Perhaps it’s not surprising given his close friendship with the star of the team, but Chris Paul thinks the Los Angeles Lakers will win the NBA Finals.
The Oklahoma City Thunder guard revealed his prediction that the Lakers and LeBron James would win the championship when he appeared on DangerTalk, the podcast of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, on Wednesday.
“The Lakers,” Paul said. “My brother LeBron over there.”
Los Angeles enters the Finals as the favorite. The No. 1 seed in the Western Conference, Anthony Davis and James led the Lakers to 4-1 victories in all three playoff series leading up to the Finals.
But the Heat likely pose the best matchup of any team they’ve faced this postseason. They have a wealth of versatile defenders, namely Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, and have a deep rotation even in the playoffs.
Paul spoke glowingly about the Heat without being prompted.
“I play all season long and there’s sometimes we lose games, and I’ll be like, ‘Man, we should have beat them’ … One of the losses this year, when we lost to this team, I was like, ‘Man. They beat us. They beat us bad.'” Paul said.
“… It was Miami. Miami. And they, they just beat the hell out of us. And it wasn’t like we were just missing shots and all that. They had all these little tricks … They just played so good together as a team.”
Oklahoma City lost to Miami this season on Jan. 17. The Heat scored 40 points in the first quarter, and it was never really a contest afterward even though the Thunder cut the score to single-digits in the fourth quarter. Seven different Heat players scored double-digit points yet none scored more than 22.
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Paul said there are some teams that if you slow down the star and force other players to make shots, they’re beatable.
The Heat and the Denver Nuggets are two teams who, in Paul’s experience, are major exceptions.
“Miami’s on a whole nother level cause they don’t have a guy you know is going to drop 20, 25 (points) every game,” he said.
Yet even though the best way to stop the Lakers is to stop James, that’s easier said than done.
James, entering his 10th finals appearance, has the most points and steals, third-most assists, sixth-most rebounds and second-most 3-pointers in playoff history.
He now has star center Davis next to him.
Paul thinks the Lakers can win their 17th championship as a franchise.
Wilson went with the Heat, but he didn’t sound convinced. He acknowledged that he was choosing them publicly more to make things more interesting with Paul as his guest.
“I don’t know man, I think LeBron’s gonna win it, but I’m gonna go with the Heat just to make it interesting in a six-game, seven-game series,” Wilson said.
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