Don’t mess with LA. Derek scored six points, and dished out six dimes as the Lakers weathered a 21-2 Mavericks run that erased a double-digit lead and posted a late run of their own en route to a 107-100 victory.
Though he wasn’t credited with a steal, Derek’s biggest play of the game came late in the fourth with the Lakers having just retaken the lead. No. 2 forced a Jason Kidd turnover and pushed the ball up to Trevor Ariza who was all alone on a break and finished with an emphatic jam that turned the lights out on the Mavs.
No. 2 lent a hand with tough defense late, despite picking up three fouls in the early going. Lamar Odom credited the defense from the whole starting crew with holding off a motivated Dallas team, as quoted by the LA Daily News:
“Our defense got us back into this game,” Odom said. “It was the reason why we pulled away in the first half. We got back into the game in the fourth quarter with our starting unit. It was just lockdown. We just took shots away from them.”
RIGHT OFF THE BAT
D-Fish scored all six of his points in the first quarter. His first bucket, a long-range bomb gave LA a 5-2 lead early. He added a point to the lead with a 1-2 trip to the charity stripe and scored his final bucket late in the quarter with a driving layup to extend a two-point lead to four.
Derek’s six assists were a team-high and he also corralled four rebounds in the win.
HOME COURT GETTING CLOSER
The victory moved the Lakers to 53-13, as they inch closer to home court throughout the Western Conference, but the NBA Finals might be a different story.
The Cleveland Cavaliers used a weekend set of wins to catch the Lakers in the overall standings. Both teams show an identical record with 16 games to play. Cleveland has lost only one home game all season, a 101-91 loss to LA on February 8. LA holds the tie-breaker having beaten the Cavs in both meetings between the two teams this season.
REMBERING THE BUZZER BEATER
The coming of March Madness always conjures up memories of buzzer beaters on every level of basketball and there are few as remarkable as D-Fish’s in Game 5 of the 2004 Western Conference semifinals.
Phil Jackson spoke about it, calling it one of the top five he’s seen, as quoted in the LA Times:
“It’s a miraculous finish in a game that wasn’t just his shot,” Jackson said. “It was the fact there were three or so shots like that in the course of that game that just kept going back and forth and made that so interesting a game.”
In a buzzer beater analysis for the Olympian, Brendan Funtek calls Derek’s miraculous shot that left the Spurs in stunned silence, the greatest pro buzzer beater ever, just because of the pure time factor:
“NBA.com recently did their 10 greatest buzzer beaters ever which instantly loss all credibility by excluding the legendary Derek Fisher 0.4. shot. I had watched hundreds of basketball games by that point in my life and was absolutely convinced the only time-frame you have for a turn-around-and-release shot is 0.6 seconds. That’s it. No less. Well, Fisher totally proved me wrong…”
NEXT UP
The Lakers catch a break in the schedule tonight before hosting the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday at Staples Center. All the action can be seen live in the LA area on FSN. Radio coverage is provided by KLAC 570 AM.
RELATED STORIES
Greatest Buzzer beaters ever (The Olympian, March 13, 2009)
http://www.theolympian.com/sports/blog/story/786714.html
Lakers find their legs in Texas (LA Times, March 14, 2009)
http://www.latimes.com/sports/printedition/la-sp-lakers-fyi14-2009mar14,0,3679366.story
Lakers’ alarm goes off at slumber party (LA Daily News, March 16, 2009)
http://www.dailynews.com/ci_11922237?source=rss