The Lakers picked up their best win of the season on Sunday, twice overcoming a double-digit deficit to take down the Nuggets, a team they'd lost to in their previous two meetings.

Denver came out and played a physical style that knocked L.A. on its heels early, but down the stretch, the Lakers dug deep and found enough toughness to fight back and take the victory.

As it turns out, the Nuggets just might have had something to do with L.A.'s late-game surge.

It's one thing to impose your will physically on the Lakers, which is something that this team has been accused of allowing to happen to them time and time again. But it's quite another to constantly remind them about it while it's happening in the form of trash talk, and the normally mild-mannered Pau Gasol pointed out afterward that Denver might have been engaging in too much of it.

"They talk too much," Gasol said. "Way too much. I don't listen to things that don't make sense. I'm a player that likes to play and that's how I talk, by me playing. Other players can't do that."

Gasol never says anything about, well, anything. He is among the most professional (read: boring) people to talk to after a game, whether his team wins or loses. So for him to pointedly criticize the Nuggets for running their mouths, the level of talk in this one must have been off the charts.

If what Gasol said is true, then the Nuggets have no one to blame but themselves for waking the so-called sleeping giant. In a game where Denver led by 11 points late in the third, and where Kobe Bryant shot a dismal 3-for-17 from the field, this is one that the Nuggets should have won. But the Lakers turned up the heat defensively, and held Denver without a field goal in the game's final four minutes.

It's clear that the motivation to do so didn't necessarily come from within, but instead came from the mouths of the Nuggets.

Source: Brett Pollakoff, FanHouse