Despite falling behind 3-1 in the series with a Game 4 loss on Sunday, the Lakers remain confident they can complete a comeback.
In a vacuum, either of the Lakers losses over the weekend to the Wolves would be gut-punch defeats that would be tough to come back from.
Putting the two results less than 48 hours apart from one another and having that drop you to a 3-1 deficit in the series is about as tough a setback to return from when it comes to postseason results.
Now, LA returns home to licks it wounds while staring at a hole few teams in NBA history have ever climbed out of. Even by the most optimistic of standards, the Lakers have to now win three straight games against a Wolves side that has looked fantastic to open the playoffs.
Before you can win three straight, you have to win one and that’s the mindset LeBron is heading into Game 5.
“Obviously, you don’t think about winning three,” LeBron said. “You think about just getting the next one. And that’s the only thing that matters because if not, the offseason begins. It’s all about Wednesday. That’s what’s important.”
If the team was looking for a silver lining, it’s that they were tied with four minutes to go in Game 3 and led by double digits in the fourth quarter of Game 4. Both games were decided in the final minutes of the contest with the Lakers failing to steal either road game.
“Oh, we’re going to get one,” Rui Hachimura said. “We’re going to get one. This is not done yet. We’re right there. We’re literally right there. We just have to fix little things. Of course, the fourth quarter is going to be the problem for us so we’ll watch the film again.
“We have to be locked in. Those little mistakes going to hurt us. We got to communicate well and have to better on that side and the coaching, the players, everybody be on the same page. But, we’re going to get one, the next one.”
Or, if you’re Dorian Finney-Smith in search of reason for optimism, it’s that you have LeBron on your team.
“I seen Bron do it already,” DFS said. “We still feel like we can win this series. We just have to win one game at a time. Obviously, we put ourselves in harm’s way but we have to figure it out as a team.”
The Lakers should feel some confident about where they stand in the series. They’ve lost a pair of narrow games on the road and won their last contest in Los Angeles. The path to winning three straight games is fairly easy to lay out.
Win at home in Game 5, pull out a narrow win in Minnesota that they couldn’t in Games 3 or 4, then return home for a Game 7 where anything can happen.
Being easy to map out and being easy to execute is two vastly different things, though. But what’s clear is that the Lakers still believe in themselves.
“Anytime you have the opportunity to go lace them up and play again, you’re not out of it,” Austin Reaves said. “A lot of these games, besides Game 1, could have easily went our way if we made a couple more plays down the stretch. But we didn’t. We dug ourselves in a hole.
“Sun will come up tomorrow and we still got another day to fight.”
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