The Los Angeles Lakers are entering this year’s NBA playoffs on a mini-roll. They have won 12 of their last 15 games, and they seem about as healthy, cohesive and confident as they have been all season.
This season has included many lineup changes, injuries to key supporting players and fans calling for head coach Darvin Ham to be fired. Now, they will face adversity of a different type when they open the playoffs against the defending world champion Denver Nuggets.
But Ric Bucher believes the Lakers have the same mojo they had last season when they went to the Western Conference finals, only to get swept by Denver. He said it’s also the same mojo they had in 2020 when they won it all (h/t Lakers Daily).
.@RicBucher: This Lakers "mojo" feels familiar to last year. pic.twitter.com/wr6ZRsXahP
— Speak (@SpeakOnFS1) April 15, 2024
“I could pick apart what the Lakers are and what they’ve done,” Bucher said when asked which Western Conference play-in team he trusts the most. “They got this little mojo here at the end of the season that reminds me of the mojo that they had in the bubble and then they had when they made their run last year. It feels familiar.”
Although L.A. struggled in Tuesday’s play-in tournament game versus the New Orleans Pelicans, they found a way to win, 110-106. It was the type of game that good and great teams win, and the type of game L.A. was able to win in the 2020 and 2023 postseasons.
The team will need every bit of that mojo to overcome a Nuggets team that looks poised to win a second straight ring. Unlike a year ago, LeBron James is relatively healthy, and the Lakers have role players in Gabe Vincent and Spencer Dinwiddie who could help them contain Jamal Murray, who killed them last May.