LOS ANGELES — Everyone was waiting for the Nuggets’ run.
We have all seen this movie before: The Los Angeles Lakers race out to an early lead, build it up to double digits, and then Denver walks them down before walking out of the building with the win. This is what happened in the first three games of this series, and it’s a pattern that carried over from the Nuggets sweeping the Lakers out of the playoffs last year.
So when the Lakers raced out to an early lead and built it to double digits in the second quarter behind the hot hand of Austin Reaves, we thought we knew what Act II would look like.
Saturday night the Lakers flipped the script.
For the first time in this series, the Lakers matched the Nuggets’ physicality and intensity in the second half — Los Angeles grabbed offensive rebounds and scored on second chances, and they kept their defensive intensity up. Then, when it came time to close out the game, LeBron James had 14 points in the fourth quarter and was making plays.
LBJ STEAL ➡️ LBJ HAMMER 🔨
— NBA (@NBA) April 28, 2024
Lakers looking to get on the board in Round 1 👀
They have a 10-point lead with 91 seconds remaining on ABC 🍿 pic.twitter.com/j1R12f6e9D
“In the past, they’ve really taken advantage of their little 7-0, 8-0 runs and those turn into 12-2 or whatever,” the Lakers’ Reaves said. “Tonight, we, kept them from kind of getting that and more.”
The result was a 119-108 Lakers win to keep their season alive. They are still down 3-1 but will board a plane for Denver for Game 5 on Monday night.
“The only opportunity for us is to win the next game and we’ve given ourselves some life, give, ourselves a little lifeline,” LeBron said. “It’s a one game series for us. So Monday’s game is the most important every season for us.”
For everything the Lakers think they did right, the Nuggets think they let go of the rope.
“We got to get off to better starts,” said Michael Porter Jr., who finished with 27 points. “We don’t want to... it takes a lot of energy to come back from a double-digit lead, down 20, down 15, whatever it is. And tonight they did a good job of sustaining it, when we got within 10 or eight it seemed like they made 3-pointer or made a big shot, so credit to them.”
Part of what the Nuggets did was miss shots they normally make inside. Midway through the third quarter Nikola Jokic was 4-of-9 shooting within 8 feet of the rim, and Nuggets as a team are 12-of-29 in the paint (41.4%). That improved, but they couldn’t get the stops they needed to get the win — the Lakers kept getting downhill and ended up with 72 points in the paint.
Jokic still had a triple-double with 33 points, 14 rebounds and 14 assists. He also made two just ridiculous passes.
Jokić behind-the-back dime to MPJ 🤩 pic.twitter.com/tWLsC1bjjA
— NBA TV (@NBATV) April 28, 2024
NIKOLA JOKIC'S IQ IS UNBELIEVABLE 🥶
— NBA (@NBA) April 28, 2024
Nuggets-Lakers | Game 4 on ABC pic.twitter.com/nInF6eLYxN
Anthony Davis had 25 points and 23 rebounds, but the Lakers got better play from their supporting cast in this game with D’Angelo Russell and Austin Reaves each scoring 21. Russell and Reaves picking up the playmaking and scoring through the second and third quarter took a lot of load off LeBron, and that left him with energy to close things out.
This just didn’t look like the Nuggets night from the start, when Porter Jr. and other players had to warm up pregame in slides (someone put the suitcase with the players’ shoes on the late bus from the hotel, so a lot of players were at the arena ready to warm up while their shoes were sitting on a bus at the hotel).
The script was flipped, for the first time in 12 games it was the Nuggets that couldn’t quite get over the hump against the Lakers.
The question is, can Los Angeles keep the script on this page in Denver on Monday night?
