reportedly most confident about facing the Lakers<\/a> in the first round and we could see the matchup come to fruition. It’s also possible that the Lakers, who are currently fourth in the West, drop to the fifth seed, as they are also just one game ahead of the Denver Nuggets.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn which case, Houston and the Lakers would also square off, if Houston maintains their current spot and\/or seeding. On Thursday night, we saw Luka Doncic suffer what appeared to be a serious hamstring injury.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Doncic was even brought to tears. Hopefully his injury isn’t a major one and he’s able to dodge a bullet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As it pertains to a potential postseason matchup between the two teams, Houston hasn’t fared well against the Lakers of late, having lost both back-to-back games last month at home. However, they did beat the Lakers on Christmas Day, in a game that proved to be a massacre.<\/p>\n
What’s been made clear about the Lakers this season is that they are not a great defensive ball club. The Lakers rank 20th in defensive rating.<\/p>\n
They can easily be attacked, especially with the Rockets’ youth. Speaking of youth, the Lakers also don’t have much of that, especially not as it pertains to their core players.<\/p>\n
The Lakers also don’t have an answer for Alperen Sengun. Through two games against the Lakers this season, Sengun is averaging 20.5 points, 8 rebounds, 7 assists, 68.2 percent from the field and even a perfect 100 percent from the foul line. Sengun posted true shooting marks of 79.9 percent and 76.5 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And again, we don’t yet know the status of Doncic and whether his injury will be a long-term one. Either way, the matchup would be a good one.<\/p>\n
If it happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday night, the Houston Rockets clinched a postseason berth for the second consecutive season, in spite of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3794],"tags":[7,292,194,4066,6,211],"class_list":{"0":"post-698234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston-rockets","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-houston","10":"tag-houston-rockets","11":"tag-houstonrockets","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-rockets"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}