The Los Angeles Lakers have plenty of concerns where June’s NBA championship is concerned. But its winter counterpart? The Lakers have always taken care of business on that front. Last season, they went on a dominant 6-0 run through the NBA’s inaugural In-Season Tournament to claim the trophy, and they opened this season with two more wins in the revamped NBA Cup. In total, that made them 8-0 in tournament games and the final undefeated team in the event’s young history.
Well, so much for that spotless record.
On Tuesday, the Phoenix Suns emphatically handed the Lakers their first-ever tournament loss, 127-100, behind 72 combined points from the star trio of Kevin Durant, Bradley Beal and Devin Booker. The end of the streak, in itself, is little more than a bummer for the Lakers. Within the grand scheme of this year’s tournament, though, it’s a potential backbreaker.
There is now a three-way tie atop West Group B. The Lakers, Suns and Spurs are all 2-1. However, as the second tiebreaker is point differential, the blowout nature of this specific loss is quite meaningful. As it stands, the Suns have a 35-point edge on the Lakers in terms of point differential at plus-19. Sure, the 2-1 Spurs could blow out the Suns on Dec. 3, knocking Phoenix down to 2-2 and putting the Lakers up against an opponent that they have a head-to-head tiebreaker over, but that wouldn’t necessarily solve their problems.
Why? Because the Lakers still have another group play game left, and it’s against the best team in the Western Conference, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder are 1-1 in their group, but have a gimme left on their own group play slate in the form of a Dec. 3 home game against the hapless Utah Jazz. Should the Lakers lose to the Thunder, they would fall to 2-2 with a horrific point differential, effectively knocking them out of the tournament.
Even if they beat the Thunder, they’d either need the Spurs to knock off the Suns or to win a tiebreaker against the other non-group winners in the Western Conference. That could prove problematic because of point differential. The 2-1 Mavericks in West Group C have a plus-41 differential. If they take care of business on their home floor against the Grizzlies on Dec. 3, they are all but assured to be the Western Conference’s wild card team because of that enormous point differential.
Essentially, the Lakers went from “undefeated in the entire history of this tournament” to “on the brink of elimination” in the span of one disastrous second half against the Suns. Sure, there have been more damaging single losses in regular-season history where playoff seeding is concerned, but from a tournament perspective? This was one of the more significant group play defeats we’ve seen yet.