Through the first three games of the NBA Playoff series between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Lakers someone new in purple and gold has had to walk into the fire of the postseason and refuse to blink.
Without their top two leading scorers in Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, the Lakers have needed a secondary scoring option behind LeBron James.
In Game 1, that was journeyman Luke Kennard who scored 27 points and was a perfect 5-for-5 from three. In Game 2, Marcus Smart accepted that role and stuffed the stat sheet with 25 points.
On Friday night in Houston, that someone was Rui Hachimura.
He didn’t just score 22 points, drain four three-pointers and play 43 minutes, although that workload tells you everything you need to know about how much Lakers’ head coach J.J. Redick trusts him. With the Lakers in hostile territory in Houston, they knew they needed a fast start to silence the crowd.
Hachimura imposed himself early, torching the Rockets for 16 points in the first quarter on a flawless 6-for-6 shooting, the best scoring quarter of his entire career.
“It was the matchup. Reed Sheppard was guarding me,” Hachimura said. “It was exactly what we worked on and practiced.”
Hachimura’s preparation coincided with the opportunity perfectly.
Houston adjusted, as they had to. The easy looks disappeared and James once again shouldered the scoring load for the Lakers.
But Hachimura didn’t disappear. He waited.
In overtime, he delivered the sequence that helped define the night and seal the victory.
With the Lakers clinging to a 105-103 lead, James shot and missed a stepback three from the left wing. Hachimura caught the rebound in midair along the baseline and as he fell out of bounds, he flung the ball back into play like a man refusing to let the possession die. Kennard came down with it and moments later, the ball found its way back to Hachimura who pump faked a three, and then drove and attacked the basket for a layup. The Lakers went up by four and never looked back.
Hachimura’s performance was the kind that forces a front office to revisit every assumption they made last summer.
The 6’8” forward from Japan is playing on an expiring three-year, $51 million deal that was supposed to be moveable. Hachimura was expected to be replaced at the February trade deadline, like the Lakers did with Gabe Vincent.
Instead, they kept him.
And now? That decision is aging like something far more expensive than $17 million a year.
Because Hachimura and the rest of the Lakers role players aren’t playing like role players.
In Game 3 Smart became the first player since Michael Jordan in 1991 to finish a game with 21 points, 10 assists, five steals and two blocks in a postseason game. Talk about elite company!
Now the Lakers have a suffocating 3-0 lead, and are one win away from slamming the door.
Across from them is a Rockets team unraveling in real time. The heavy favorites to win the series, now look like a team searching for answers that are never coming. For evidence look no further than the mistakes they made with a six-point lead, the ball in their hands and 25 seconds left in the game.
“Horrendous mistakes,” said Houston head coach Ime Udoka. “I don’t know if you want to say it’s youth or scared of the moment.”
The only question left now, is which Lakers role player will step up in Game 4 on Sunday?
Maybe it’s Deandre Ayton or Jaxon Hayes. Or maybe Reaves returns to fill the void.
The Lakers have many options when they look to close the series and continue to prove that this team doesn’t need injured stars to save the season.
They create new ones every game.
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