Zach Lowe

This may surprise you given the injuries, but I'm going Houston Lakers in the 4-5 series.

No Luka for now.

No Reeves for now.

I am working under the assumption that they will not play in this series.

We shall see.

I would love to be wrong about that.

Obviously, I'm happy again that Luka was ruled eligible.

as was Cade for all the offseason awards.

Here's the reason why I have this on here.

It's not just the classic, like, does LeBron have one last, like, I'm still LeBron James, I can carry us across the finish line by myself series in him.

I don't think that he does.

It's more...

How are the Lakers under man going to try to junk this series up, particularly on defense where they've been just throwing everything at the wall zones, switches and double teams, half zones, hybrid zones, man to man here and there.

How are they going to junk it up?

Defensively blitzes, blitzes and force the rockets to pass out of blitzes and sort of like, okay, Shen Goon, can you find I'm on, I'm on Thompson with this interior pass and then we're going to swarm him and can you blah, blah.

Can the Lakers junk it up?

and sort of nudge the rockets offense to its worst and most stagnant impulses and actually make this somewhat of a series.

I, and, and, you know, the rockets have had an ugly crunch time offense all season.

They play some lineups that are a little bit at a shooting deficit.

I think they took the third fewest threes in the league and the Lakers and JJ Redick find a way to junk it up a little bit and ugly it up and, and just take away the easy stuff from the rockets.