The Lakers' quiet takeover has an inescapable pulse
The Lakers won anyway; they won going away 124-114 with the kind of ease that should unsettle the rest of the league, because what looked like a patched-together roster played like a full-blooded one, and what looked like a problem became a prophecy.
Key points
- Everybody was on the same page, everybody was communicating." Fifty years from now, some of these Lakers will remember championships and forget their first baskets entirely.
- Los Angeles Lakers forward Jake LaRavia (12) and guard Luka Doncic (77) react after the Lakers defeated the Atlanta Hawks at State Farm Arena.
- Fatigue is the truth serum of the NBA; the Lakers keep the league honest.
The Lakers are now 3-0 on the second night of those cruel little two-fers, 5-1 in back-to-backs overall, and if you're looking for the fingerprint of a real team rather than a fortunate one, that's it.
Additional details
- Nobody warns you about the part where it starts to feel inevitable, where you catch yourself checking the standings the way you'd check a wound — not because you expect blood, but because you no longer trust how painless it's become.
- He hit shots that bent the game, then grabbed defensive rebounds in the final minutes that Redick called "as big as any play he made all night." "Guys kept finding me and just kept knocking the shots down, you know," Mamukelashvili said.
- But Cameron Carr will remember his — a two-handed transition slam in the first quarter, his first NBA points, the ball thrown ahead by Dončić, the rookie rising like the future tends to.
- The night belonged, on paper, to Luka Dončić — 32 points, 10 assists, eight rebounds, five steals, two blocks, a stat line so stuffed it reads like a box score ate a thesaurus.
- "There's a compounding effect to having guys out of the lineup," coach JJ Redick said afterward, almost like a man describing weather — the cold math of subtraction.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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