you have to build championship habits,” O’Neal stated. “So when you’re up with a big lead, championship habits say, ‘Hey, we up 16. Let’s put them away in the third quarter so we can rest in the fourth quarter.’ That’s championship habits.”
While that is fair, no lead is safe in today’s NBA. We see 20-point leads vanish in an instant all the time. Is it not ideal that the Lakers blew that big advantage? Yes, but even the best teams in the league blow big leads from time to time.
The Lakers should be happy they got this win. They got lucky in the end, but you need some luck occasionally.
O’Neal stated there that his former head coaches wouldn’t be happy with this win, so here is what Lakers’ head honcho JJ Redick had to say about this game in his press conference.
“It was a great basketball game,” Redick said, via Spectrum SportsNet. “Felt like we had a couple of opportunities earlier in the second half to get up 16, 18, and had some missed opportunities. The turnovers really hurt us in the second half. High-pressure games sometimes you make bad decisions, and I thought some of our turnovers were unforced, just poor passing.
“And then we got cold from three, they got hot from three,” Redick continued. “… You can probably make a, not that it was perfect for us or perfect for them, but a sort of a teach tape down the stretch of all the things that happened both in regulation and there in overtime.”
While Redick recognizes there were areas where the Lakers struggled, he is, in all, happy with how his team played. They could have thrown in the towel after the Nuggets took that eight-point lead in the fourth, but battled hard and sent it to overtime.
While there was a bit of luck involved in that Reaves play, there was nothing lucky about Luka Doncic’s game-winner. Doncic drilled a stepback mid-ranger over Spencer Jones with 0.5 seconds remaining to give the Lakers their fifth straight win. They’re now 42-25 on the season and are third in the West.
The Lakers will take on the Houston Rockets next at Toyota Center on Monday at 9:30 p.m. ET. It is the first of back-to-back games against the Rockets, with the teams playing again on Wednesday.
