Looking ahead in the Western Conf. II (Plus WNBA)

by: Andre Gomes

Looking ahead in the Western Conference (Part II)

If you missed the Part I of this article yesterday, please read it before you read this one. So now let's talk about the series between the Lakers and Utah.

Utah won yesterday at home by 123-115, needing an overtime to win the game after dominating about 90% of the game. It's true that the Lakers yesterday were the away team closer to win a game in this series, but also it would have been easy for Utah to get nervous (like Orlando got last Saturday) and end up screwing their chances to win the series, by losing this game in the overtime. But they played extremely well in the clutch moments of the game and their win in the overtime was never in doubt. This is the kind of win that really motivates a team. After Boozer played an amazing Game 3 with 27 points and 20 boards, this time it was Deron's time to step it up, shooting 9-13 FG and 3-4 3pts, scoring 29 points and assisting his team mates for 14 times during the game. Utah was mostly perfect in all aspects of the game, making 32 assists and just 14 turnovers and only sending the Lakers 25 times to the FT line, an huge improvement from the previous three games of the season. Boozer and Okur had double-doubles and the team showed they have solutions in the bench, outscoring the Lakers in bench points by 39-16.

If Utah played a great game, the same can't be said about the Lakers. First of all, Kobe literally disappeared in the game after a good start. He ended up just shooting 13-33 FG, 1-10 3pts and 6-10 FT! He obviously still scored 33 points, but so many misses especially in the overtime clearly put the team in bad position. Also Fisher, Vujacic and Farmar combined one single assist in 72:59 min in the field! The team just made 20 assists during the whole game, with Kobe making 10 of them. Actually the team if we exclude Kobe had just 10 assists and 9 turnovers, showing that the ball movement was far from perfect yesterday. The only factor that maintained the Lakers in the game and took it to overtime were the good individual performances of Gasol and Odom, which helped the team in not getting outrebounded by Utah for the first time this season.

This game showed us that Utah is playing like a team and the Lakers are just being competitive thanks to some individual performances of their main players, as their point guards can't assist nobody to save their lifes. With Utah coming to the 5th Game at LA with some momentum, the Lakers really need to perform better as a team, as it was showed yesterday, Kobe is the best player in the league, but it won't decide all playoff games on his own. If the Jazz are capable of playing an ugly game, like they did for example when they won by 77-66 at New Orleans, I wouldn't be surprised if they won the Game 5 in Los Angeles and then at home in the Game 6, only an amazing performance of the Lakers would save them from a premature elimination. Everybody is underrating Utah and they have showed that they are inferior to any team in this league. Remember what they did at Boston? Either the Lakers steps it up in the next game at home or Utah will reach the conference final for the second season in a row.

WNBA PREVIEW: Connecticut Sun

If there was a ranking for most changes on a team during this off-season, the Sun would be a real contender for the first place. If last season they were involved in a major trade, this season they have done it again and the objective if to try to change the style of the team. Katie Douglas went to Indiana and Connecticut got the powerful Tamika Whitmore. The team now got more defensive consistence and it will be hard for them to repeat the 19-14-1 O/U they had last season. The Sun last season ended the regular season with a 18-16 record and also 18-16 ATS, but it's curious to see that from their 18 wins, 8 were gotten playing as underdogs, which gives them a respectable 45% of upsets. Besides this trade, Nykesha Sales, Margo Dydek, Kristin Rasmussen, Le'Coe Willingham, Megan Mahoney and Erika DeSousza also left the team or at least won't play for the Sun this season, which represents 45 ppg of the 75 ppg they had last season.

So the challenge will be big for Connecticut this season, but although all these changes they still have a good team and they have in their roster one of the most dominant centers in Europe, Sandrine Gruda. I don't believe the Sun will be capable to fight for the title this season and their season performance will depend from the team chemistry they will be able to get and how quickly they can adapt to the ballclub and to the new style of play. The sooner they can adapt to that, the most wins they will get this season.

For today I have one premium pick!

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