THERE ARE HYPERBARIC chambers and then there is the giant hyperbaric chamber at the UCLA Medical Center. Lakers star Austin Reaves spent the better part of four weeks in this enormous tube as he tried to recover from a Grade 2 oblique muscle tear he had suffered April 2 during a game in Oklahoma City.
Initially doctors told Reaves he would be out 4-6 weeks with the injury, but probably on the longer end of that timeline.
The Lakers initially assumed he would be out until the conference finals, team sources told ESPN, but Reaves was determined to get back for at least some of the Lakers' playoff run.
"I left my house every day around 7:30 in the morning to get treatment and didn't come home until about 8 at night," Reaves told ESPN. "I was going crazy trying to get back. ... I was in that hyperbaric chamber all the time."
The giant hyperbaric chamber at UCLA Health can accommodate up to 18 people and simulates the pressure of being 30 feet underwater -- roughly double the amount of pressure at the surface. That pressure promotes healing by forcing pure oxygen to dissolve into your blood at concentrations far beyond what's possible on land.
Reaves made it back in four weeks, in time for the Lakers' improbable first-round series win over the Houston Rockets.
But this round, against the Oklahoma City Thunder, it seems like nothing Reaves or the Lakers do matters. It's an entirely different kind of pressure.
Because the inevitability of this series illuminates an uncomfortable reality for the Lakers.
For years -- decades, really -- the NBA's most glamorous franchise has been guided by a singular principle: recruit and retain superstars, let them lead the team to championship glory, and figure out the rest later. It worked ruthlessly well.
Until it didn't. And that guiding light has never been more obvious, its vulnerability more exposed, than against this Thunder team.
One team is top-heavy, overly reliant on those stars and forced to fill in the myriad gaps around them. It's an ad hoc operation because it had to be.
The other has been built intentionally -- brick by brick -- for years, guided by cultural, strategic principles. Players fit seamlessly. Backups mirror the skills of their starters. Backups to the backups do the same.
That Lakers ethos is stuck in the 1980s. Oklahoma City is already preparing for the 2030s.
"I mean ... they're basically perfect," Reaves said after the Thunder took a commanding 3-0 series lead Saturday night with a 131-108 win over a sellout crowd at Crypto.com Arena.
And you have to play perfectly to beat them.
"It takes everything and more to beat a team like this," Lakers forward LeBron James said. "They have the proper personnel to be able to shape shift out there and yeah ... to still be productive no matter who is on the floor."
THE LAKERS HAVE done an admirable job of slowing down reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander this series. He scored 18 points in Game 1, 22 in Game 2 and 23 -- on 7-of-20 shooting -- in Game 3, well below his season average of 31.1.
But OKC is still winning by an average of 20 points because of guys such as Ajay Mitchell, Chet Holmgren, Jared McCain and a ferocious two-big lineup, with Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein, that put up a staggering 64 points in the paint in Game 3, tied for OKC's most in a playoff game since the franchise moved to Oklahoma in 2008.
Before the series, Lakers coach JJ Redick compared the Thunder to two of the all-time great teams, the 1995-97 Chicago Bulls and 2015-17 Golden State Warriors, the only teams that had back-to-back net ratings of plus-10 or more.
"They're a terrific basketball team," Redick said. "Typically, if you can poke holes at a team in a playoff series, there's a good chance they might have, like, a temporary solution or can sort of adjust maybe a little bit. "This team, in-game, because of their personnel, can just adjust like that. They need shooting on the floor -- great. They need multiple wing defenders on the floor -- great. They need two bigs on the floor -- great."
All that is deliberate and has been carefully planned out.
Each piece, each player on the Thunder feels like it was hand selected to fit exactly the role the team needs. For the Lakers, each piece or player was just whomever they could get via trade, mini-midlevel or veteran minimum contract, or late second-round draft picks to fill in around James, Reaves and Luka Doncic.
But that top-heavy construction has been beaten easily in each of these three games -- and all four regular-season games against the process-driven behemoth that is this current Thunder team.
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VETERAN GUARD ALEX CARUSO felt that craftsmanship immediately when the Thunder traded for him before last season.
"I knew they had made the trade for me to play the way that I play," Caruso told ESPN. "I think the team that was assembled had a role carved out for somebody to play, and I was the person they chose."
After Game 3, Caruso was lingering in the locker room with about seven other players. That's about as rare a sight for a team with a free Saturday night in Los Angeles as you'll ever see. But Caruso had a simple explanation. "We're all going to a team dinner," he said. "The whole travelling party."
Those great Warriors teams used to plan team dinners like this on the road all the time. The Spurs did too. Not to build chemistry, but to relish in the chemistry they had already built.
"It's not easy to win 60 games in the NBA, and we've done it a few years in a row," Caruso explained. "It's just a testament to an everyday kind of process. You don't get there in one game. You don't get there overnight. They lost for a couple of years, found some guys that they can build around and then one-two people at a time and now we're here."
That mentality is the mantra of every rebuilding team. Very few ever achieve it like this Thunder group has.
Cast alongside a star-driven team like the Lakers -- or any other team that's not constructed as solidly -- and the Thunder pressure you until every flaw or weakness is exposed.
Caruso, of course, has seen both sides of this equation. He was a key role player on the 2020 Lakers championship team, led by James and Anthony Davis.
"That was an older team," Caruso said. "We had guys with experience. Hall of Famers with experience. Dwight Howard, [Rajon] Rondo. Then our role players were pretty elite, too. It can work, but they didn't think it was sustainable because they broke it up."
Caruso departed that championship team in 2021 as a free agent. The Lakers chose Talen Horton-Tucker and Kendrick Nunn to fill the role he had played -- a choice that stings even more watching the way he fits so well with the Thunder.
"It feels great to be a part of," Caruso said when asked what it feels like to be a part of a team built like the Thunder. "You do it the right way and then you have people that you enjoy being around every day, and it makes it really simple."