Hello, Lakers Nation. Welcome in to the Lakers Nation.com podcast. My name's Trevor Lane, and it's game day. Lakers Wizards 7 p.m. Pacific time tonight. The Lakers badly need to pick up a win. I'm going to show you why in the standings in just a moment. Don't forget it'll be live tonight. 7 p.m. Pacific time right here on the Lakersnation.com YouTube channel. Breaking down the game. Come join me. It's like a party. Hopefully, it'll be a victory party for the Lakers. So first night of a back-to-back tomorrow, the Lakers take on the Cleveland Cavaliers, a much more difficult matchup, and this is the Lakers injury report for tonight. No Luka Donchich, league suspension. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in just a moment. Marcus Smart still out with the right ankle contusion. Let me get a little bit

concerned here. Now, hopefully this is more about the fact that the Lakers are playing the Wizards,

that it is any kind of actual injury for Marcus Smart or anything that's going to

keep him out for the long haul here. I'm hoping that he's available tomorrow against Cleveland.

They will certainly need him. He is kind of the key to this Lakers team, this Lakers defense.

He's missed the last three games with the injury that he suffered in Orlando. This will be now his fourth straight game missed due to this injury.

So the Lakers definitely need Marcus Smart back in action, especially tomorrow when they're

dealing with players like Donovan Mitchell and James Hardin.

I don't know if he's going to actually be a go in that one or not.

Obviously, he's been out and not even being declared doubtful or anything

like that, just out for tonight's game. So not ideal there. Adieu Thero, also not ideal.

Out with left, left knee soreness. He's been out for a bit. He played two minutes in a game

and got apparently picked up a knee issue and he's been out ever since. I know there's a lot of

frustration from Lakers fans about Adu Thero.

I hope that he can get better, get back out onto the floor and get some minutes because

I'll tell you what, these last three games, these have been three games, the three

tanking teams of Lakers just played that should have been opportunities for Adu Thero to

potentially get out there. We look at the Pacers, the Nets, and now tonight against the Wizards, these would have been playing time opportunities, whereas, you know, like if he's healthy against the Cavs, is you really going to play significant minutes? Probably not in a matchup like that. But against tanking teams, yeah, maybe there's an opportunity for him to actually get out on the floor, but he's got to get healthy and stay healthy. He's dealt with a lot of injuries already this season. All right, I mentioned Luca and the suspension situation. So Luca is not out of the woods right now just because he is serving his suspension for tonight's game. Like the good part of this is the Lakers are playing a tanking team in the Washington Wizards, even without Luca, without Marcus Smart, which is a big deal. I want to talk about the rotation as well and what that's going to look like. What's the starting lineup going to look like for the Lakers? It is a big deal. But if you were to miss a game, this would probably be the game of the remaining games left that you would want him to miss against the Washington Wizards. First night of a back-to-back. It means ideally you get a Luca tomorrow against the calves with fresh legs when everybody else on the team will be coming off of a back-to-back. So it's not a bad thing that this is the game that he's missing. It's bad that he picked up the technical. But again, that doesn't mean that he's totally out of the woods. So he picked up his 16th technical. If he gets another one, he's not suspended again. But if he gets one more after that, if he gets an 18th technical, he will once again be suspended. Now, the Lakers, including tonight's game, have eight games remaining.

So Luca, if he picks up two technicals, he will be suspended again.

So he's got to get through these next seven games that he'll be eligible to play in without picking up two more technical fouls.

Now, for the playoffs, the technical foul count resets. And you get a maximum of six

technical fouls in the playoffs and then a one game suspension for a seventh tech, a ninth tech.

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