Golden State Warriors vs. Los Angeles Lakers: Playoff Preview
After a grueling 7-game series which ultimately came down to the best player on the planet, the Warriors officially defeated the Sacramento Kings to advance to the Western Conference Semifinals. They have little time to celebrate, however, - just over 48 hours - before they’re back on the hardwood.
The opponent this round? LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers have had a similar roller coaster of a season to the Warriors, rife with injuries, rumored internal strife, and the drama that the organization often has going about it at all times. A trade deadline revitalization, however, has LA looking like one of the hottest teams in the playoffs.
The real story is, of course, the rebirth of LeBron’s rivalry with the Warriors. Despite a 3 and 1 record against arguably the second greatest player of all time, their most recent meeting in a playoff-adjacent setting was the play-in tournament in 2021, a situation that happened only because Stephen Curry carried a battered Warriors squad to get a puncher’s chance. Many are claiming this could be legacy-altering if Steph falters, but those people don’t really watch enough basketball to acknowledge how special it is to see the kind of greatness there is between him and LeBron on the court together.
The Lakers took care of the Memphis Grizzlies pretty handily in round 1, but the Grizz were missing key rotation players Brandon Clarke and Steven Adams, which nulled their rebounding capabilities by a significant margin, and missed time from team star Ja Morant certainly didn’t help much either. Regardless, Los Angeles is not a team to be underestimated, even if the Warriors are starting to get things together at the right time.
The Tale of the Tape
The Lakers were a bit of a roller coaster until the trade deadline, when they retooled their roster to include now-key contributors such as former Warrior D’Angelo Russell and Rui Hachimura. They offloaded Thomas Bryant to Denver and sent Russell Westbrook packing as well before his buyout. Since the All-Star Break, the Lakers were ranked 2nd in win percentage (69.6%) and led the league in free throw attempts. They were ranked 4th in both defensive rating and rebound percentage as well. Their team’s identity is what you’d figure it to be: They’re big. They don’t give up a lot of easy baskets, they outsize most teams they play against, and they control the glass on both ends of the floor. In many ways, they’re opposite to the much smaller Warriors who don’t boast a single player over 6’9 on their roster and led the league in both threes attempted and three-point percentage. With two competing styles of play representative of today’s versatile modern era, the devils will be in the details when it comes to deciding who will take the series.
How the Warriors Win
Make your open shots. The Lakers gave opponents the 2nd most wide open attempts on threes in the NBA since their roster reshaping, and the 3rd most shots in general in that same span. While they’re a highly-rated defensive team, a lot of that defensive aptitude can be attributed to their scheme centered around Anthony Davis and focused on not giving up points in the paint. They play a lot of loose coverages, almost never meeting the level of screens, and they generally don’t put in the effort to close out on shooters, a hitch which they suffered from against the Grizzlies. The kryptonite for a team that plays a lot of mid-to-deep drop and doesn’t switch all that much, logically, would be the NBA’s best three-point shooting team and the best shooting backcourt of all time. Their size and athleticism puts them in similar company to, ironically enough, last year’s Grizzlies team which Golden State took care of in a gritty 6 games. The key difference is that this LA team doesn’t push the pace as effectively as those young guns did. The Warriors will need to make their looks early and take advantage of Darvin Ham’s tendencies to adjust at a slower rate (much like his mentor Mike Budenholzer in Milwaukee) while stalling out the Lakers’ mediocre half-court offense and crashing the boards. They also have home court advantage, so despite winning 2 on the road in Sacramento, it will be key for them to win convincingly at Chase Center.
How the Lakers Win
The easy answer here would be size. LA needs to control the glass, which would wipe away a lot of margin for error which Kevon Looney gave his team against the Kings. The Lakers can get out and run in transition at a relatively efficient rate, something which Sacramento used to great effect in the 1st round, so keeping Looney and company from grabbing offensive rebounds is going to be paramount to their success. Ham’s team will also need to close out on shooters and run the Warriors off the line, into the paint territory of one of the NBA’s better rim protectors in Davis. Los Angeles also held the best free throw differential in the NBA - the antithesis to the Warriors’ worst - this season, so ensuring they can capitalize on what will likely be copious amounts of free throws will give them another way to garner momentum of their own, or break any which Golden State can get.
The Series Prediction
Fresh off of a Game 7 which apparently was prefaced by the greatest rallying speech of Steph’s career, the Warriors looked completely locked-in and not only held a historic NBA offense to just 100 points, but beat them by 20 while shooting 32% from the outside and 63% from the line. We’ve also seen them flip the switch and continue to improve as the playoffs as a whole gone on in the past: There’s no indication that the games in this series are going to be any different.
While the Warriors are starting to look more cohesive and it will be hard-pressed to find a game where Klay Thompson, Jordan Poole, and Andrew Wiggins all shoot as awfully as they did in their last contest, the Lakers do have the size advantage and will have the ability to dictate a slugfest if that’s what it comes down to. Ultimately, however, the Warriors are more experienced: This isn’t a type of matchup they haven’t seen before, as Los Angeles’ strengths harken back to another playoff opponent of the Warriors past: The Anthony Davis-led New Orleans Pelicans, who Curry and company were a combined 7 and 1 against in 2015 and 2018.
The Golden State Warriors will beat the Los Angeles Lakers in 6 games.
(Photo credit: Adam Pantozzi / Getty Images)