The Athletic NBA Daily
Why the Lakers are a nightmare for the Thunder + MVPs in purgatory
07 Apr 2025
Luka Doncic scored 30 points to lead the Los Angeles Lakers to a 27-point blowout win over the Oklahoma City Thunder. Dave DuFour and RealGM’s John Wilmes breakdown the Lakers win, discuss JJ Redick’s coaching, and the OKC’s nightmare scenario. Then, Dave and John discuss the MVP level performances from Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo and what it means if they fail in the playoffs.Host: Dave DuFourWith: John WilmesExecutive Producer: Andrew SchlechtAudio Producer: Grayson Moody Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
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Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily. Coming up, John Wilmes from Real GM is here. We're going to talk about the Lakers dominating the Thunder and a couple of MVPs in purgatory as we head to the playoffs. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, John. John Wilmes, my good buddy who writes over at Real GM, filling in for Zena and S, who are both off.
I mean, Zena is not even off, to be honest with you. I mean, she's working like women's national championship game, which she's probably recording like right now. John, thanks for joining me. We just got done watching the Los Angeles Lakers. handily beat the Oklahoma City Thunder thanks to an amazing shooting performance.
I mean, I'm pretty sure they just hit another three-pointer in postgame that they're going to count. What's your big takeaway? I think that this is game one. They've got another matchup Tuesday night, so it's a back-to-back for them. What's your big takeaway from round one of the new look Lakers versus the Thunder?
it's a tiny vision of of like the thunder's worst nightmare right where you've been kind of wondering all season long if their sort of playoff level intensity would cease to be an advantage once we get closer to and then into the playoffs right and obviously your mvp likely mvp uh shea gilgis alexander had a productive day yeah uh let me pull up the numbers on that but i i believe he was very productive from the field he had
He 12 for 23, but he didn't get to the free throw line at all. So and then nobody else on the on the team clicked offensively. They created an OK amount of turnovers to like they usually do. But the Lakers just sort of meeting and actually surpassing their intensity level is maybe something that you kind of worried about all season long with the Thunder.
Yeah, listen, the Thunder have a reputation for being extremely physical. And I thought that the Lakers, whatever their game plan was, was on point. Number one, they came out just as physical as the Thunder. I thought they kind of raised the level of what a foul call was going to be pretty early on, which is good. Because usually I think the Thunder does this to other teams.
And by matching that intensity, I think it really, they punched the Thunder in the mouth a little bit. And it helps that, look, they wound up going 22 of 40 from three. So we can throw the results out to a certain degree because that is an aberrational shooting performance. But there were big takeaways.
I thought on the defensive end in the half court, the way that the Lakers were both willing to switch a big Jackson Hayes out onto Shea Gildas Alexander. And then they were pre-rotating behind Jackson. the action to cut off the driving lanes. And part of that is that's what took away some of the free throws for Shea because there was just no one coming in with bad fouls.
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