Aaaaaaaaand we’re back! The Lakers title defense kicked off its Foreward part of the season (aka as the NBA preseason this year) as Chapter 1 is yet to come. We didn’t see many of the players who were featured on the team when we won the NBA title a couple days ago or so. We did, however, see many (not all) of the new faces in what was an expectedly ragged affair. Style points weren’t many to come by and there won’t be any major rotation decisions made based off of what we saw. so the news that will likely make the most headlines is: The NBA is back!
- The Good. Talen Horton-Tucker looked pretty good, he made nice plays both for himself and others. He looked solid on D as evidenced by his three steals. He had really a nifty finish over Zu in the 3rd. Not the most efficient showing, he played a tough game, though. He consistently found a way to slow the game down which is a huge developmental step for any young player. Trezz played as advertised. the dude almost had a double-double by the half and brought regular season energy in a preseason game. I loved his steal and finish on Serge in the first half. There were some nice defensive close outs for a preseason game. Wes Mathews had a super-efficient game. Biggest good? No serious injuries after we saw Wes hit the deck with a slight ankle tweak and Caruso slip and get some treatment on his hip.
- The Bad. Schroder didn’t ‘wow’ and none of our ‘sure hope they improve as shooters!’ guys shot great. Fans of Kostas Antetokounmpo saw some nice flashes but will surely have wanted to see a little more, he did play well on defense. Kuzma had a mostly ‘Kyle…’ showing until the game was on the line when he found an open Quinn Cook for a three and canned a clutch triple of his own. You know, the regular preseason kind of thing.
- The Ugly. The turnovers, so very many turnovers. With so little time between October 11th and the season kicking off there isn’t the luxury of a lengthy ‘getting acquainted on the court’ phase of the season and it showed tonight. Also the overall shooting was terrible, especially from three point land. Personally not sweating the Bad or the Ugly, for many reasons. Mainly: it’s preseason.
- One odd thing: no rookies on the Lakers this year. There will be no hazing, no backpacks, everyone will carry their own luggage (or in the personal manner preferred) and the whole squad will have some amount of NBA service time logged, barring a trade.
- From paper to reality. Since we didn’t see 4/5ths of the Lakers starting line up tonight (I’m assuming Schroder starts) it’s fair to say we still ain’t seen nothing yet. We got a win, nobody got hurt and some of the guys we’re hoping develop into something useful did pretty well. We’ll see if Sunday sees more players of impact see the floor for some time together.
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Good Fiver, Jamie. Tough to get excited about a preseason game where only one of our projected five starters played and turned the ball over 6 times. But it’s still a preseason game after only a few days of practice after only a few weeks off. And Dennis was playing with four bench players. Did not see great pick and rolls with Trezz but can’t wait to see Schroder, KCP, LeBron, AD, and Marc starting lineup. Working on a ‘Gasol and Schroder empowering the Lakers’ offense’ article right now.
I had a big disagreement with Gerald on the podcast where he continued his vendetta against THT, whom I thought played well. I was especially encouraged by his 6 for 6 from the line as that bodes well for him eventually becoming a good 3-point shooter. Kid can get to the rim like Waiters but still looked a little skittish on defense although I love his length and big hands on D. We may be seeing an 11 man rotation this year because of the promise and upside Talen can bring to the team. He’s our first round lottery pick for this season.
For the Clippers, PG looked good. We’ll see how he handles the pressure when they get into the playoffs again. Still miss the fans. Lakers need to install those big screens like in the bubble. Being in NorCal, I watched the game via League Pass, which used the Lakers feed since it was our home game but had the Clippers announcers. Man, that was hard to stomach all game long. Glad we’ll have ESPN doing Sunday’s game. F the Clippers!
‘F the Clippers’ lol
Oh I heard the disagreement and I also wanted to chime in on how awesome I thought it was that Wall and Cousins had such solid debuts. We may well forever view Cousins as ‘the one got away, like, three times…’ But I couldn’t be happier for both players, shame they have to be Rockets, lol.
In regards to THT, it’s the same conundrum we see with Kyle Kuzma, right? Give him a bigger role, more of a share in the scoring and the numbers aren’t terrible. Are they All Star numbers? No, no they’re not but they are solid. In reality the beauty of the Lakers right now is we don’t honestly need either one to blossom into a star…yet. We have nJames and AD, the latter firmly entering his prime and LeBron seemingly forever entrenched in his ‘golden years prime’ vibe.
The defense is the key with his ability to make plays for the team. If he can average 3-4 game and play some stout D he’ll carve out a role. If he tries to go for 230/game I don’t think wee’ll see too much of him.