Hello, Lakers Nation. Welcome in Trevor Lane here for Lakersnation.com. This is the Lakersnation.com podcast. It is game day. Lakers versus Nuggets. Here we go. Game one of the Western Conference finals. Only four teams remaining in the entire NBA. We started with 30. We're down to four. Lakers Nuggets.

We're going to see which team earns a trip to the finals.

We've got a lot to get into today.

I do have some fan questions and comments to dive into.

But before I get to that, I want to break down what I see as three key factors in this series,

three key things that we need to keep an eye on moving in.

Now, one of the things that before I get into my three keys, one of the things that I want

everybody to remember is to keep a very open mind. What we've seen in these playoff series is that

sometimes it's out of the box thinking that helps pave the way to victory. I mean, look at what Golden State did, right, putting Gary Payton the second into their

lineup. And that seemed to help that through a wrench at the Lakers and their plants.

The Lakers responding by putting Dennis Schrooter into their starting five.

We've seen the Lakers go to different schemes, different styles, do a lot of different stuff

here in order to try to

adjust to the adjustment. So even as we do the best that we can to predict what we expect

to see in this series, and as much as I see this series as kind of a straight up, at least from

the Denver perspective, matchup series, like I expect that Jamal Murray is probably going to defend DeAngelo Russell, Katavius, Cobolpo's probably going to defend Austin Reeves. Maybe they swap, but the guards are going to defend the guards. Their forwards are going to defend their forwards. Their bigs are going to defend their bigs. Like, that's just the way it's going to go. Yokic probably defends Anthony Davis. If not, maybe it's Aaron Gordon, but I don't think we're going to start out with a lot

of cross-matching in this series, not quite the way that we saw in Golden State, where

Anthony Davis is defending Gary Payton the second and stuff like that that we saw going on.

I don't think we're going to see quite as much of that, even going back to the Memphis

series, where you had AD not defending Jaron Jackson, Jr. instead spending most

of his time acting as a roamer off of a player like an Xavier Tillman, sometimes even Dylan

Brooks, so he could stay in the middle of the floor. I don't think we're going to see a ton of that

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