For a brief time, it looked like the Los Angeles Lakers weren’t going to figure things out before it was too late. They proved a lot of people wrong on Thursday with a statement win over the Portland Trail Blazers. The team played much better on both sides of the court and finally looked like the team that beat the Clippers and Bucks shortly before the NBA suspension.
One of the biggest concerns coming out of Game 1 was that Anthony Davis didn’t have a great game. He silenced all the doubters in Game 2 as he put up 31 points in just three quarters. It was a great turnaround for the superstar big man and LeBron James leveled some really high praise at Davis.
“I’ve had some great teammates in my career,” LeBron said. “AD is one of those unicorns, and he does things that some of my other great teammates are not capable of doing.”
Davis is a really unique player and is almost impossible to stop when he’s playing well. He just needs to play as he did on Thursday on a consistent basis.
LeBron Talks Lakers’ Tough Road This Season
It’s been a hard and unprecedented season for many teams but the Lakers may have had the toughest road of all this year. They’ve dealt with injuries, tragedy and adversity. LeBron had a chance to talk about what the team has been going through.
“I mean, it started from training camp, to preseason, traveling abroad, to entering the New Year, the tragic death obviously of Kobe [Bryant] and those victims on that helicopter, to the stop of the season, to players getting injured, [Rajon] Rondo going down for a big piece of the year, to the restart, not having our brother Avery Bradley here,” LeBron said. “And so on and so on. I don’t even know. It just feels like it’s been three or four different seasons [in one], so I know what we’re capable of. I know how we’re built.”
There’s still a lot of games left to play and the Lakers will need to keep pushing through.
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Davis Talks Relationship With LeBron
One of the biggest reasons the Lakers have had success this year is the fact that Davis and LeBron have such a strong relationship. Playing for the Lakers is a much different experience than playing for the New Orleans Pelicans. Davis has been relying on LeBron during the transition.
“Our relationship has been great the entire season,” Davis said of James. “I’ve kind of just been leaning on him this entire season, just trying to figure out the tricks [of the] trade of playing with a guy like him and a team like this. … He kind of has been there for me and supporting me and kind of guiding me through this entire process.”
Davis and LeBron are the keys to the Lakers being a title contender. As long as the two men continue to get along, that will mean good things for the team. Davis is a free agent this year but it doesn’t seem like there’s any chance he’s going to ditch LeBron just yet.
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