LOS ANGELES_Apparently four days between games helped.
The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Denver Nuggets, 120-116, on Tuesday night, with three players eclipsing 20 points and rookie Ivica Zubac scoring a career-high 17 points.
"We feel good," Lakers Coach Luke Walton said. "The guys in the locker room feel good, which is nice to see. ... I'm happy for the guys to see them and they're enjoying themselves. I thought there was a lot of positive to that game and I thought there was a good amount of negative, too. That was my challenge to them after the game. Take some time to reflect. Think about individually and as a team when we are good and unselfish and talking on defense and what that looked like. The start of the fourth quarter, or the end of the first quarter when the ball got stagnant and we stopped playing defense altogether, how it's different. Be mindful of what it feels like when we're playing basketball one way versus another."
Nick Young scored 23 and D'Angelo Russell scored 22, with a career-high 10 assists and only two turnovers. Lou Williams added 21 points for the Lakers.
"I thought D'Angelo was fantastic tonight," Walton said.
With Russell back into the starting lineup after missing three games with a sprained knee ligament and strained calf muscle in his right leg, the Lakers started the game by scoring eight consecutive points.
"I thought the starters did a great job of setting the tone early for us," Walton said.
The Lakers' first-quarter lead rose to 11 before Denver began to chip into it in a significant way. At that point the Nuggets responded with their own 8-0 run that included six points by forward Kenneth Faried and brought Denver within one.
Faried's biggest contribution, though, was not his scoring. By the end of the first quarter, he nearly had a double-double. He scored 10 points and had nine rebounds during the period in which the Lakers as a team had 10 rebounds.
The Lakers' interior defense was so stifling at one point, it caused Faried to lose the ball in the paint, allowing Russell to take it the other way and swing an assist to Young, who dunked the ball.
Back-to-back three-pointers by Young, with a steal by Young sandwiched in between, gave the Lakers a 76-68 lead in the third quarter. Young pounded his chest and shouted as the crowd cheered.
But as the third quarter closed, the Nuggets took control. From the end of the third quarter into the fourth quarter, the Nuggets went on a 15-0 run, broken by a Zubac layup.
"A lot of the game was similar, honestly" to games the Lakers lost leads in, Walton said. "It almost happened again tonight at the start of the fourth. We had a five-point lead and by the first timeout I called a minute and a half into it the lead was gone. It was gone because Denver picked up their intensity and our way of dealing with it was to go one on one."
But it was a run the Lakers withstood with the help of a 39-point fourth quarter.
