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Alexander: Lakers get off to a good start against Rockets

April 19, 2026

LOS ANGELES — Given all of the projections going into the Lakers-Rockets first-round series, Saturday night’s Game 1 provided an interesting twist: The idea of both teams going into this with the intention of stealing the opener.

So who really was the underdog, anyway?

The Lakers had more star power on their bench than the Rockets did, Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves in street clothes on the L.A. bench and Kevin Durant wearing what looked like a hoodie on the Houston sideline.

But the Lakers also had the most star power on the court. LeBron James was healthy, in uniform and had a 19-point, 13-assist, eight-rebound night, one in which he made history as the oldest NBA player ever to have 10 or more assists in a game. All five Lakers starters scored in double figures in their 107-98 victory, and Luke Kennard’s 27-point night – with a 5-for-5 performance from 3-point country – was the difference-maker.

The narrative going into this series was about the shorthanded Lakers trying to hold down the fort until Doncic (hamstring) and Reaves (oblique) could play again, and whether an elongated best-of-seven – a 16-day span from Game 1 to a potential Game 7 – might work in their favor if they could just stave off execution long enough.

But the pregame bombshell, one that had been hinted at before Saturday, scrambled that speculation. Durant bumped his knee during practice on Wednesday, and by Saturday he was still experiencing soreness and limited movement. So he, too, was a no-show for Game 1.

“Hopefully it’s a one-game thing,” Rockets coach Ime Udoka said before the game. “But he tried it out just (a little while) ago and it didn’t feel good enough. … Soreness. It’s very tender, tough to bend in certain ways. And so (there’s) not a lot of swelling, but (he) hit it in a very awkward spot, I guess, more than anything.

“It could be a regular bumped knee, and I think you can kind of play through that. But (it’s) right above the knee, (the) patella tendon area up there, and it’s just very tender and sore. Like I said, pain tolerance is one thing, but actually limited movement is more the cause.”

With Durant watching instead of playing, other Rockets received more defensive scrutiny. They, too, had five players in double figures, but none really broke out. Maybe Lakers players felt liberated by not having to deal with the big guy.

“You’re not going to stop Kevin Durant,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said, interrupting a postgame question about how you re-adjust when the other team’s best player can’t play. “… There’s a lot that you have to do with Kevin. And you just kind of scrap that and move on to all the other stuff we worked on.”

These are Redick’s second playoffs as a coach, and the first one – last year’s first-round loss to Minnesota in five games, had some rough patches, especially when he went without subs in the second half of the Lakers’ Game 4 loss in Minnesota and didn’t use center Jaxson Hayes at all in Game 5, when the Lakers were eliminated.

A lot of that was because he didn’t trust Hayes in crunch time. Going into this series there was a question of whether he’d be able to trust Deandre Ayton, either.

In Game 1 the question was answered, at least for the moment. Ayton finished with 19 points, 11 rebounds and a blocked shot. Houston center Alperen Sengun finished with 19 points, eight rebounds, six assists and five fouls.

“I could feel the trust JJ had in me,” Ayton said. And if that wasn’t unintentional irony, I don’t know what is.

But with Doncic and Reaves unavailable, the attitude has to be for everyone else to make up for it. Saturday night, under the pressure and scrutiny of playoff basketball, the Lakers made it work.

“I mean, we don’t have a choice,” James said. “It has to be that way. It has to a collective group. When you’re missing so much firepower, like we are right now with AR and Luka being out, we all have to pitch in, and we all have to do our job, and even do a little bit more.”

Redick’s approach seems to be for his team to focus on its own mentality.

“You can’t worry about who’s in or out of the lineup,” he said, referring less to his own team’s absences than that of the opponent.

“It’s our game plan. It’s our standards. It’s how we play. And we’ve built towards that. And I thought our guys just responded well and met the moment. I mean, that’s the biggest thing. You got to meet the moment in every game.”

Kennard noted that since he arrived here in February, in a trade with Atlanta for Gabe Vincent and a future second-round draft pick, “we haven’t been really healthy a lot. So (it) just speaks on the guys in the locker room staying ready, being ready, stepping up in big moments, making big shots.”

Yeah, that would constitute meeting the moment.

“I feel like that kind of just speaks to what we’ve done the last few weeks with guys out. So again, it’s gonna take everybody. We know that, we’ve got to continue to elevate each other and push each other and yeah, continue to be a team,” he continued.

And James sounded the note of caution, as the veteran leader should.

“I thought we had a great week of preparation, but we got to continue that,” he said. “It’s just one game. We protected our own court, Game 1. We got to get better over the next 48 hours for Game 2 on Tuesday.”

Captain’s orders.

jalexander@scng.com

Orange County Register

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Alexander: Lakers get off to a good start against Rockets

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