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The Los Angeles Lakers may not be in the same exact place they were last season, but they’re close, challenging for first position in the Western Conference as they continue their defense of the NBA championship.
They’ll face a contest, for sure, on Thursday night as they take on the Denver Nuggets, who are currently the fourth-place team in the West and are coming off a win over the front-running Utah Jazz.
Can the Lakers impose their defensive will on the Nuggets? We’re going to explore that answer, so you can take aim and fire over at America’s Bookie.
Denver Nuggets at Los Angeles Lakers Picks
Nuggets vs. Lakers ATS Prediction
Tip-off: 10:05 PM ET (TNT)
NBA Basketball Betting Odds: Lakers -5.5, Total: 219.5
The Nuggets come into this game very upbeat. They scored 79 points in the first half and turned back the Jazz 125-117, getting a monster effort out of Nikola Jokic, who scored 47 points, which included four out of four from the three-point arc. He was not alone out there on the deep perimeter; Denver made 18 of its 28 attempts at triples.
Most people associate the Nuggets with high-scoring, high-flying basketball. Well, they can score all right, but they are hardly operating at a breakneck rate. In fact, in a statistic called “Pace,” which measures the number of possessions per 48 minutes that a team has, Denver is 29th out of 30 teams. They are one of the least likely teams to get out on the fast break.Therefore, they have to be very efficient when they run the half-court offense.
And you can’t argue all that much with their field goal percentage, which, at 48.4%, is the fourth-best in the league.
But even though the Lakers have a number of guys who can really fill up the hoop, not the least of whom are LeBron James and Anthony Davis, they are winning, for the most part, with defense.
It’s not all that common that a team will find itself in the top ten defending both two-pointers AND three-pointers, but that’s where the Lakers are, at ninth and third, respectively, in the NBA.
In terms of Defensive Rating, which measures points allowed per 100 possessions, Frank Vogel’s team is ranked #1 in the league. And there are a couple of very important components to that aside from the shooting percentage they’re allowing.
They are, for one thing, the best defensive rebounding team in the league, pulling down 80.5% of their opponent’s misses, which has a mitigating effect on one of Denver’s strengths – that of offensive rebounding (second in “ORB,” or offensive rebounding percentage). So they tend to hold the second-shot opportunities to a minimum, therefore “finishing the stop.”
The other thing they do is defend without fouling, The Lakers send their opponents to the line for fewer attempts than anybody else in the league. And since the Nuggets, as mentioned, don’t get out on the break much, they aren’t going to get caught in some of those “easy bucket” situations.
Speaking of fast breaks, the Lakers were second only to Toronto last season in fast break points per contest. But they have dialed that down this season – about four points per game on average. So, by definition, it should be an indication to America’s Bookie patrons that this is going to be a more deliberate proceeding than these teams conducted in last season’s Western Conference finals series.
Well, maybe not.
The Lakers and Nuggets combined for an average Pace of 96.2 during the series, which is low. I mean, the Nuggets, as we mentioned, are at 97.1, which is 29th in the league. So that would have been a slow pace.
And four of the five games in that series (won by the Lakers 4-1), not to mention seven of the last eight meetings overall, have gone over the total – and over the number that is posted for this game.
The totals trends for these teams in the young season are conflicting – the Nuggets are 14-5-1 to the “over,’ while the Lakers are 7-15 to the “under.” And that’s fine. But I think this is a case where the number that has been posted is too low to offer us any real value.
We do favor the Lakers to win this – by how much we don’t know. But the Nuggets have been held below 108 points only twice. And they have scored 31.5 points per game in the first quarter and almost 61 in the first half, so they could wind up forcing the Lakers to play a little catch-up.
It would take a tremendous defensive effort by Los Angeles, or an underachieving shooting experience for the Nuggets, to take us below the number on this one.
The Play: OVER 219.5
