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LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Lakers are preparing for their opening round series of the NBA Playoffs against the Minnesota Timberwolves. This week, Lakers head coach JJ Redick organized a watch party for the team for the Golden State Warriors and Memphis Grizzlies play-in game. According to Lakers’ guard Austin Reaves, the watch party also served as a way for Redick to give the team a little pep talk before the playoffs.
“JJ turned into a motivational speaker and it was fun. I asked him how many times he rehearsed it, he said zero, he was speaking from the heart,” Reaves said. “It’s obviously always fun when you get together as a group and you have time to kind of kick back, relax and just hang out as friends and family and have a good time.”
The Lakers will begin the NBA Playoffs on Saturday against the Timberwolves after securing homecourt advantage for at least the first round. It’s the first time since the inception of the play-in that the Lakers have made the postseason outright.
They will face a Wolves team that ended the season with plenty of momentum going 8-2 in their final ten games. The Lakers and Wolves split the regular season series at 2-2. They also have a lot of size that the Lakers don’t necessarily have the personnel to counter.
Reaves knows it’s going to have to be a total team effort in order for the Lakers to have success against the Wolves.
“You just got to play hard as s**t every possession. You win by the smallest margin or lose by the smallest margin in the playoffs as we could tell from last year,” Reaves said. “We can’t take possessions off. At the end of the day we got a group of guys that are ready to go to war. There’s a difference between being ready to go to war by yourself and being ready to go to war with your team. We’re locked in as a group and ready to go compete.”
Reaves in particular is going to be a player the Lakers will need a big series from. On the season, he was averaging career-highs of 20.2 points, 4.5 rebounds, 5.8 assists while moving into the full-time starting point guard role.
The Lakers finished the season at 50-32 during JJ Redick’s first year at the helm. Amid the successful regular season and the Luka Doncic trade, the organization recently rewarded general manager Rob Pelinka with a contract extension and new job title.
