DETROIT –– When Goliath looks like David, nobody roots for Goliath.
That's the dirty little secret of this Lakers season, the thing nobody says out loud on the talk shows because it doesn't test well with the focus groups: people want this team to fall apart.
They want the Luka Dončić experiment to curdle. They want the overpaid guy from Arkansas to shrink when the lights get hot. They want JJ Redick to look like a podcaster who wandered into the wrong building.
For three weeks, and all offseason, the critics circled like they always do, armed with the comfortable certainty of men who've never had to close out a game in Detroit on a Sunday.
The Lakers hadn't played anybody. The offense was a mirage. They weren't athletic enough, deep enough, serious enough.
Austin Reaves, they said, was a nice story and a bad contract — a second option in a league that demands first options.
Then Dončić, the NBA's leading scorer, the man averaging 45 points over his last four games, was sidelined with back tightness.
And the vultures licked their beaks.
You know what happened next; you just don't know how it happened.
In a wire-to-wire contest, without the best player on the planet, the Lakers went into Little Caesars Arena and beat the Pistons 121-116.
Sure, it wasn't pretty the whole way. It wasn't supposed to be. But it was real, and real is the one thing nobody wanted to give them.
"We set the tone from the very beginning," Reaves said. "We delivered the first punch. I know they are known to be the number one defense, but we looked like the number one defense in the league."
Reaves was right, and that's what should worry the rest of the NBA. Detroit entered Sunday with the best defense in basketball and a 6-2 record built on making teams feel claustrophobic. The Lakers hung 38 on them in the first quarter alone — 38-4 in the run that decided everything, four steals, five threes, Cade Cunningham held scoreless in the entire first half, which is the kind of stat that makes coaches check the box score twice.
"That's almost unheard of," Redick said. "The attention to detail on the defensive end was there from the beginning."
The jab, as the old Lakers say, was good tonight. Detroit never got past it.
But here's where the story turns, because stories like this always turn. Up 26 in the second quarter, the Lakers did what young-ish teams do: they relaxed.
Dennis Jenkins caught fire — "it's like you're standing in an open field and all of a sudden it starts raining," Redick said, and there isn't a better description of a role player hitting six of seven from deep.
Detroit pushed; the Lakers panicked. Three, four straight possessions ended in dunks and leak-outs, and a 26-point lead dissolved to one.
One point. On the road. Against the league's best defense. With no Luka.
Things looked like a disaster was looming; it seemed everything the Lakers had built in the first half was about to get flushed into the Detroit River.
Enter Reaves, who had been sitting, watching, seething.
"He came back in the game and everything just kind of settles down," Redick said. "That's what the leaders do."
Reaves' night: 43 points, 14 of 27 from the field, four of six from three, 11 of 11 from the free-throw line, five rebounds, four assists, in 36 minutes.
And — this is the stat that the analytics people should frame — one turnover.
One.
Against the most disruptive defense in the sport, with the ball in his hands every possession, against double teams and physicality and everything Detroit throws at people, Reaves turned it over once.
"He was the focal point of the number one defense in the league," Redick said. "One turnover, 43 points, 11 for 11 from the free throw line, over 50% from the field and four for six from three. That's as close to a perfect game in that role as you can get."
There's history here, too, and it matters.
In 2021, the Pistons held the 42nd pick and planned to spend it on Reaves.
He declined, bet on himself and signed with the Lakers as a free agent.
Detroit took Isaiah Livers instead; Livers now plays in Japan.
Reaves just hung 43 on the franchise that almost had him, in their gym, on a night when his team needed every single one.
Now here's the thing about Reaves, and it's what makes people outside Laker Nation crazy: he refuses to accept the narrative.
The dagger — a one-legged, off-balance, shot-clock-expiring three to bury Detroit's last run — should be the defining image of his career so far.
His assessment?
"That was a terrible shot," Reaves said. "When I stepped back to shoot, I thought it looked like one of those ridiculous shots Luka makes. I didn't even try to make it, and then it went in. It looks the same in the stat sheet. I was a lucky basketball player tonight."
He was the only one in the locker room who believed that.
"There's never a dull moment around here," Reaves joked.
Walker Kessler, who put up 12 points, 16 rebounds, seven of them offensive, and three blocks, shook his head at the whole "luck" business.
"Luka is an incredible player, and I think there are times when he's playing that A.R. kind of has to take a secondary role," Kessler said. "But you could see tonight that he's a very capable player. It doesn't matter if we get a Luka game or an A.R. game — we're still going to win."
Read that again. Sit with it.
Because that's the ineluctable truth this season keeps serving up, course after course, win after win: the Lakers aren't one man deep anymore.
They haven't been for a while. We just refused to see it.
The Lakers' bench scored 45 points.
Collin Sexton came off it and dropped 17, attacking left-handed at the rim as if the paint owed him money, settling the team when the wheels got wobbly.
Ziaire Williams scored 16, hit threes, dunked off cuts and spent the night making Cunningham uncomfortable — picking him up early, shading him this way and that, refusing to let Detroit's engine find idle.
Kessler blocked shots and kept the ball in play, the small genius detail of a big man who understands possession is sacred, and threw in a fourth-quarter and-one that Reaves called "the most important play of the night."
Man down, next man up, Sexton called it. Simple words for a simple formula that somehow eludes most teams.
And Redick? The podcaster-coach the internet keeps waiting to expose?
He managed the game like a man who'd done it a thousand times.
Detroit made its run while Reaves rested late in the third, and the clamor to rush him back started immediately. Redick stuck to his rotations.
"If you overreact to that, then you're going to overreact to it consistently," Redick said. "You got to allow the players to play through it. You got to allow them to get their rest. It's chaos otherwise."
The players rewarded that faith by closing the door themselves. Three turnovers in the fourth quarter against a ramped-up defense. Free throws down the stretch — Reaves and Sexton knocking them down while Detroit kept hunting twos. Poise, on the road, in a building that was one stop from becoming a bonfire.
The comeback was the tell, though.
Detroit cut it to one, and the building smelled blood, and the Lakers didn't splinter. They huddled. They reloaded. Sexton drove left. Reaves got to the line. Kessler swallowed the glass.
"Games like that really just show our togetherness," Sexton said. "We have to continue to fight. It's going to be ups, downs, but we have to continue to push to the end."
This is now five consecutive wins, with a 9-2 record. The best start the skeptics keep insisting is a fluke, and the fluke keeps happening every other night.
So go ahead. Keep saying they haven't played anybody.
Keep saying Reaves is overpaid, that their defense will crack, that the whole shimmering thing collapses the moment a real contender punches back.
That's the comfortable story, and comfortable stories are hard to abandon.
Just know that Sunday night, in the loudest, most hostile gym in the league, without their best player, the Lakers wrote a different ending.
Quietly. Coldly. Almost casually.
Reaves said nothing about it was dull.
There never is, when a team decides to stop asking permission.