Lakers Spank Rockets 107-98 For 1-0 Series Lead

The score of this one might suggest that the Rockets weren’t in fact spanked, by the Lakers. They were. This was a wire to wire win for LA, and at no point did it seem like the Rockets were going to push past LA, take a lead, and keep it. The Lakers held the Rockets to 16pts below their season average for points allowed for this 9 point win. It could have been more. The final four minutes saw something of a Rockets garbage time scoring flurry, and they narrowed the Laker lead, slightly. The Lakers for their part seemed mostly interested in turning the scoreboard over enough that the Rockets never got close enough for discomfort.

The Rockets were, of course, missing Kevin Durant, the expensive painting that mostly covers the hole that is the Rockets offense. The Lakers, of course, were missing Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, and had a 41 year old LeBron James leading the charge of… Luke Kennard, Marcus Smart and Deandre Ayton. That turned out to be plenty for Los Angeles.

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There are two ways of looking at this. One is, the Rockets probably won’t shoot this badly, again. LeBron won’t be playing with a week off, again. Kevin Durant is far more likely to play again soon than Doncic or Reaves. So, it’ll be fine. After all, the Rockets shot 93 times to the Lakers 66 and lost by 9. That really shouldn’t happen. A team has to miss a lot of shots for it to happen, and the Rockets certainly did. There’s really not a good offensive line anywhere, except for Tari Eason. Tari didn’t miss at all, and the rest of the team missed a ton. Unfortunately Tari only took 7 shots.

So one view is that the Rockets probably won’t shoot that badly again, and that Kevin Durant might well be back for the next game, and that will help, too.

If that’s where you come down on things, it’s fairly safe to stop reading now.

This is another view. The Rockets had a week to prepare to play a Lakers team without their two best players. The Lakers had the same. One team came out with a fairly clear plan to win this game, despite injury woes. The other came out looking almost exactly the same as the rest of the…

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Publish date : 2026-04-19 05:13:00

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