Coming up on a jam-packed episode of Locked on NBA Daily, it's an NBA playoff breakdown.

We're going to talk about why the Lakers have everything at stake in game one against the Rockets

and whether the Cavaliers got the most favorable path of any team in the Eastern Conference.

Plus, we'll talk about why the Hawks are clearly not afraid of the Knicks and then make some play-in predictions.

Locked on NBA Daily starts now.

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Hello and welcome back to Lockton, NBA Daily. I'm Wes Goldberg. That's Matt Moran Hayes. We've got a great show for you today. The play in tournament starts tonight, and we're going to make some predictions about who we think is going to move on later on in the show. But we're going to start with our playoff previews here with the series that we already know, the three, six matchups and the four or five matchups in each conference. We'll talk about the Eastern Conference in the next second. We're going to start here in the West with Lakers versus Rockets, the four or five matchup. Yesterday, we heard guys that from Lockdown Rockets host Jackson Gatlin say that he thinks that this series should be a cakewalk for Houston.

Here's Lockdown Lakers on the importance of Game One, even though Luca Donchich and Austin Reeves are going to be out.

Game one is always incredibly important.

This series, it's even more so. If the Lakers go out and get dusted in this game one, there's a very good chance.

It's harder for them to come back.

It's just like it kind of pops that balloon of belief.

And if you want to extend the Lakers playoffs to have any chance of like, oh, you know what?

Oh, my God.

Like, miracle, miracle stem cells work.

He's like the scans look good.

He can come back.

That's more than likely not going to be game one, game two.

You're talking game three, game four, game five.

And if the Lakers are already down three to one, do you really bring back Luca from this injury? I don't think you do. Hey, as you've been high on the rocket since before the season started. I know that they lost their mojo a little bit in the middle of the year, but they seem to have maybe gotten it back towards the end of the regular season. Lakers, a lot of talk about belief from lockdown Lakers there. What can the Lakers do to

try to extend this series and potentially get Luca back, who is apparently back stateside

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