Lakers News: NBA Practiced Western Conference Finals Award Ceremony Ahead Of Game 4

Ouch.

Los Angeles Lakers All-NBA small forward LeBron James was taking no chances in the hours leading up to what might just very be the last NBA game of his playing career on Monday, a 113-111 Western Conference Finals Game 4 loss to the Denver Nuggets.

According to Dan Woike of The Los Angeles Times, James showed up at LA's home court, Crypto.com Arena, several hours prior to the game's scheduled 5:30 p.m. tipoff time. When he got there, he spotted league officials rehearsing the process of awarding Denver its conference championship accolades... even though the club at that point had yet to actually clinch the series!

The NBA may have just been thoroughly exhausting every potential eventuality in doing this, given that a win on that night would indeed mean that the Nuggets would get to advance to the Finals (which ultimately did wind up happening, to be sure), but obviously James took the NBA's preemptive prep a little personally.

“It was a little motivating factor,” James noted.

Under the circumstances, he played almost as well as he could have -- until the game's waning seconds, anyway, when he twice forced up bad misses (one a block while being quadruple-covered by Denver players) when the Lakers badly needed a bucket.

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