The Los Angeles Lakers will begin the 2024 NBA Playoffs on Saturday evening when they visit the defending world champion Denver Nuggets. It will be a rematch of last season’s Western Conference Finals when they got swept.
Not that many people feel L.A. has a real shot in this series. For it to win, a lot of things will have to go right, but for the Nuggets to win, they will simply have to keep doing what they have been doing since last spring.
Guard Austin Reaves actually played well in last year’s Western Conference Finals, averaging 21.3 points a game while shooting a blistering 56.0% from 3-point range on an ample volume of attempts. He’s also one of the Lakers’ most confident players, and he showed tons of confidence when he made a bold statement about this year’s rematch.
Via Heavy Sports:
“We’re gonna win,” Reaves told Heavy Sports in a one-on-one interview to promote his “Perfect 10” episode with Hotels.com. “If you don’t go in with that mentality, then what’s the point of going in?”
At the same time, he warned that his team will need to be very on-point in the fourth quarters of games.
“You got to be really good the fourth quarter team because they execute so well in the fourth quarter,” Reaves said of the Nuggets. “They don’t make mistakes and anytime you make a mistake in the fourth quarter, they capitalize on that.”
In last year’s series, the Lakers got thoroughly outplayed in the fourth quarters of the final three games. All three of those contests were decided in the final minutes when Denver went on several surges and the Lakers were unable to do anything in response.
If they control enough of the final minutes of each game this time around, perhaps they’ll have a chance of winning — at least an outside chance.