Hoops Tonight - Lakers Win Epic OT Game Vs. Knicks, Brunson Leaves With Injury

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eligibility varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire one hundred and sixty eight hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkang dot co slash b ball. All right, welcome to Hoop tonight. You're at the Valume. Happy Thursday, everybody, Hope all of you guys are having a great week. Just a quick show for you guys tonight. I'm only going to be hitting the Nicks Lakers game at the tail end of the TNT slate.

I get back in town from our last ski trip of the year tomorrow, and we're going to get back to our normal sequences starting on Saturday. N everyone will cover in that Laker Celtics game and hit a bunch of other games in that show as well. You got the Joe before you started to subscribe to the Hoops to that YouTube channel. So you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at undercore jcnlts.

You guys, don't miss showing out'spin. Don't forget about a podcast feed wherever you get your podcast und Hoops Tonight. It's also super helpful if you leave a rating and interview on that front, and the last at least keep dropping mailbag questions in the YouTube comments so that we can get it to him on our Fridays throughout the remainder of the season. So this was a really interesting game to me because it was the first serious team to really punch the Lakers in the mouth. The Charlotte

and Utah games are hilarious. It's actually crazy if you look back at the Lakers since January fifteenth, they've beat the good teams every single time. It's been Charlotte, it's been Utah, it's been Philly, it's been these like random games that they've toasted off against some really limited teams. They've been locked in against the good teams and basically undefeated for a long time, and this was the first

team that since the Luka Doncics deal. When all these dudes are on the floor and they're out there and they're competing, that actually presented a bunch of real problems for them, and I think there's a lot that can be learned from that as we dig a little bit further into this one. A bunch of things went against him early. The defensive game plan JJ Redick had for Jalen Brunson really backfired, at least with respect to Brunston.

We're going to talk about it because it gets a little bit more complicated at the end of the game when no one else can create a shot except for Brunson. That's where it can become problematic. But one of the things that JJ was doing in this game was he was in ball screens that in Bald Jackson's man he was icing, meaning he was having the on ball defender

guarding Jalen Brunston funnel him towards the sideline. Then he would have Jackson basically just sit on the opposite side of the paint, or on the strong side of the paint, I should say, waiting for Brunston to drive into him, and then anytime Brunston wanted to iso anybody, that guy was opening up his stance effectively funneling towards the sideline anyway, and Jackson Hayes was zoning up like strong side zoning of like just sitting in help waiting for and send

to drive into him. One of the things that Brunson was doing really well in this game was he was like, Okay, you're gonna gift me a drive. It's just gonna be towards the sideline. Okay, fine, I'm just going to repetitively attack from the left slot so that I'm going to my left hand and you're allowing me to just get downhill without even having to make a move. And he would just like put a tiny hesitation like peek at

the rim for a second and then fire downhill. And he was getting floaters, he was getting to the rim. He was drawing defenders out of position and drawing fouls. Just a brilliant foul drifting game from Jala Brunson. When they got into ot there that was like the only offense for the Knicks was Jalen Brunson throw his body into somebody and get to the foul line, and it

worked over and over again. There were times where he would draw super hard help and it'd be easy swing passes to the opposite side for o j Nnobi, who consistently has been torching teams for loading up the strong side. It's kind of interesting to see every team kind of has this guy right. It's like the weak side score forward, the guy that is catching the ball on that skip pass and is getting a lot of advantages, and og

has just been feasting on that. They I thought that og on Nobi also just did an unbelievable job on Luka Doncic. He has like a size and strength advantage that a lot of perimeter defenders lack. It's like a lot of the top tier perimeter defenders you've seen in the league, the you know, the Herb Jones types, the Jaden McDaniels types, the Dyson Daniels types. Luca just throws those guys around like rag dolls. Who are the guys that he struggles with. It's the og Nnobe types, It's

the Leu Dort types. It's the really big and strong players that can absorb contact from him. Andrew Wiggins famously did a really good job on him in the Western Conference Finals series in twenty twenty two, right, And it's because he's a bigger, stronger type of athlete. One of the things that Og and Obi was doing a great job of all game until overtime, and we'll get to

that in a minute, was he was avoiding switches. So one of the things that Luca will do is he's going to try to bring a defender that he likes into the action as a favorable perimeter matchup, and he's going to then try to get that guy into a ball scream in this case, trying to attack cat Og all night long. Just it's such a great job of refusing to allow those switches and just getting back to Luca.

And as he was getting back to Luca, he had no choice but to try to attack and pick and roll against Cat with Og and Obi applying that back pressure, and like he just was staying attached, attacking the pocket from behind, attacking the basketball. They forced a bunch of turnovers. I want to give Kat some credit here too, because anytime we talk about ball screen coverages, it's a bracket. Right. There's two ends to it. There's the guy chasing over the top, and there's the guy that's coming up to

the level. And Og and Kat just had Luca playing in a crowd all night, and he was like struggling to find some of those better pick and roll reads. Like one of the things that Luca does a great job of is he'll get into a crowd, which is normally a bad thing for any offensive player. We call it over penetration. Right, if you drive too far into the paint and you get surrounded by bodies, it doesn't matter how much help you draw if you can't get

the damn ball out. Well, one of the things that Luca's best at compared to most perimeter guys is like he'll get the ball out from those situations. He'll be in a crowd, underneath the basket or deep in the paint, and he just finds a way to get the basketball out to an advantage, right. And the Knicks just swarmed him tonight and just did a really good job of

preventing some of those kickout passes. And there for what two and a half quarters, they just kept the Lakers at arms distance as Brunston just repeatedly torched their defensive game plan. As Og and Obi and Kat just did a great job on Luca. Like the Lakers in general, I thought were just getting out hustled. I thought the Knicks were the first team to really punch him in the mouth physically. Josh Hart did a bunch of damage.

Mitchell Robinson did a bunch of damage. Austin Reeves looked immediately like he was way out of rhythm and looked like he was like just didn't have a step, like that peak step that you expect from Austin, missing some of his finishes around the rim, leaving a lot of jumpers short. Shout out to Austin. He had a huge three. I think it was in ot if I remember correctly, as the Knicks kind of kind of held the Lakers at arms length for the first two and a half quarters.

Brunson's torch and the game plan, OJ Andnobi scoring on skip pass. There's Austin's having a rough game, Lebron's leaving jumpers short. I thought Lebron early looked like you're starting to wear some of that fatigue from the defensive job that he's had to carry over the course of the last few weeks and doesn't look good right. And a first example of some real adversity for the Lakers to deal with, but they slowly managed to work their way into the game. The first thing that stood out to

me was taking away those baked in driving lanes to Brunson. Again, like, there's nothing wrong with offering help. You want to offer help when you're dealing with mismatches. But like, if you square up on a defender more, and by the way, you still shade aside. You still want to shade to the sideline because you want to have plan a plan

in place for how to deal with dribble penetration. But at the very least, if you square up the guy a little bit more, he'll have to make a move, as opposed to just going right down hill into the teeth of your defense where he's breaking you down over and over and over again. And so I thought, specifically, Luca was the guy that really did a good job on Brunson in that stretch. Squaring him up and actually forcing him to make a few moves gave Vincent to

some much better reps. They started to get some stops. One of the upsides to JJ Redick's game plan was they did an amazing job double teaming Karl Anthony Towns and forcing the ball out of his hands, and in general they did a great job on McHale bridges and so as a result, as Bunsen started to cool off just a little bit there in that tail end of the third heading into the fourth quarter, there wasn't really anywhere else for the Knicks to go, and their offense

grinded to a complete halt. They were at like seventy five points early in the third quarter and they what, they didn't even get to one hundred by the end of regulation, and so the onslaught just keeps coming. Lucas starts to finally make some reads in ball screens. One of the things they did to help Luca he gets some separation from Ojan Andobi as they started running more three man action, so they had another guy involved in the screen, whether it's a double drag effectively a guard

screen before the big man sets the screen. They ran a lot of stack in this game to try that's where you have a guy backscreen for the role man in pick and roll. They're doing that to try to get Brunson into the action. They did a little bit more of that to get Luca more separation from Ojan, Andobi. Then he was able to finally make some of his classic pick and roll reads. Gets a lob to Jackson Hayes going down the lane, a skip to the left corner to gave Vincent, a skip to the left corner

to Lebron James. Suddenly some of those like traditional what you expect Luka Doncics type of pick and roll sequences start to take shape. Lebron starts to get going. His shot making was huge there down the stretch of the game. I've got a huge play in the game too, is when he got that rebound and pushed actually Luca got the rebound, pushed it to Lebron, kicks it up the floor to Gabe Vincent in the right corner and transition he knocks down the three. They go ninety nine to

ninety six. And then on the last possession there in the final minute. Again, as I talked about, one of the big things that I thought helped the Lakers game control of Brunson briefly was squaring him up and Gabe opens up the drive on the left side with Jackson, So Jackson's there strong side, zoning all the way over on the right block, and Gabe just has his body opened up for Brunson to drive, and so what does he do. He just does a quick driple move and

does that low gather move on Jackson. Hayes picks up the foul and banks it in. So like they go right back to the game plan thing that wasn't working, that specific concept of funneling towards the sideline and strong side zoning. They've been doing a lot of that over the course of the last couple of weeks on some of the better guards that they've been playing, and it's worked pretty well. Brunson was the first guy to like

really eviscerate that coverage, which I thought was interesting. But when they get into overtime, one of the things that stood out to me. Luka Doncic we talked about was struggling to get separation from OJ and Anobi in switches.

He kept having to deal with OG and really for the rest of overtime he did a great job, but for two straight possessions at the start of overtime, they give up the switch and once in a transition cross match, and all a transition cross match means is you didn't get back in transition, and so everybody had to grab the nearest man. Instead of grabbing their actual assignment, you

just gifted them an advantage. In the transition cross match, he had Carl Town's on the right wing, Is stows him into the middle of the floor and hits that little turnaround over his right shoulder right and then on the very next possession ball screen, the same type of ballscreen og had been fighting through all night long. He concedes the switch and Luca gets a cat kind of on his heels along the left wing. He hits that

big three. He puts him up five bruns and grifting continues to score in that overtime period and keep the game close. But a big, big adjustment from Tibbs there. He blits his Luca on the blitz, hits Jackson Hayes. Jackson Haes makes a really nice skip pass and pick and roll to Austin Reefs in the left corner, who had struggled to make shots all night. Hits a big one, and Jalen Brunson, by the way, just kept coming down the floor and kept getting to the foul line. He

got Lebron on his step through. He got Jackson on a play where he just kind of punched him in the face. I was talking with Jackson, our producer, before the show, like officiating is going to be a big story in this one. I want to talk about it in a minute. I am so excited. We are less than a month away from going to the Sphere to see Dead End Company. I'm actually seeing three shows in a row. If you haven't seen him yet, even if it's not the Dead the Spear is like an incredible

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ten that's Hops one zero. Make sure you click the link in the description to download the app and have the code automatically added to your account so you can use it later. Thank you, see Geek. But one of the things that I thought was fa fascinating was like, to me, there's a difference between getting a defender out

of position by playing basketball and drawing a foul. So for instant like if if if Brunson drives past Vando and then rises up with a straight up and down fifteen foot at the elbow and and Fando runs into him, then yeah, he got the defender out of position. That

to me is foul drifting. That I'm okay with. Being in the NBA when you're driving to the left and a guy's like just like riding you, trying to get back in front, and you just stop on a dime and literally just throw your elbows into the guy's face and shooting a jump shot like that, Like, go do that in your pickup game. You're gonna end up in a fistfight on the before you get another shot up. Like it's not You're not that's it's not basketball. Like that's the kind of thing that I'd like to see

cut out. And I think there's a lot of that from from both teams tonight, with Luca and Austin being two of the biggest culprits in the league. We'll talk about that in a minute. But Brunson actually manages to grift his way back into the game. It's a nice transition foul call on Austin Reeves but lands on his foot on the way down and ends up having to leave the game, and just a simple hard drive from Lebron James draws two drops it off to Jackson, Hayes

gets a foul, Knox down two free throws. They get a big stop because it's harder to create a shot when you don't have Jalen Brunson out there, and the Lakers end up getting out of there with the win. And I thought, honestly, it was just a really excellent example of a resilient basketball team. You know, this is a team that's been winning for a long time. This is a team that is starting to take a very comfortable position in the standings, like they're not going to

end up in the plan. There's not really that much of an advantage in the two three four spot in the standings. It would have been so easy for them to just be like Brunson's got it tonight, Austin doesn't have it, where the calls aren't going our way, whatever it is, like, let's just pack it in. We don't have it. I know they were like, screw this, We're

beating the Knicks tonight. And they got all the stops they needed to get, and I thought Luca and Lebron made as many big plays as they needed to gave. Vincent hit all those huge threes that they needed. I did think it was an indicator of how you can expect this team to struggle against an elite playoff matchup.

An example that I would give would be like okay See. So, for instance, like the odds of the Lakers facing the Knick are low because the Knicks haven't performed well against the top teams in the Eastern Conference, and so it's unlikely that they end up winning the Eastern Conference. But one of the things that they will run into is a guy like Lou Dort who can do a really good job on Luca and who can make him uncomfortable.

And they also are a team similar to what Og and Kat did, that can really pressure the ball in like force deflections and difficult cross court passes and a lot of the stuff that the Knicks were causing problems for tonight and getting out in transition. Like Charles Barkley and at halftime was talking about how the Knicks don't run, and he's not wrong in terms of their frequency. They're not a team that runs a lot, but they do run off of turnovers and they're actually one of the

most efficient transition offenses in the NBA. And they got out and they got easy dunks, they got easy threes just running out on turnovers that they forced. And that's what Okaysee does. And that's absolutely a type of issue that you'll see the Lakers run into and look, you can kind of see the dynamic, right, Like Lucas starts to fatigue struggle with ball pressure, there's some turnovers, Austin Reeves gets overwhelmed athletically, Lebron is forty, maybe he can't

leverage himself as much as he used to. Those are the kinds of scenarios where I think we'll see these Lakers struggle is against these big, physical ball pressure teams that can really really wear down the Laker offensive guys at the point of attack, and then they're just bigger and more athletic. They can cause some problems. Right, So I didn't think it was important to pay attention to some of those things. And guards, these quick guards are

going to cause some problems. The Lakers do not have a player on the team and Gabe Vincent who I would consider to be a good guard defender, and so there's gonna be a lot of game plans stuff. There's gonna be a lot of like tightness and rotations. There's a lot of missed rotations on the backside tonight on plays where Og and IOB got good looks, and so I think there's a lot of room for improvement here.

But that's the exciting thing. Like, this was a game where I thought the Lakers played really poorly for large portions of it. It was a game where they're game plan backfired. It was a game where this opposing superstar was having one of those special nights, and they pulled it out and they got to win. And I don't think there's any way to look at that other than as a positive. And then last thing before we get out of here today again, I'm not gonna go too

crazy tonight. We'll get back into our groove when we get back into to our home base, our home studio, where the cameras work and the streams stay smooth through to the finish line. I am so against all of the bitching and moaning about the NBA. It drives me crazy. I think we're in such a golden age of NBA ten talent, and I wish people would just watch it and enjoy it a little bit more than they do.

But if there's one thing that I've consistently said is broken in today's game that needs to change, it's officiating and specifically the concept of grifting. The problem with grifting is it rewards non basketball plays, and when non basketball plays start to get rewarded, competitors start to seek it as an advantage, especially competitors that don't have amazing athletic advantages.

It's usually the guys like Jalen Brunson. It's usually the guys like Austin Reeves who are like, I'm going to find a way to get an extra five to six points a game just by doing this JANKI shit, and as long as it keeps working, they're going to keep doing it. And this is why I do actually blame the officials, because when push comes to shove, if they don't blow the whistle, the guys will stop doing it.

And by the way, happens like every year in the postseason, they kind of cut this shit out, and you see every team adjusts and they start to play more bullyball. They start to they stop grifting and start trying to initiate contact to get separation rather than initiating contact to get to the foul line, and the game changes and shifts in that way. And so like my thing is like I would just like to see discretion given to the officials to decide whether or not something it's a

basketball play, and if it's not a basketball play. Get it out of the game by not rewarding it. Have these dudes like, for instance, if Austin Reeves drives right into McHale Bridges' his chest and shoots the ball into his face, he probably shouldn't get two free throws for it. If Jalen Brunson drives on Jackson Hayes to the foul line and Jackson is sliding with him and Jalen Brunson just throws the ball in his arms into his face,

that's not basketball. If you come off of a screen, you pump fake and the dude jumps out of his shoes, by all means, jump and shoot your jump shot and

get two foul shots out of it. I just want to see a little bit more emphasis on rewarding good basketball, because if you don't reward good basketball, and you reward bad or ugly basketball or fake basketball, then we're gonna have these national television broadcasts where we have Austin Reeves, Lukadancis and Jalen Brunson having a contest to see who

can get to the foul line first. And not only that, the officials were so maddeningly inconsistent in this game that everyone's pissed off, Like the Lakers are pissed off Bronston's grifting his way to line every single time down the floor. The Knicks are pissed off because they're getting all these loose ball foul calls and all these other janky ass calls at the end of the game. And it's because no one knows what a foul is. No one knows,

so no one knows how to play defense. Everyone's frustrated. I don't the officials just completely lost control of that game. And I didn't think they did their jobs tonight. The job of the NBA officials is to facilitate NBA basketball games that look like NBA basketsketball. If they don't do that, they're not doing their jobs. And I thought they botched that tonight and put a little bit of a black

mark on an otherwise entertaining game. But yeah, we're gonna get way deeper into all this stuff when I get back in town again. We're gonna take tomorrow off from traveling, but on Saturday night, we're gonna hit after Lakers Celtics, and I plan on hitting a few other games and a few other teams in that show as well. Again, I appreciate you guys for supporting these and I'll see

you on Saturday night the volume What's Up guys. As always, I appreciate you for listening to and supporting OOPS tonight. They would actually be really helpful for us if you guys would take a second and leave a rating and a review. As always, I appreciate you guys supporting us, but if you could take a minute to do that, I'd really appreciate it.