After the start of the fourth quarter, I was still on the bench with Shaq watching the other Lakers players fight the court, but I also noticed that Shaq's face looked quite serious at this time, and he suddenly became like this, I am really not used to it, to be honest, I am really not used to it, and suddenly I thought that maybe the usual Shaq who can make people feel relaxed and comfortable is also very good.

Less than 1 minute into the fourth quarter, the Jazz used the breakthrough to cause the Lakers two fouls in a row, and these two fouls were shooting fouls, and finally the Jazz used free throws to get three points.

In fact, the lineup sent by the Jazz after the fourth quarter was also quite strange, at least completely different from the lineup used by the Jazz before, their coach Jerry Sloan actually used the Utah duo separately, just sent their core guard Stockton, and then put Karl Malone on the bench.

In addition, the Jazz did not send any particularly tall interior players, and overall the Jazz lineup was more like a small lineup combination of point guards and four forward players.

Of course, I'm not surprised that Jerry Sloan is arranging his troops like this, because this is also to correspond to the Lakers' current lineup on the court, after all, the Lakers did not send Shaq as a top interior lineman, and the center on the court actually looks very soft on the inside, and his personal presence on both the offensive and defensive ends is not very strong.

It is precisely because the Jazz team is completely aimed at the characteristics of our Lakers players in the arrangement, and the overall physical fitness of our Lakers players is still slightly worse, so even if the Lakers players still play very hard, but the field gradually began to tilt towards the Jazz side, and the 14-point difference was gradually widened to 17 points.

At this time, the head coach of the Lakers, Silver Fox Harris, took the lead in sitting still and called a timeout, after all, the current score difference is 18 points, and there are about 10 minutes left before the end of the fourth quarter.

At the timeout, I found that the Silver Fox Harris still had a clear idea, and he was also quite clear about the Jazz's tactical arrangement, but it was still very difficult for the already very tired Lakers to recover the 18-point difference in 10 minutes of game time, after all, we had exploded for a long time in the third quarter, and at that time we had almost pushed our physical strength to the limit, and the most critical point was that we did not have enough rest time to recover our physical strength.

Speaking of which, because the pit we buried in the first half of the field is too deep, a full 37 points, not to mention that losing so much at half time can be regarded as a big shame, if we can catch it back in the second half, it is only a greater shame for the Jazz team, so it is foreseeable that the Jazz team will go all out in the next game, this is also their home field, if the lead of 37 points in front of tens of thousands of fans in front of the whole court is overturned, Then they really don't know what they're going to be sprayed like in the future.

Silver Fox Harris didn't actually do much tactical set-up, just replaced me and Shaq on the court, plus the previous point guard Van Exel, small forward Eddie Jones and power forward Robert Horry.

This is the strongest lineup for our Lakers right now, but the overall playing time of our lineup has been very long since the second half, and the next ten minutes of the game will be a huge test of willpower.

When I first came to the Utah Plateau, I didn't feel how difficult it was to breathe, and even because of the dry and refreshing air and weather, I once felt that it was more comfortable and smoother to breathe here than at lower altitudes.

However, when your whole body is overdrawn after hours of high-intensity competition, and every breath in your lungs requires more effort than usual, this is when the problem of hypoxia in the highland climate becomes very problematic.

Compared to the Jazz players who have lived here for a long time, we still have to put extra effort to adapt to this lack of oxygen, and even for a moment I felt some small dark spots in front of my eyes, which I knew must be the precursor to my hypoxia symptoms, maybe some of our Lakers players will need to go to the ceiling fan for a few bottles of saline or a few puffs of pure oxygen after this game.

And because we're on the side behind the score, we have to pick up the tempo of the game and try to keep the Jazz out of the position.

But on the other hand, if the player configuration on our side can shoot from the outside, it can also deal with positional battles very well, but in the case of declining physical fitness, can our outside line still maintain stable firepower?

Eddie Jones has hit back-to-back shots from beyond the three-point line before, so I think I can pass him more balls if I have the chance, and Shaq and I have to act as both the initiator and the finisher at the same time.

Unlike other teams' guards with super organizational skills, our Lakers' guard line is almost always the kind of players whose offensive ability is far stronger than their organizational ability, and even the main point guard Van Exel is also the kind of two-way guard play, and if the ball is in his hands, he will often choose to attack by himself.

However, the paradox is that there are too many players in our Lakers lineup who need to shoot, but there is a lack of a person who can effectively organize and distribute the ball, and at this time I can't play this role well, after all, as a scoring guard, my first priority is to score, but my style of play must also squeeze a lot of Van Exel's possession.

It is for this reason that my relationship with Van Exel is not very good, in fact, the better I play, the less room he has to survive, because before the Lakers relied on him when they needed a single point more often, and Eddie Jones and Horry were more like the Lakers' outside shooting point without the ball, and after I showed a stronger ability to finish the offense during this time, Van Exel's role in our current lineup was basically replaced by me.

And he's still the kind of player who needs the ball in his hand to be able to score, and it's impossible to let him play without the ball, originally I have a good ability to catch and shoot, if the guard is a point guard with strong passing organization, I'm willing to give up the ball to play without the ball.

However, this Van Exel is a player with a very poor passing awareness, which is not only manifested in his passing skills, in fact, if he wants to pass a good ball, he has that ability, the key is that his consciousness of passing is always very backward, and the guard who is more like him is Iverson or later Irving, but the presence of a player like him in our Lakers team is very detrimental to the team.

It is for this reason that our Lakers team seems to have a lot of players who can score on the surface, but when it comes to the game, it often becomes their own singles, whether it is Shaq singles or my singles, or Van Exel singles, but the poor Eddie Jones and Robert Horry who play without the ball can only be used as the fourth and fifth offensive options.

Eddie Jones's personal data has naturally fallen off a cliff this season, perhaps at this moment he is also beginning to think about the idea of playing in other teams, the most important point is that the game between him and Shaq is very low, which is like a very strange thing, you can hardly find a reasonable explanation.

After the timeout, the Jazz made all of their starters, and they were still expressionless, and sometimes you might even think they looked harmless from the outside, but it was only when you actually fought them that their tough defense and relentless hand-to-hand combat showed you how terrible the militarized management these guys believed in was.

Unlike their slightly loose defense at the beginning of the first half, the Jazz at this time also began to pack and delay our ball-handlers in advance, perhaps because Jerry Sloan saw that our team lacked a good backcourt playmaker, and once the ball-handler was fully covered, it was easy to cause our ball-handler to make mistakes, so as to get an easy chance to counterattack.

For this point, the silver fox Harris also specially reminded us, let us move the ball at a faster speed, and don't let anyone get the ball and dribble the ball in place for more than ten seconds before they are willing to pass it.

I think this is the case, because as I analyzed before, the desire of our Lakers players to win the game at this time has temporarily overwhelmed their personal desire to perform, and they no longer like to dribble and delay time as before.

When the ball between our Lakers players is fast, the whole team's offense is suddenly revitalized, after all, the individual ability of our players is there, if we pull it out separately and let the Jazz players compare with us, then we will definitely be able to win.

However, the game is not heads-up or three-on-three, it is a five-man game, and in order to bring out the best in the team, sometimes someone does have to make sacrifices, otherwise a team will definitely not be able to go far in its own way.

The usual Lakers may indeed be very ununited, but at this moment, the players on the court have shown the individual ability and passing vision that star players should have, which fully shows that our Lakers team is not a player with poor ability, nor is it impossible to play a good match, just because we are too selfish to each other, and many times the personal honor is far above the overall honor of the team, and only in the face of a desperate situation can we force us to become a real team.

Therefore, sometimes this kind of difficulty and adversity is also a kind of teacher, which can help our team to run in better, and I believe that no matter what the final result of the game is, we can have a deeper understanding and knowledge of what a team is.

At this point, even as I like to play alone, I have become a little smarter, and when I can get the opponent's bag and see my teammate running out of the tactical position, whether he has formed an empty space or not, I will pass the ball out at the first time, because I know that I am only a part of the team's overall strategy, and I can't delay the implementation of the whole team's strategy because of myself.

I'd be happy to take over the last few attacks when it comes to the moment when the score is not too different, but now I have to convince myself of my team-mates and I need to convince my team-mates that we should be together as an invincible whole.

At least within three minutes of the first three minutes, our Lakers withstood a wave of crazy offense from the Jazz, in fact, the Jazz's physical fitness at this time has also declined a lot, their main offensive means are mainly more dependent on the tactical system to create open shooting opportunities, but under our tireless pursuit, the mentality of the entire Jazz players seems to have gradually changed.

When their outside shots start to be inaccurate, they will be less decisive when they shoot in the open space again, and basketball is such an interesting sport that the court is affected by something invisible called momentum or morale.

When the Jazz's offense suffers repeatedly, their ability to execute their tactics will drop dramatically, and when the tactics can't score points for them, they will also fall into the quagmire of star singles.

However, it is equivalent to the strength of our Lakers in singles, and the Utah doubles on the Jazz side are not best at singles, whether it is my single defense of Stockton, or Shaq's single defense of Karl Malone is a very easy thing.

The reason why Karl Malone was able to score so many points so easily in the first half was not mainly because Shaq was too loose on the defensive end, and when he came up in the second half, when he made up his mind to prevent Karl Malone, with Shaq's height, arm span and athletic talent, it was really difficult for Karl Malone to get an easy chance to score again.

Of course, the defensive intensity of the Jazz is still strong, especially their defensive system is very mature, and it can be seen that even if it is just a regular season, it will be played as a playoff game for the disciplined ones.

The Jazz's very holistic defense is very restrained by our Lakers, a team that relies on star singles, although our tacit understanding and willingness to cooperate at this time have been greatly improved, but the Jazz defensive players know how to use some seemingly inconspicuous ways to disrupt our team.

In fact, their seemingly inconspicuous defensive runs have a very deep principle in them, and in fact, our Lakers team also lacks a top playmaker who can read defense on the court at any time, Kobe Bryant has a strong passing talent and learning ability, but when it comes to reading the game, it is still much worse than a player like LeBron James.

Although I was trying very hard to think about the Jazz's defensive system at this time, trying to find a way to crack their defense, the time that could give me to think was too short, and more often I could only rely on intuition and instinct to play, and the same was true for other Lakers players, even if we wanted to play more tacit cooperation, but in the end we were cut into one individual after another by the Jazz's defense.

Luckily, because we defended the Jazz very well and were able to protect most of the defensive rebounds, we had a lot of opportunities to fight back quickly.

If we can't find a way to break the Jazz defense in the positional battle, then the fast attack counterattack is the last straw for our Lakers, of course, physical fitness limits the power of our fast attack counterattack, even then it still caused the Jazz to continue to foul, using foul free throws we can score on the one hand, and on the other hand, we can also stop the game time and win some respite for the players.

It's just that in the case of serious physical overdraft, whether it is Shaq or the Lakers outside players, including me, the free throw shooting rate can basically only be maintained at about 50%, and Shaq's free throws are quite stable at this time, almost every time he hits two free throws.

Our score with the Jazz has been narrowing hard, from 18 points to 15 points, then to 13 points, and finally it looks like it is about to chase within 10 points, but at this time the Jazz team's outside line finally fired, probably because the physical fitness of the players on the court is too poor, so it is difficult to completely keep up with the opponent's outside Honacek, and can only watch his almost empty three-point shots.

With less than seven minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Lakers were still 13 points behind the Jazz, which is not impossible to chase, but we need to readjust our breathing and take a little rest, so head coach Silver Fox Harris finally called a timeout.

We only had one last timeout left after this timeout, so we had to work hard until the end of the game and there would hardly be any more timeouts unless we could just stop the Jazz.

After this timeout, our Lakers team did not make personnel adjustments, even if the physical fitness of the players on the court has already bottomed out, but we still have to persevere, no matter what the final result of the game is, we have done our best in the second half, in the face of the strong rival Jazz team in the first half behind so many points can grit our teeth and hold on until now, and recover so many points, it is worthy of those fans who spend money to buy tickets to watch the game.