After halftime ended and both sides returned to the court.
The Lakers and the Pelicans displayed two almost completely opposite extremes in competitive form.
The Pelicans' players were fully focused, putting everything into every defensive possession and every play.
As for the Lakers, their body language gave the fans the feeling... that this game simply wasn't important to them.
On offense, they played simply and carelessly, while on defense, they occasionally gave up easy balls...
In short, they displayed none of the competitive form one should have in a Playoffs-level Game 7 War.
With the momentum building on one side and fading on the other, the Lakers naturally fell into a huge disadvantage in no time.
It wasn't until Vogel could no longer hold back and called two timeouts in a row that they barely managed to stop the slide.
During the second timeout, he cursed out several defense-oriented role players on the bench.
He tried to use that method to awaken the players' form.
But... just cursing out the role players wasn't going to help~~
The key problem hadn't been solved. Treating only the symptoms without addressing the root cause—what good would that do?
Yet Vogel simply didn't have the ability or confidence to lose his temper at the core players. If he didn't want to be fired immediately after the season ended...
And so, it became a deadlock once again.
After the timeout ended and the game resumed, the good news for Lakers fans was that their team had finally pulled itself together somewhat.
Griffin and DeRozan worked hard to close the gap through a series of Pick-and-Roll plays.
The bad news, however, was that even then, they were still trailing by a massive 15 points.
And there wasn't much time left in the game...
Trying to