It's about a little over an hour before tipoff, and the Lakers look more like an AAU team than a storied franchise about to take on the defending world champs.
It's about a little over an hour before tipoff, and the Lakers look more like an AAU team than a storied franchise about to take on the defending world champs.
Loud music is blaring, causing the constant conversation between the young teammates to get louder and louder. Lonzo Ball snacks on a banana. As they watch video from their last game against the Warriors, Josh Hart calls out Larry Nance Jr. for not getting him the ball, "Damn Larry, make a pass right there!"
They look and sound like a bunch of kids ... because, well, they are a bunch of kids.
So when this bunch of kids fell behind by 23 points in the third quarter in the most raucous home arena in the NBA, most expected them to cave, like so many teams do, and chalk it up as a lesson to take things more seriously before a big game.
But then a funny thing happened. They came back.
And it wasn't so much the fact that they came back -- the NBA is a league of runs, after all -- but it was who was leading the charge that was most impressive. Whoever types up the play-by-play must have grown weary of writing Kyle Kuzma's name.
- Kyle Kuzma turnaround hook shot.
- Kyle Kuzma layup.
- Kyle Kuzma 26-foot 3-point step back jump shot.
The 22-year-old rookie scored 12 of his 27 points in the third quarter and continued his onslaught into the fourth, when the Lakers eventually took an 89-88 lead.
"It's something he wouldn't have done earlier in the season," Lakers coach Luke Walton said of Kuzma after the game. "We're really impressed with the way he is playing and even more so with the composure he has kept in these last couple games. At times in each game, he puts us on his back and the rest of the team starts to get confidence again."
And when the Warriors came charging back, as they tend to do, it was Ball who emerged as a stabilizing presence. He scored nine points on 4-of-5 shooting in the final frame and didn't commit a single turnover
"He did a good job of calming us down, making sure the offense was set up, making sure we got into our plays," Kuzma said of Ball. "He showed pretty good poise down the stretch."
The Lakers would end up losing the game, 113-106, but the fact that the Kuzma and Ball were the ones keeping things close even surprised Walton.
"How quickly they're picking all this up is really impressive," he said. "They didn't get rattled at all tonight. In fact I thought they were two of our more mentally tough guys out there. When it got tough, I felt like the two of them really kind of kept us in it until everyone was ready to re-engage and get back in the fight."
Just to reiterate, this is Walton talking about a 22-year-old and a 20-year-old as the most mentally tough players on the team. It's not something you see very often from two rookies, particularly a duo that has had to face a murderer's row of the NBA elite over the past week.
The Lakers' last four opponents: The Cavaliers in Cleveland, the Warriors at home, the Rockets in Houston and the Warriors in Oakland. No team will face a tougher four-game stretch this entire season, and both Kuzma and Ball have turned in their best four games of the season. Not only that, but they snapped the Rockets' 14-game winning streak and were within striking distance in all three losses down the stretch.
"It's a learning curve but we're both rookies," Kuzma said of himself and Lonzo. "We go through the same stuff every single day. It's always good to have multiple rookies to go through it together."
The stats have been fantastic -- Kuzma joined Jerry West and Elgin Baylor as the only Lakers rookies to score 25 or more points in three straight games, while Lonzo made a career-high five 3-pointers on Friday against the Warriors en route to 24 points, the most he's scored since the second game of his career against the lowly Phoenix Suns. But we all know there are good stats and bad stats. What's so impressive is that the two rookies haven't padded their numbers during garbage time. Instead they've emerged as bona fide leaders and shown supreme composure in what was supposed to be the most difficult series of games in their careers.
Their youth can be an advantage in that sense. Not only are they physically capable of bouncing back from one tough game to the next, but they might also be more equipped to forget the circumstances and just play basketball -- the certain bravado and swagger that can only come with unjaded youth. Also, while Ball's reluctant to admit it, the fact that he has been in the national spotlight basically since he was in high school does play a part in how he's able to stay in control when other 20-year-olds might crumble.
"I think just playing in the league, period, has helped me," Ball said after the game. "The more I play, I feel like the better I'm doing. Obviously the spotlight's been on me for a while, so, you know, I'm pretty used to it. I'm just getting more comfortable out there."
Both Kuzma and Ball have a long way to go as players and as leaders, and losses are losses, but it's hard to have watched this Lakers team over their four-game gauntlet and not come away with way more than just a glimmer of hope for the future. The fact that they played the Warriors twice during that stretch was fitting, since they're the team the Lakers try their best to emulate.
"We want to model ourselves after Golden State," Kuzma said. "It's no secret, with Luke coming from there, our personnel, our versatility. We want to be like them. We're going in the right direction, for sure."
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