Welcome to a special edition of the Athletic NBA show live from the in season tournament in Las Vegas.

I'm going to go, Sam your host, Sandruch, with me. I've got my guy, Eric, name. Eric, we aren't going to talk about your team yet. We're not going to talk about the Bucks yet. We're going to talk about this Lakers Pelicans game, and it wasn't much of a game. Honestly, kind of sad. 133.89. The Lakers were amazing. You could tell the Lakers really wanted this one.

And the Pelicans just shot the ball horrifically. Yeah, I mean, it's funny like I was working on my story back in the hallways, running around, trying to, you know, figure out everything that's going on with the Bucks post game. And by the time I sat down, started writing, I look in the Lakers are up 20.

And I was like, oh, okay, well, I guess this isn't going to be much of a game. And I mean,

it really was that when you look back on kind of everything that they were doing.

LeBron was just ridiculous.

Like, you can tell he's really locked in.

You know, the other day, Yannis had joked.

Like, you know, whoever gets this is clearly better than Michael Jordan and Mary Bird and Wilc Chamberlain, because they don't have an in-season tournament championship.

I don't know if LeBron believes the same thing that Yannes joked about, but he certainly

seemed motivated.

He did.

He put on a show, too.

He only played 23 minutes, but in that time, he had some dunks.

He had this heat check three that just lit the entire arena on fire.

That was really fun.

But those are probably the most fun moments of the game.

The third quarter, the Lakers outscored the Pelicans 43 to 17.

And that was the game.

So we will see the Lakers in the finals on Saturday.

Let's go to the most interesting game, though,

because the Bucks Pacers game was nip and tuck up until,

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