Hello, Lakers Nation. Welcome into the Lakers Nation.com podcast. I am Trevor Lane. You can find me over on X at Trevor underscore Lane on Instagram and threads at Trevor Lane NBA. Lakers Nuggets. Let's go. Revenge on the mind of the purple and gold. Can they actually get it done? We're going to be talking about that a lot over these next few days leading up to the series opener on Saturday. We will be having that game over on playback.tv slash Lakers Nation, as well as the Lakers Nation YouTube channels.

So come hang out with us on Saturday for game one of Lakers Nuggets. But I want to talk about a few things on today's show. I want to get into the mental state of the Lakers right now. I think that's going to be really critical in this series. Nuggets head coach Mike Malone already talking a little bit about the Lakers and kind of where they're at. So I want to talk about that as well. We also need to get into the mailbag, but let's kick things off with this.

Lakers coach, Darvin Ham, oops, Lakers coach Darwin Ham, after the Lakers win over the

Pelicans, a nervous win, by the way, over the Pels, not necessarily an inspiring win, but if we

want to look at it in a glasses have full way, if we want to look at it with some optimism,

we can say, well, the Lakers got objectively poor performances, particularly when we look at

what we expect from them on a night-to-night basis out of LeBron, James, and Anthony Davis,

and yet they still won.

That's that, maybe that says something there could just be the Lakers have the Pelicans number. Were they fortunate that Zion got injured? Maybe, but glasses have full. The Lakers did not get a good performance out of either LeBron or D or AD and yet still won the game. So afterwards, Darban Ham was asked, you know, hey, what, what are your thoughts on, you know, should the Lakers have tanked this game so you could avoid the Denver Nuggets and you'd be playing on Friday?

Darwin with this all-timer here said there was a report of what?

Insane asylum sources say.

Nah, it was someone that just got out of the insane asylum. So

Darwin Ham saying, it would have been crazy for us to take a play in game with a chance

to punch our ticket to the postseason just so we could avoid Denver. And we know how

things played out. The Golden State Warriors, they went home, not sad.

And now it's Sacramento who's going to be playing the Pelicans.

By the way, a little side note here, how crazy is that the Pelicans won 49 games this season

and may very well be going home Friday night.

No Zion Williamson.

Brandon Ingram, clearly not 100%.

They've got to play Sacramento.

I know they've done well against Sacramento this season, but 49 wins and the Pelicans may be

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