Lakers Make Big Warriors Announcement on Monday
Lakers Make Big Warriors Announcement on Monday originally appeared on Athlon Sports.
The Los Angeles Lakers were eliminated by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the 2025 NBA Playoffs. This early exit was especially disappointing after LA stunned the basketball world by acquiring superstar guard Luka Doncic from the Dallas Mavericks at the February trade deadline.
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Doncic's arrival, combined with the greatness of LeBron James and emergence of Austin Reaves, helped Los Angeles secure the third seed in the Western Conference. This made the Lakers' early exit even more surprising, as it was a lower-seeded Minnesota team that prevailed in just five games.
As they look toward the 2025-26 campaign, the Lakers are expected to make changes.
Los Angeles Lakers guard Luka Doncic (77) and Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James (23)© Jonathan Hui-Imagn Images
Whatever changes end up being made by LA this summer could first be displayed in the NBA preseason. On Monday, the team made an official announcement on the home portion of its preseason schedule.
After tipping off preseason action in Palm Springs against the Phoenix Suns, the Lakers will play their first Crypto.com Arena preseason game against the Golden State Warriors on Oct. 12.
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"Los Angeles will host a pair of preseason games on its home court at Crypto.com Arena, featuring contests versus Golden State Oct. 12 and Sacramento Oct. 17,' the team announced in a statement (via Jovan Buha of The Athletic).
The Warriors and Lakers always help drive NBA ratings, and while a preseason contest between these two teams certainly doesn't have the luster of their recent regular season and postseason battles, it is still sure to excite fans after the long summer months.
While the NBA Finals are set to begin this week, the Lakers and their fans have an eye toward next season.
Related: Luka Doncic Sends Austin Reaves Message After Lakers Trade Report
Related: Three-Time All-NBA Star Announces Decision on Retirement
This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 2, 2025, where it first appeared.
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That carried over into the 2025 postseason, as Indiana faced a Bucks team missing Damian Lillard, and a Cavaliers side that saw Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, De'Andre Hunter and later Donovan Mitchell all miss time. Advertisement The thing about that, though, as Pacers coach Rick Carlisle noted after knocking off the Knicks: 'You still gotta win the games.' The Pacers did that, often in thrilling and heartstopping fashion, to build on last spring's success and put themselves in position to move on to the championship round. And after New York made them look uncomfortable in a Game 5 win, they simply returned to their first principles — speed, ball pressure, body and ball movement, sharing — and finally broke the Knicks … just like they've done to damn near everybody else for six months. 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With Haliburton at the controls, Indiana has finished second and ninth in offensive efficiency in the last two seasons — the first time the Pacers have fielded consecutive top-10 offenses since the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. (Which, not coincidentally, was the last time the Pacers made the Finals.) Pacers president Kevin Pritchard and general manager Chad Buchanan saw what kind of pilot Haliburton was and set about building a sound-barrier-breaking spaceship around him, retrofitting the roster to surround him with sprinters and shooters. That resulted in a team capable of getting buckets in bunches … but one that still struggled to get stops, lacked size on the perimeter and was missing a credible star-caliber second weapon. Advertisement 'And then, look,' Carlisle said. 'The Siakam trade took things to another level.' It's almost unbelievable how perfectly Pascal Siakam has fit into precisely the holes that the Pacers needed filling: an All-Star comfortable working off of Haliburton or pairing with him in the two-man game, exploiting mismatches against smaller defenders in the post or slower defenders with his face-up game, running the floor like a greyhound to create easy baskets for the offense and unyielding stress for the opposing defense, making the extra pass and calling his own number depending on what the game calls for. He does all of that while playing solid defense across multiple positions, never turning the ball over, and providing the kind of hard-won leadership to which even Indiana's longest-tenured pros can turn. 'You brought in a champion,' Pacers center Myles Turner said. 'You brought in someone that's been there before.' Advertisement They all know what it's like now: They've faced the pressure, they've met the moment, and they've reached the highest level the sport has to offer. Four more wins and they're immortal. Getting those wins against the best team in the NBA will be the toughest challenge Indiana has faced yet. Get them, though, and not a soul alive will be able to form their mouth to call these Pacers a fluke again. Head-to-head Oklahoma City won the regular-season series, 2-0. In the first meeting, on the day after Christmas, with Indiana just starting to turn things around after its early-season morass, the Thunder battled back from a 22-7 deficit to score a 120-114 win at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. It was one of Haliburton's quietest nights of the season — just 4 points on 2-for-6 shooting, though he did add 8 assists against just 1 turnover in 35 minutes — as Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault dispatched Dort and Wallace to shadow him all over the court. Advertisement Indiana responded by going to its Plan B: getting Haliburton off the ball, kicking it to Nembhard, and allowing him to attack 4-on-4 in a more spaced-out floor. The Pacers were still able to generate offense — six double-digit scorers, led by a 23-9-7 night from Nembhard — but just had no answer for Gilgeous-Alexander, who torched them for 45 points (11 of which came in the final 3:42, as OKC closed on a 17-7 run) to go with 8 assists, 7 rebounds, 2 blocks, 1 steal and just 1 turnover in 38 minutes of work — a top-15 individual performance of the entire NBA season, according to John Hollinger's Game Score metric, which aims to provide a rough estimate of how productive a particular player was on a particular night. The rematch came in late March, and was a nip-and-tuck battle … for about a quarter and a half. Oklahoma City ripped off a 20-5 run over a four-minute span just before halftime to blow the game open, held Indiana's starters at bay to open the second half, and then delivered another four-minute 19-7 burst — with SGA off the floor, in J-Dub-led small-ball lineups — to push the game out of reach. The Thunder led by as many as 25 in the fourth quarter, which Haliburton, Siakam, Turner and Nesmith sat out completely, and cruised to a 132-111 win. Advertisement The 133.3 offensive rating that OKC posted in the win marked Indiana's fourth-worst defensive outing of the season. And if you want to get a sense of just how frightening this Thunder team is … it wasn't even a top-20 offensive night for them. Matchup to watch Indiana's turnover avoidance vs. Oklahoma City's turnover creation In both the regular season and playoffs, no team has forced turnovers on a higher share of opponents' possessions than the Thunder, whose roster-wide commitment to intense physicality and ball pressure has produced one of the best defenses in recent memory. In both the regular season and playoffs, the Pacers have owned the NBA's third-lowest turnover rate — a massive reason why, since they got healthy in early December, they've also owned one of the five or so best offenses in the league. Advertisement Strength, meet strength. Haliburton's superpower as a lead initiator — one he put on full display in his brilliant Game 4 performance against New York — is his exceptional ability to make audacious passes at breakneck speed without giving the ball to the other team. Over the last three seasons, only three players who have played at least 5,000 total minutes have assisted on more than 40% of their teammates' baskets while turning it over on fewer than 15% of their team's offensive possessions: Nikola Jokić, Luka Donćic and Haliburton — who has the lowest turnover rate (11.7%) of the bunch. 'I take pride in taking care of the ball,' Haliburton said after Indiana's Game 4 win over the Knicks. 'I'd rather do really anything else on the basketball court than turn the ball over.' (Joseph Raines/Yahoo Sports Illustration) Oklahoma City, conversely, would love nothing more than to take the ball away from you. The Thunder led the NBA in steals, deflections, loose balls recovered on defense and points scored off of turnovers this season, and tied for third in points per possession added in transition. They want to harass you into making a mistake, and then make you pay for it — over and over and over again. Advertisement OKC didn't force a hailstorm of miscues in its two regular-season matchups with Indiana. Haliburton committed only one turnover in 64 minutes against Oklahoma City during the regular season. And as a team, the Pacers turned the ball over only 24 times in two games against the Thunder, leading to 26 points — fewer points per game off of turnovers than OKC scored against anyone else in the league. The 'when' of those boo-boos matters, though. In the March meeting, the Pacers led late into the first quarter … and then committed five turnovers in the next nine minutes of game time, with a missed layup that the Thunder immediately turned into an SGA layup on the other end to boot. Before you knew it, Indiana had lost its offensive rhythm, Oklahoma City had found one, and Gilgeous-Alexander and Co. were up double digits. As Owen Phillips has noted at The F5, turnover margin has become arguably the defining win condition in the modern NBA. During the 2024-25 NBA regular season, teams that won the turnover battle went 668-461, a .592 winning percentage, according to CourtSketch. In the postseason, the team that commits fewer turnovers is 54-20, a .730 winning percentage — equivalent to 60 wins over an 82-game season. Oklahoma City will try to do what it did to Memphis, Denver and Minnesota: tighten the vise grip on and off the ball, reducing the amount of airspace in which the offense has to operate until it's so tightly constricted that the Thunder can just rip the ball away. Indiana, on the other hand, will try to do what it did to Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York: vary its angles of attack and take advantage of being able to run five-out spacing at virtually all times, spreading OKC out enough that even the most hellacious unit in the league can't move far enough and fast enough to keep up with the flight of the ball as it leads navy blue-and-gold-clad bodies into open shots. Whoever's able to tilt the possession battle in their favor figures to have a leg up in what promises to be an all-out sprint of a series. Biggest X-factor How does Holmgren change the matchup? Holmgren didn't play in either game against Indiana during the regular season. He missed the first game during his recovery from a fractured hip, and the second as part of Oklahoma City's management plan for his return from that injury. Advertisement At the risk of overstating the obvious: Adding a 7-foot-1, 3-point shooting, face-up driving rim protector and rebounder who plays 30 minutes a night figures to alter the chemistry of the matchup at least a little. But how? For one thing: Who does Chet guard? During the regular-season matchups, Hartenstein opened up on Turner and Williams began on Siakam, with Dort on Haliburton, Wallace on Nembhard, and SGA taking Indiana's fifth starter (Mathurin in the first game, Nesmith in the second). With Holmgren starting, do you slot him onto Turner, stretch-5-for-stretch-5, put Hartenstein on Siakam — a matchup he saw plenty during both the regular season and the 2024 Eastern Conference semifinals when he was with the Knicks — and slide J-Dub over to Nembhard? Can Indiana make hay out of that, whether with Turner leveraging his strength advantage over Holmgren or Siakam using his speed to dust Hartenstein? If Dort goes shutdown-corner on Haliburton, can Nembhard (who averaged 19.5 points, 7 rebounds and 7 assists per game on 50% shooting against OKC in the regular season) use that bionic shoulder to create space against the 6-foot-6, 220-pound Williams? Advertisement (Also: Daigneault hasn't been shy about toggling the matchups to get his wings cross-matched onto bigs and vice versa — think Wallace on Turner and Hartenstein on Nesmith — when he thinks it might wrong-foot the offense. If and when the Thunder juggle the matchups, can the Pacers' wings take advantage of the extra space and make them pay?) Conversely: How does Indiana defend Chet, and what are the downstream effects of that? The Pacers mostly guarded him with centers during their two meetings in the 2023-24 regular season; that was before OKC added Hartenstein, on whom Indiana stationed its centers with Holmgren absent. Wallace starting in Holmgren's place in both games gave Haliburton a like-sized, lower-usage 'hiding' spot on defense, and allowed Carlisle to station Siakam on Dort, off of whom he could roam to play free safety and muck things up as a help defender. If Carlisle starts more or less straight up — Turner on Hartenstein and Siakam on Holmgren, with Nembhard and Nesmith taking Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams — does the need to be more attentive to Holmgren on the perimeter make it tougher for Siakam to load up in help position? With Haliburton then slotted onto Dort, how hard does OKC look to hit its guard-guard screening actions, trying to hunt the Pacers point guard more effectively than their Eastern competitors were able to in service of forcing Haliburton to handle even more physicality? And if the Pacers try to handle that hunting by pre-switching off the ball, a kind of three-card monte game aimed at keeping Haliburton out of the action, will the Thunder have opportunities to attack gaps and compromise the Pacers rotation? Other key questions I'm curious about Crunch-time lineups Oklahoma City Thunder You can write Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams' names in Sharpie. J-Dub has played 131 of OKC's 192 fourth-quarter minutes this postseason (68.2%) and SGA has played 107 (55.7%). That includes nearly all of the Thunder's (comparatively rare) 27 'clutch' minutes — defined by NBA Advanced Stats as when the score is within points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime. Holmgren (97 fourth-quarter minutes, 23 'clutch' minutes) will likely be manning the middle, too. Advertisement Beyond Oklahoma City's burgeoning Big Three, though, Daigneault tends to mix and match. If rebounding and rim protection are the top priorities, Hartenstein will close; if ball pressure, perimeter switchability and shooting are paramount, expect to see plenty of Dort, Caruso and/or Wallace. Whether they go big, small or somewhere in between, Oklahoma City has the goods to throw out nightmarish defensive lineups that provide enough space for SGA to go to work. That's why, despite hardly ever letting contests come down to one or two possessions late, the Thunder have tended to fare awfully well within tighter confines: They're 21-10 in 'clutch' games, outscoring opponents by 42 points in 94 regular- and postseason crunch-time minutes. Indiana Pacers Nembhard, Turner, Siakam, Nesmith and Haliburton lead Indiana in fourth-quarter minutes during the postseason, and that quintet has outscored the Pacers' opposition by 18 points in 51 final-frame minutes. They've also played nearly all of the team's 'clutch' minutes. Advertisement Carlisle has demonstrated his willingness to reach down the bench for a change-up if he thinks one's necessary: T.J. McConnell for point-of-attack pressure and an extra ball-handler, Ben Sheppard for a bit more size and shooting on the perimeter, Obi Toppin for some more offensive juice and athleticism, Thomas Bryant to stretch the floor, Jarace Walker (if healthy) for more mobility up front, etc. For the most part, though, expect Carlisle to stick with the unit that got him here — the group best equipped to play the style on both ends of the floor that can make Indiana such a difficult puzzle for opponents to solve. Prediction: Thunder in 6 The Pacers are a phenomenal team: an explosive, efficient, fast-paced and well-drilled offense, paired with a physical, aggressive, versatile, well-schemed defense. They're deep and disciplined, creative and well-coached — a beautifully conceived and constructed modern NBA team. It's just that the Thunder are all of that, too, only better at … well, just about all of it. Advertisement I picked Oklahoma City to hoist the Larry O'B before the season, I did it again before the playoffs, and as impressed as I've been by Indiana, I see no reason to switch up now. SGA caps one of the most incredible individual seasons in NBA history by winning Finals MVP, and the Thunder make all of us wonder whether all that talk about the death of dynasties might not have been a bit premature. Series odds (via BetMGM) Oklahoma City Thunder (-700) Indiana Pacers (+500) Series schedule (all times Eastern) Game 1: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Thursday, June 5 (8:30 p.m., ABC) Game 2: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Sunday, June 8 (8 p.m., ABC) Advertisement Game 3: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Wednesday, June 11 (8:30 p.m., ABC) Game 4: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Friday, June 13 (8:30 p.m., ABC) *Game 5: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Monday, June 16 (8:30 p.m., ABC) *Game 6: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Thursday, June 19 (8:30 p.m., ABC) *Game 7: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Sunday, June 22 (8 p.m., ABC) *if necessary
