What do you think about the Laker team now?

You follow the box scores of the games every day?

Just the Lakers.

You're kidding.

That is really a compliment.

I was pleased to see you smile at the top bar show because once the game starts, you have a game face.

You don't smile much out there.

I don't think you have to do things for money anymore. Correct. What's up, Laker fans? Welcome to the Laker Film Room podcast, brought you by the Blue Wire Podcast Network. I'm Pete, joined by Darius. We might get Mike later in the fancy San Francisco hotels. They don't have the best Wi-Fi. So he's wrestling with that right now. We shall see. But we're going to preview game five today. And I would like to start, Darius, on the offensive end of the court. As you accurately pointed out in both yesterday's pod and the text thread, we were kind of bemoaning the Steph highball screens, which we will get to probably a little bit later and how the Lakers were guarding that. But it's like, oh, we got 49 points at halftime. We're not scoring particularly well. Now, in both live action and then the details of

this, I thought, really revealed themselves more in the rewatch. We needed guards to step up.

In that first half, we didn't have any guards played particularly well. And then in the second

half, Austin and Lonnie really had good second halves. But I would

like to start with LeBron James, who haven't talked about a ton in the last couple of pods. And

Darbin had some quotes about like LeBron kind of having something in reserve. And throughout the

course of this series, I've seen LeBron really picking his spots, especially in the second half of games. So I saw something in game three. You saw something in game four. Talk to me about what you've been seeing.

So there's just a certain amount of control that LeBron had. And so just to highlight your point first about like something in reserve, we talked about that play where he got in a full

sprint and deflected that pass after the Curry Steel, tight sort of game. This was in game three.

The one where he ran up into the stance. Yeah. Where he hurtled the front row and then ran up

into the stance. In game four, he had a similar sequence where he hurtled the front row and then ran up into the stance.

In game four, he had a similar sequence where he got isolated against Clay in the post off of a switch, and he's at like the foul line area.

And LeBron's starting to back him down. He goes into and turns over his left shoulder to do a fade away.

And Clay slaps down and strips the ball.

Clean steel.

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