Hello, everybody. Welcome in to the Lakersnation.com podcast. My name's Trevor Lane. And once again, it's game day. Lakers Pelicans tonight, 7.30 p.m. Pacific time. Come hang out on the Lakersnation.com YouTube channel, which can be found at YouTube.com slash Lakers Nation or over on playback, which is at playback.com slash Lakers Nation. We're going to hang out. We're going to do a little play-by-play. We'll react to the game.

We'll take questions, comments from the chat. It's a lot of fun. As I always say, it's like a party. Coming out tonight, Lakers Pelicans, 7.30 p.m. Pacific time. What I want to do on today's somewhat truncated show, I am recording this not long away from the start of tonight's

game. So I know this isn't going to have a whole lot of shelf life. So I just want to briefly talk

about tonight's game against the Pels. I want to get into the mailbag as well, but also take a

peek at the standings and what's actually the best case scenario for the Lakers, because there's some tricky ones, some really interesting games going on tonight. So we're going to get into all that and more. Please make sure you do subscribe right here to the channel and turn on those notifications as well. All right. So again, 7.30 p.m. Pacific time, look, you want my analysis for Lakers, Pelicans, go kick their asses.

Go kick their asses. The Lakers are 14 and a half point favorite. Go kick their asses. That's what the Lakers need to do tonight to the Pelicans. I don't care what they do in terms of the rebounding, the deep, obviously, try to keep the Pels off the offensive glass. They're a pretty good offensive rebounding team. But the Pelicans, they're tanking. they're resting Zion Williamson for the remainder of the season.

The resting C.J. McCollum for the remainder of the season, they're not trying to win games. Why are they not trying to win games? Well, it's really simple. It all comes down to the standings. Yep, they're in full tank mode right now as a number of teams are i think it's actually kind of funny because

you see what's going on right now philly is uh two games up in the wind column which is what we look at

for the tanking teams on the pelicans so the pelicans went eish we're getting the the 76ers

haven't won a game in their last they're oh and 10 in in their last 10. Uh-oh, we're 3 and 7.

We're going to accidentally pass these guys.

And so the Pelican said, oh, that's it.

Bench them.

And they bench Zion Williamson.

They bench C.J. McCollum.

And then the Philadelphia 76ers said, oh, yeah?

Well, we're going to bench Tyrese Maxie for the rest of the season.

That's right. We're going to try to make sure we don't win a game again. So it's an interesting tank race going on. The Pelicans, now look, their players, are they going to play hard? Absolutely. The players that are playing are going to go out and try to win. Organizationally, they are very much not trying to win. They are, they've gotten Zion out for the season. C.J. McCollum out. They traded away Brandon Ingram.

I mean, this again, the Lakers are a 14.5 point favorite for a reason. The fact that they are a 14 and a half point favorite to me suggests that LeBron and Luca and all the guys are probably going to play, despite it being second night of a back to back where the Lakers were at in the standings, which we'll take a look at. I don't think you can mess around with a game like this. You don't have a lot of easy games remaining on your schedule. This is, I believe, probably the easiest one. So you've got to go out there and get the job done. So like I said, you want my analysis? My deep basketball analysis,

diving into the weeds of, of basketball goodness here, go kick the Pelican's asses tonight.

That's what they have to do. Yeah, when you've got a team like this on the schedule that is

organizationally not trying to win,

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