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How the Lakers Gave the Rockets a Dose of Their Own Medicine

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“Usually I’d let him go on chewing those Oreos until he was dead broke, but I don’t have that kind of time.”

It was the moment Matt Damon discovered John Malkovich’s tell in “Rounders” and took him for six stacks of high society — $60,000 — to save his and his best friend’s life.

The moral of the moment is rather simple: when you find a weakness in a life or death situation, you lean on it. Sometimes, however, there’s no stopping the inevitable.

Following the Los Angeles Lakers’ 110-100 victory over the Houston Rockets in Game 4, Lakers head coach Frank Vogel was more than happy to share how he was preventing the high-powered Rockets from ever getting off the launching pad:

It’s not an exaggeration to say that coach Vogel caught onto Houston’s Oreo habit, and instead of letting the Rockets shoot themselves onto the golf course, he is daring them to pivot their business model in the final hour, and he’s doing it because he already knows their answer: they won’t, nor, will they ever.

They don’t know any other way.

After losing the first game of the series, the Lakers decided to shift their strategy to fight fire with fire and try to, quite literally, choke the air from the engines of the Rockets’ long-range bombers. The result of which has produced eye-popping results, as Houston’s quantity of three-point attempts per game has plummeted from 51.0 during the OKC series to 38.8 against the Lakers. That number drops even further to 31.5 if you filter out only the games in which Rajon Rondo has been active for.