The Los Angeles Lakers comfortably defeated the Atlanta Hawks on Monday night to get back on the right track with the playoffs looming. Los Angeles lost two games in a row leading into Monday night and desperately needed to get back in the win column to hold off the surging Houston Rockets.
It was a great game for the Lake Show and truly was one of the most impressive team outings of the team. Everything was clicking for the Lakers as there was a real synergy on the court that has been missing for most of the season thus far. If this version of the Lakers can stick around then the team can make serious noise in the NBA Playoffs.
Not everything went amazing for the Lakers on Monday night, though. The game literally could not have started any worse for Austin Reaves, who was ferociously dunked on by Jalen Johnson less than 20 seconds into the game.
GOOD EVENING FROM JALEN JOHNSON pic.twitter.com/y2HMNQ0WF6
— Atlanta Hawks (@ATLHawks) March 19, 2024
That ended up being the peak of the Hawks’ night as the Lakers would lead the game throughout. Getting dunked on may have frazzled Reaves a bit, though, as he did not turn in his usual great scoring night for the purple and gold.
And of course, there was no way that Reaves was going to get out of talking about getting dunked on. Reaves spoke to the media after the game and took the viral moment on the chin with a laugh and a smile on his face.
Lakers’ Austin Reaves responds after getting postered by Jalen Johnson
This Austin Reaves-@DanWoikeSports interaction is great: pic.twitter.com/ue2ctUOU54
— Jovan Buha (@jovanbuha) March 19, 2024
It is good to see Reaves being such a good sport about it but that is probably a lot easier to do when your team ends up dominating the game from there on out. If the Lakers would have lost this game to the Hawks then Reaves probably would have had a different tone when speaking to the media.
Thankfully for Reaves, Johnson’s poster dunk somehow wasn’t the best dunk of the night across the league. There are 364 days of the year where Johnson’s dunk would have been the play of the night and would have been the viral moment that circled social media.
Instead, earlier in the night Anthony Edwards threw down an even more impressive dunk on John Collins of the Utah Jazz. As bad as Johnson’s poster on Reaves was, Edwards postering Collins was 10 times worse.
Thanks to Edwards and thanks to the Lakers’ win, Reaves is able to laugh this one off while the league quickly forgets about it.
