43 comments

1. My favourite part of this game was Finch having to burn both of his challenges because of classic Lakers ref ball.

   Also, we were terrible and only lost by 9 and still have home court

2. Randle balled the fuck out tonight. You have to absolutely love his toughness.

   We played about as bad as we could for 3 quarters and we still gave ourselves a chance to win. That’s a great sign going forward.

   We also knew the refs would give them a game or 2.

   Let’s protect homecourt.

3. Despite anything else we need to hit more than 20% of our threes

4. split series on the road. let’s get it done at home.

5. Conley 0 points

   Reid 9 points

   DDV 4 points

   NAW 4 points

   Absolute no show from these dudes and McDaniels wasn’t much better. 5-25 from 3pt and we still somehow kept this rigged ass game close. Pathetic performance but it’s hard to imagine we can play much worse.

6. Lakers were gassed at the end

7. I don’t wanna hear about refs. Both teams got more than enough calls. They punched us in the mouth early and granted, we really battled the rest of the game but we traded 2s all night and couldn’t hit our 3’s. The defense was there though. We got the split and home court. Ain’t worried. Oh and fuck Luka Doncic.

8. Wolves in 5

9. Genuinely don’t understand how so many can be loud and wrong about Gobert’s performance today . You’re letting the likes of reggie miller brainwash you into thinking he’s a liability when he’s maybe been successfully iso’d about 4 times between lebron, Luka and reaves all game and clamped them in every other possession . The only issue was his rebounding that’s it

10. We played like shit, but fought hard. I feel good about this series overall. Now WIN 2 at home Wolves

11. Who had a worse game? NAW, Mike, Rudy, Donte, Jaden, Naz, or Ant? EVERYONE was a no show except Randle

12. Got punched in the face early and took too long to get into a rhythm. The good news is this was to mostly be expected, Lakers had a dozen adjustments to make and we basically had none. Our shooting over-regressed too. Luka made some insane shots, and we had some bad bounces on rebounds.

    Need Ant to bring a lot more energy to game 3.

    RANT: Also the refs were ass. I think they struggled to ref the physicality, but they were bad. Couldn’t touch Luka, the ticky tack fouls didn’t go both ways, and they took our best players out. There were too many times we drove in late in the shot clock and didn’t get a call, and the Lakers would do the same and get bailed out. Ant is a disrespected star. They also made a point too foul Hayes out too which benefited the Lakers. So for any Lakers fans talking about the box score, 5 of those fouls were Hayes being an idiot.

13. Good news: held em to 94

    Bad news: couldn’t break 85

14. I took these notes with no access to live box scores and no rewind button available to me, so some of my observations could certainly be incorrect, but here’s what I thought about tonight

    1q notes:

    * jaden and rudy trust eachother to guard their yard which is a positive sign that we were missing (from Rudy mostly) in the past

    * jaden let rudy solo luka, rudy didn’t overhelp (which is good because it allowed him to contest the dumpoff)

    * don’t read r/NBA and don’t listen to fans at crypto – every shot guarded by Rudy or Jaden without help was a hard shot. Luka makes them, but we’d rather he makes those than the easy ones

    * things I don’t think I liked: sticking to our principles would have us rotate off Luka to guard AR. Probably want AR to get the open shot over Luka if you know nobody can rotate for your guy?

    * I know it’s ugly to dump on Julius when he was our ONLY offense early, but all their easiest looks in the first half came from him – either ball watching and losing a cut to give Luka an easy pass, or randomly not deciding to take the 1v1 challenge vs his assignment

    * when engaged, Julius looks like a fine defender on anyone we put him on. LeBron settled for a lot of long two fadeaways instead of trying to attack Julius. We’re probably okay with that? Though those looked easier than Luka’s “hard shots” mentioned above

    on reffing:

    * I don’t care if you feel the reffing was bad on both sides of the ball. They entered the night set on reffing us hard, and didn’t have to make it as obvious because we didn’t put up enough of a fight. You can tell their intent by how they reffed the non-subjective calls

    * I can call out play by play, but suffice it to say that the “game decorum” rules were unevenly administered, namely delay of game, challenge rules, and ofc the fact that we had to use all our challenges for the game on back to back calls

    * beyond game decorum calls, I was frustrated about what was allowed on either end in terms of rebounding, though that felt more evenly chaotic in the 4th quarter

    * all these put together tell me the refs weren’t just taking opportunities to make calls on the Wolves, but really were excited to unevenly administer the rule book

    * reggie called out the refs saying “you’ve got to make the call for the wolves” 3+ throughout the game and it has to be REALLY bad for that guy to levy criticism against the league or the refs

    offensive notes:

    * lebron doesn’t look strong enough or fast enough to deal with naz/julius, I would have liked to see us go to that more in the 1st half

    * we had to work way harder to get shitty looks, so credit Lakers for finally taking the game seriously. I don’t remember seeing the off-the-screen, one-step 3 that Ant made about 200 of until the 2nd half and it was so refreshing to see him take one (and of course make it)

    * our Bench Big 3 did nothing. Obviously they didn’t get much play time to have the opportunity to do anything, which is very frustrating, but even when they were in I don’t remember them playing their game until like 3min left in the 3rd. I’ll rely on Dane Moore’s review to figure out whether that was our fault or the Lakers defense

    * did Ant get way fewer touches or is my gut feeling off? we could have used some Ant magic, whether that was multiple 3pa in a row or the assisting we see occaisionally

    * the better Luka was calling out signs whenever we shot FTs in the 2nd half lol. We never stopped the play, but I’ll keep my eyes on it in upcoming games

    overall:

    * not much to take away from the game after about 15 minutes because the refs made it clear these two teams aren’t playing the same sport

    * sadly once we got down, we stopped playing like winners for about 16 minutes. too much standing around after stopping the first action. sad to see since we weren’t really PUT AWAY until pretty late in the game

    * it’s insane that we didn’t see JC. I’m happy we saw a little of TSJ and he did prove himself to be a defensive liability, but I don’t think he’s unplayable

    * I’ve said it every time he calls a game of ours and I’ll be saying it again, but Kevin Harlan is not a good PBP guy. He really struggles to figure out what’s happening in real time. He’s at half court and can’t figure out who is in action, who fouls are on, etc. He gets a ton of credit for an amazing call on amazing plays, but we have to give up so much in terms of the listening experience for 47.5 minutes a night. I like reggie though lol. He’s cheesy but he makes this duo bearable

    * idc we’re the better team as long as we keep our mentals level. It was nice that we got a lot of individual players’ bad games out of the way at the same time. Beyond that, we’ve got to play well enough for 48 minutes that it’s undeniable

    * I want to review 8:05 in the fourth to see how Rudy didn’t get that board. Rudy is contending it was Vando being dirty, which I’m inclined to believe, but I’d like to see it again and I didn’t have rewind on my stream

15. https://preview.redd.it/pqh9zroekiwe1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5de11a70e9d66e1a722ea062a137312a1a6dbb3c

16. If we play just an average Wolves game, we win by 6+. Incredibly frustrating and it’s almost entirely because of the lazy, awful first quarter.

17. Hope this is an uncomfortable video session tomorrow. We had plenty of opportunities and threw it all away.

    Need better decision making in crunch time if we are going to do anything this post season.

18. Fuck L.A. and the refs. that foul on Randle hitting LeBron turned the game.

19. Wolves gave themselves a chance in the 4th getting a lot of stops but turned it over 4 times. Offense never was in any sort of rhythm, refs missing obvious calls and Wolves missing open 3s did not quite help it. It’s going to be a long series, need to protect the home court.

20. Our worst game of the year. The lowest scoring game we had all season was 93… we have 85 tonight

21. Take the first quarter as seriously as they took the 4th quarter, this is probably a W.

22. Before you get too down: Lakers looked like shit tonight. They’re out of runway. This series is winnable.

23. On the bright side, no one on the Lakers can guard Randle besides maybe LeBron, who doesn’t have the legs to do it for more than a few minutes at a time anyways. Need to just spam the Randle Ant two man game until they prove they have an answer

24. That was an ugly game.

25. everyone played terribly except randle and it was a 9 point game. If we can just fix up the silly turnovers, not shoot abysmally by 3, and get some more rebounds (talking to rudy) we will be alright.

26. Lakers are in trouble, we beat ourselves and the refs helped them all they could. Execute and we win the series handily.

27. The silver lining for me in this loss was it looks pretty obvious we win the serious with even a semi-equal whistle. Wolves the better team

28. I can’t believe we cut it to 9 and just stopped taking threes such a horrible offensive process, also no TJ while we had to watch Mike play 20 minutes of negative basketball is crazy

29. All those hometown ref calls and only a 9 point lead, I still believe

30. Elite 3 point shooting team decides not to shoot any 3s in a game where they are down 9 in crunch time. Pathetic.

31. I don’t understand why we didn’t even try to use Clark once in a game where the lakers is playing offense like crazy. Like we don’t wanna try to at least put a defensive specialist to slow down their scoring,

32. Shoutout Randle. Yep that’s it

33. Randle was absolutely fantastic on both ends, I’m sad we wasted the best playoff performance of his career playing catch up the whole game.

    Finch not playing Shannon at all in the 2nd half after his impact in the 1st is the most discouraging thing about the game.

    Rudy played amazing iso defense all night but his inability to grab a rebound really hurt.

    Conley simply can’t play this series.

34. Laker players looked absolutely gassed at the end of the game. Good luck trying to keep that tempo up.

35. The early foul trouble cost us. They were playing on egg shells all game and lakers got everything in the paint. They were equally horrible shooting

36. Wolves in 6. Lakers can’t hang in late game. We got into foul trouble early in the game and shot like ass. We almost seemed to let them win this game and didn’t seem like we cared. Lakers look bad again and wolves looked worse.

37. After two games, I still think we’ll win this series as long as we make shots. We’ve held them under 100pts twice, and their offense outside of Luka doesn’t look like it’ll improve much. We have more firepower. Wolves in 6.

38. Rudy goes from a 20/20 threat every night to a 6/6 guy. Randle fought hard, was getting absolutely thrashed all night.

39. All of our fouls were on the guys that dominated game 1 btw

40. Rudy locked up doncic in the 2nd half. If we just shot a little below average but guess everyone besides ant and Randle made shots

41. Knick fan chiming in.

    Regardless of the loss, yall are physically fucking the lakers up. Y’all did what yall was supposed to do and that was steal a game. Dare I say the lakers are scared to get physical with yall and are heavenly reliant on Luka’s theatrics. I feel really good about yall chances regardless of how ugly the game was tonight.

42. Luka is such a floppy diva. It makes me want to vomit

43. I’d argue this was legitimately our worst game of the season and the stats back it up. Not sure if that makes me feel better or worse though.

    https://preview.redd.it/wtesk6i1oiwe1.jpeg?width=826&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e4505425eb1451bde81a938f5e68c2961abd4d0