National Basketball Association

Lakers win play-in game, set sights on being lowest seed to win NBA title

Updated May. 20, 2021 10:20 a.m. ET

By Melissa Rohlin
FOX Sports NBA Writer

LOS ANGELES – The defending NBA champions insisted they'd be healthy when it mattered.

They promised they'd rise to the occasion.

And in their most important game this season, they kept their word.

The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors 103-100 in their play-in game at Staples Center on Wednesday, securing the 7-seed and setting up a first-round playoff series with the Phoenix Suns.

Staples Center was alive all night with the biggest home crowd this season (the announced attendance of 6,000 fans included Drake and Michael B. Jordan sitting courtside), and in the end, that crowd was rewarded when LeBron James took over with the game on the line.

James was poked in the eye by Draymond Green with 2:07 left, sending him onto the ground in a fetal position with his arm covering his face.

He shook it off.

Just over a minute later, with 58.2 seconds left and the score tied at 100-100, James swished a 34-foot 3-pointer over the best 3-point shooter in the league in Stephen Curry, sprinkling in a bit of poetic justice to add to the drama.

"I was literally seeing three rims out there," James said in his walk-off interview. "I just shot at the middle one."

Anthony Davis joked that the Lakers owed Green some gratitude.

"I think we might need to poke LeBron in the eye a lot more to hit shots like that," Davis said, smiling.

With the victory, the Lakers avoided having to play in an elimination play-in game against the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday, a fate they seemed destined for in the first 24 minutes of the game but that now falls on the Warriors.

The Lakers opened the game in a lackadaisical stupor. By halftime, the team's top scorers were quieter than Staples Center when fans weren't allowed, with James shooting 1-for-7 from the field, Davis going 2-for-12 and Dennis Schroder going 1-for-9.

Meanwhile, Curry was dancing around the Lakers' top-rated defense, scoring 15 of his game-high 37 points, including making one of his signature step-back 3-pointers as the buzzer sounded at the end of the second quarter to give the Warriors a 55-42 advantage.

Things weren't looking good for the listless Lakers, who had claimed they were going to approach Wednesday like a Game 7, but instead were acting as though it were summer league.

But in the locker room at halftime, some unsuspecting characters helped turn things around.

"Duds [Jared Dudley] and Smooth pretty much got on our ass at halftime," James said. "Smooth is [Markieff] Morris, if you don’t know who Smooth is. They got on us, they showed us that we gotta pick it up, pick this s--- up. They brought the fight to our building and we gotta bring it right back. When guys like that speak, you listen. We took it to heart. We didn’t take it personal. We just took it with us and we improved our effort in the second half."

The Lakers, who never had a lead for the entire first half, outscored the Warriors in the third quarter 35-24. They went on to take their first lead of the game about a minute into the fourth quarter after Kyle Kuzma made an eight-foot hook shot to put them up 81-79.

Davis scored 13 of his 25 points in the fourth quarter, making five of his six shots. James added eight points during that period, finishing with 22 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists.

After battling multiple injuries over the past couple of months and tumbling down the Western Conference standings, it took the Lakers a little while to remember their pedigree.

But they eventually pinched themselves awake from their slumber.

"We came out a little hesitant and we had to remind ourselves at halftime, ‘Yo, we’ve been here before. Like, let’s go and play our style of basketball,'" Davis said. "And we were able to do that in the second half. So, we had to find that swag again, find our swag, knowing that we’re defending champs and nothing is going to be easy for us because we do have a target on our back and every team wants to beat us."

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The Lakers know they have a tall task ahead of them.

The lowest-seeded team to win a championship was the sixth-seeded Houston Rockets in 1995.

But on Wednesday, the Lakers reminded themselves of what they're capable of doing as they set out to rewrite history.

Melissa Rohlin is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. She has previously covered the league for Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times, the Bay Area News Group and the San Antonio Express-News. Follow her on Twitter @melissarohlin.