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Hoops Tonight Host (18:28)

So where did I go wrong picking this series? There's two main areas. The big one is, is like I, I thought that Anthony Edwards just cleanly and clearly outplayed Luka Doncic in this series. I just thought he was the better basketball player on both ends of the floor. And you know, when I came into the series, I just thought that that was a matchup, that Luka would win. And I thought like Ant would be closer to where LeBron was as like a guy that looked like somewhere in the 5 to 10 best player in the league, but, you know, not being able to be the same kind of commanding presence that Luca is as an offensive force in the series. And Ant just was able to flip that dynamic. And you know, for all of the talk, I've seen a lot of talk. I saw Carson Breber, my friend from Nerd Sesh, do a video yesterday talking about depth and how important depth is in the NBA and I don't disagree. I think depth is super important. It'd be really nice if you could have a depth piece that you can go to. Everyone was bitching at JJ Redick for not playing any of his bench guys in game four. How did Jared Vanderbilt look down the stretch tonight, guys? Like, there wasn't exactly a guy that, that JJ trusted to put out there in those situations. Right? The, the reality is though, is that in, in these sorts of situations, it comes down to when you're in the half court, your superstar has a superpower. And that superpower is what overcomes surrounding circumstances. And like that, that, that's the reality. Like the Lakers couldn't score in this series. They had shooting on the floor, they had play finishing on the floor, and when they generated fantastic looks, they went in. But it came down to ultimately, Luka could not create that initial advantage. He could not beat his one on one defender profoundly enough to dictate that second defender that could get the defense in rotation and allow the Lakers to generate wide open shots. He wasn't able to do it effectively enough. On the other end of the floor, Anthony Edwards, and what he does was dictating two, sometimes three defenders every single time down the floor. And so his team was able to repeatedly generate fantastic looks. And so here's the thing. Do I think the Lakers roster has issues? Yeah, they need to get a legitimate bonafide center. We're going to talk about some of the other kind of like, deficits that they have and where the Lakers should go from here. I didn't think JJ Redick had a good series, but ultimately I thought it came down to Luka outplayed Ant, Julius Randle outplayed LeBron. It's really difficult to overcome that. No matter how good your coach is, no matter how deep you are, no matter what other, you know, kind of cards you can pull out of the deck, so to speak, if your stars get beat, it's going to be really hard to win. And like, when I saw that, you know, that message from, from Carson, like, I think it's valuable in terms of, like, just how athletic the game is now with how fast everyone plays. To have seven or eight guys that you really trust is a huge asset. But I look at the Denver series and I think that they're winning because Jokic is the best player and he's dominating the star matchup and Jamal Murray is kicking James Harden's butt. And I look at this series and I think Anthony Edwards and Julius Randall outplayed Luca and LeBron. And I look at the Celtics Magic series and I'm watching game four, you know, pivotal game four down on the road in Orlando. And Jason Tatum is surgical on one end of the floor and Palabon Caro looks like he doesn't know what he wants to do on the other end of the floor. It even looking at the Pacers series, how did the Pacers pull that out down the stretch? Tyrese Halliburton just backpacked the team in crunch time. And ultimately, I still think having the best player in a series really does matter, even though depth also matters. I think that this was a good example and there were several examples in this first round of the star matchup playing a big role in how these series go. So where do the Lakers go from here? We can get more into it in the mailbag. I'd imagine we're going to talk a lot of, like, big picture Lakers stuff here and on playback here in a little bit. But, like, I Thought there were obvious athleticism deficits. You know, if there's one thing that I just didn't listen to my own, like I let my heart get in front of my head, so to speak. I. I watched every single minute of the Minnesota Timberwolves kicking the shit out of the Denver Nuggets last year. I watched every single minute of the Minnesota Timberwolves kicking the shit out of the Phoenix Suns last year. I watched probably like the better part of 40, 45 Minnesota Timberwolves games this year. Like, I watched them. And I repeatedly came on the show and said, man, the upside with the Wolves is they can just maul everybody when they get into the playoffs and the ref swallow the whistles and it just turns into a bloodbath and everyone just kind of seems powerless under those waves of size and athleticism. I knew it and I didn't properly factor it in. It was just foolishness on my part. And it's a lesson learned, a valuable lesson learned. But I do think there's some reality with the Lakers roster build and their lack of athleticism. And this to me is something to keep in mind with the build moving forward. I think there was a lot of talk coming out of this series even when things were going poorly and even before the series about the Lakers just need a center. How Austin Reeves is the perfect kind of co star to have alongside Luka Doncic. He kind of fits the mold of the Jalen Brunson, Kyrie Irving idea of having like a shot, creating guard next to Luca. And you know, LeBron James is this guy that can operate as like a defensive fulcrum and a ball screen, fulcrum, slash, secondary, ball handler, whatever you need. I look at it now and I go, I don't know that you can be athletic enough with Austin Reeves and Luka Doncic as core players. And so I think the Lakers, when they look at their kind of like their coffers going into this off season, you have, if I'm not mistaken, at least one first round pick. Cause I think they gave up the other one in the AD trade. So you have one first round pick, you've got, I think at least one pick swap. You've got the Dalton Connect piece, which I think is a young player that some teams would value. And then Austin Reeves is one of the best assets in the league because of his salary and what he makes, right? So I think that the Lakers have to start seriously considering the reality that if they play Austin next to Luka in the big picture, there is an athleticism deficit and if you're not freaky athletic at the other three spots, it might not be tenable. And so you. And by the way, that doesn't mean that Austin, I, I'm a big believer in Austin and I absolutely think that Austin can have success in a championship context. I think Austin got humbled a little bit in the series. I think that Austin was revealed to have two major shortcomings. One, his ability to handle physicality. I think he'll spend a good amount of the summer in the weight room. I think also Austin was exposed as a poor catch and shoot player and I think he's going to have to spend a lot of time this summer if he, if, if he's going to stay alongside Luka operating as a catch and shoot player. But beyond that, it's about the matchup, right? So the Wolves kick your ass in large part because they just have all these bodies, right? And so like Aunt, Aunt Edwards had Austin Reeves in jail in this series. And so Austin has to find a way to be impactful even when he's not able to score the basketball effectively. Not turning the basketball over by not struggling against that physicality, by adding strength and working on ball handling through physicality. And then two, becoming a better catch and shoot player so that you can be at least an asset off the ball offensively. There were guys, there were in each of these last two games what at least like 8 or 9 clean catch and shoot looks that Austin missed that literally could have changed both games. If Austin shot the ball better from three tonight, they very easily could have won tonight. If Austin shot the ball better from three in game four, they very easily could have won game four. That is a piece of low hanging fruit for Austin that he can improve on. He needs to become a better catch and shoot player. But regardless, in the big picture, I tend to look at it as though you're putting yourself in a bind, building around Luca with Austin being as unathletic as he is. And so there's a version of this where like if you put Austin on the Orlando Magic, he'd be incredible there because he would be anchored by big strong athletes all over the floor. And his specific trait, his skill set, which revolves around like high level skill on ball offensively becomes very valuable in the context of that team, right? So like, I think what we've noticed here is, yeah, because guys, you don't want to overreact to the Timberwolves matchup, but at the same time you're going to run into a big athletic team. If you're going to win the title, it's like it's a prerequisite. You're going to have to overcome a team that's probably bigger and more athletic than you. Right. And so with that being the case, I think with the Lakers moving forward, they have to at least explore the idea of flipping Austin for a bonafide two way athletic starter of some kind to anchor alongside Luka. The obvious need for a vertical spacer. I think that, you know, I think Luca, I think Luka had a really bad offensive series. I thought he was exposed as a poorly conditioned athlete. He consistently faded towards the end of games. He like, like missed like back to back games where he had bad misses right at the rim that directly led to run out layups or let run out transition threes that hurt the team. He obviously has a lot that he can get better at but at the same time there's some clear stuff that you can do to make his life easier. And one of those is get him a legitimate screen and roll threat. Get him somebody that you can sit in the dunker spot and that can create that vertical spacing window. Right now that is not. I saw a lot of talk surrounding that in this series that I don't necessarily agree with. There was a lot of talk about like play Jackson Hayes. The TNT broadcast was being ridiculous. Constantly panning to Jackson Hayes every single time Rudy Gobert got an offensive rebound. Does anybody remember what it looked like when Jackson Hayes was on the floor in this series? He's awful. He can't do anything on either end of the floor. That was, that was not going to be an answer after what we saw off of the early parts of the series. But going back to the Boston series last year, there will inevitably be a team that can switch that action. And so like the 5 out spacing look would have been a counter against Boston in a way that the vertical spacing piece wasn't because of Tatum and Jalen Brown's ability to switch the Don Lively and the Doncic Gafford pick and rolls right. And so like yeah, you want to get him a center. But most of this still comes down to, in order for Luka to, to be able to carry a team through four playoff rounds, he has to become a more better conditioned athlete. Luka got blown by or gave up a bucket on five possessions before the first team, before the first TV timeout tonight. In, in for, in the fourth quarter it was just give the ball to Ant or Julius against Luka and they were going right around him for the bucket. He's got to find a way to be better than he has been on that end of the floor. He's got to find a way to be better in the fourth quarters offensively against these bigger athletic teams. And the only way he's going to get there is if he does the work that Steph Curry and so many other of the lesser athletes in NBA history have done, which is work obsessively on conditioning so that you can hold up as that situation gets more complicated later in these postseason series. We'll talk a lot more about Lakers throughout the mailbag and in the excuse me, in the playback segment, but that's my initial impression right now as we go to the summer is they're a little bit further away than I realized and and we're going to be talking a lot about that. It's a very important summer for Rob Pelinka in the Lakers. So before we talk Warriors Rockets for a few minutes, I just wanted to remind everybody we are starting our first ever Watch Playback after show tonight. So when we are done here on YouTube live, we are going to head right over to playback. We're going to take questions from the audience. We're going to let you guys come on stage to share your opinions. We're going to do some film towards the tail end of that segment. We're going to do a bunch of stuff. It's going to be less formal, it's going to be a lot more interactive. We're going to be hanging out on playback for a solid 45 minutes or so after the YouTube live show. So make sure you guys take the time to hit the link in the subscription below this video right when we get done. And I'll see you guys over on playback when we are finished here. All right, let's talk Warriors Rockets. So as wrong as I was about the Lakers series, I've been somewhat on top of this one. I predicted before the series that I that the warriors would win in six games and that they would probably get blown out in Game five. This is a somewhat typical series flow, the better team playing without home court advantage. I saw a stat today, actually that home teams down three one who are favored in game five when they were 30 and 10 in the last 40 games since 2003. So it was kind of cool to see a stat that kind of matches up with something that I've always kind of felt about this kind of game, which is just it's a really tough game to win, especially when you're the the More athletic team. Like that was the big difference between the Minnesota Lakers game tonight is like, you know, when you have a home team feeding off their home crowd, who's the supremely athletic team? They can be overwhelming. Whereas, like what we saw with Minnesota LA tonight, Minnesota's athleticism travels and it became something that the Lakers were unable to overcome. But again, that's basically what happens in these series that I see. When you have a road team that you pick to win, you steal a game on the road between games one and two, you take home court advantage, you come home and you win games three and four, you punt game five, cause it's a really tough game to win. And then you end up closing things out in game Game six. And Houston came out tonight and just kicked Golden State's ass in every phase of the game. They forced the warriors into nine turnovers in the first half. Amen. Thompson's ball pressure on Steph was amazing. Steph did a poor job of handling it. He got picked clean a bunch of times around half court. The Rockets shot the ball super well. They got 1.67 points per jump shot in the first half. That's outrageous. They shot super well on contested shots too. Dylan Brooks and Fred Van Vliet both made like running crazy contested threes right before the half as the warriors were making their run. Brooks's three banked in. It was ridiculous, right? They ran nine possessions of zone and held the warriors to just six points on those possessions. Fred Van Vliet kept up his hot shooting from game four. Amen. Thompson goes for 25 points. He's really starting to showcase his upside. Dylan Brooks had 24. Everything went right for the Rockets. Now. There was an obvious lack of intensity from the warriors that, that you know, we talked about even leading up into the game, right? So how much of this is translatable for the Rockets to Game six back in Golden State? Now, before I talk any further, again, I do not think this will happen. I think the warriors will take care of business. I think they'll come out and probably win game six relatively comfortably against Houston. I think that when they really engage themselves defensively, they can strangle this Houston offense. And I think that they have the ability to just hit the jets right out the gates, change the tone and tenor of the game, build a little bit of buffer, and I think they'll be able to stiff arm the rockets for Game 6. But the warriors haven't exactly scored well in this series. They're averaging less than 103 points in their three wins. The reason why they're up 31 is they haven't, the Rockets haven't been able to score. So the case if you're going to try to like draw a line between what the Rockets have shown over the course of this series and a potential win in game six back in Golden State and a win in game seven, what you would try to focus on is that the Rockets have found some success in the half court offensively with the Shangun Fred Van Vliet two man game, particularly inverted when Shangun's on the ball. But it at least puts the warriors in a predicament where they have to switch and then Sengun can get some favorable matchups there. Now in theory, if you defend as well as you defended through the rest of this series and you keep things low, scoring enough and Fred and Alper and Changun generate enough offense, they absolutely can win that game, game six and take it home for a game seven against Golden State. But I don't think they will. I think this was a textbook example of just a really tough closeout game to win on the road against a young super athletic team. Just tip the, tip the cap for the Rockets to the cat. Tip a cap, tip the cap to the Rockets for throwing a great punch. But I expect the warriors to show that veteran resolve when they get home on Friday night. We were going to have two games on Friday, but now we're going to end up only having one game. So just as a teaser before we head over to playback, Jackson's going to come on and we're going to take one question. After that we will head over to playback.

Hoops Tonight Analyst (35:35)

Yes sir. Indeed. This was, this is a question that's, you know, partially it's asked in jest, but the sentiment of it is certainly serious. And the question is that got a lot of this was Nico right? And maybe Nico was not right. But. But the question about sort of Luca's defensive conditioning that you definitely alluded to, you definitely talked a lot about how big of a problem is that obviously was a problem this series. How big of a problem is it? Sort of long term.

Hoops Tonight Host (36:01)

So Nico is not right. And I think people are just using that as the obvious talking point regarding Luca's struggles in this series. In order for Nico to be right, you have to equate whatever the diminished version of Luca's value that you see, you have to equate that down to one first round pick and Max Christie who has the potential to be a good two way starter in this league. But isn't there Yet. And Anthony Davis, who is an awesome player, but at this phase in his career is a lot slower than he used to be. He finally had a couple healthy seasons in a row, and then he broke down this year. Like, for any concerns you have about conditioning. Anthony Davis famously came into Lakers camp out of shape multiple times in the LeBron James era. It was something that LeBron himself was frustrated with. So, like. Like, the. The Nico piece is ridiculous, because even if you just try to, like, I saw Zach Low say in his pod, like, oh, there are corners of the NBA smart NBA world that say, oh, you can see getting off of Luca as being smart. I still think that's stupid. I don't agree. But even if you. Even if you accept that the actual nuts and bolts of the trade make no sense now, from there, Luca was out of shape when he got hurt, allegedly from the reporting. Part of what triggered the need or the desire for them to take this action was Luka, shortly before the trade, about a month before the trade, showing up to the facility, fat as shit. So, like, there's a certain amount of like. Like, this was never going to be the season where Luka would prove everyone wrong. He was out of shape when he came back. He played his way into shape. He never really looked at any point into peak shape. He just looked at some points, like Luka Doncic that we've known over the course of the last couple of years at times. And so I think for Nico to be right, it would need to be, we're here again next year, and Luka looks fat, out of shape, banged up, and can't play any defense. If we're here again at that point, then it's a totally different conversation. But even within that context, the trade doesn't make any sense. But Nico's lack of belief in Luca, I think would have to be predicated on multiple additional years of him not living up to his potential.

Hoops Tonight Analyst (38:22)

Yeah, this is the first time we've ever seen Luka have a subpar for his standards playoff run ever. Yeah, he's been. They've lost. They haven't won the championship before, but he's been outstanding in every other playoffs until this year. Not every superstar is great in every single playoff run. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the most recent one, so, you know, fair to take a close look at it, but it doesn't necessarily mean this is going to be the consistent thing that happens for Luka throughout the rest of his career.

Hoops Tonight Host (38:46)

No, I totally agree. Um, it's. It's I'm curious to see, I'm curious to see what Luka does this summer. I'm curious to see if LeBron takes a pay cut. I'm curious to see what kind of moves they look to make. I want to see what the roster looks like when we get to August or to October. Excuse me. It's, it's going to be interesting. I, I, I will freely admit, as having rooted for Luka, that I was very disappointed in him in this series. But at the same time, I also know that if there was some sort of, you know, what do you want to call it, like a transformation of character or like some sort of leap that he takes as a competitor, it's going to happen next season, not this season. All right, guys, we're going to head over to playback. Make sure you guys meet us over there. Again, the link is here in the description. We'll be starting up there just in the next couple of minutes. We'll see you guys over there shortly. What's up, guys? As always, I appreciate you for listening to and supporting Hoops tonight. It would actually be really helpful for us if you guys would take a second and leave a random rating and a review. As always, I appreciate you guys supporting us, but if you could take a minute to do that, I'd really appreciate it.

Sponsor Voice (39:48)

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Degree Advertiser (39:52)

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Hoops Tonight Host (40:07)

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Degree Advertiser (40:20)

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