An L.A. Sports Night for the Ages
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 28 Oct, 2025

From a Lakers game to an 18-inning World Series watch party, I was reminded why I love both L.A. and live sports.

Last night combined pretty much everything I love about sports.

I need to start with the caveat that as a native Iowan I grew up without a professional sports team in my backyard. 

The woman in front of me at the Lakers game was more interested in the Dodgers game on her phone

My Bronx-native father, having grown up watching Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford deliver one World Series win after another, had passed on his Yankees fandom to me. But he didn’t care enough about basketball or football to have a team, leaving me to fend for myself.

As such I decided to take advantage of my current LA residency and hop on the LeBron James bandwagon.  Why not cheer for one of the greatest of all time while you can, even if being a Yankees-Lakers fan confuses the hell out of people?

And last night, I had a ticket to the Lakers game to see LeBron in person.

It was only while I was heading to the Crypto.com arena — a name that it kills me to type out — when I learned that both LeBron James and Luke Dončić, the Lakers’ two biggest stars, would not be playing due to their respective injuries.  I resigned myself to the fact that it would be a less exciting night than I had hoped. 

Boy was I wrong.

Tom's Watch Bar in downtown L.A. had no shortage of TVs

Lakers-Trail Blazers

The Lakers were playing the Portland Trail Blazers, a team that under normal circumstances could have been any generic opponent.  But these were not normal circumstances. 

Last Thursday the basketball world was rocked with one of the biggest sports scandals in history, and the Trail Blazers were squarely at the center of it.

Portland coach Chauncey Billups had been arrested by the FBI for his alleged involvement in a gambling scheme that has only gotten increasingly bizarre as more details have emerged, which include involvement of at least three of New York’s famed mafia families as well as the use of high tech gadgets that helped Billups’ associates cheat unsuspecting poker players out of tens of thousands of dollars. 

Suffice it to say that Billups is taking some time away from the sport of basketball. 

That has thrust assistant coach Tiago Splitter into the position of interim head coach.  Last night marked just his third game at the helm.

But aside from Billups' scandal, there were at least a couple other reasons that the Trail Blazers have been on my mind lately, both of which are related to my work here at GoldSea.

By 11pm, I needed another beer

One is that Andrew and Peggy Cherng, the founders of Chinese fast food behemoth Panda Express, are embroiled in a legal dispute surrounding the Trail Blazers’ purchase. 

The Cherng’s were initially set to buy the team as part of a bid led by investment group Raj Sports, but later jumped ship to instead purchase minority ownership of the team under businessman Tom Dundon’s Dundon Group.  Now Raj Sports is suing the Cherngs for interfering with their business transaction and seeking to bar their involvement in a sale to the Dundon Group. It’s unclear if they will be involved in a purchase in any capacity now.

Another exciting aspect of the team is rookie player Yang Hansen.  Hansen was the big surprise of this past summer’s NBA draft.  He was chosen mid-way through the first round, way earlier than anyone expected. The Chinese native then seemingly proved his worth with dominant performances during the NBA’s summer league and training camp. 

But Hansen began the NBA season last week with substantially less playing time and fewer points than had been anticipated, leading to such headlines as “Blazers have a Yang Hansen-sized elephant in the room to address,” “Trail Blazers’ Yang Hansen: Not very involved,” and “Yang Hansen is a triumph of imagination.”

Sadly, he did nothing to dispel the narrative last night, clocking nine minutes of play during which he scored only a single point after going 0-3 on field goals, 0-2 on three-pointers, and 1-2 at the free throw line. 

And yet, he still did better than the other player I was excited to see: the Lakers' Bronny James who went 0-2 on field goals and had zero points to show for his twenty minutes of playing time. 

I guess if there’s a silver lining it's that he did score the same number of points last night as LeBron James. 

The son of one of basketball's greatest players of all time has of course been the subject of endless scrutiny since he was drafted to the Lakers last year despite claims that he was undeserving of the spot given the fact that it likely happened due to the near-insistence of his father.

I personally own both a purple licensed Lebron James Lakers jersey and a yellow knockoff James Jr., the latter purchased more or less out of irony despite the fact that I do still want to see him succeed. 

Dodgers-Blue Jays

It was during the second half of last night’s Lakers game that things got interesting…for reasons that had nothing to do with the Lakers.

Twenty minutes across the city the defending champion L.A. Dodgers were taking on the Toronto Blue Jays in game three of a tied World Series. 

I had cracked a joke to my buddy about how any celebrity sitting court side at the Lakers game was basically telling the world that they couldn’t get tickets to the World Series, which seemed to ring true given the ‘celebrities’ who showed up on the jumbotron.

As excited as I was to attend only my second Lakers game ever, a part of me did wish that I could watch some of the baseball game — on TV, of course.  Little did I know that the game was still going. And going and going and going.

During the fourth quarter of the Lakers game I checked my phone, shocked to see that the Dodgers game was in the 12th inning. It was also around that time that I noticed the woman sitting in front of me was watching the baseball game on her phone, paying little attention to the live sporting event that she had paid to attend. 

Even more pathetic than her behavior was my own attempt to catch a glimpse of her screen.

Sadly the Lakers did not prevail.  They lost by 14 and it was never particularly close towards the end.  But as I was leaving that game I figured I might as well stick around the area and catch the end of the ball game.  Surely it had to be wrapping up. 

It was exactly 10pm and Tom’s Watch Bar had all but one of what had to be 100 screens turned to the game.  It had started at 5pm which means that the patrons had been sitting there drinking for at least five hours.

The sudden infusion of energetic Lakers fans must have felt like the portal scene in Avengers: Endgame when an entirely new crop of superheroes unexpectedly shows up out of nowhere to offer snack up support.

I stood by the bar, watching excitedly. 

The game rolled on, entering the 14th inning. And then the 15th. And then the 16th. 

While I had already decided that I was going to write about this experience, I started asking myself if there was an explicit “Asian American angle” I should be paying attention to. 

Surely Shohei Ohtani’s presence was good enough.  After two home runs and two doubles over four at bats, he was arguably the reason that the Dodgers were still in this thing at all.  Now every time Ohtani got to the plate, the patrons of Tom’s Watch Bar would loudly boo.

To be clear the jeers were not directed at Ohtani but at the Blue Jays, who were now refusing to pitch to him and would instead intentionally walk him for his second four at-bats of the game. 

And then there was Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Japanese pitcher for the Dodgers who is already on track to become one of the franchise’s most impactful post season players in history. A mere shot of him warming up on TV sent the entire watch bar into an excited frenzy. 

At about 11pm some time after the effects of the tallboys my buddy had bought us at the Lakers game had worn off, I decided to come out of retirement and order a cold one.  

Love of the Game

At risk of waxing a little too poetic about drinking beer at a sports bar on a Monday night, there really was something beautiful about the whole scene:

The shared camaraderie; strangers high-fiving one another when there was a big play.  Even the two brave Blue Jays fans standing in the middle of the packed 1,200 person venue were welcomed by their adversaries, which is something that I could safely say would not be the case were these Yankees fans in a Boston sports bar. 

As a Yankees fan myself I had shown up wanting the Dodgers to lose, which might have been a small consolation for the humiliation they had bestowed on us in the 2024 World Series. 

But truthfully I found myself accepting that there might be worse things in life than seeing the happy warriors around me — who assumed I was one of them — rewarded for staying until the bitter end.

At 11:50pm in the bottom of the 18th inning, Dodgers slugger Freddy Freeman hit a homerun, ending the game. The Dodgers had won 6-5 in a game that was now shared the record for longest in World Series history. 

Such loud and prolonged chants of “Fred-dy” surely hadn’t been heard since Queen’s 1985 Live Aid performance.

I wasted no time walking to the metro in hopes of making it home before 1am. 

As a lover of both sports and Los Angeles, it had surely been a night for the ages.  Even if LeBron had been nowhere in sight.