DENVER — The buzzer was still sounding as Jamal Murray's game-winner hit the bottom of the net in Monday's 101-99 win over the Los Angeles Lakers.

He drilled the fadeaway jumper over Anthony Davis and right in front of his Denver Nuggets teammates, where pandemonium ensued. Davis, after lunging toward the shot, landed on Denver's bench and got a courtside view of the celebration.

Twenty-two minutes of game time earlier, the Lakers were up 20 and had a 95.2 percent win probability on the road. After the game, a few Lakers players couldn't help but recall an officiating decision that helped chip away at their lead.

With just under 40 seconds left in the third quarter, D'Angelo Russell drove left on Michael Porter Jr., who swiped at the layup attempt and hit Russell in the face after the ball had left his hand. Officials called a foul on the play, but the Nuggets challenged.

After a relatively short review, the call was overturned. Referee Scott Foster explained, "After review, the hook to the arm is deemed marginal. It's a successful challenge."

He didn't even address the post-shot contact to Russell's face. The shot wound up being entered in the play-by-play log as: "MISS Russell 1' Driving Layup."

"Questionable calls really dictated a lot," Russell said after the game. "We all saw it."

Later, he doubled down on X.

His teammate, LeBron James, wasn't too happy about it either.

"I don't understand what's going on in the replay center, to be honest," LeBron told reporters. "D-Lo clearly gets hit in the face on a drive, What the f--k do we have a replay center for if it's going to go [like that]? It doesn't make sense to me. It bothers me."

But here's the thing. Los Angeles had a 20-point second-half lead. By the time the controversial play happened, the Lakers had already surrendered half of that advantage. The score was 79-69 when the challenge occurred.

Had Russell been given the free throws, he might have stretched the lead to 12, but there's no way to know if that would've slowed Denver's momentum.

Earlier in his postgame presser, LeBron said, "We had our chances." He's right. Giving up a 20-point lead is about a lot more than a single challenge that happened halfway through the comeback. Regardless of whether Foster and his crew interpreted the call correctly, there was certainly more L.A. could've done to preserve its lead.

About halfway through the fourth quarter, LeBron hit back-to-back threes to stretch the lead from two to eight. With 5:27 left in the game, the Lakers' win probability jumped back up to 92.5 percent. L.A. then proceeded to give up 20 points (or 181.8 points per 100 possessions).

With under a minute left, with the Lakers up two and with Murray heating up—he scored 14 of his 20 points in the final frame—LeBron was called for a foul on a driving Murray. The contact on that one wasn't obvious, and LeBron asked for a challenge. Lakers head coach Darvin Ham opted not to, and Murray hit both free throws.

LeBron scored on the ensuing possession to push the Lakers back in front, 99-97.

On the play immediately preceding the Murray dagger, James dropped Kentavious Caldwell-Pope with a subtle forearm and went on to miss a wide-open three from the top of the key.

As LeBron said, L.A. had its chances, particularly on defense. Frustration after a loss like that is understandable, but one challenge in the third quarter is nowhere near as important as six minutes of giving up nearly 200 points per 100 possessions.

But perhaps James' postgame commentary was as much about Game 3 and 4 as it was Monday's heartbreaking loss.

Generally speaking, the Lakers haven't had much to complain about on the officiating front over the last two seasons. In both 2022-23 and 2023-24, L.A. led the league in net free-throw attempts (their attempts minus their opponents'). The Lakers' net free-throw attempts more than doubled second place in each season.

Over the two years combined, the Lakers have taken 983 more free-throw attempts than their opponents. The second-place Miami Heat are at plus-386.

All of those trips to the line didn't prevent an epic reaction from LeBron to a missed call in January 2023 that led to this post from the NBA Referees' official X account:

From that point of the 2022-23 season to the end, L.A. shot 328 more free-throws than its opponents in just 32 games. The Philadelphia 76ers were second in net free throws over that stretch at plus-112.

Perhaps Monday's pointed comments from Russell and LeBron will settle somewhere into the subconscious of officials going forward and return this rivalry to a trend that was broken in Game 2.

The Nuggets have now beaten the Lakers in 10 straight regular-season and postseason games. Monday was the first time during the streak in which Denver (which got 17 free-throw attempts) took more freebies than L.A. (which had 13).

That may be overthinking all of this. There's no reason to accuse officials of intentionally juicing the Lakers' free-throw differential. As the last 10 results in this years-long series have shown, it wouldn't even seem to matter if that was happening.

The Nuggets, particularly during crunch time of important games, are about as machine-like as any team in recent NBA history.

In the fourth quarter alone, Nikola Jokić had seven points, five rebounds and four assists and was plus-11 in under 10 minutes. Murray, after a second straight cold shooting night, scored six points in the final minute.

For nearly a decade, LeBron was an NBA terminator who laid waste to just about any Eastern Conference opponent who got in his way. When he jumped to the Western Conference for the first time in his career in 2018, there wasn't any way he could know that another machine was coming together to end his reign.

Regardless of officiating or individual confusing challenges, the Nuggets have this matchup solved.