Davis shows he’s ready for big stage with Lakers
Anthony Davis caught the ball deep on the left side with the Lakers losing and time about to run out.
The shot Davis made to win Game 2 of the Western Conference finals was from nearly the same spot and situation as one he attempted in his team’s last game before the NBA season was suspended.
He missed that one, sending the Lakers to a 104-102 loss to Brooklyn on March 10, and was bummed about it for a few days.
Not LeBron James, though. That moment just reinforced what he already believed about the All-Star forward the Lakers had acquired to play alongside him.
“You’re not going to make them all, but the belief to just take it and live with the results is what it’s all about,” James said.
Davis has been making plenty so far in the deepest postseason run of his career.
He has been the dominant player in this series, where the Lakers have a 2-0 lead with Game 3 scheduled for tonight. Davis followed his 37 points in Game 1 with 31 more on Sunday, including the Lakers’last10.
The No. 1 pick in the 2012 draft, Davis had long been one of the NBA’s best players by the time he got to Los Angeles last July. But it’s one thing to be performing quietly in New Orleans, where just winning a postseason round made it a good season.
It’s another thing to be playing with James, where not winning a championship makes it feel like a lost season.
“When I left, I just wanted to be able to compete for a championship, and I know that moments like this comes with it. Especially being in L.A., the biggest market in basketball,” Davis said after the 105-103 victory on Sunday.
“I know the quote-unquote pressure is going to be on us, going to be on me, especially the first year with everything that happened last year, and then also playing alongside Bron,” Davis said. “I know he gets criticized more than any basketball player ever.”
Davis had never made a buzzer-beating shot in the postseason and had only one in his entire career. Now he’s on a list of Lakers that have done it in the playoffs, a group that includes Hall of Famers such as Kobe Bryant, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, along with noted clutch postseason performers Derek Fisher and Robert Horry.
Without Davis’ shot, the Nuggets would have been celebrating another comeback victory. They trailed by 16 points and had already erased deficits of 15 or more against Utah and the Clippers in the first two rounds, on their way to overcoming 3-1 deficits in both.
GETTING MAD WORKED FOR CELTICS >> Boston’s first win in these Eastern Conference finals just happened to come two nights after Marcus Smart sparked a loud and emotional series of shouting matches inside the Celtics’ locker room, all of that starting only a few seconds after the Miami Heat won to take a 2-0 lead in the series.
That lead is down to 2-1 now, the Celtics playing brilliantly in Game 3 and leading wire-to-wire to take a bunch of newfound momentum into Game 4 of the series on Wednesday night.
“I’ve always been saying that before you see the rainbow, it has to storm,” Smart said Monday, speaking about the post-Game 2 dustup for the first time publicly. “For us, that was a storm that we had to go through. We found our happy place.”
There have been 17 instances of someone scoring to give his team a double-digit lead at some point in the first three games of the series; all 17 of those have been done by the Celtics. The Celtics have yet to trail by more than eight, have led by as much as 20 and have been in front for 75% of the first 149 minutes played in this matchup.