The Los Angeles Lakers are looking for their fifth straight win. This would be the first time they’d string together such a run since November, and the timing could not be more consequential. Despite going 7-1 over the last eight games, the winning streak has done nothing to soften their most vocal critic.

“My worst nightmare is the Lakers winning tonight, and I have to listen to all the crap on Monday on all the talk shows about how the Lakers are contenders,” Barkley said before the game on Inside the NBA.

Even his co-hosts weren’t spared. Shaquille O’Neal floated the idea of the Lakers locking up home-court advantage, and Kenny Smith argued for a third-seed scenario, only for Barkley to shoot both down with a flat “No.”

“Please, please don’t let them win,” Chuck said. “I’m going to be nail-biting all night tonight. They’re going to be talking about it all day Monday. Thank God I’ll be in Dayton.”

The stakes were sky-high: the Lakers (41-25) entered clinging to the West’s fourth seed, just a half-game ahead of the Nuggets (41-26), with the winner taking the all-important tiebreaker (they’re 1-1 against each other), precisely the kind of ‘contender’ talk Barkley despises.

Even at halftime, with the Nuggets trailing 50-61, Barkley refused to waver.

“They are going to lose this game tonight, GUARANTEE!” the NBA legend said on air. “This little pretty girl wearing a LeBron James jersey, she going to be crying in 2 hours.’

Barkley’s disdain isn’t new. Just last week, with the Lakers mired in a three-game skid, he turned up the heat further:

“I’ve been saying it for months,” Barkley said. “The Lakers are not a good team. I just think it’s funny how the media has turned on Luka. Everything’s Luka’s fault now. I find that hilarious. And I guess we’re contractually obligated to talk about them every day like they do on our network.”

The Los Angeles Lakers are 16-20 against teams with a .500 record or better. This comes after the Lakers beat the Knicks and the Timberwolves in back-to-back games.

However, Barkley’s nightmare ended up coming true because the Lakers – Nuggets game went into overtime thanks to a surprise free-throw tactic by Austin Reaves. Nikola Jokic, who put up a triple-double in regular time, struggled to make most of his plays work in overtime. The game ended in style with a stepback fadeaway shot by Luka Doncic with 0.5 seconds remaining from 18 feet out.

For weeks, though, Chuck has pointed out that the Lakers often lack athleticism and aren’t good enough defensively to be called contenders.

One of the Lakers’ Big 3 defended the team against Charles Barkley’s opinion

The Western Conference playoff race is extraordinarily tight. Teams seeded three through six all sit at 41 wins, while the seventh-seeded Suns trail with 39. Charles Barkley opined that the Lakers are not built to beat Denver, Houston, San Antonio, or OKC, and even called them mediocre. This was three weeks ago, on the same broadcast, and Austin Reaves happened to be listening.

“I know the guys going to go on TV because they throw them stats out there,” Barkley bluntly stated. “When those three guys play together, they still ain’t going to [contend].”

Moments later, host Ernie Johnson asked Reaves if he had heard the comments. The Lakers star had heard it all, but remained calm and composed.

“Yeah, I heard a little bit,” Reaves said. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.”

With 15 games left, the Lakers have every opportunity to prove Barkley wrong, but they’ll need more than a handful of wins against quality opponents to silence their most persistent critic. The Purple and Gold will tip off a six-game road trip with consecutive games against the Rockets starting Monday night.