It’s impossible, there’s no way and can not be. There are teams that, in addition to everything else, are out of luck. The final shot will never be scored by them and will always be scored by the rival. It is so. You may think it’s karma, but in reality it’s your own mistakes, which usually always come back to bite you in the ankles. Or, when they’re as gigantic as the ones the Lakers stack, to grab you by the throat and take your breath away. After a good run based on a docile calendar, the opportunity to maintain some semblance of optimism had presented itself great. But even that, a glimpse of some hope, however diffuse it may be, ends up turning into pain for these Lakers. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is only transformed. And in these Lakers it always turns into something worse. ASomething that would be very painful if the nerve endings weren’t basically dead by now.
The defeat against the Indiana Pacers (115-116) is one of those defining ones and it may definitive. If there was something to solve in a team that is gibberish by design. He was a rival in back to back after losing clearly against the Clippers. And was the team of phantom transferwho has been talking for months about that option to change Russell Westbrook and his evil contract for Myles Turner and Buddy Hield. Symbolic in that too, the collapse of the Lakers absorbed any good news, left a bit of fun in a sarcastic anecdote and quite good basketball for such a long-suffering crowd. And surely tired. The Lakers, with a very dignified image, they led 101-84 with 9:30 remaining. A +17, against a team on the second night of back to backon your court and with Anthony Davis and LeBron James on your team. In already negative inertia, with the scare getting under their shirts, they still commanded with ease with three minutes to go (110-101). From there, they conceded 15 points. A dramatic hit-and-miss exchange ended with a basket by LeBron with 20 seconds left and it was 115-113. Myles Turner missed a three-pointer, but the Lakers did not close the rebound and Andrew Nembhard, an unexpected hero, scored the final triple at the buzzer.
A sadistic ending that showed that everything that can go wrong from the start is going to go wrong for these Lakers. In fact, it will come out worse. But he also proved, more than anything else, that These injuries may sound bad, but they are the result of not being a good team, not well managed and not having a reliable level. There’s no more. The question is not why that last possession came up tails, it is why this situation came to be with a game that seemed claspedtotally under control. According to the calculations of ESPNthe Lakers had a 99.1% chance of winning with 9:59 to go. But a franchise that is storied for doing incredible things has been doing them for a long time too… but for the worse. Very, very, very bad. When you least expect it, a new misfortune is invented, a defeat more ugly, painful and ridiculous than the previous one. Another notch, a span below in a well that, sport is like that, never bottoms out. Everything can get worse, no matter how difficult it may seem.
The Pacers are leaving happy with the gift and 12-8, Eastern quarters. It’s a bright season for a team that was expected in the sewers, waiting for Victor Wembanyama. Once again, the atomic young couple made up of Tyrese Haliburton (24 points, 7 rebounds, 14 assists, not a loss) and Bennedict Mathurin (23 points, 8 rebounds) led a compact team, with 15 points and 13 rebounds from Turner and another 15 from Hield, for the who in LA wants, still at this point, to draw his what if Nembhard made three more three-pointers in addition to the game-winner and finished with 12 points.
But the Pacers, without detracting from their merit, would not have beaten a serious, decent team this time, minimally structured to sustain themselves in a last quarter with everything in their favor. It was enough for him not to jump down the ravine when it was a long way from danger. But the Lakers, once again, decided to sprint into the void, go looking for chaos when chaos seemed to have taken the night off. Westbrook had good stretches (24 points, 6 assists), Davis finished with 25 points, 13 rebounds, 6 assists and 4 blocks and LeBron needed 22 points to score 21 points. But actually, what difference does it make? That is the question one day after Pelinka, through the press, moved the date to do something from mid-December to January. That moment, the carrot before the stick, never comes. never comes right. And although there is no certainty that it will end up happening, it seems increasingly clear and to make matters worse that it would be, in any case, already too late.