If you look at an NBA team’s 82 game regular season schedule, there are always one or two games you can point to that you know are going to be tough for that team to win.  The Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Lakers each played one of those games in the past week.  First Phoenix, who after playing five road games in ten days came home to play New Orleans in the first game of a back-to-back.  After handily defeating the Hornets to take their record to an NBA best 7-1, the Suns flew out to Los Angeles to play the rested Lakers in the second game of back-to-back games for the Suns.  The results? Brutal as the Lakers clobbered the Suns by nearly 20 points.  The next night the Lakers got themselves a taste of that scheduling medicine.  After playing Phoenix in a TV night game that didn’t end until near 11 o’clock local time, the Lakers had to hop on a four hour flight to Denver (which happens to be the city in which the drive from the airport to the hotel is the longest in the NBA (1 hour)) and got to their hotel just as the sun was rising, only to have to play a night game against a rugged and tough Denver team that had this game marked on their calendar for five months (i.e. since the Lakers knocked the Nuggets out of the Western Conference finals last June). The result? Even more brutal as the Nuggets clobbered the Lakers, who hung tough in the first half before scoring only 23 points in the entire second half (Carmelo Anthony had 18 in that half just by himself) on their way to a 26 point loss to Denver.

Sometimes there are games that, when teams look at their schedule at the beginning of the year, they know they are likely to lose.  The Suns played one of those games and got clobbered by the Lakers and then the next night the Lakers got a taste of that schedule medicine, getting clobbered by the Nuggets.  Don’t worry LA/Phoenix fans……you are both at 7-2 and the tough schedule now will make you tougher come playoff time.

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