In a reunion of last year’s Western Conference Finals teams, the second-seed Denver Nuggets led by Nikola Jokic will face LeBron James’ seventh-seeded Los Angeles Lakers in the first round of the NBA playoffs, as Denver begins the quest to defend their 2023 championship, the franchise’s first ever.
Denver drew the Lakers after Los Angeles, who initially finished eighth in the West, defeated the seventh-place New Orleans Pelicans in the play-in tournament to secure the seventh playoff seed. This will be the third time in five years the two teams will have matched up in the postseason, and while due in part to that fact they are deeply familiar with each other, some significant differences make this, as Nuggets head coach Michael Malone called it after a recent practice, “a different series.”
“Guys are coming off a 57-win season, and we understand what we have in front of us,” Malone said. “And I think the biggest challenge is, everybody keeps talking about how we’ve beaten them eight games in a row, and as I told our guys today, that doesn’t mean anything.”
“This is a different team, a different series, and it will be a hell of a challenge to beat the Lakers again in the playoffs,” Malone added.
The eight consecutive Nuggets wins over the Lakers which Michael Malone referred to extend back over 15 months ago to January 9, 2023, when Denver beat L.A. in their final regular season matchup last year, and includes the Nuggets’ four-win sweep in the conference finals, and three-win sweep of this season’s series. Additionally, the Lakers have not beaten Denver on their home court at Ball Arena in over a full two years.
But even though this recent dominance might seem to indicate that the Nuggets have L.A.’s number, the current incarnation of the Lakers is arguably their strongest going into the playoffs since the 2020 bubble. Since the mid-February All-Star break, the Lakers have had the league’s 12th-best net rating at plus-3.6 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass, including the fourth-best offense at 119.7. And with one of the greatest players of all time in LeBron James, alongside Anthony Davis, another multiple All-NBA player, they are not a team to be taken lightly.
