Lakers Stun Thunder in Double-OT, 114-106
Wow.
Okay, enough gushing. This was a great win for the Lakers, the best of their 41 wins this season. The adversity included losing Metta World Peace (misnomer?) to ejection, having Andrew Bynum sit during the entire fourth quarter (don’t know why), and playing an OKC team that entered the game with a .730 percentage and is quite serious about running the table.
Both teams had something to play for. The Thunder came in one-half game behind the Spurs for the top spot in the West. The Lakers, in third place, had a thin one-half game lead over the Clippers. The Lakers would like the Clips to stay in fourth play and play the fifth-place Grizzlies, while the Lakers would get the Nuggets or the Mavs, neither as dangerous as a finally-healthy Memphis team. Normally, I don’t think angling for a “favorable” playoff spot is worth the effort, but if the Lakers were to lose World Peace for, say, the first four games, playing the Nugs or the Mavs would be far preferable.
Usually I’d rail against Kobe going 9-26 but this was a very unusual game. In fact, Kevin Durant, virtually tied with Kobe at just under 29 points a game, and a good percentage shooter, shot 11-34. That’s 23 missed shots!
Russell Westbrook shot 3-22. That’s 14%. Andrew Bynum shot 5-15. Pau Gasol was 7-18.
One hears a lot of nonsense about the connection between poor shooting percentage and good defense. Sometimes teams are just missing shots, uncontested shots. Sometimes it’s good defense forcing bad shots. The theory doesn’t distinguish. But when all of the great shooters in the game have poor percentages, it’s the defense. Ask Bynum. So often he powered in close as usual only to be bodied by Perkins while Ibaka was leaping to block his shot. Ibaka had seven blocked shots and I think three of them were on Bynum. My guess is it frustrated him and got him kinda dreamy out there when he should have been focused. After a Laker hoop he usually trotted back. Ibaka and Durant sprint back.
Maybe that’s why Mike Brown benched him. Or perhaps he tweaked something and Brown shut him down for the rest of the game.
Kobe showed his grit and his greatness. Sefalosha, a truly great man-to-man defender, was inside Kobe’s shorts all night. A couple of times Kobe got sent crashing to the floor—legally, the result of a blocked shot or takeaway. Other times, they were hard fouls that sent him to the line where he was 6-7. He was poked in the eye and generally beat up but played a hard 49 minutes with eight assists and six rebounds to go with his 26 points. And he hit big shots down the stretch.
Pau had 20 points, 14 rebounds and nine assists. He had 11 assists four days earlier! And most of those assists were pretty.
Jordan Hill showed what he could do with 35 minutes—14 points, 15 rebounds and three blocked shots. Devin Ebanks was also effective off the bench..
The turning point in this one, for both teams, was Metta’s sledgehammer elbow at a vulnerable part of James Harden’s head. But it wasn’t thuggery, despite his rep. It was more like ADD or a bipolar issue. I believe Metta was somewhere else for that moment, perhaps on a playground in grade school where the older kids made fun of him. Hey, I just work here. He’ll certainly get a two-game suspension and thus miss the first playoff game. More likely he’ll get more. If so, it’s a blow that the Lakers might not recover from. He has been terrific for the last month.
Yet without Metta, and without Bynum in the 4th quarter, the Lakers pulled off a gutsy 18-point comeback (winning the 4th quarter 30-14) to force overtime and then decisively win the second overtime 16-9.
How many times this year has the Thunder blown an 18-point lead? Yeah, I thought so.