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Portland Trail Blazers small forward Carmelo Anthony says the team's first-round matchup against LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers is going to be a chess game, per Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated.
Although the Lakers are the No. 1 seed in the West and the Blazers are in eighth place, Portland isn't your normal No. 8 seed since they would have likely been higher than that had Jusuf Nurkic not missed the majority of the regular season recovering from his leg injury.
“This is a chess game. More of a mental challenge than a physical challenge,” Blazers forward @carmeloanthony on getting ready for @KingJames. Melo also says “we are out there trying to win” and compared Lakers-Blazers to a boxing match.
— Marc J. Spears (@MarcJSpears) August 17, 2020
While the Lakers have the two best players in the series in LeBron James and Anthony Davis, the Blazers have Damian Lillard, who is undoubtedly the hottest player in the bubble right now.
Carmelo Anthony and CJ McCollum have also been playing at a high level at Disney World, which is why many pundits believe the Blazers can give the Lakers a run for their money.
Anthony is averaging 15.4 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.5 assists for the Blazers in 58 games this 2019-20. The future Hall of Famer, who has faced off against James in the playoffs before, put up 16.5 points in the eight seeding games and scored 21 points against the Memphis Grizzlies in the play-in game.
Anthony has been making clutch shots left and right since the bubble games started at Disney World. It has been great to see considering he was out of the league for a while.
Since all the pressure is on the Lakers to win this series, the Blazers can play with the “nothing to lose” mentality and compete freely.
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