The Los Angeles Lakers won first place in the Western Conference on Monday with a 116-108 victory over the Utah Jazz. In a normal year, this would be a cause for celebration. The advantage of a home court and a year-long conditioning process would isolate the Lakers from possible unrest, and the rest of the regular season would not make sense. This time it is not. After a four-month break, each team is out of shape. No home court takes away the advantage of being superior to the court. Now this is just a position on the bracket.
If anything, recognizing first-round seeds is a bad thing in 2020.
Teams in the center of the rank have the opportunity to maneuver in both directions. They can dictate their matches. Since the announcement of the bubble plan, the Lakers, stuck at number 1, have mostly failed. They, like the Milwaukee Bucks in the East, are subject to parentheses. They can do very little to avoid bad games. Note that the choice of words. Very small. Nothing at all. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s purchase
The programmers gave the Lakers the opportunity, a new opportunity to adjust the classification in their favor, to avoid the strangeness of potentially unsafe programming, to experiment with some new formations and to keep a face from a PR point of view – all in one fell swoop. . The Lakers will play the Houston Rockets on Thursday, and given their hopes in the league, they must do their best to lose the game. This means spending a night with LeBron James and Anthony Davis in particular.
There are Laker-centered reasons and rocket-centered reasons, and we will start with purple and gold.
First, each bubble team had a set of mutual matches. It was necessary if the league scheduled all the games he wanted to play shortly before the playoffs. The Lakers will play the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday. The next day they pull out the missiles.
Back games are one of the most dangerous graphics in terms of injury risk, and teams know it. It is for this reason that LeBrons spent the second night of January in January. Anthony Davis has done this twice. Some players, such as Kawhi Leonard, do not play back-to-back under any circumstances. If this game had been in place of April instead of August, there is no doubt that the Lakers were sitting at their best players. Why play at stakes without risking your stellar health? The four months the NBA has just picked up adds another degree of risk. James is 35 years old and Davis has a long history of injuries. Asking you both to spend a long time playing in the evenings means asking problems.
Applying NBA recreation policies complicates things.
James and Davis are technically healthy, and the rules specifically prohibit teams from resting healthy players in high-profile national television games like this one. However, it is worth noting that the NBA would not technically lose revenue if the rating of this game dropped below expectations. National television revenues are blocked. His broadcast partner TNT suffers an immediate blow, but contradicts the fact that the captive audience provided by this pandemic is likely to raise the ratings of other games to the point that a friend is just a drop in the bucket. Neither the league nor TNT would have been electrified, and the Lakers would probably be fined. So then? The latest violation of recreation policy occurred in February when Minnesota’s Timberwolves left D’Angelo Russell out of the game for so-called “planned rest.” The fine was $ 25,000. Jeanny Buss can afford it. The retrospective nature of the game fully justifies it from the point of view of public relations. Health is a priority in the bubble.
Of course, other teams have already played each other without incident.
There is no convincing evidence that players lost all the time make them more vulnerable to injury on the second night of the return game than in a regular game. This is a logical assumption, but alone it might not be worth worrying about league anger. The real advantage is the manipulation of the bracket.
There are four sensible teams that will face the Lakers in the second post-season round. They are 2-1 against the Denver Nuggets, but that loss came without LeBron. They are 3-0 against the Oklahoma City Thunder, including an extraordinary victory without James or Davis. They are also 3-0 against the Utah Jazz. None of these teams in the series is a kind of challenge to the Lakers. Their goal should be