If you
missed the Part I of this article yesterday, please read it before you read
this one. So now let's talk about the series between the Lakers and Utah.
Utah won
yesterday at home by 123-115, needing an overtime to win the game after
dominating about 90% of the game. It's true that the Lakers yesterday were the
away team closer to win a game in this series, but also it would have been easy
for Utah to get nervous (like Orlando got last Saturday) and end up screwing
their chances to win the series, by losing this game in the overtime. But they
played extremely well in the clutch moments of the game and their win in the
overtime was never in doubt. This is the kind of win that really motivates a
team. After Boozer played an amazing Game 3 with 27 points and 20 boards, this
time it was Deron's time to step it up, shooting 9-13 FG and 3-4 3pts, scoring
29 points and assisting his team mates for 14 times during the game. Utah was
mostly perfect in all aspects of the game, making 32 assists and just 14
turnovers and only sending the Lakers 25 times to the FT line, an huge
improvement from the previous three games of the season. Boozer and Okur had
double-doubles and the team showed they have solutions in the bench, outscoring
the Lakers in bench points by 39-16.
If Utah
played a great game, the same can't be said about the Lakers. First of all,
Kobe literally disappeared in the game after a good start. He ended up just
shooting 13-33 FG, 1-10 3pts and 6-10 FT! He obviously still scored 33 points,
but so many misses especially in the overtime clearly put the team in bad
position. Also Fisher, Vujacic and Farmar combined one single assist in 72:59
min in the field! The team just made 20 assists during the whole game, with
Kobe making 10 of them. Actually the team if we exclude Kobe had just 10
assists and 9 turnovers, showing that the ball movement was far from perfect
yesterday. The only factor that maintained the Lakers in the game and took it
to overtime were the good individual performances of Gasol and Odom, which
helped the team in not getting outrebounded by Utah for the first time this
season.
This game
showed us that Utah is playing like a team and the Lakers are just being
competitive thanks to some individual performances of their main players, as
their point guards can't assist nobody to save their lifes. With Utah coming to
the 5th Game at LA with some momentum, the Lakers really need to perform better
as a team, as it was showed yesterday, Kobe is the best player in the league,
but it won't decide all playoff games on his own. If the Jazz are capable of
playing an ugly game, like they did for example when they won by 77-66 at New
Orleans, I wouldn't be surprised if they won the Game 5 in Los Angeles and then
at home in the Game 6, only an amazing performance of the Lakers would save
them from a premature elimination. Everybody is underrating Utah and they have
showed that they are inferior to any team in this league. Remember what they
did at Boston? Either the Lakers steps it up in the next game at home or Utah
will reach the conference final for the second season in a row.