All right, welcome to Good Take.

West Goldberg here, joined by Mike Shear, the author of basketball poetry.

And we've got some takes that we've got cooked up, including our thoughts on the newest NBA draft reform proposal and how the sons could build off of their playoff season. A reminder before we get started here, good take is part of the Real GM Radio Network. And we're coming to you every Thursday with the best takes that we've cooked up this week. Remember to subscribe and make sure you check out all the other great shows on the network by subscribing to the Real GM Radio feed wherever you get your podcast. And check us out on YouTube where you can watch the full episodes. We are on the road to a thousand subscribers, our first thousand subscribers of our newly relaunched RealGM Radio Network. So please make sure you support what we're doing here. Go to YouTube.com slash RealGM Radio and subscribe. Before we get to our takes, though, we've got a bunch of games to get to from last night, Mike. Let's talk first about rockets. They get the wind over the Lakers. A few things stood out to me in this game, but the big headline is it was their clutch time execution. Just so much better at the end of this game when it was a five-point game, a six-point game in the last couple of minutes, especially when you compare it to that game three disaster that ended up going to overtime, the big Jabari Smith and Reed Shepard gaffs at the end of that game. No such gaffs in this one. The Rockets take care of business in a game that was pretty tight throughout. I actually thought the Lakers had the edge for most of this game, especially in the beginning of this game, but the Rockets got it out of the mud. And now they go from down 03. They win the last two games. They're

down 3-2. No team has ever come back from down 03 to win a series. But this series is interesting

for a few different reasons. First of all, I think it was always much closer of a series than that 3-0 lead might make you believe. Like the point differential was always kind of close. It favored the Lakers. Last night it flipped. Now the rockets are plus five points for the series despite having a game down, being a game down. And by the way, they had a chance to win game three. That game goes to overtime. If that go goes a little bit different at the end, a couple different bounces of the ball, this series could be flipped. The Rockets could be up three to right now. We'll get to some of the X's and O's and things that change at the end there that I want to get to here. But just big picture, I guess we'll start there. No team has ever come back from down 03 and won a series.

I don't know that I'm picking the Rockets to do it here, Mike,

but I do think that this is a series and could definitely go seven games.

Like this is not over for the Lakers by any stretch.

No, not at all.

And it's not even that nobody has know, nobody has ever come back from

3-0, but we don't only see teams force in game 7 very often. I think it's only happened 16 times,

most recently the Boston Miami series from a few years back, which I know you'll remember.

And I think, yeah, I, it is exciting. Like this whole first round has been so wild and so exciting in so many different ways.

We're going to have six game sixes, I think, at least.

And you know a handful of those are going to game seven.

I just keep going back to the fact that like it's hard for me to imagine that like LeBron James wants that stain on his legacy of going down being the first guy guy to blow a 3-0 lead, right? Like, nobody in the NBA is more hyper-aware of, like, his own accomplishments. And I think this is something that would be held against him. It shouldn't be, right? Like, he's 41 on a team missing. It's two best players, like two other best players. And Reeves just came back, and we can talk about that in a second. But it would be.

So people would weaponize that against him.

And I have to think he's going to find it in himself to like pull it together and get one more big game. But like going back to this one, I mean, this series might be over if the Lakers just don't shoot 26% from three, you know? Like I thought the defense was pretty good. They were like even more aggressive about playing off the Rockets and being like, hey, Rockets, we'll even let you take as many corner three-pointers as you want.

We don't really care. Like jack them up. And they protected the rim super well. That's the math they've done under JJ Reddick, pretty much Reddick's whole tenure. And I thought that was fine. They just need to shoot a little bit better. And this could be a different game. Yeah, not to boil it down to something as simple as ball goes in, ball doesn't go in.

But if you look at the games in this series, the team that has shot better from three point range has typically won the games. And that's really the thing that flipped over the last couple of games here is that the Lakers were making a bunch of shots in the first three games from Beyond the Arc. And then the Rockets were missing all their threes. and then it flips, right? Then the Lakers, you see a little bit of regression to the mean there, and then, you know, guys like Marcus Smart and Ruehachemar aren't making everything anymore. Luke Knard has been a little shaky after the, after a hot start to the series, and then on the flip side, Houston started making shots, right? You got Jabbar Smith Jr. even Amman Thompson's making a couple threes.

So, uh, Reed Shepard. So you got all these guys now making threes. One other note that I had on the three-point shooting, and this to me was the big schematic change that I think Emil Doka made, which shocking, like he made one. Like he actually did a basketball X and O strategy thing instead of just trying to, as Mo De Kiel put it on the double dribble the other day. He said he may basically coaches through intimidation, which I thought was a great line. He actually did make a scheme change here where if you notice Houston did not shoot many threes off of screens in last night's game. And I thought that was a good counter to what the Lakers had been doing, especially when Kevin Durant was involved in these games, it was just involved in the one game, but when they're trapping and blitzing and just jump helping out on all these threes off of these screens and crowding their shooters, which, you know, the rockets are big on the interior. They're kind of small on the exterior, especially with Durant out. And when you've got those big, long Lakers jumping out on you and crowding you, it's going to make things hard. So the Rockets decided, okay, we're just not going to run screens anymore. We're going to do most of our work through isolation. We're going to try to push the pace a little bit more than we usually do.

And it was a lot of drive and kick, a lot of isolation stuff I thought for the Rockets to generate their threes last night. I went back and watched all the threes from this morning and I can only count like a couple that were even off a three, off of a screen. And you could tell that they were coached to not go into screen and roll because they

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