Crowd favorites Los Angeles Lakers gained a 2-1 lead over the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 3. The forward duo of LeBron James and Anthony Davis had a monstrous game.

King James had a stat line of 38-12-8, while Davis’ humongous second half pushed his stat line to 29-11-8. For RIP City, Dame had yet another fantastic game, but it wasn’t enough to get past the Western Conference juggernauts.

Along with Lillard, CJ McCollum and Carmelo Anthony showed up in the latter half of the match. But the Lakers’ defense was too much for them down the stretch.

Damian Lillard Talks About His Injury and Lakers’ Shooting

As a unit, the Lakers only shot 65.1% from the charity stripe. However, there was an eye-opening difference in the free throw attempts between the two sides. Lakers visited the line 43 times while the Trail Blazers were an attempt shy of 20 times.

According to Damian Lillard, this difference was a major factor in his team’s loss.

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“The discrepancy in free throws is something that’s out of our control,” said the star point guard.

“Last game, we came out, and they played a really physical game. They played a really aggressive game. That led to a blowout victory for them. Tonight, we came in saying we weren’t going to get bullied and let them out-physical and out-aggressiveness us, and maybe sometimes we did foul, but they’re a physical team as well. When a team is living at the free throw line like they did tonight as a team, it’s going to be hard to win a game against a team that’s as good as they are.” added Dame.

Lillard dislocated his left index figure in the last game, and the effect was visible on his ball handling. When asked about the effect of the injury on his performance. Lillard said: “Obviously, I dislocated it, so it’s going to have some effect on ballhandling. Tonight, the biggest thing I felt was just going up to shoot. When I was gathering the ball, I was uncomfortable.”

Playoff mode activated for King James

LeBron James has always been a different beast during the postseason. His 8 straight trips to the finals back up the effect James had on his team’s success in the playoffs.

After a crazy triple-double stat line in Game 1 of the series, James took a seat back in Game 2, scoring only 10 points. Many eyebrows were raised after his performance.

But LeBron has been facing such criticisms his whole career. The 4-time MVP bounced back with an outstanding performance in Game 3 to give the Lakers a 2-1 lead over the eighth-seeded Blazers.

If James and Davis keep performing at this level, the 17th championship title is certainly in reach of the team.