Hello, Lakers Nation. Welcome in to the Lakers Nation.com podcast. My name's Trevor Lane, and it's game day. Lakers Rockets. Game 3, 5 p.m. Pacific time tonight. It'll be live right here on the Lakersnation.com YouTube channel, doing a little play-by-play, breaking down the game as it happens. The series shifting to Houston, we'll see if the Lakers can make it 3-0.

On today's show, I'm going to get into a very important injury report, a surprising injury report as well.

The keys to victory for the Lakers, and we'll finish things off by getting into the mailbags.

Let's dive in here.

The injury report, the big surprise came out yesterday.

Austin Reeves has been upgraded to questionable for

tonight's game against the Rockets. Now, is he actually going to play? I have my doubts on that

just because this was supposed to be like a four to six weekish, maybe more injury. And we're

talking about even less than four weeks right now, but a great sign that he's upgraded to questionable, and we'll see. Maybe we get some news that he's ready to go. My hope is that he is not coming back too soon, that if he is going to play in tonight's game, it's because he is really, truly 100% ready. The last we had heard from Shams Tarania was that he had played some one-on-one,

but had to then move up and play three-on-three and then play five-on-five. That was just a few days

ago. Has he made all of that progress? Is he truly ready to step on the floor or not? As far as

what can change, you know, I talked about it on the YouTube channel a little bit yesterday,

but the big thing that I see if Austin Reeves is back, whether it's tonight, whether it's game four, whether it's game five, whatever it is, if there's a game five, who knows? Maybe the Lakers just sweep Houston. Wouldn't that be fun? But regardless of when it happens, I think the key here, number one, because they get a lot of people asking, well, isn't this going to mess things up with Luke Kinnard? Well, Austin, the last time he was injured, he came off the bench. He came off the bench and he had a minute's restriction. I would assume it would be the same. He would probably come off the bench and have a minutes restriction if he is indeed back in action.

Again, whether that's tonight, game four, game five, whenever.

I would assume that he will be on a minutes restriction.

And I'm not really worried about Luke Canard being taken out of a rhythm or something because

Austin Reeves is back.

I think what's it more exciting about Reeves potentially coming back is having a player

that can run the offense when LeBron is out.

Right now that has been, you know, we can talk about the rebounding and winning the turnover

battle and all these sorts of things that we've been talking about over the course of the series.

But one of the big keys for the Lakers has basically been whenever

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