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Ding ding!

How about we can just watch basketball? How about we can just watch basketball?

Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily Ding here on the Athletic NBA

NBA show, and it's over.

Laker season, it's done.

They are missing the playoffs.

I am actually in Phoenix.

It was at the game and I am scarred for life. And to talk about it with me is Mo de Kiel. He writes a Bleacher report. He talks for the athletic. Mo, what the hell was that?

I mean, it's what it's been all season. It's not been anything different for the Lakers. Like, you know, they tried.

I'll give them credit. They really tried. And then the sons were just like, and then the sons

towards the end of the second quarter decided like, all right, we're done playing with our food.

Let's just end this. And it just became a farce after that. Like there wasn't much else we could talk about. that's been the lakers season really you know we could talk about the injuries and things like that but there were a lot of questions of the pairing of russell westbrook with lebron james and anthony davis the roster construction as a whole everything that they've done it's not a surprise none of this is shocking it is a little bit but like in a sense of like as we saw the season go, which is bad. I mean, we're so used to it at this point. But this team was just so listless in the second half of this game. And meanwhile, you have Devin Booker. He had four shots in a row in the middle of the third quarter as the just the mountain just piled onto them. I mean, you know, the Lakers were up

in the first, what, 15, 16 minutes of this game, maybe 18 minutes of this game. And then by the middle of the third quarter, it was a 22 point pullout. It's just amazing how quickly it flipped. And Los Angeles just, they didn't look like they knew what they were supposed to be doing out there a lot of the time.

It's not that they didn't know. They just felt like it was over. The guy that was playing the hardest was Austin Reeves. That was it. You know, after that, it was pretty much all over. Once they got down big, you never felt like they were really going to make a comeback or anything like that in a game that, I mean, they basically needed to win every game to close out and, you know, they just couldn't get it done.

And I don't have anything else to say, Jared, this has been a tough, this has been one of the worst teams to watch all season with just how they've played and everything like that. And it just tells you, just throwing names together doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen. I mean, this is honestly one of the worst teams have ever seen, ever, relative to the expectation. I mean, I think I had them as the team that was going to make the finals in the West, honestly, just because I didn't know who they held a pick, but they seemed like they certainly had a chance of the talent they had on board, and like, we know they had injury issues, but they are just such, they're a dumpster fire. They really are.

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