It was a wild second half at crypto.com arena, but it's the Los Angeles Lakers who are into the playoffs red-hot.
The purple and gold rallied back from down 15 points to win an overtime thriller in the play-in tournament over the Minnesota Timberwolves, 108-102.
Tied at 95, the Lakers had the ball with 21.7 seconds to go and the shot clock off. LeBron James inbounded to Dennis Schroder who gave it back to James. Covered by Taurean Prince, James drove toward the contested bucket and was able to find Schroder for a wide-open corner three, which he banged with 1.4 seconds to go.
Every day, it feels like a new fear-mongering headline or social media post declares that ChatGPT or some other AI model will eventually replace us. But if a real-life version of SkyNet is going to kill us all, take our jobs or both, it’s going to have to be a lot more advanced than the statistical models we have now, as the Lakers showed with their 108-102 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves to advance to the NBA playoffs on Tuesday night.
You see, those robots may be smart, but as someone on the Lakers’ coaching staff reminded the team ahead of their critical play-in matchup, at least one computer-generated equation gave the team just a 0.3% chance to make the postseason after they started 2-10.
Which analytics said that? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t know if the players did either.
Now, to be fair to that robot/software the Lakers ultimately made look like a dumbass on Tuesday, that was probably a safe bet at the time. After all, the Lakers are the first team in NBA history to make the playoffs after a start that bad. They definitely defied the odds to make this happen.
And it wasn’t like whatever model spit out those numbers was alone in not believing in the Lakers, either. As Lakers fan and receipt enthusiast Lakers Guru made sure to dig up after the win, as recently as February, one of the foremost basketball minds of our time — sixth-winningest coach in NBA history George Karl — was tweeting about how the Lakers couldn’t even draft vaunted prospect Victor Wembanyama with their draft pick when they missed the postseason.
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