LOS ANGELES — If the Lakers and the Mavericks meeting for the first time this season was supposed to feel special, it failed.
There were no angry glares at the Dallas bench, no hard stares on the floor between the past and the future of the Mavericks. The emotion for Luka Dončić was much more internal.
There was no clear-cut villain, hiding in plain sight in the Mavericks’ executive seats, to be jeered. Nico Harrison had been fired and wasn’t there to be thanked or harassed.
This, a 129-119 win against the Mavericks, felt kind of like any other night — a sentiment that both signals how comfortable Dončić looks in his new home and how consistently the Lakers are playing high-level basketball 18 games into their season.
The player the Lakers never should’ve been able to get, Dončić, torched another defense with ball fakes, brute strength and bursts of speed — all paired with emergency-brake deceleration. He scored 35 points; no big deal. Seen it before. Gonna see it again.
“I would say it’s a little bit easier now,” Dončić said of seeing his old team. “But like I said, games against Dallas always have some special meaning to me. I still have a lot of friends there. It’s always special. It’ll always be special for me.”
Just not as special as the first few.
The player the Mavericks somehow didn’t get in that trade, Austin Reaves, added to his resume as one of the NBA’s best offensive players by using a sudden first step, some overdue shot making and tremendous body control. Reaves had 38 to lead his team — something that might’ve seemed like a big story last year. Now, he could end up on the All-Star team.
“How long ago did I tell you all, AR can f—ing play ball? When was this? When was he a rookie? I don’t even remember,” LeBron James said after Reaves’ big game.
“I’ve been told you all, he can ball. It’s nothing (new). AR, he’s great.”
Dončić’s revenge and Anthony Davis’ return from injury took a backseat to Reaves, the hardest player on the court to stop.
“I think he’s been one of the best basketball players in this league, just the way he scores, he makes a place for others in the game,” Dončić said. “It’s very good. I’m just happy he’s on my team. And that’s probably the last compliment I ever give him.”
And the one who has been doing this the longest, James, continued to show he was willing to accept whatever the game presented to him in a complimentary role, calmly scoring just two points in the first half before finding some seams and some shots to get him into double figures scoring for the 1,296th-straight game.
In four games this season, James has been whatever the Lakers have needed him to be — a laser from three, an engine in transition, a force on the glass and a voice on the defensive end. Unsurprisingly, the Lakers have won all four.
You could be forgiven if you forgot that the Lakers even trailed in the fourth quarter, their control and poise making their eventual victory seem like an inevitability because of how well they’ve performed in tight situations this season.
After the win, the team’s 14th this season, the Lakers have the third-best winning percentage in the entire league — a standard of play set in the early portion of the year and met routinely.
“I think the game plan discipline and game plan execution has been pretty good all season and we’ve been building that,” coach JJ Redick said of his team’s habits. “The outliers on that, to me, are like the games where we lack effort, didn’t play hard, which basically is two games of the 18. I think our communication habits, on-court huddles, all of that stuff has been great.
“And then offensively, the organization and the execution is significantly better than where it was last year. And our ability to understand what we’re trying to do and why we’re trying to do it on offense has been really good.”
That all of this felt so ho-hum — even with the Lakers clinching a home game against the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Cup quarterfinals, even with the team re-winning the Dončić trade and winning its sixth straight, Friday was more about the Lakers kinda just being themselves.
“We’ve done a good job of problem-solving during games when we have runs that aren’t great,” Reaves said. “Instead of breaking apart, we come together and figure it out and that’s what good teams do. You have to be able to problem-solve on the fly. Coaching staff gets a lot of credit for that. They give us basically the answers to the test, we just gotta go out there and do that and play hard, so I think that might be the biggest one.”
No, Friday never reached the heights of a bitter rivalry game. Instead, it looked and felt very much like one great team handling its business against a worse one.
“Maybe felt differently as a viewer, but the game to me was like a very simple game in that the guys that don’t normally make 3s for them made some 3s,” Redick said after. “We had too many turnovers in the first half. And then the second half, we stopped turning the ball over.
“Their guys kept making 3s until the very end, basically. And we were able to get enough stops.”
We’ve heard stuff like that before. And if the Lakers stay on their path, we’ll hear stuff like this again.
