2023-04-30 05:18:01
LOS ANGELES (AP) — LeBron James did not immediately respond to Dillon Brooks, who called him old and questioned his abilities at the start of the first-round playoff series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies.
One day following James and the Lakers beat up Brooks and the Grizzlies. James preferred that a song by rapper Jay-Z speak for him.
The leading scorer in NBA history tweeted a portion of the lyrics to “Trouble.” Among some profanity appears the phrase: “It is evident that you are looking at a legend.”
Maybe everyone except Brooks knows that James has been a legend for years. He’s working on another chapter of his legacy this season, and the league is beginning to realize there’s no telling how far the star and the Lakers can get from him in James’ 20th NBA season.
The Lakers have won 14 of their last 18 games. They resolved their series once morest Memphis in six games, a team that accumulated 51 wins in the regular season.
Since the first round of the playoffs is played over a maximum of seven games, it is the first time that the seventh seed has eliminated the second seed. And on Tuesday, the Lakers will collide once morest the team that wins this Sunday’s duel between Golden State and Sacramento.
“Everything gets harder when you level up,” James warned. “We were able to conquer the first level and now we are one more up.”
The Lakers lost their first five games under rookie coach Darvin Ham. They entered the season 2-10 and were seven games under .500 by Valentine’s Day.
But following the trade deadline, they started to improve.
The additions of D’Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt and Rui Hachimura produced impressive results. But the 38-year-old James made the biggest difference, staying healthy and eventually becoming the highest-scoring player in NBA history.
And in recent weeks, Anthony Davis has probably been the most valuable player on the team. He has put up six masterful displays of defensive work, including 26 blocks once morest Memphis.
But even Davis reckons the Lakers will go as far as James takes them.
“He just leaves everything on the court,” Davis praised. “Many of us are exhausted. Obviously he has more miles racked up maybe than all of us put together, but we just try to do our part to make it easy for him so he doesn’t have to push himself the whole game.”
James scored at least 21 points in five of the six games once morest the Grizzlies. He got the first 20-point, 20-rebound performance of his two-decade career in Game 4, when he also hit a tough layup that forced overtime.
After a difficult fifth game, James brought in his best repertoire in the sixth, capped by a reverse dunk into traffic. It was a basket that every basketball player would have wanted to sign, at any age.
“I’m telling you it’s not real,” said Ham, who was an assistant for the Lakers late in Kobe Bryant’s career before moving to Milwaukee’s staff. “Like Kobe, he is amazing. And you know that so is Giannis (Antetokounmpo, Bucks star). I’ve been around some of the five elite players in the NBA, but I’ve never seen anything like what Bron does.”
Although James is not one of the Lakers’ best defensive players, his focus and mentality have helped the team’s evolution. Los Angeles looks dominant and resilient.
The Lakers controlled the talent of Ja Morant and virtually shut down the contribution of the other Memphis players. This revealed Ham’s strategy, who has privileged defensive work since his arrival.
This is also the mindset the Lakers had under Frank Vogel, who led them to the title in 2020. However, they lost it for much of the next two seasons.
Defensive dominance is much easier with a healthy Davis in the paint. Injury-prone, Davis was in his best form once morest Memphis.
“I think it was him and everyone knows it. The world knows it. The basketball people know that and the competition knows how dominant he is defensively… He’s been spectacular,” James said.
The game in which the Lakers clinched the ticket was a blowout, thanks to Russell, who scored a playoff-high 31 points on five 3-pointers.
Russell has a very close bond with the Lakers crowd, who cheered for him during his first two seasons in the NBA, particularly difficult. The scoring specialist point guard has been inconsistent since his return, but the Lakers are hard to stop when he scores and distributes the ball to the best of his ability.
“I think the energy since we made that trade or made that decision to bring the guys here has been contagious to the whole group,” Russell said. “It was something we might control. We brought our energy to the team, and it spread.”
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