If the Lakers were going to convince anyone they were serious, then wins against actually good teams were going to have to come. Prior to Sunday, the Lakers faltered time after time when given the opportunity to beat a contender, including very recently in Denver.
In beating the Knicks, then, they not only put together a strong performance in a wire-to-wire win, but they did so against one of the Eastern Conference’s best sides which was playing at a high level. Coming into the game, they had won
16 of the last 21 contests.
No matter how you slice it, it was a big win.
“I feel like we’re doing some really good things and we still have room for improvement, but tonight was a good step in the right direction,” Austin Reaves said. “They’re a really good team. I think they told me out there that they average 117 [points]. To hold a team to 97 points of that caliber just shows our grittiness that we’ve come to enjoy to do on the defensive end.”
As Reaves notes, not only was it a big win, but the way they did it was important, too. Not often this year have they won a game on the back of their defense.
On top of that, this was a Knicks team fresh off a dominant win in Denver on Friday, a team the Lakers came up just short against.
“It’s a pretty awesome win,” Luka Dončić said. “They just beat the Nuggets by 40, so I think it’s a pretty big win for us. It’ll give us a lot of confidence moving forward.”
This is also to say nothing of the fact that the Knicks handed the Lakers a pretty frustrating loss in New York earlier this season, which was also something very much on the minds of the team as well.
“A very big win,” Jaxson Hayes said. “I mean, obviously, any wins a big win in this league. It’s a very hard league to play in. I just feel like we owed them that one, at least, for New York. We lost bad in New York, got punked by them in New York, so we just needed to get that one back.”
No matter how you slice it, the Lakers picked up a big win on Sunday. The challenge now will be to build on Sunday’s win and not make it an aberration.
LA will immediately have a chance to do it again on Tuesday. We’ll quickly find out how serious they will be moving forward.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
