NBA Playoffs 2012: Why the Lakers Won’t Come Back from Game 1 Loss to Thunder

There are plenty of inferences you can make about the Oklahoma City Thunder's 119-90 thrashing of the Los Angeles Lakers Monday night, but most of those inferences can be boiled down into two theses about the fate of the series. 

You could be of the opinion that the Thunder's dominance was a relative aberration, a happenstance simply spurred by an raucous home crowd and internal motivation stemming from Metta World Peace dropping the Peaceple's Elbow on James Harden on April 22.  

That theory assumes the series will rebound to its expected status as the preeminent of the conference semifinals in Game 2.  That a fully rested and fully motivated Thunder team was a mismatch for an exhausted and ill-prepared Lakers team just 48 hours removed from a difficult Game 7 victory over the Denver Nuggets.  

The aberration theory doesn't mean you must be picking the Lakers to recover from Monday night and pull the upset over the Thunder.  To borrow from Dan Savage for a second, it just assumes that it (in this case the series) gets better.  Much, much, better.  

The other theory is that we're on the precipice of a redux of the Lakers' second-round series against the eventual NBA champion Dallas Mavericks from last season.

It assumes  the Lakers are a complete mismatch against a more motivated and more talented Thunder team. That we're on the verge of a four- or five-game series followed by another tiresome Lakers offseason where rampant "Dwight to LA" rumors dominate the summer. 

For me, 95 percent of the time I would fall into the former camp.  It sounds far more sensible and follows the basic analytic theory that games are played in a vacuum with very few residual buildups from previous contests.  



This will prove to be the exception, however, and it comes down to four distinct reasons.
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Los Angeles Lakers