Lakers Throttled by Nuggets in Game 6: Los Angeles Hand-Wringing Commences

Denver crushed Los Angeles--from the start it wasn't close. Ty Lawson feasted on L.A.'s slow pick-and-roll defense, en route to 32 points on 18 shots.

And while it would be easy to view what has happened over these past two games and think the Lakers doomed, remember: Home teams win Game 7s roughly 80 percent of the time. 

In a perfect world, we would heap praise on Denver, a quality squad that is quite evenly matched with its opponent. But in this imperfect world, we instead play the blame game, excoriating the Lakers' bigs for not showing up in consecutive closeout games. 

Bynum is especially in the crosshairs, on account of his "Closeout games are actually kind of easy" quote. Pau isn't faring much better, considering his weak series against Dallas last year, and his 1-of-10 performance Thursday night.