It's the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day.

Welcome everybody to the Lockdown Lakers Podcast. I'm Anthony Erwin. I'm joined by Pete ZS Pete. Holy crap.

If I told you at halftime, we were going to win that game by 20 plus points. What would you have said?

Dude, I was heading into halftime. So yesterday's bet online, bet of the day that I put was I had money on the nuggets money line. They were getting there is plus 190. And I was like,

this is too good of a team to ever be getting plus 190 typods, right? And heading into halftime, I was like,

easy money. Here's my bet. And against Lakers, Anthony, you know, I said, I said it on the show. I hoped I was I hoped I would be wrong.

This that's that's that's a few bucks that I'm happily, you know, you know, discard. It's five bucks. Well, well spent.

No, but but I just, I mean, good Lord, dude, I just you run out of, you know, hyperventilating praise at some point.

I was watching this game again with Jen and it started later, right? So Avery's already in bed. And on multiple occasions, Jen was like, Fred, you have to shut the bleep up.

Make sure that had anything to do with basketball.

It will, I mean, yeah, in general, but like, especially, yeah, it's not there. She was moving and hooting and hollering and yeah, it was such a fun half.

I, you know, she was, she was saying, you know, we were watching this game and she's like, it has been a long time since the Lakers made you make those noises.

Yeah. Yeah.

There was a play. There was a play where Kuzma had the ball in the right wing and Harold flashed right down the middle of the key.

And you saw the angle of the past that Kuzma had to make. Harold's like, you know, doing jumping jacks in the middle of the key.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, I haven't, I haven't been like that kind of engaged in a Laker game in a really, really long time. And it's, and it's simply because this team, this team, dude, like we're going to talk about it in the third segment.

And by the way, today, we're going to start talking about the defense here in a second for the first segment. And then in the second segment, we're going to get to some individual shout outs. I thought a few players in particular deserve some praise here. And then in the third segment, we're going to revisit the conversation that we started this season with, right?

About this being the most talented roster of our lifetimes. So we'll get to all of that. But yeah, I just, let's, let's talk about the defense.

I mean, I thought they would take a step back this year because especially against the team like the Denver Nuggets, because Dwight was so effective against Yokech for stretches and, and, you know, Jovell, I think was always going to struggle in this kind of a matchup or whatever.

But just, just in the second half for, for 24 full minutes, not counting garbage time there. 24 full minutes. They held the fourth best offense in the NBA. And by the way, it's a fourth best offense that hasn't even shot the ball very well. So like it's a, it's the fourth best offense that can greatly improve if they just like start making shots. And they looked hapless out there.

Yeah, that we're a swarm when we're at our best defensively. We're really swarming and it's different by nature than last season's team with the rim protectors and the shot blocking.

But we really saw our defensive speed is nuts, man, especially throwing THT in the mix now to that we run that we went in the second half.

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