NBA: Lakers Below the Margin, Nuggets Still Climbing; Status, East and West.   

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.  .  .   SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner.

NBA  ---  That other Los Angeles team, surely you know who they are, “the Lakers!”  What’s that? You only know about them vaguely? Sports fans, check your NBA history, the Lakers came to grace “tinsel town” from Minnesota decades ago, purchased huge talent and became a kind of dynasty---Jerry West, Magic, Kobe, Shaquille, head coach Phil Jackson, champions!

Well, the Lakers still have spark, except not all 48 minutes of a match, more like two-thirds of that. Not that the Lakers aren’t still “Basketball with the stars.” There’s Kobe, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash, Pau Gasol, Metta World Peace, packin’ the stands! For a Lakers/Nuggets match on Monday, February 25, all seats at Denver, Colorado’s Pepsi Center seemed taken, and then some----but the Lakers lost to the Nuggets, 119-108, becoming 28 wins-30 losses, still under .500, the NBA season more than half over.

Go to a Lakers game and you’ll marvel at feats performed by Kobe, Nash, Howard, Gasol and M. World Peace. On Monday against the Nuggets, Kobe scored 29 points, making him the games leading scorer. Nash scored 16, Howard and M. World Peace scored 15 each. Nash set up plays and passed dynamically enough to feed Kobe the ball for much of the 29. Howard still blocks and takes rebounds most smoothly. Versus the Nuggets, Howard accrued four offense and 10 defense RB’s, compared with Nuggets forward Kenneth Faried’s four (O) and six (D). And, MWP defended close-in at Mach-speed, responsible for a high share of the Nuggets missed shots. . . note: Gasol did not play on Monday night.

Speed comparisons can probably be expressed in whole numbers and decimals, but it’s enough to say that in the first quarter of the Lakers vs. Nuggets game the Denver team was perfect hustle, all five were Usain Bolts, the Lakers as if in a potato sack race, Nuggets 35, Lakers 29 as the first quarter closed. At halftime, it was Nuggets 67, Lakers 54.     

So, what’s missing from the Lakers? A key factor for sure, “Consistency of performance from the team’s four stars, especially ‘defense.’”

Whether the “inconsistency” is from the four Lakers stars still learning how to play together in ways that no other team could take apart, or from the four losing a step or two from their mileage in the game, such is hard to tell from a single season of play, and perhaps the Lakers head coach just hasn’t come up with means-testing for a strategy that could raise the consistency bar.

Also, the Lakers inconsistency could be a matter of physics, in that placement of four star players on the same team actually diminishes the impact that each player could have separately moment-by-moment afield, forcing each to squelch some of their best moves as they must work as a team.

Or, teams that the Lakers defeated with ease in the past have been raising their own performance bars + stats .  .  .  which brings us to February 25 and the Denver Nuggets, the latter creating a lead early on and keeping it almost throughout, finishing eleven points up, shooting 78 points in the paint (nearly 57 percent), completing 43 of 78 field goal attempts. The Lakers were able to attempt more FG’s (88) than the Nuggets but they had a higher number of misses per number of attempts.

Too, a lion’s share of the Nuggets-versus-Lakers points were from under or over the basket out of drives and assists that appeared to stun the Lakers the way that Kobe and cohorts worked their shock-and-awe against the Nuggets a year ago and before that, enough to knock the Denver franchise out of first round playoffs more than once.

If the Lakers front office planners brought four wonder boys together to outmatch all talent in the NBA game, they may have paid insufficient attention to the fact that other teams would be setting up their own wondrous effects, for instance, Monday night’s “on game” skills demonstrated by the Nuggets high scorer forward Wilson Chandler (23 points) and by guard Ty Lawson (22 points) and forward Faried (12 points) finding holes in the Lakers defense lightning-fast, so many of their shots being tipped/netted by teammates.

Right now, the Lakers are safely in third place of the Western Conference’s Pacific Division, more than 10 games ahead of the Sacramento Kings and the Phoenix Suns, both performing poorly, below .400. Yet the Lakers are 12 games behind first place L.A. Clippers, and six behind the Golden State Warriors, “catch-up will demand a much better than .500 game-after-game record now that there are fewer than 25 Lakers games left before the post-season commences.”

The Nuggets are at second place within the WC’s Northwest Division, six games behind the 41-15/.776 Oklahoma City Thunder, a team that the Nuggets defeated 121-118 in January, and will face on March 1, again on March 19.  .  .  doesn’t look like the Kobe-led quartet will be available for the Nuggets to avenge those post-season/first round losses to the Lakers, not this year anyway.

STATUS, EAST & WEST   ----  There’s less certainty within the NBA’s Eastern Conference than inside the Western Conference with regard to which teams will lead their divisions as the current season ends. The EC’s Southwest Division leading team, the 40-14 Miami Heat, is the only numero uno to have a sizable lead, over the second place 32-23 Atlanta Hawks, while the EC’s Atlantic Division New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets are at first and second posiitons, 33-20 and 33-24. Leading the EC’s Central Division are the 35-21 Indiana Pacers, three games ahead of the ascending 32-24 Chicago Bulls.  .  .  The Western Conference leading teams seem safely locked in, the 41-15 Thunder being six games ahead of the 36-22 Nuggets within the WC’s Northwest Division, the WC’s Southwest Division’s 45-13 San Antonio Spurs six games up over the 37-18 Memphis Grizzlies, and the WC’s Pacific Division’s 40-18 L.A. Clippers six games ahead  of the 33-23 Golden State Warriors. . .  Meanwhile, the rising underdog story belongs to the 18-37 Washington Wizards, having risen to third place within the EC’s Atlantic Division from recent wins, a surprise being the team’s 119-113 defeat of the Denver Nuggets, February 22.

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