What do you think about the Laker team now?

You follow the box scores of the games every day?

Just the Lakers.

You're kidding.

That is really a compliment.

I was pleased to see you smile at the top bar show because once the game starts, you have a game face.

You don't smile much out there.

I don't think you have to do things for money anymore. Correct. What's up, Laker fans? Welcome to the Laker Film Room podcast. I'm Pete, joined by Darius and Mike. And today we're going to talk a little bit about the general NBA playoffs. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. The Celtics got dog walked at home in game two. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But I wanted to start with Minnesota and Denver. Mike, last year, you know, when you get beat by the eventual champs, there's a little bit of a, you know, we got beat by the champs at least. At the very least, we, you know, that's how it went down. We lost to the best team in the league.

And so to see the Lakers go from losing in five, obviously in a somewhat maddening fashion,

having been ahead on the scoreboard for way more than Denver was, but losing convincingly nonetheless,

to go from that to see Denver really struggling with a Minnesota team that is just a wolf pack in a lot of ways,

right, led by Anthony Edwards and just an incredible amount of size and athleticism.

And they are built around a defensive identity that I think is incredible.

The other day, Rudy Gobert misses game two.

And they come out and they hold Denver to 80 points in their own gym. In one of those games, Mike, where that's a must win in a lot of ways for Denver. You drop game one at home. You definitely don't want to go down 02. And I know you've had a lot of, we're seeing some of what you've been saying about Denver for a minute, I think, come to fruition. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on both sides of that, Mike, on the Denver Minnesota series, because Minnesota has come out of

the gates just incredible in their first six playoff games. Yeah. So Minnesota, to me, represented

the exact type of team that was going to give Denver a lot of problems coming off of a series

in which they

had to get up to Western Conference Finals type energy to beat a Laker team that was coming pretty

fast after him. And I thought that like the crunch time execution that Denver has, which

they get credit for, they're great at it, Yolkich and Murray being the key of that. But Murray's

game winner, certainly the one to cap off the 20-point comeback and then even the one with about three seconds left when the Lakers didn't have a timeout and couldn't advance the ball, I thought that masked some of where things may have gone in a direction of kind of the Lakers don't have the same level of athleticism in size as the Timberwolves,

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