Denver Nuggets will face LeBron James’ Lakers in first round

For a second straight season, the Denver Nuggets will meet LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers in the playoffs, this time in the first round.

The Lakers secured the second seed in the NBA’s Western Conference by beating the New Orleans Pelicans 110-106 on Tuesday. They’ll meet the Nuggets in Denver on Saturday at 6:30 on ABC for Game 1 of Round 1. The NBA has not yet released the rest of the series schedule.

The Nuggets have beaten the Lakers eight straight times, including the four-game sweep of them in the Western Conference Finals last season. LeBron James and Anthony Davis are their starring duo, who have fallen over and over to Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray. The two franchises have met in the postseason eight times before now with the Nuggets only win coming last year to advance to the NBA Finals. This is the third run-in between James and Jokic in the playoffs, the other came in the bubble’s conference finals, and this year’s is the rubber match.

The Lakers won four more games this season than last and will benefit from more time off between games in the first round than the bunched of nature of the late stages of the postseason. Los Angeles also added Gabe Vincent to their team, who Denver saw playing for the Heat in the NBA Finals a year ago. Vincent missed most of the season, so they picked up former Colorado Buffaloes star Spencer Dinwiddie late in the year. D’Angelo Russell, who struggled in last year’s series, has been playing good ball and hit the biggest shot of Tuesday’s game. Davis played a career-high 76 games and was a Defensive Player of the Year candidate. But it all comes back to James, in his 21st season and seeking a fifth championship. This year James has shot a career-high from three and stayed mostly healthy though he’s dealing with an ankle lump currently.

The Nuggets also won four more games in this year’s tougher Western Conference. The 57-win team earned the No. 2 seed because of the wild final weekend of the season. Had Denver not lost to the bottom-feeding Spurs, the Nuggets would’ve set a franchise record for wins in an NBA season and would be facing the winner of Pels vs. Kings/Warriors. But fate put the Nuggets against the Lakers again.

“It’s the defending champions, we understand how difficult the matchup has been,” James said on TNT postgame. “We’re going to get back in the books and this series will be extremely tough on us.”

The two’s matchups have drawn a ton of media attention after comments of the Mile High City team being the SoCal team’s daddies. James and Davis said they had conversations about the Nuggets in the offseason and then the two teams faced off for Game 1 of the regular season when Denver raised the championship banner. The series will certainly draw eyeballs for on and off-the-court reasons but it could be James’ final pass of the baton to Jokic, after he sore-losered threatened retirement after last year’s sweep.

The Nuggets have nearly a week of rest and likely watched the play-in game together on Tuesday, while the Lakers had to battle in the bayou to even get here.