Category: Sports News

HOUSTON — The most telling moment of Friday’s Game 3 between the Lakers and Rockets didn’t come in overtime. It came before the ball even went up. 

The Toyota Center in downtown Houston sat half-full at tipoff, a quiet indictment of a Rockets team already down 0-2 in the series and playing without superstar Kevin Durant. 

The Rockets arena is EMPTY pic.twitter.com/zoDZuJ427K

— BrickCenter (@BrickCenter_) April 25, 2026

Lakers players wondered out loud in the visiting locker room how the arena could be so empty for a playoff game. Maybe some fans chose to watch baseball down the street, where the Yankees were in town. Others simply chose not to believe in their team. 

But by the end of the night, belief wasn’t the problem. Loyalty was. 

Because what unfolded inside that building wasn’t just a shocking Lakers win in overtime, 112-108, to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the series. It was a full-scale takeover of an opposing arena.

Purple and gold colors bled through the lower bowl from the opening quarter. LeBron James and Luka Doncic jerseys were scattered like confetti across the crowd. And when Bronny James finished off the first father-to-son alley-oop in NBA playoff history, even the Rockets fans stood and cheered. That’s how undeniable greatness works. 

“You could definitely hear all the Lakers fans in here tonight,” Lakers center Jaxson Hayes said afterward. “You could see all the purple and gold jerseys … they drowned out the Houston fans.”

It only got louder.

Hayes detonated a one-handed lob from Luke Kennard. The crowd erupted — not for the home team but for the show. By the fourth quarter, the lines had blurred. By the final minute, they were gone.

Jaxson Hayes catches the Kennard lob and finishes with FEROCITY pic.twitter.com/gxUsf3CliF

— NBA on Prime (@NBAonPrime) April 25, 2026

Up six with 25 seconds left, Houston had the ball and control of the outcome. Hold the ball and the game would take care of itself. Instead, the Rockets threw an ill-advised pass that turned into three free throws from Marcus Smart. Panic. And then the defining sequence of the game: LeBron stalking rookie Reed Sheppard in the backcourt. He knocked the ball loose, eventually reclaimed possession, and buried the game-tying 3 that sucked the oxygen out of Rockets fans and sent Lakers fans into a frenzy. 

LEBRON JAMES TIES THE GAME AT 101

13.1 SECONDS TO GO ON PRIME. pic.twitter.com/V5LqcXlt7I

— NBA (@NBA) April 25, 2026

In that moment, the Rockets didn’t just lose the game. They lost the room. 

By the time overtime came, the outcome felt inevitable. The Lakers closed out Game 3 with authority, but the damage had already been done. Houston’s crowd had flipped and they all stood in awe of the 41-year-old James, still bending the game to his will in his 23rd season. 

The Lakers didn’t just steal a game on the road. It was a full-on heist.

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HOUSTON — Through the first three games of the NBA playoff series between the Rockets and the Lakers, someone new in purple and gold has had to walk into the fire of the postseason and refuse to blink. 

Without their top scorers in Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, the Lakers have needed a secondary scoring option behind LeBron James. 

In Game 1, that was journeyman Luke Kennard, who scored 27 points and was 5-for-5 from 3. In Game 2, Marcus Smart accepted that role and stuffed the stat sheet with 25 points. 

On Friday night in Houston, that someone was Rui Hachimura. 

He didn’t just score 22 points, drain four 3-pointers and play 44 minutes, although that workload tells you everything you need to know about how much Lakers coach JJ Redick trusts him. With the Lakers in hostile territory in Houston, they knew they needed a fast start to silence the crowd. 

Hachimura imposed himself early, torching the Rockets for 16 points in the first quarter on 6-for-6 shooting, the best scoring quarter of his career. 

This Lakers sequence…

Jaxson Hayes hustle.
Luke Kennard assist.
Rui Hachimura triple.

Hachimura: 14 PTS, 3-3 3PM, 5-5 FGM pic.twitter.com/E0DYgAcdRG

— NBA (@NBA) April 25, 2026

“It was the matchup. Reed Sheppard was guarding me,” Hachimura said. “It was exactly what we worked on and practiced.”

Hachimura’s preparation coincided with the opportunity perfectly. 

Houston adjusted, as it had to. The easy looks disappeared, and James (29 points) once again shouldered the scoring load for the Lakers. 

But Hachimura didn’t disappear. He waited. 

In overtime, he delivered the sequence that helped define the night and seal the victory.

With the Lakers clinging to a 105-103 lead, James shot and missed a step-back 3 from the left wing. Hachimura caught the rebound in midair along the baseline, and as he fell out of bounds, he flung the ball back into play like a man refusing to let the possession die. Kennard came down with it, and moments later, the ball found its way back to Hachimura — who pump-faked a 3 and then drove and attacked the basket for a layup. The Lakers went up by four and never looked back. 

SHARING IS CARING.

HACHIMURA PUTS LA AHEAD BY 4.

GET TO PRIME FOR OT ACTION. pic.twitter.com/hdr4HAIiMr

— NBA (@NBA) April 25, 2026

Hachimura’s performance was the kind that forces a front office to revisit every assumption it made last summer. 

The 6-foot-8 forward from Japan is playing on an expiring three-year, $51 million deal that was supposed to be movable. Hachimura was expected to be replaced at the February trade deadline, like the Lakers did with Gabe Vincent. 

Instead, they kept him. 

And now? That decision is aging like something far more expensive than $17 million a year.

Because Hachimura and the rest of the Lakers’ role players aren’t playing like role players. 

Rui Hachimura on the Lakers victory in Game 3, his hot start offensively, and the Lakers playing like the more desperate team pic.twitter.com/FH3aMG7pKO

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) April 25, 2026

In Game 3, Smart became the first player since Michael Jordan in 1991 to finish with 21 points, 10 assists, five steals and two blocks in a postseason game. Talk about elite company.

Now the Lakers have a suffocating 3-0 lead and are one win from slamming the door. 

Across from them is a Rockets team unraveling in real time. The heavy favorites to win the series now look like a team searching for answers that are never coming. For evidence, look no further than the mistakes they made with a six-point lead, the ball in their hands and 25 seconds left in the game. 

“Horrendous mistakes,” Houston coach Ime Udoka said. “I don’t know if you want to say it’s youth or scared of the moment.”

The only question left now is which Lakers role player will step up in Game 4 on Sunday?

Maybe it’s Deandre Ayton or Jaxson Hayes. Or maybe Reaves returns to fill the void.

The Lakers have many options when they look to close the series and continue to prove that this team doesn’t need injured stars to save the season. 

They create new ones every game.

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Tyrese Maxey has been living quite comfortably in this series.

Not in the sense that every shot is falling or every possession ends in points, but in the way that’s slightly concerning with every passing game. Through three games, he’s largely been getting to his spots and dictating pace. When the Sixers need something to settle a possession or tilt momentum, the ball finds him and the floor opens up just enough for something good to happen.

Boston hasn’t fully solved him yet. You can’t expect to with a guy like him. Game 3 didn’t change that, but it did show how thin the margin is.

The Celtics won, 108–100, and now hold a 2–1 series lead. They closed it with experience, shot-making, and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown doing what they’ve done for years now. But before that closing stretch, the game looked like it was tilting in a scary direction.

Maxey hit back-to-back threes midway through the fourth. Xfinity Mobile Arena was popping (even though the name “Xfinity Mobile Arena” feels utterly popless). For a moment, it felt like Game 2 all over again.

But after those two threes, Maxey didn’t score again.

That’s the balance Boston is trying to find. Obviously, you’re not going to prevent Maxey from doing his thing. He’s simply too good to completely neutralize. But hitting him with at least a somewhat potent tranquilizer that wobbles him long enough to win the stretches that matter? The Celtics can do that.

Which is why the Jordan Walsh minutes in Game 2 still linger in my mind.

Maxey is still dictating the terms of this series

Maxey hasn’t really run into a matchup that changes how he plays yet. The tracking data makes that pretty clear.

Derrick White has taken most of the assignment, close to 12 minutes and over 50 possessions. That’s Boston’s best option on paper, and White has been solid. But Maxey is still getting into his spots. Three-for-seven shooting doesn’t scream dominance, but it also doesn’t force him out of anything. The offense is still very much flowing through him without much resistance.

Hauser’s minutes tell a slightly different story. The second-most common player to draw the Maxey assignment, he’s spent about eight minutes and 40 possessions guarding Maxey. And give him some credit: Maxey is just one-for-four when guarded by Hauser. That lines up with what we’ve seen from Hauser over the last couple years. He’s not someone you can just pick on and expect easy offense, even if teams keep trying.

After that, it’s been more of a mix. Brown has had stretches where he holds up and others where Maxey gets downhill. Tatum and Pritchard haven’t been on him enough to really matter.

So you’re looking at a bunch of capable defenders, and none of them have really shifted the feel of the matchup. Maxey is still playing on his terms.

That’s what makes the Walsh minutes worth paying attention to.

The Wolf of Walsh Street

That’s where Walsh comes in, because his minutes didn’t feel like the others.

The sample is small. We’re talking under two minutes matched up with Maxey and only a handful of possessions. That’s not enough to declare anything, but within that stretch, Maxey didn’t score and only got one real shot attempt off. For a player who’s been able to get into his offense pretty much whenever he wants, that stands out, even if it’s brief.

It didn’t look like a fluke either.

Mazzulla pointed to it after the game. “He was good. We all have a role to play,” he said when asked about the job Walsh did on Maxey, before narrowing in on the specifics. “I thought he was big in our pick-and-roll defense as well, and did a great job making it difficult for him.”

Walsh isn’t navigating screens the way White does. There are still possessions where he gets clipped and ends up trailing the play. Against most guards, that’s the possession. Maxey especially lives off that first step once he gets a shoulder advantage.

But Walsh didn’t get clipped in the same way. More often than not, he was still around, contesting, reaching into the play even after he was technically beaten. It lined up with how he’s talked about defense this season, not trying to erase a player, just pushing him away from what he wants to do and making him find something else.

There’s a clip floating around where Maxey comes off a high screen and has the exact pocket he’s been using all series. Normally that turns into a drive or a pull-up. Walsh stays attached just long enough that it never really opens. Maxey hesitates, pulls it back out, and the possession resets.

It felt different than anything else we had thrown at Maxey up until that point. And I liked it. I liked it a lot.

For your consideration

If Game 3 showed anything, it’s that Maxey is going to have his moments no matter what.

He’s too comfortable getting to his spots for that to disappear. The goal isn’t to take that away completely. You just need to keep it from stacking.

In my opinion, Walsh fits into that more than anything else Boston has tried so far.

Part of that is just how he approaches it. Before the series, he talked about trying to “take away tendencies” and push guys into something they don’t want to do, even if it means living with the result at the end of the possession.

There’s also a level of intent to it that the team has noticed. Payton Pritchard said earlier this season that Walsh “brings an energy, guarding the best [offensive player] every night,” and that it’s what’s going to keep him on the floor. That’s basically the job here. Just stay in the fight long enough to make things uncomfortable.

It helps that he’s not going into this blind either. He mentioned leaning on Jaylen Brown for things “beyond the scouting report,” the small stuff that can get under a player’s skin or throw off their rhythm. You could see hints of that in those possessions.

If this series keeps playing out the way it has, Boston is going to need more of those possessions where things don’t quite click for Maxey. Fewer of those clean, one-motion attacks where everything lines up could make all the difference in what’s proving to be a closer series than most people expected.

I’m not saying Walsh needs to be out there for 30 minutes a game going forward. But it’s something you can go to.

And right now, even a couple possessions where he hesitates instead of just playing sounds better than the alternative.

Losing home-court advantage before hitting the road against the Philadelphia 76ers prompted a sense of urgency for the Boston Celtics. To them, Game 3 might as well have been a win-or-go-home contest.

There were no thoughts of returning to Boston with another split. No feeling of settling. The locker room had made up its mind well before the Celtics took the floor at Xfinity Mobile Arena.

“This was like a Game 7 for us,” Jaylen Brown told reporters after Boston’s 108-100 Game 3 win on Friday night, per CLNS Media. “Even though it’s a long series, we wanted to come back and respond after dropping one in our home floor. We can’t lose two games in a row in the playoffs. That’s tough. So this was a big win for us.”

Boston faced a far-too-familiar postseason scenario — this time against a Joel Embiid-less Sixers team, with the seven-time All-Star recovering from emergency appendectomy surgery. During their championship run in 2024, the Celtics dropped Game 2 in both the first and second rounds against the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers, forcing mid-series responses.

Going from sarcastic “We want Boston” chants echoing across TD Garden in Game 1 to early exits and silence in Game 2, the Celtics found themselves in a spot they had seen before. So before heading out to face Philadelphia’s notoriously hostile environment, the team had a conversation.

Understanding that not everyone on the roster had lived through a Game 3 road test of this magnitude, Brown felt it was important to communicate with everyone.

“It’s something you definitely talk about, but something you gotta experience for sure,” Brown said. “And I think our team is still a young team, so this experience was great. It’s great to get these experiences and win. But when you get hit, you just gotta respond.”

Brown added: “Most importantly, just stay together through the adversity. But when you get hit, you gotta hit back.”

In the third quarter, with less than six minutes, Tyrese Maxey buried a step-back 3-pointer over the reach of Jayson Tatum to give Philadelphia a 67-64 lead. Less than two minutes later, Brown backed down Justin Edwards to sink an 11-foot fadeaway jumper and give Boston back its lead at 69-67.

It was all about staying the course.

Yet, to Brown’s point, even though several members of the roster — like Neemias Queta and Jordan Walsh — were part of the 2024 run, it’s a different challenge when you’re playing meaningful minutes. Watching from the bench offers valuable experience, but nothing compares to being thrust into the moment and truly learning what it takes to secure a 2-1 series lead.

The last time the Celtics were in that position, Queta and Walsh were spectating. Kristaps Porziņģis, Al Horford, and Luke Kornet were ahead of Queta on the depth chart at center, and Walsh was a 19-year-old rookie with just nine NBA games to his name. Now, Queta is Boston’s starting center, while Walsh — though not in the lineup — has been leaned on throughout the season to take on challenging defensive assignments against some of the league’s elite offensive stars.

There’s a clear discrepancy between what it takes for the 2025-26 Celtics to win and what it took for the 2023-24 Celtics to win, and the locker room has embraced that reality.

Brown and Tatum, both scoring 25 points apiece, combined for 50 in Game 3. But it took more than Boston’s dynamic duo to outlast the Sixers. Derrick White added three blocks, Payton Pritchard scored 15 off the bench, and Baylor Scheierman chipped in with two momentum-swinging steals that helped shift control back toward the Celtics.

The in-sync engagement from Boston’s bench said it all.

When Tatum pulled up and hit a clutch 3-pointer over Adem Bona to push Boston’s lead to 106-100 with 25.3 seconds left in regulation, the entire Celtics bench matched his energy. Everyone rose to their feet — fired up, re-energized, and looking as if they were ready to play Game 4 on the spot.

“This is what you sign up for,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla told reporters, per CLNS Media. “They’re all pushing us. We have to push them. Usually, competition brings out the best of people, and you’re also in two great environments. TD Garden’s a great environment, here is a great environment, and you’re just throwing haymakers at each other. I think you relish that in the moment.”

Figuring out the puzzle of winning is nothing new to a Mazzulla-led group, especially this season.

“It’s what we’ve done, it’s what we do when we’re at our best,” Mazzulla said. “So the goal is to just try to be at our best as much as we can. So we do that in training camp, preseason, regular season, playoffs, we do it. It’s just the trust that we’ll — more times than not — try to be the best version of ourselves. So like I said, there were big-time plays tonight by multiple people in both halves, and we just have to be able to do that.”

More impressive than the win itself were the paths the Celtics took to get there. Maxey and Paul George combined for 49 points, and while the Sixers didn’t replicate their 3-point explosion in Game 2, their intensity never dipped. Philadelphia pushed Boston to the wire on Friday night, forcing the Celtics to earn every basket and every stop before crossing the finish line.

That included Brown’s off-balance, one-legged floater with 6:10 remaining, Pritchard’s buzzer-beating step-back three with 1:17 left, and White’s two offensive rebounds in the fourth quarter — the second of which led to Tatum’s dagger.

For the Celtics — and especially Tatum — it was the same old challenge, just on a different night.

“As you probably could imagine, we’ve been in this scenario time and time again,” Tatum told reporters, per CLNS Media. “Times we’ve fallen short, and times we’ve succeeded. It’s all about learning from past experiences. Whether it’s the first play of the game or crunch time, it’s about making the right read and making the right play.”

Treating Game 3 like Game 7 wasn’t just the right call; it was the perfect reprogramming of the team’s mindset in what many view as a low-pressure contest. The stakes obviously aren’t perceived as drastic, considering a 2-1 lead means the job is only halfway done, but that’s a simplistic approach. Mazzulla’s locker room isn’t built like that. So, with Embiid progressing and inching closer to a return, the Celtics needed to put Tuesday night’s Game 2 defeat way back in the rearview mirror.

That was priority number one for everyone in a Celtics uniform.

“It’s just about responding,” Tatum said. “Responding from Game 2 and how we played in that one, and wanted to play better. We still had 17 turnovers and a lot of ugly possessions. Obviously, there were some possessions where we figured it out and made plays to win the game. But just on both sides of the ball, there’s a lot of things that we can learn from.”

It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. And in the playoffs, that’s all that matters.