The Los Angeles Lakers have many concerns about where the month of June will take place. NBA As far as the championship is concerned. But its winter counterpart? The Lakers have always taken care of that front. Last season, they went on a dominant 6-0 run in the NBA Season-opening tournament to claim the trophy, and they opened this season with two more wins in the revamped NBA Cup. Overall, that made them 8-0 in tournament matches and the last undefeated team in the event’s young history.
Well, that’s it for that impeccable record.
On Tuesday, the Phoenix Suns emphatically handed the Lakers their first tournament loss, 127-100, behind a combined 72 points from the star trio of Kevin Durant, Bradley Beal and Devin Booker. The end of the streak, in and of itself, is little more than a bummer for the Lakers. However, in the grand scheme of this year’s tournament, he is a potential game-changer.
now there is a three-way tie at the top of Group B West. The Lakers, Suns and Spurs are 2-1. However, since the second tiebreaker is by point difference, the crushing nature of this specific loss is quite significant. As things stand, the Suns have a 35-point lead over the Lakers in terms of point differential at plus-19. Sure, the 2-1 Spurs could defeat the Suns on December 3, knocking Phoenix to 2-2 and pitting the Lakers against an opponent over whom they have a head-to-head tiebreaker, but that won’t necessarily solve their problems.
Because? Because the Lakers still have another game left in the group stage, and it’s against the best team in the Western Conference, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder are 1-1 in their group, but they have some time left in their own slate of group games in the form of a Dec. 3 home game against the hapless Utah Jazz. If the Lakers were to lose to the Thunder, they would fall to 2-2 with a terrible point differential, effectively eliminating them from the tournament.
Even if they beat the Thunder, they would need the Spurs to beat the Suns or win a tiebreaker against the other non-group winners in the Western Conference. That could be problematic because of the point difference. The 2-1 Mavericks in Group C West have a plus-41 differential. If they take care of business on their own court against the Grizzlies on December 3, they are all but assured of being the Western Conference wild card team due to that huge point difference.
Essentially, the Lakers went from “undefeated in the entire history of this tournament” to “on the brink of elimination” in the span of a disastrous second half against the Suns. Sure, there have been more damaging individual losses in regular season history when it comes to playoff berths, but from a tournament perspective? This was one of the biggest group game losses we’ve seen so far.
