Culture
Lakers hold off Pelicans, will face Nuggets in first round
After a disastrous loss to the Los Angeles Lakers to close their regular season, the New Orleans Pelicans sought redemption in the opening game of the NBA Play-In Tournament on Tuesday. Instead of redemption, the Pels got a high-intensity affair that ended in a 110-106 loss after star Zion Williamson’s 40-point game and early exit.
With the win, the Lakers earned a meeting with the defending champion Nuggets in Denver on Saturday in the first round of the playoffs. The Pelicans will host the Sacramento Kings — who knocked off the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday — in an elimination matchup Friday.
LeBron James scored a team-high 23 points, to go along with nine assists and nine rebounds. Lakers D’Angelo Russell, who scored 21 points and added seven assists, was also instrumental in the victory, shooting 5 of 11 from 3. Former Pelican Anthony Davis put up 20 points and notched a game-high 15 rebounds.
Williamson, whose 40 points paced both teams, also finished with 11 rebounds and five assists. He walked to the locker room in the final minutes of the game with what Pelicans coach Willie Green later described as left leg soreness.
But with Williamson, the Pelicans shook off their Sunday sluggishness with a back-and-forth night. They carried a 10-point lead into the early seconds of the second quarter, but Los Angeles found its momentum before the break and took a 10-point lead into halftime. From there, the Lakers kept building in the third as they continued to limit CJ McCollum (nine points total) and Brandon Ingram (11 points), who looked off after playing in his second game back after missing the previous 12 games with a knee injury.
The Pelicans reduced their 18-point deficit to seven points entering the fourth quarter, and found a spark from there, pushing to within two points after a 9-0 run that included a Williamson block on James that led to a Jose Alvarado 3. Alvarado then assisted Williamson on a monster dunk to tie the game 93-93, but the Lakers ultimately put the game away after Williamson’s shock exit with just over three minutes left.
ALVARDO TO ZION.
WE ARE TIED IN THE #SoFiPlayIn.
4 minutes left on TNT. pic.twitter.com/h9HeKaObJt
— NBA (@NBA) April 17, 2024
How will Lakers fare against Nuggets?
This was a spirited win for the Lakers, who staved off the Pelicans’ second-half rally to secure the No. 7 seed and advance to face the No. 2 Nuggets in a rematch of last season’s Western Conference finals. The Lakers will certainly be heavy underdogs entering the series, but they’re confident that their new starting lineup and high-powered offense will give them a chance to defeat the defending champions.
The obvious challenge will be solving Denver’s crunch-time offense, which has shredded the Lakers over the past calendar year. Denver has won eight straight games against the Lakers entering Game 1 on Saturday. — Jovan Buha, Lakers senior writer
GO DEEPER
Win and face Denver, or lose and risk elimination? There’s no wrong choice for Lakers
You can buy tickets to every NBA game here.
Required reading
(Photo: Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
By MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib, Elisabeth Egan, Claire Hogan, Laura Salaberry, Gabriel Blanco and Karen Hanley
December 2, 2025
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