3rd January - New Orleans Pelicans @ Los Angeles Lakers - 11-23
Happy New Year everyone, as we come together to see the first game of 2020 for the Pelicans. We've had a couple of days off, so god knows whether that will work in our favour or not: it could be that we're well rested and fired to get going, or it could be that we have some lethargy going on. In any case, we're walking into this game with an active 4 game winning streak, and it would be cool if we could keep that going.
That said, it'll be a tough one. Tonight we take on the Lakers, on the road. Despite a 4 game skid recently, LA are still 27-7 so far this season and have won 3 straight by comfortable margins. Admittedly, only one of those games was against a good opponent (Dallas game) but still, it's worth noting.
Lakers are 4th in DRtg and 7th in ORtg. By comparison, we are 19th in ORTG, and 23rd in DRtg. You may be thinking to yourself that 23rd is an improvement on our defense from about two weeks ago, where we were 24th, and much better than where we were about 3 weeks ago, when we were 27th. You would be right. Let's keep that progress up.
1st in blocks, 2nd in steals, 7th in assists, 2nd in FG%, the Lakers are a pretty good team at a bunch of things. They're mediocre rebounders, only falling in 16th in the league in that, and they're not very good from 3 or the FT line, sitting at 20th and 27th respectively in those categories. So there are weaknesses in this team that can be exploited.
One thing to be noted is that LA is dead middling in pace, ranked 15th in the league. They're not a team that sprints around naturally but they aren't some crawling team either; they should be able to run with us at least a little bit. That's to be expected, frankly; AD did run with us for a while, and of course so did Rondo. Lebron is the greatest transition player of all time so... yeah.
Let's go out there and do our best, but this isn't the kind of game where we get sad if we lose. We can get sad if the team plays stupidly, or annoyed too, but this is the kind of game where we could play well and still take the L, and in that situation you have to just deal with it.
#WBD
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Originally Posted by msusousaphone
