The Los Angeles Lakers trailed the Denver Nuggets 118-116 with 5.2 seconds left in regulation on Saturday night. The plan was simple: Austin Reaves would intentionally miss his second free throw.
What happened next was anything but simple.
Reaves sent the ball off the left side of the rim, grabbed his own miss, and knocked in a game-tying floater with 1.9 seconds remaining. The Lakers went on to win 127-125 in overtime.
“Yeah, it’s the perfect miss,” LeBron James said. “He was able to hit it off that left side of the rim, recover it, and then still make a tough floater. Perfect execution on his part.”
Reaves explained why the intentional miss made more sense than converting the free throw.
Denver had fouled him twice while leading by three in the final 9.9 seconds to prevent a tying three-pointer attempt. Making the free throw would have left the Lakers down one with a full-court sprint ahead, and another foul would have worked against them.
“I wasn’t going to give the ball an opportunity to go in,” Reaves said. “Some people shoot it high and end up making it on accident, but I don’t think my ball ever got over 10 feet.”
James noted that the play is not something teams typically rehearse.
“None of us practices to miss free throws,” he said.
Lakers coach JJ Redick had called for Reaves to miss to his right. But when Reaves noticed Nikola Jokic was matched up alone on the left side against Deandre Ayton, he adjusted. Ayton let Jokic drift inside toward the restricted area, giving Reaves a clear path to collect the rebound and score the biggest of his 32 points on the night.
“AR made the right play, he missed it to the single side,” Redick said. “It’s a hell of a basketball play.”
The win extended the Lakers’ winning streak to five games and gave them a key tiebreaker over Denver as both teams compete with Houston and Minnesota for seeding in the Western Conference.
Reaves kept his sense of humor about it all.
“I’m just mad it’ll mess up my free-throw percentage,” he joked.
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