The Zach Lowe Show
Round 1 Winds Down: Lakers Eliminated, Game 6 Previews, and More With Michael Pina
Thu, 01 May 2025
Zach is joined by Michael Pina to discuss the end of the road for a few teams, starting with the Lakers’ loss to the Wolves (1:05). Next, they look ahead to Game 6 between the Warriors and Rockets (31:52), as well as the second-round series between the Pacers and Cavs (48:47). Lastly, some things to watch for in tonight’s Game 6s in Detroit and Los Angeles (1:21:42). The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How did Rudy Gobert perform to eliminate the Lakers?
He could never punish those teams on offense despite being by far the biggest player on the floor. And that's what you need your center to do. You need your center to get offensive rebounds, roll for dunks, and do big guy stuff so that they can't put Reggie Jackson on you and live with it. So that they have to put their big guy back in the game and sacrifice some of their shooting
on offense to counter what you're doing to them on offense. And he was never able to do that. Until last night, Michael Pina, 27 points, 24 rebounds. He looked like, is Gulliver big and the Lilliputians are small? Whatever that is, that's what he looked like in that game. It's the best game of Rudy Gobert's career. He switched on to LeBron over and over and over. They were fine with it.
Like, you want to go at him with LeBron? He'll switch. He'll contain him. The only time he got beat really was on a backdoor cut. His defense on Luka, the entire... I read the stats on this podcast a week ago with John Krasinski when people were making fun of Rudy Gobert. The stats said, and the eye test said, minus one or two lowlights... He was doing great. He got picked sixes against him.
He was great again last night. What a moment for Rudy Gobert, the NBA's punching bag, and he sends the Lakers home. An incredible game that was a strange game because at halftime, the Wolves were up by 10. It felt like they were up by 20. The Lakers were doubling Anthony Edwards all over the floor, and he was just brilliantly, patiently, calmly, not forcing it, not saying, I got to be the man.
Why are you putting two on me? Make the simple read. Let the offense take care of itself from there. They had some Wolves haywire moments in the second half where they kind of forgot what was working for them. And Rudy Gobert, every time the haywire moments were coming, lob dunk, offensive rebound, lob dunk. And the Lakers are out, and Minnesota moves on.
Rudy was phenomenal. Um, I should have known that you were referring to Rudy and that's where we should start. And one of the first things in my notes, watching the game early on was how his teammates were trusting him. So very early on, Julius Randall had Luca, Luca guarding Julius Randall, by the way, um, in the back half of this series, which was kind of a disaster.
But, you know, they load up on the strong side. Randall beats Luka off the dribble, finds Rudy cutting through the paint for a bucket. They hit Rudy on a rim run. He seals Luka, and Luka had to pick up his second foul, I believe, like five or six minutes into the game.
They gave Rudy the ball.
Exactly. So it felt like every time Dante DiVincenzo, who missed a million threes, every time he missed one, Rudy was there for a putback dunk. You know, the Timberwolves doubled up the Lakers in second chance points, 20 to 10, 18 offensive rebounds to eight. Rudy had nine himself.
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Chapter 2: What factors led to the Lakers' early playoff exit?
You mentioned the fact that really when the Luka trade happened, this season almost in the, in the sort of afterglow of that trade, this season was almost an afterthought. The trade was about the future, about a bridge to the post LeBron era. And yeah, this season's roster was incomplete. Um, they would have to address some of the holes in the off season.
And it, but the future had been set up for them. And that was the point of the trade. And then as the team started winning, it was like, Oh, okay. Kind of forgot that Luca and LeBron are like really awesome. And they've got some interesting supporting pieces around them. This team can do some damage in the playoffs. And I, and I thought they could do some damage in the playoffs.
Obviously that was proven incorrect. It seems obvious what they need to do in the off season. Depending on LeBron's player option, they're going to have very little flexibility to really do stuff in terms of free agency signings. They could have the baby mid-level exception and stay under the aprons. They're under the aprons, which is good. Helps them make trades.
And then obviously they have all the stuff that they traded for Mark Williams. They have the 2031 pick or 2032 pick. They have a bunch of swaps. They have Dalton Connect. They have stuff they can aggregate and move for a center who can give Luca the passing target that he needs and shore up the defense.
Because my God, that small ball lineup, you could see Anthony Edwards digested in real time as the series was going on. He would drive and he would just, you could see his mind thinking, if I can just get by the first guy, I don't really even care who's next. There was a drive where I can't remember who he beat at the point of attack, but
And then two guys swarmed on him near the rim, and he just went through them and laid the ball in. And then you replay, it's like, oh, it's Gabe Vincent and Austin Reeves. Like, of course he doesn't care. He's just going to go through those guys. So it seems obvious that they'll come back with a better, more complete team.
Next year, I'm assuming LeBron is not going to retire despite the fact that we do the same dance after every time the Lakers get eliminated from the playoffs. So if I don't know, I'm not sure I've heard no buzz that he's going to retire. No one in his orbit has flagged it for me. Anything's possible, but I'm expecting him to come back and play.
The question then would be, does he do the thing that he did last year where he kind of waits and opens up the possibility of, yeah, I'll opt out and maybe take a pay cut if you can find somebody with the big mid-level exception? We'll see. But there's only so much they can do, and the West is awesome and only going to get better.
The likelihood remains that this team will not win a championship in the next two or three years. It's just going to be very hard. But they have Luka. And if Luka can get in shape and get healthy and he's just – it's one of my – I mean, he got fouled hard last night. He got fouled hard and it hurt. And he fell awkwardly and his back bent a little bit. That hurts. But he's always laboring.
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Chapter 3: What are the Lakers' offseason prospects and cap situation?
or a couple sequences when they were running high pick and roll, and they were setting the screen for him really close to midcourt, and Kevon Looney was on the court, and Kevon Looney was in drop, and Jalen Green was just kind of dancing and getting wherever he wanted for a couple minutes there.
I thought that Shingun, again, didn't have the statistical profile, but I thought his game was really solid, and he showed patience, In the pick and roll, there was one play where he didn't settle. He got it. I think it was a similar play where he set a high screen for Fred and caught it at the nail.
And Quentin Post was on him and giving him this huge cushion because the Warriors would love for him to shoot that little flamingo shot. But instead of taking it, taking the bait, he threw it back out to Fred, ran another pick and roll, got a better angle, got behind post, and drew a foul.
So if you're looking for things to hang your hat on, it's just playing with more poise, playing with more patience, not getting sped up. If you're Houston, those are really good things. But I think... at the end of the day, I fundamentally agree that their, their offense, particularly in the half court, it's just so reliant on offensive rebounding and like really tough shot making.
So, so the pick and roll point you just made about the half court picks and all that, and the Shen Goon rescreen and hard roll is a really important point in the series, because one of the reasons why Houston's half, half court offense is just stalled out constantly. And there are many, many reasons. It's an offense that's, frankly, in its infancy stylistically. They just don't have counters.
They don't do a lot of interesting things. They do one thing. And if you stop that one thing, they don't really know what else to do. But another big reason is the Warriors are playing the Jalen Green, Shang-Goon, and Fred Van Vliet, Shang-Goon, pick and roll two on two. Draymond is containing everything, keeping everything in front of him. And they don't have to send help from anywhere.
And Houston's big men cannot get behind Draymond on the roll.
Houston played with more ways to orchestrate that pick and roll in game five that forced the Warriors to send some help Dylan Brooks got a kick out three when they set it up at one point and and uh I think it was got a little bit behind Draymond you just got to get some traction whether it's playing with where the screen is attacking it in different ways setting a re-screen having uh
uh setting a screen for the screener on his way up to set the real pick so that there's some momentum going into it just something to get the Warriors to scrunch in you mentioned um the zone I looked it up this morning uh the Warriors against Houston zone 0.91 points per possession so far in this series that is very bad for the Warriors and very good for the Rockets um
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Chapter 4: What is the current state and future of the Milwaukee Bucks and Giannis?
I mean, I'll echo everything that you said just about the similarities between these two teams. And I think that it's kind of, it feels like, I don't know if you feel the same way, but a lot of these series have been a slog and kind of defined by the defenses and the physicality that's been a big theme in this postseason.
And I think that this series has an opportunity to give us just, you know, aesthetically breathtaking offensive basketball moments I don't know if it'll be up and down, particularly because Indiana's transition defense is very good. And as you said, neither team really turns it over. So there's limited opportunities there. But the offenses are just tremendous.
They just constant moving and cutting and screening and. warp speed dribble handoffs and all that sort of stuff. I don't want to be reductive with where my head goes in the analysis from the top, but surface level, the first thing that I think about is Tyrese Halliburton and his defense. And I think about that because...
It's not new, this thing where if you're an extremely talented offensive player who is not very... You can't be played off the floor, obviously. He's the engine of the team. But there are some limitations on the defensive end that teams will poke at kind of cruelly in a playoff series, as the Detroit Pistons are doing right now with Jalen Brunson.
And I watched the first round where the Cleveland Cavaliers publicly stated, Darius Garland publicly stated, called Tyler Hero out by name in terms of, this is what we're doing. This is our offensive game plan to put this guy in ball screens, make him defend, attack him. And I think that it'll be really interesting. We don't have a big sample this season.
with Halliburton against the Cleveland Cavaliers he played in one game one half really a game that the Pacers won and he got hurt I think he pulled his hamstring and it was like in January or something and then he played them again in April but no one on the Cavs played in that game because it didn't mean anything to them um
So just thinking about how often are the Cleveland Cavaliers going to go at Tyrese Halliburton? How much success will they have doing so? And what is the balance between just running our stuff? We run pick and roll anyway. Yeah. A ton of pick and roll. We have a lot of success with it. We love pick and roll with our bigs.
We don't really want to... We could obviously run multiple pick and rolls and get a switch that way or something like that. But we don't want to muck up our offense. It's beautiful. It produced 136.2 points per 100 possessions in the first round. But I'm just curious, just... how central Halliburton's defense will be in this series. So that's the primary thing I'm going to be looking at.
I think it's going to be central, like it will be for most teams the Pacers play. On paper, and I think to some degree in reality, I mean, Indiana's been a good defensive team now for quite a while. I think they ended up middle of the pack, but last 50 games are probably eighth, ninth, something like that. Nembhardt, and Neesmith are a very good twosome to put on Garland and Mitchell.
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Chapter 5: What happened in the Warriors vs Rockets Game 5 and what to expect in Game 6?
Not like Brooke Lopez level drop, like a high drop and recover. Maybe mix in a blitz here or there to make Miles Turner a playmaker. But I'm not going to send a third guy flying at that pick and roll right from the start. And I'm going to be interested to see how they react to that.
Honestly, Zach, I wouldn't be surprised if they switch that action. Jared Allen and Evan Mobley have been switch happy all season.
Jared Allen on Tyrese Halliburton. is a problem for Cleveland. Evan Mobley on Tyrese Halliburton is totally livable. It's the other end of some of those switches that are interesting to me. This is a major Pascal Siakam series.
Yes, yes, yes.
If they're going to switch the Pascal-Tyrese two-man game, and I would run it both ways. Run it both ways. Try to get a small guy on Siakam. If they're going to switch that, or if I can generate switches on that, he's got to eat on those switches and draw help. Who guards him when the Cavs go with one big guy?
Because you know they're going to stagger Mobley and Allen and play a lot with pick who's the four. Sometimes it's Dean Wade. Sometimes it's Okoro. Sometimes it's even Max Struess. They've got to win those minutes with Siakam. He's got to win those matchups. And maybe it's DeAndre Hunter. By the way, DeAndre Hunter has these weeks where... he just makes every contested three.
Like there's not even, there's no rotation. There's no anything. He's just like, I'm just going to take this three now with you in my face. And it went in like nine times in a row against, I don't understand it.
Um, there are, there are places the Pacers can poke for sure beyond just hunt Darius Garland, which, you know, I always like when they ISO Halliburton on some of the, some smaller guards or bigger guys. I think he's a very good isolation player. Um, Again, these teams are like very not mirror images of each other, but they're very similar.
I think Indiana is going to be able to score an okay to decent amount in this series.
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Chapter 6: What is the controversy around 'Thumbgate' involving Stephen Curry?
Well, they can't. I mean, part of it is that they can't make any because they can only play so much. But even schematically, like the Clippers have... A, they're playing more lineups with Zoo as the only non-shooter. So they're leaning into their shooting more to stretch the Nuggets defense out. They even played a little stretch of game five with all shooters. No Zoo, no Simmons, no Jones, no Dunn.
Complete five out. Spread the floor for Kawhi and let him cook. And then they got... I don't know if they got nudged to this, but Ty Lue has now leaned into the, we're guarding Jokic with Harden or Kawhi, and we're putting Zubats on Aaron Gordon. And digest that. Now, knowing Ty Lue... he may go the other way to open game six and just say, you're prepping for that. We're not doing that.
We'll spring it later in the game. It felt like the nuggets overthought, uh, the entire process of countering that because there were just not enough possessions where they just, how about we just give the ball to Jokic with James Harden on him? Um, And we know why they're doing that. They're not the first team to do it. There was the infamous, like, Rui Hachimura has solved the Nuggets.
After one stretch of one game, the Lakers lost Hachimura on Jokic.
Or just the Minnesota Timberwolves and their existence.
Well, the Minnesota Timberwolves at least had one thing going for them. They were gargantuan across the board. The Clippers are not gargantuan. And we'll see if that – it's just interesting how we got to a place where the Clippers felt like the stronger, deeper, fresher team. And then you blink and they're down 3-2 and they're trying a lot of stuff.
And the Nuggets are just like, we're kind of just doing what we do and we don't have a lot of choices. Like, hey, Peyton Watson, can you give us six minutes, eight minutes? Nine minutes. Russ, can you just like hold the red? Russ made a ton of shots in game five. It just it's interesting. I'm interested to see where that goes. OK, I don't know who's going to win tonight. I pick Nuggets in seven.
So I don't even know how the hell they're up three to. I don't still don't really know what happened at the end of game four, but they won. So I don't know. I'll stick with Nuggets in seven. One thing you're watching for the Pistons-Knicks slugfest, combined score Knicks plus five after five games. Pistons very impressively stave off elimination in New York. One thing you're looking for tonight.
I think that, you know, going back to the conversation we were having about Halliburton I've just been so impressed with J.B. Bickerstaff's commitment to making Jalen Brunson work on defense, which is something he did not do a couple years ago when he was the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Did a little bit.
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Chapter 7: How are the Warriors adjusting their lineups for the next series?
Detroit fans will very correctly point out. We could easily be going for the closeout tonight. If that call had been made on the Tim Hardaway three at the buzzer in game four, it wasn't, I don't know what's, this is a game. I got no feel, no feel for this one. Like absolutely no feel for what's going to happen. Other than it seems like it's going to be close and nasty.
And Tobias Harris is going to be yelling at people. I love this. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm very excited. This series has been fun and I'm very excited to watch it. Yeah. I had Nixon seven. Yeah. You're closer to right on that. If this ends Nixon six, that your prediction wins over my prediction.
And, you know, I, I think Kate is the best player or has been, and maybe is the best player in the series. I don't, I'd have to maybe think about that a little bit harder. But I just... I love Cade. And I love Asar Thompson. And I love his defense. Full court pressure on Jalen Brunson. I think that's made a big difference in this series.
And I think that we're eventually going to have to rename the dunker spot to something after the Thompson twins. Because... They've expanded the diameter or the radius or whatever of wherever the dunker spot is supposed to be on a basketball court. They take off and dunk it from outside the paint. It's just so remarkable.
There are rim runs. There are drives where they raise up in traffic, both of them. And they're like still going up and like changing, like moving the ball around in the air as, as defenders who jumped after them are going down. And it's like, they're, I almost like Pistons fans aren't going to like this. And I say it as a total joke. Can we get them on the same team at some point?
Or would they just overlap so much that it wouldn't work? I just want to see what it would be like to have two Thompsons playing together in the NBA. Obviously, they've been together before at the same time. But you mentioned making Brunson work. I'd like to see the Knicks make Cade work a little bit more on defense.
Now, Cade's a decent defender who's big and strong, but they started going into some Ananobi Brunson two-man actions. I would just like to take the starch out of him a little bit.
Yeah, that's a good call. I will also say what's really impressed me about Cade is how comfortable he is going at Mikael Bridges, too. He wants that matchup. The only guy he doesn't want is OG for obvious reasons, but he'll get Kat coming up. He'll get Mikael on switches. He'll wave Mikael's guy over. Yeah. If McHale's on him, he'll wave away a teammate. Tim Hardaway Jr. has Jalen Brunson on him.
He'll wave him away. He's like, actually, no, I like this matchup. So I like the whole team's moxie and the fact that they're doing this without Isaiah Stewart, who's one of the most important players throughout the regular season, is super impressive. And brings a whole lot of moxie. Moxie, yeah. To put it lightly. So, yeah, I...
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