A few key differences separate Dwight Howard and Andrew Bynum, who is fancied during happy times as the Magic center’s potential equal. But one general disparity is this: No opponent game-plans around exploiting a Howard weakness on defense like it does with Bynum.

For the second straight postseason, a Lakers opponent armed with an elite mid-range shooter — the Thunder this season, the Hornets last season — designed much of its offense around the idea that it could produce relatively easy mid-range shots by attacking Bynum on various pick plays. The Thunder were confident that Bynum would hang back rather than step out to challenge Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, and that both players — especially Durant — could get clean looks from 15 feet.

The mid-range shot is the worst shot in basketball, a low-percentage attempt that produces few free throws or offensive rebounds. Most teams that shoot a lot of them are bad offensive teams. But it’s a shot every team must have in its arsenal, especially against an opponent like the Lakers, who have two elite wing defenders and two 7-footers capable of blocking everything at the rim.

The Thunder are one of the few teams with the personnel to exploit this mid-range weakness in an efficient way. They have one deadly shooter (Durant), another star fast becoming deadly from that range (Westbrook) and a center — Bynum’s opposite number — who can serve as the final screener on lots of different play types. This stuff destroyed the Lakers their 119-90 loss in Game 1 on Monday. It resulted in some communication breakdowns and a few mid-stream strategy changes in the second half — the kind of defensive chaos that hurt the Lakers against Chris Paul and the Hornets last season and ultimately undid them amid a hail of wide-open shots against Dallas in the second round.

The attack began right away, and, notably, it did not begin with a pick-and-roll:

Read More…

Pau Gasol (left) and Andrew Bynum struggled in the Lakers’ Game 6 loss. (Justin Edmonds/Getty Images)

Kobe Bryant played an efficient, effective game Thursday while battling the aftereffects of a stomach ailment. But his teammates imploded around him, and the Nuggets played with a fury and polish that the Lakers could not match in Denver’s 113-96 victory. Bryant was understandably upset afterward. First, there was this on small forward Metta World Peace, who is set to return from his seven-game suspension for Game 7 on Saturday in Los Angeles:

“He’s the one guy that I can rely on night in and night out to compete and play hard and play with that sense of urgency and no fear,” Bryant said of World Peace. “I’m looking forward to having that by my side again.”

The Lakers obviously are missing World Peace, for reasons I outlined toward the end of this piece Wednesday. Small forwards Devin Ebanks and Matt Barnes have been mostly awful, and the Nuggets are ignoring them on offense to bottle up the Lakers’ post game. World Peace is an average NBA player at this point even at his best, but he’s a better three-point shooter, by a healthy margin, than Ebanks or Barnes, and he has a tough post game only one Denver wing player, Danilo Gallinari, is really equipped to defend. With Barnes and Ebanks failing, the Lakers have played a ton of minutes with point guards Ramon Sessions and Steve Blake sharing the floor. Both are subpar defenders whom the Nuggets have torched. The Lakers have allowed 104.4 points per 100 possessions when Blake and Sessions play together, a mark that would have ranked 25th in the regular season.

[Chris Ballard: Kobe got competitive fire from unexpected source]

But in the most obvious sense, Bryant’s lionizing of World Peace is ridiculous. He is the one Laker whom Bryant has literally not been able to count on in these playoffs, having removed himself with an irresponsible elbow to James Harden’s head in the team’s second-to-last regular-season game. The NBA suspended World Peace for the first six games of the playoffs, and given the trickle-down effect of his absence, it’s fair to wonder if L.A. would have wrapped up this series by now had he been available. Some reliable teammate.

Read More…

Rookie Kenneth Faried (right) outworked Pau Gasol and the Lakers in Game 5. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Before the playoffs, I predicted that the Lakers would beat the Nuggets in seven games. And so while I’m not entirely surprised that the younger, deeper Nuggets have a chance to tie the first-round series at three games apiece with a victory in Denver on Thursday, the manner in which we’ve arrived here has been unexpected. Five reasons this series is still going on:

• The Nuggets, in the most basic sense, are winning or at least “tying” the major trade-offs they have to make because of the Lakers’ massive size advantage. One such trade-off: scoring enough fast-break points by outrunning the Lakers’ big men to compensate for all of Los Angeles’ post-up scores, offensive rebounds and easy buckets that come with pounding the ball inside. Denver has pulled the trick so far, in part because it is simply outhustling the Lakers.

The Nuggets averaged a league-high 19.8 fast-break points during the regular season, according to NBA.com. They’ve increased that number to 21 per game in this series, an even better accomplishment than it appears when you consider two things:

1. The Lakers are winning the tempo battle in general. The teams have averaged about 90 possessions per game in the series, almost exactly what L.A. averaged in the regular season and down substantially from the league-leading 94 possessions per game for the roadrunner Nuggets.

2. The Lakers are not turning the ball over. Only two teams, Denver and San Antonio, have coughed it up less often per possession in the postseason, meaning the Nuggets are not feasting on an unusual number of steals and run-outs.

Read More…

After another epic between the Grizzlies and Clippers on Monday, every remaining first-round series stands at 3-1. And in a weird scheduling quirk, four teams have a chance to close out 4-1 victories tonight, a scenario that would leave us with one fait accompli in Miami and one remaining hope for real on-court drama in Memphis. Here’s one key factor to watch in each of the four games:

PACERS VS. MAGIC

Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that David West has logged in this series. (Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

The power forward matchup: We knew going in that Orlando lacked the size to match up with the behemoth Roy Hibbert, but David West’s old-man game has been just as big a problem — and perhaps a bigger one — for Ryan Anderson, Earl Clark and (in fewer chances) Glen Davis. Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that West has logged in this series, while the Magic have won the remaining 39 minutes — with West sitting — by a mammoth 19-point margin.

This all peaked in the third quarter of Game 4, when the Pacers built a huge behind West doing a little bit of everything — slipping screens to create penetration, drawing double-teams in the post, ducking in for post-up chances behind Hibbert pick-and-rolls and firing solid passes to open shooters. He overpowered Anderson and Clark, and his play, coupled with Anderson’s disappearance, has been perhaps the largest swing factor in this series. It got so bad that Stan Van Gundy went small in the second half of the fourth quarter, with Hedo Turkoglu at power forward, a move that seemed to unnerve the Pacers for a short stretch.

But in the long run, or what’s left of it, the Magic need Anderson to make this matchup something close to a wash. He’s just 10-of-31 from the floor so far, and the secondary skills he brings — offensive rebounds, two-point shots, the occasional free throws — have vanished in this series. Orlando has a huge speed advantage at the big-man positions, and it can (and has) hurt Indiana by running West in multiple pick-and-rolls and targeting Hibbert as the last man in quick-hitting, staggered screen plays, knowing Hibbert will sag back and concede a jump shot. Anderson needs to make some of those jump shots, and the Magic need to find a way to limit West on the other end without compromising themselves fatally elsewhere. That’s a huge challenge given the roster limitations here, but Van Gundy, working what might be his last game in Orlando on Tuesday, has coached his tail off in this series. Does he have some tricks left? Read More…

If Ty Lawson can maintain the rhythm he had in Game 2, the Nuggets have a fighting chance on Friday. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

The Nuggets almost have to sweep two games in Denver in order to have a realistic chance at upsetting the Lakers, who lead 2-0, in the first round. Game 1 was a blowout, but the Nuggets appeared to make some progress in rallying to make Game 2 close in Los Angeles. Was it fool’s gold, or did the Nuggets discover something?

Here are five things to watch as the series resumes in Denver on Friday:

1. Can George Karl find enough combinations that work?

Through two games, the Nuggets have played only one five-man lineup for more than eight minutes, a trend that reflects both the depth of this team and Karl’s struggle to find some stability against this opponent. The one lineup that has cracked the eight-minute mark — the Nuggets’ starting lineup — has been a disaster so far, having been outscored by 17 points in 22 minutes. Danilo Gallinari has shot just 12-of-32 as this lineup’s would-be top-scoring option, and the Kenneth Faried/Kosta Koufos big-man combination just hasn’t offered enough dynamism to combat the Lakers’ massive size advantage. Faried is a monster athlete, but he’s giving away too much size to score in the paint, and neither guy has enough range to unclog the lane for Ty Lawson.

The easy suggestion would be more time for the Al Harrington/Andre Miller/Corey Brewer trio, since the Nuggets have actually outscored L.A. when any two of those three are on the court together — in both the regular season and the playoffs. But that likely has a bit to do with the fact that these three enter the game late in the first quarter and play into the second quarter, when the Lakers rest their stars one or two at a time. Would their success hold up as well against the A-team?

The center position is particularly tough. Karl might dream of going ultra-small with Harrington or Faried at center, and he did play the little-used Faried/Harrington/Gallinari front-line trio — it logged just 30 minutes the entire regular season — a few minutes in each of the first two games. Karl might be able to steal minutes for lineups like these when either Pau Gasol or Andrew Bynum is on the bench, but even then the size disadvantage might be overwhelming, with Jordan Hill working the offensive glass. JaVale McGee provided some key shot-blocking and one transition dunk in Game 2, but he has been unable to make any non-dunk shot so far. Timofey Mozgov has the strength to guard Bynum, but it’s clear Karl doesn’t trust him (and hasn’t for much of the season), and he has looked uncertain on offense. Read More…

Blake Griffin posterized Pau Gasol (twice) in the Lakers' win over the Clippers. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

A night that had the potential to be the craziest of the regular season certainly lived up to the hype, with games in Minnesota, New Orleans, Utah, Los Angeles, Boston and Miami — all but one with major playoff implications — coming down to crunch time. The Jazz-Suns showdown was probably the most exciting of the night, with Paul Millsap and Steve Nash trading ridiculous clutch plays around a Channing Frye banked-in prayer that gave the Suns three crucial points during a dry spell.

But Lakers-Clippers might have been the most spell-binding game. The Staples Center tenants have been barking at each other and trading shoves since the preseason, Blake Griffin mauled Pau Gasol twice Thursday night and Chris Paul worked his brand of magic again in the fourth quarter. The win 113-108 Lakers win gave them the inside track to both the Pacific Division title and the No. 3 seed. They are now two games up in the loss column over the No. 4 Clippers, with the season series tie-breaker in hand. If the standings hold, the two teams could not meet in what would be a hugely entertaining playoff series unless they both advanced to the conference finals. That would seem unlikely.

Some bullet point thoughts on the game:

• About those Griffin dunks over Gasol: The second one was clearly an offensive foul, and as I watched it, I once again thought that if I were a coach, I’d create some sort of cash bonus system for players who give good, honest challenges against big-time dunkers. The system would also carry small cash fines for players who duck out of the way.

Alas, I checked with the league, and such a system would violate league rules that ban teams from changing a player’s compensation in any way.

Such a system is inherently silly, since it’s meant to heal wounds players may not even feel so deeply; players understand that being the victim of a highlight now and then is the price of doing business, and they keep the big picture in mind better than fans do. And Pau, of course, continued to play hard, highlighted by his crunch-time rejection of Griffin in the post. Still, when you catch Andrew Bynum desecrating the very idea of “transition defense” with his “elderly man jogging” routine several times per game, it’s discouraging to know lots of fans and highlight shows will miss that and focus on Gasol actually trying to play sound defense. Read More…

Kevin Durant and the Thunder have had two solid wins over the Lakers this season. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)

Even though San Antonio is on fire, it is mandatory to refer to Thursday’s game between the Lakers and Thunder in Los Angeles as a possible Western Conference finals preview. Oklahoma City walloped Los Angeles for the second time this season, 102-93, stamping itself as a potential matchup problem for the Lakers — just as the Spurs, who are 8-2 in their last 10 games against the Thunder, present major issues for OKC.

Five takeaways from Thursday’s game:

1. The Thunder have defended the Lakers very well in three of four halves this season.

It’s a major reversal from last season, when the Lakers went 2-1 and generally torched the Thunder’s defense. The Lakers have dropped to 15th in points per possession this season, down from sixth last season, and so perhaps their inability to consistently generate good looks against the Thunder — who defeated them 100-85 last month in Oklahoma City — is merely symptomatic of the larger issue holding the team back from true contender status.

The Lakers had things rolling early Thursday, primarily because they ran a lot of pick-and-rolls, got Oklahoma City’s defense moving and fired quick-hitting passes all over the court. This is the best way to beat any team, but it’s especially important against a Thunder team that features several young defenders — power forward Serge Ibaka and guards James Harden and Russell Westbrook — who can be vulnerable on the move and against teams that space the floor well. The Lakers hurt the Thunder early on traditional guard/big man pick-and-rolls involving Ibaka and a couple of guard/guard pick-and-rolls that flummoxed Harden. Ibaka and center Kendrick Perkins still have occasional communication issues, and on one fast-moving first-quarter play they both rotated toward Pau Gasol near the foul line, leaving Andrew Bynum open for a dunk.

Read More…

Ramon Sessions has lifted the Lakers' offense in his first four games. (Jerome Miron/US Presswire)

This season, more than any other, serves as a warning against overreacting to small sample sizes. The Mavericks have gone from hot, to cold, to dead, to hot, to cold again in less than a month. Portland looked like a sneaky contender in mid-January. The Knicks’ entire season has been a collection of distinct five- or six-game sample sizes.

Ramon Sessions has played four games with the Lakers, including three against defenses ranked 18th or worse in points per possession — Houston, Minnesota and Utah, though the Jazz played some stingy D in beating the Lakers on Sunday. Sessions has logged a grand total of 100 minutes with his new team after being traded from the Cavaliers. Those 100 minutes might prove totally meaningless in the long haul, such as there is a long haul in this compressed schedule.

With all that said, you cannot simply ignore early trends, and the results suggest that Sessions, as many predicted, could have a larger impact on the Lakers than his middling individual numbers in Cleveland indicate he should. Sessions might be only a league-average point guard, the thinking went, but league average would be a giant upgrade over the Derek Fisher/Steve Blake combination — an improvement that might add up to something greater than the difference between Sessions’ individual stats and those of the players whose minutes he would take.

Read More…

The Lakers focused on the future by nabbing point guard Ramon Sessions and trading away Derek Fisher. (Jason Miller/US PRESSWIRE)

The Lakers made two moves today in pursuit of two goals: winning the 2012 NBA title and saving money. They indisputably accomplished the latter, as today’s swaps will save the Lakers about $1.7 million in player salary for this season and as much as $8 million next season, depending on how the Lakers and a few players handle their contract options. You can double the savings, since the Lakers are miles over the luxury-tax threshold, and you can tack on even more, since the Lakers dealt away two first-round draft picks in the process — picks that will turn into players guaranteed money.

FULL LIST OF DEADLINE DEALS

It remains to be seen whether the deals helped the Lakers mediocre offense enough to vault them into title contention.

To review:

• The Lakers traded Derek Fisher and a 2012 first-round draft pick (formerly the Mavericks’ property) to Houston for Jordan Hill, who earns about $550,000 less than Fisher this season and can be released cost-free after the playoffs. Fisher, on the other hand, has a $3.4 million player option for next season, and given his love for the Lakers and the fact that he could not get that kind of money on the open market, it was a certainty that he would exercise that option had the Lakers kept him.

• In a deal that should be the headliner, the Lakers traded Luke Walton and Jason Kapono — one player who was totally out of their rotation, and one on the fringes — to the Cavaliers in exchange for Ramon Sessions and Christian Eyenga. The Lakers tossed their 2012 first-rounder to Cleveland and gave the Cavs the right to swap first-round picks with Los Angeles in the 2013 draft if L.A.’s pick ends up higher than the Miami selection the Cavaliers own via the LeBron James sign-and-trade. That is a valuable little asset for Cleveland, considering the Heat are likely to finish with the best or second-best record in the league next season, barring injury.

Taking on Luke Walton’s $5.8 million salary hurts and probably amounts to overpaying for an extra pick, but the Cavs are still flush with cap room going forward regardless, and it’s not as if they are primed for a giant free agent spending spree this summer. It’s a high price for a low pick, but if Dan Gilbert is willing to pay it, hey, good for him.

Read More…

The Trail Blazers sent Marcus Camby (pictured) to Houston after shipping swingman Gerald Wallace to the Nets. (Sam Forencich/NBAE via Getty Images)

The Blazers have given up on the season, having now traded two starters in the span of a few hours for precisely zero players who will provide much help this season. In their latest move, Portland traded Marcus Camby to the Rockets for Hasheem Thabeet, Jonny Flynn and a future second-round pick.

This is all fine, Portland jokes aside. Camby and his $11 million expiring deal weren’t part of the long-term plan — a plan that got a boost Thursday, when the Blazers acquired a 2012 first-round pick from the Nets that will be theirs unless it falls within the top three of the draft. With Portland clearly surrendering, it’s possible the Blazers will now have two 2012 lottery picks to add to a decent collection of assets going forward: a franchise big in LaMarcus Aldridge, two solid wings in Wesley Matthews and Nicolas Batum (a restricted free agent this summer), an intriguing young guard in Elliot Williams and near max-level cap space to use this summer or beyond.

Thabeet and Flynn will be unrestricted free agents after this season, and so the most likely outcome is Portland dumping both after getting a free 20-game look at two unfortunate lottery busts. Perhaps one of them will show some spunk over those 20 games; the Blazers certainly have openings at center and point guard, where Raymond Felton remains, despite Portland’s best efforts to dump him after a miserable 40-plus games in the PDX.

FULL LIST OF COMPLETED DEADLINE DEALS

As for Houston, this is a sound move, if not the splashy one the Rockets have been dying to make for years. Thabeet and Flynn have very little value around the league at this point, and the Rockets have managed to turn them into a second legitimate center to use when Samuel Dalembert is on the bench. Read More…