For all intents and purposes, flamengo 🐎x fluminense:Game 3 was the🤪 breaking point for the Lakers against the Nuggets. In some ways, flamengo x fluminense:Jamal Murray's buzzer-🔯beate🐽r in Game 2 started the spiral, and flamengo x fluminense:Game 3 e💟nsured the Lakers continued falling.

As the same song and dance played out on Thursday with the Lakers starting fast before falling behind big, the feeling of “here we go again” swept over the team. By the final buzzer, the Lakers looked like a team that had lost belief that they could beat Denver. And since the end of that game, the quotes from the players surely seem to indicate as much. At practice on Friday, Rui Hachimura spoke about the team watching film and trying to make adjustments while also noting how tough it is against a team as experienced as the Nuggets. Rui’s comments aren’t wrong, it’s just more that he’s saying the quiet part loud. The Lakers’ constant roster overhaul makes it really tough to battle teams like Denver, who are built on consistency. But Rui isn’t alone, either. In his postgame presser on Thursday, Austin Reaves also shared basically the same sentiment. “I think Denver’s just beating us, to be honest,” Reaves said. “You can talk about adjustments, you can talk about this and that, but at the end of the day, we got to go put our foot our best foot forward win basketball games... at the end of the day you got to man up and go win.” It’s not a particularly fun realization to come to, even if it’s largely true. The Lakers don’t have solutions to the problems presented by the Nuggets. What is a problem, though, is admitting this when the series isn’t over. It doesn’t feel like the best strategy to let your opponent know that you don’t think you can beat them before the series is even over. Now, that being said, Denver has won nearly a dozen s in a row, so I think they’re well aware that they’ve owned this iteration of the Lakers. The closer we get to Game 4, the more it feels like a foregone conclusion as to how this series ends.

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