LOS ANGELES \u2014 If the Lakers and the Mavericks meeting for the first time this season was supposed to feel special, it failed.<\/p>\n
There were no angry glares at the Dallas bench, no hard stares on the floor between the past and the future of the Mavericks. The emotion for Luka Don\u010di\u0107 was much more internal.<\/p>\n
There was no clear-cut villain, hiding in plain sight in the Mavericks\u2019 executive seats, to be jeered. Nico Harrison had been fired and wasn\u2019t there to be thanked or harassed.<\/p>\n
This, a 129-119 win against the Mavericks, felt kind of like any other night \u2014 a sentiment that both signals how comfortable Don\u010di\u0107 looks in his new home and how consistently the Lakers are playing high-level basketball 18 games into their season.<\/p>\n
The player the Lakers never should\u2019ve been able to get, Don\u010di\u0107, torched another defense with ball fakes, brute strength and bursts of speed \u2014 all paired with emergency-brake deceleration. He scored 35 points; no big deal. Seen it before. Gonna see it again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say it\u2019s a little bit easier now,\u201d Don\u010di\u0107 said of seeing his old team. \u201cBut like I said, games against Dallas always have some special meaning to me. I still have a lot of friends there. It\u2019s always special. It\u2019ll always be special for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just not as special as the first few.<\/p>\n
The player the Mavericks somehow didn\u2019t get in that trade, Austin Reaves, added to his resume as one of the NBA\u2019s best offensive players by using a sudden first step, some overdue\u00a0shot making and tremendous body control. Reaves had 38 to lead his team \u2014 something that might\u2019ve seemed like a big story last year. Now, he could end up on the All-Star team.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow long ago did I tell you all, AR can f\u2014ing play ball? When was this? When was he a rookie? I don\u2019t even remember,\u201d LeBron James said after Reaves\u2019 big game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been told you all, he can ball. It\u2019s nothing (new). AR, he\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n
Don\u010di\u0107\u2019s revenge and Anthony Davis\u2019 return from injury took a backseat to Reaves, the hardest player on the court to stop.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he\u2019s been one of the best basketball players in this league, just the way he scores, he makes a place for others in the game,\u201d Don\u010di\u0107 said. \u201cIt\u2019s very good. I\u2019m just happy he\u2019s on my team. And that\u2019s probably the last compliment I ever give him.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the one who has been doing this the longest, James, continued to show he was willing to accept whatever the game presented to him in a complimentary role, calmly scoring just two points in the first half before finding some seams and some shots to get him into double figures scoring for the 1,296th-straight game.<\/p>\n
In four games this season, James has been whatever the Lakers have needed him to be \u2014 a laser from three, an engine in transition, a force on the glass and a voice on the defensive end. Unsurprisingly, the Lakers have won all four.<\/p>\n
You could be forgiven if you forgot that the Lakers even trailed in the fourth quarter, their control and poise making their eventual victory seem like an inevitability because of how well they\u2019ve performed in tight situations this season.<\/p>\n
After the win, the team\u2019s 14th this season, the Lakers have the third-best winning percentage in the entire league \u2014 a standard of play set in the early portion of the year and met routinely.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the game plan discipline and game plan execution has been pretty good all season and we\u2019ve been building that,\u201d coach JJ Redick said of his team\u2019s habits. \u201cThe outliers on that, to me, are like the games where we lack effort, didn\u2019t play hard, which basically is two games of the 18. I think our communication habits, on-court huddles, all of that stuff has been great.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then offensively, the organization and the execution is significantly better than where it was last year. And our ability to understand what we\u2019re trying to do and why we\u2019re trying to do it on offense has been really good.\u201d<\/p>\n
That all of this felt so ho-hum \u2014 even with the Lakers clinching a home game against the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Cup quarterfinals, even with the team re-winning the Don\u010di\u0107 trade and winning its sixth straight, Friday was more about the Lakers kinda just being themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve done a good job of problem-solving during games when we have runs that aren\u2019t great,\u201d Reaves said. \u201cInstead of breaking apart, we come together and figure it out and that\u2019s what good teams do. You have to be able to problem-solve on the fly. Coaching staff gets a lot of credit for that. They give us basically the answers to the test, we just gotta go out there and do that and play hard, so I think that might be the biggest one.\u201d<\/p>\n
No, Friday never reached the heights of a bitter rivalry game. Instead, it looked and felt very much like one great team handling its business against a worse one.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe felt differently as a viewer, but the game to me was like a very simple game in that the guys that don\u2019t normally make 3s for them made some 3s,\u201d Redick said after. \u201cWe had too many turnovers in the first half. And then the second half, we stopped turning the ball over.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir guys kept making 3s until the very end, basically. And we were able to get enough stops.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve heard stuff like that before. And if the Lakers stay on their path, we\u2019ll hear stuff like this again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 If the Lakers and the Mavericks meeting for the first time this season was supposed…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":413089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3141,1260,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-413088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","9":"tag-nba","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115633662554704749","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}