Who needs Lakers vs. Lakers now?

The second-round matchup of the NBA's dreams is upon us

May 02, 2023

The old joke in David Stern's NBA about his fantasy playoff matchup, if the league office actually had the capacity to manipulate things for TV purposes as conspiracy theorists loved to suggest, was Lakers vs. Lakers.

We're about to be treated, nearly 20 years after Stern cracked that joke himself in 2004, to the closest thing #thisleague can deliver to that impossible hypothetical.

Stephen Curry's Golden State Warriors against LeBron James' Los Angeles Lakers.

The world will be watching.

Steph vs. LeBron on a significant stage is, of course, nothing new. They memorably squared off in four consecutive NBA Finals duels from 2015 through 2018. They even went head-to-head in a hugely hyped play-in game in 2021 that doesn't come up much anymore because, well, who even knows where to go to look up play-in specifics that the league still refuses to document as part of its regular-season or postseason history?

To gain a fifth championship ring, LeBron or Steph has to go through the other first. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

This time, though, is going to be different ... and not only because we're five years removed from their most recent Finals encounter. With apologies to the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron is a Laker now. He stars for a team with a galactic fan base and will be leading the Southern California-based purple and gold against the Northern California franchise that has amassed no shortage of global popularity itself after winning four championships across the past eight seasons.

The matchup also stirs up no shortage of nostalgia for me because A) I'm an incurable nostalgist as every regular reader here knows by now and B) we haven’t seen a Warriors/Lakers series since 1991.

That one happens to be the first NBA playoff series that I ever covered, late in my college days at Cal State Fullerton, when The Washington Post followed up my internship from the previous summer by putting me on a slew of big-boy assignments as a West Coast stringer. The Run TMC Warriors unexpectedly came away with a 1-1 split from the first two games at The Fabulous Forum ... only for the Lakers, in the final full season of Magic Johnson's career, to win the next three games (including two in Oakland).

Looking ahead to this delicious second-round pairing as an apparent fellow nostalgist, Golden State's Klay Thompson said: "I'm just really excited to stick it to the team — or try to stick it to the team — that I grew up rooting for."

Ten more things I’m thinking about entering Tuesday night’s Game 1:

🏀 I’m not really buying the notion of legacy-altering implications being on the line in this series for Curry or James at 35 and 38, respectively, when they’ve both already achieved so much — unless one of their teams goes on to reach the NBA Finals for an unforeseen crack at another championship. Each has four career rings, but remember what we covered in the Monday Musings: No NBA team seeded lower than No. 3 has won it all since the No. 6 Houston Rockets in 1995 … when the Rockets were defending champions and traded for Clyde Drexler at midseason.

🏀 This is the first time a sixth seed has faced a seventh seed in the NBA playoffs since No. 7 Seattle beat No. 6 Houston in six games in 1987. That was just the fourth year of the NBA’s 16-team playoff format, which is 40 years old now.

🏀 The Warriors are the first defending champions in league history to trail 2-0 in a playoff series and recover to win the series. The four other teams in that situation all lost, three of them got swept and in only two previous cases was it a best-of-seven series. It was the first 2-0 deficit Golden State has faced in the Curry Era. "We're defying the odds by still playing at this high of a level," No. 30 said after Sunday’s win. "I know everybody wants to see you fail. That's kind of the nature of where we're at right now. We love when we still prove a lot of people wrong. It's part of our vibe now."

🏀 Remember the Lakers’ 2-10 start? Us, neither. This is a completely different team now after the in-season acquisitions of Rui Hachimura, D’Angelo Russell and Jarred Vanderbilt as well as the emergence of Austin Reaves and consistent contributions from Dennis Schröder. “Their others will be the key to the series,” one Western Conference coach told me this week.

🏀 No less important to the Lakers’ chances: They will need more from LeBron and Anthony Davis than they got from the two stars in Round 1. Davis was a monster defensively against the Grizzlies but doesn’t have the greatest history against Draymond Green, who — as one well-placed observer put it to me — has “always taken that matchup personally” and will also have considerable help this time from the ridiculously underrated rebound machine Kevon Looney in countering AD. James, meanwhile, is still recovering from the Feb. 26 foot injury that sidelined him for 13 games while the Lakers were making their late-season push just to ensure they had a spot in the play-in tournament. My pal Ben Golliver of The Washington Post noted this week that the Lakers were outside of the West’s top 10 as recently as March 21.

🏀 It’s one of the crazier stats in circulation: Warriors coach Steve Kerr has never lost a playoff series to a Western Conference team. Golden State is 19-0 against the West during Kerr’s nine seasons, which include six trips to the NBA Finals (4-2) and two seasons in which the Warriors failed to reach the playoffs (including 2020-21 when they lost play-in games to the Lakers and Grizzlies).

🏀 I normally wouldn’t overstate the importance of Game 1, but Tuesday night’s opener seems like a significant opportunity for the Lakers. They haven’t played since Friday. The Warriors have had little turnaround time after the considerable emotional expenditure involved in winning a Game 7 in Sacramento. The conditions on the road might never be more favorable for L.A.

🏀 The Warriors, 11-30 away from Chase Center during the regular season, are 2-2 on the road in these playoffs and have now won a road game in a league-record 28 consecutive playoff series.

🏀 Consider June’s presumptive No. 1 overall draft pick Victor Wembanyama wowed by Curry’s 50-point performance in Game 7 … and maybe more Americanized than we realized. As Wemby tweeted Sunday: “What is Steph on goddamn.”

🏀 The NBA announced that Sunday’s Game 7 in the Sacramento/Golden State series averaged 9.8 million viewers on ABC, making it the most-watched playoff game in Round 1 in 24 years and thus taking us back to the 20th century. It wouldn’t shock me if at least one Warriors/Lakers game on ESPN or TNT (meaning cable rather than network TV) tops that figure in this round.

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Programming Note

Turner Sports' Chris Haynes and I recorded our latest edition of #thisleague UNCUT on Monday night.

That could only mean lots of discussion about James Harden, after years of being skewered for his playoff reliability, rumbling for 45 points (despite just four trips to the free-throw line) to lead Philadelphia to a stunning Game 1 victory in Boston without the injured Joel Embiid.

Numbers Game

🏀 39

If Nikola Jokić is feeling pressure this postseason to validate his two regular-season MVP awards, it’s pretty hard to tell. On the night before he is widely expected to be announced as the runner-up to Philadelphia's Joel Embiid in this season's MVP race, Jokic totaled 39 points, 16 rebounds and five assists in the Nuggets' 97-87 Game 2 victory over Phoenix.

🏀 311-27

Although we just saw Golden State come back from a 2-0 series deficit in Round 1 against Sacramento, we still feel compelled to note that teams which take 2-0 leads — like Denver has over Phoenix — have advanced 92.0% of the time in league history in best-of-seven play. Those teams are 311-27 according to WhoWins.com.

🏀 25.9

Boston's Game 1 home loss to Philadelphia dropped its probability for winning this season's championship from Monday’s league-leading 36.4% to 25.9%, according to Basketball Reference based on 1,000 simulations of the remainder of the playoffs. Philadelphia (23.8%) and Denver (21.9%) are next in line.

🏀 1981

Monday's 119-115 triumph was Philadelphia's first Game 1 win in Boston since April 21, 1981, in Larry Bird's second NBA season. The Celtics came back from 3-1 down to win that series en route to Bird's first championship with a six-game triumph in the NBA Finals over the 40-42 Houston Rockets.

🏀 3.0

During my ESPN years, one of the most important data lessons passed on to me by my longtime colleague John Hollinger was the predictive value of average per-game point margin, which has proven often in the past that it can tell us lots about a team’s overall quality and playoff potential beyond mere wins and losses. In this abnormal season, though, that category hasn't been as helpful as usual in assessing a team's true potency. Hollinger noted in a Monday piece that only six teams this season had an average point difference greater than plus-3.0 ... and only three of the six teams (Denver, Philadelphia and Boston) are still alive in these playoffs.

🏀 8:30

NBA Finals start times have been moved up a half-hour on weekdays from 9 PM to 8:30 PM. The dates for all Finals games have already been set as shown in the enclosed screenshot.

🏀 4

Four of the nation's top six television markets are represented among the eight NBA teams still alive this season: No. 1 New York (Knicks), No. 2 Los Angeles (Lakers), No. 4 Philadelphia (76ers) and No. 6 San Francisco (Warriors).

🏀 192

Despite a fractured index finger on his shooting hand that clearly hampered him during the later stages of the Golden State series (14-for-44 shooting in the final two games), De'Aaron Fox scored 192 points across seven games. That's the second-highest total in league history for a player in his first postseason series, according to fellow Substacker Justin Kubatko:

214 — LeBron James (2006)
192 — De’Aaron Fox (2023)
190 — Bob McAdoo (1974)
186 — Luka Dončić (2020)
184 — Bob Lanier (1974)

PS — Did I feel compelled to run this stat because Buffalo's Bob McAdoo is high on the list? You guys know me too well.

The Stein Line