Anybody in the world would take that scenario.”Īs Ham had shared with his team after its April 11 win over Minnesota in the play-in game, the team’s own analytics department gave scant reason for hope after their awful start. But you look up, and you’re 1-0 against the defending champs. For us to really just keep our head down and grind through it, like you said - it’s felt like a long year. “Darv wrote it on the board the other day, where I think they gave us like a 0.3 percent chance of making the playoffs at that time. “I mean, we went 2-10 to start the year,” Reaves recalled to The Athletic. With a massive smile sparked, he elaborated from there. Or, as better put by Lakers small forward Austin Reaves when asked how he might have reacted to this sort of crystal ball prediction back then, “Hell, yeah!” If you told any of these Lakers people just a few months ago that this would be how they spent their evening on May 2, they may have sent you straight to the league’s drug testing lab. I-Poke-Bears, Dillon Brooks, the exiled Memphis Grizzlies guard who had angered all of these Lakers and inspired this surge with his ill-advised criticism of LeBron James nearly two weeks before. The two men embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in months, and Pelinka even growled for good measure.

But the loudest exchange took place when first-year coach Darvin Ham came barreling his way.

He gave a hearty handshake and half hug to nearly every member of the staff, many of them players who came their way during a flurry of trajectory-changing moves that he made at the trade deadline. No, Pelinka’s gaze was on the Lakers folks who were quite pleased after pulling off the kind of playoff feat that seemed so wildly unlikely earlier this season. Little did he know he’d be honored with an 11th-place finish in a matter of hours - right behind Sean Marks, whose Brooklyn Nets super team fell into the East River and floated away some time ago.

The warriors heir