THE New Orleans Pelicans could have avoided a rematch against the Los Angeles Lakers by winning the regular-season finale between the teams Sunday (Monday in Manila) and claiming a top-six playoff spot.
Instead, the Lakers again outclassed the Pelicans and didn’t even have to leave town as the two teams will square off in New Orleans on Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila) during the NBA play-in round.
The winner of the contest between the No. 8 seed Lakers (47-35) and No. 7 Pelicans (49-33) will advance to play the second-seeded Denver Nuggets in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs.
The loser will get a second chance to make the playoff field on Friday (Saturday in Manila) when its play-in opponent will be the Golden State Warriors or Sacramento Kings.
The Lakers led by as many as 32 points in the convincing 124-108 win over New Orleans. Los Angeles beat the Pelicans by 44 points on Dec. 7 and won three of this season’s four matchups.
In the other game, the Golden State Warriors once again will try to make it a disappointing ending for host Sacramento when they face the Kings in a loser-goes-home Western Conference play-in contest.
Golden State’s Draymond Green is confident his squad will still be playing next week.
“We just got to go win,” Green said. “When this team’s back is against the wall, I like how this group shows up.”
Green said he expects to be roundly booed again when he steps on the court in Sacramento. His playoff antics from last season have not been forgotten as part of an electric series in which the Kings won the first two games before Golden State recovered to win four of the final five.
Though Stephen Curry’s 50-point performance in Game 7 allowed the Warriors to advance, Green’s stomping on the midsection of the Kings’ Domantas Sabonis in the fourth quarter of Game 2 lives on as the series-defining visual.
Lakers star LeBron James isn’t feeling comfortable about the repeat matchup even though his squad just steamrolled the Pelicans on the latter’s home floor.
“The game is going to be extremely hard, extremely difficult, extremely physical,” James said. “I’ve always known that, when you play a playoff series–and I look at this like a two-game playoff series–if you win that first game, a team has multiple days to kind of sit on that feeling or sit with that taste in their mouth of defeat.
“So, they’re going to be extremely ready for us and we have to come in with the same sense of urgency that we had the previous game.”
Pelicans coach Willie Green certainly isn’t going to forget the bitter taste between now and tipoff.
“We have to come back with the right mentality,” Green said. “They were the aggressors. We have to be an aggressive team. We must be a more physical team. We have to keep them out of our paint and make them take contested shots and rebound the ball.
