When the Lakers led Houston 3-0 in the first round, JJ Redick was asked why it was so hard to close out a playoff series. <\/p>\n
He said (sounding like Dexter):<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udcac \u201cWell, you have to kill them. It\u2019s difficult to kill someone. You\u2019ve got to \u2026 again, survival instincts says, \u2018I want to stay alive.\u2019 And so, you got to be able to kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the opposite end of that 3-0 deficit, the Lakers played like a team that wasn\u2019t ready to close its eyes. They fought through turnover problems. They sustained a six-plus-minute scoring drought. They took haymakers from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Ajay Mitchell.<\/p>\n
And they lived. And lived. And lived. Austin Reaves. LeBron James. Marcus Smart. Jaxson Hayes. Rui Hachimura. All made plays. All put the Lakers in position\u2026until there was no more air. James\u2019 missed runner would\u2019ve given the Lakers the lead. Austin Reaves missed 3-pointer would\u2019ve tied the game. <\/p>\n
Two shots that didn\u2019t fall in the final minutes, the difference between playoff life and playoff death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Lakers led Houston 3-0 in the first round, JJ Redick was asked why it was so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-664015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}