It’s definitely in the players’ minds that they can for sure lose this one and definitely possible that the anxiety makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Lakers also know that they just need to play hard and keep fighting and that we’ll cough it up. That in turn makes it hard for the team to relax (not that they should) but at least keep their anxiety high enough that they’re performing under the pressure of not messing it up and not being able to relax enough to execute.
I’ve made this analogy before, but this is like “erectile dysfunction” in a young person. It’s almost exclusively Not a physiological problem. They likely had one event where they weren’t into it or ended up not being able to perform. This triggers a cascade of anxiety that itself prevents erection because the anxiety prevents sufficient relaxation to be engaged in the moment. They then try to hyper-focus on hyper-focusing, which is no help. This is one criticism I have for Quin in that I believe his answers have nothing to do with relaxing and letting things happen but when **** hits the fan everything starts being “let’s force our way out of this” and you see heavy iso and the death of ball movement.
If our guys believe we’ll lose, we’ll lose. If we’re so focused on not losing, then we’ll overthink and try to iso our way out of the mess.
We can definitely lose this game. Or, as Frank Costanza said, “you couldn’t smooth a silk shirt if you had a hot date with a babe.”
