For the first time this season the Lakers beat an in-division rival on their homecourt, regardless of the corporate sponsorship. They also remained unbeaten in 2022. Riding hot finishes from James and Monk along with a zero turnover performance from Westbrook the Lakers held off a 4th quarter rally from Sacramento to move 1 game above .500.
- The motherf@#$ing problem that is LeBron James. The 30 point streak ended against the Wolves and through 3 quarters it looked like it would stay that way. But when the Kings came out swinging to start the 4th LeBron had been trying to answer with threes. They made an adjustment after an early timeout and LeBron started driving to the rim and the Kings were really slow to re-adjust and play him to drive and not shoot. LeBron got himself going on his drives to the rim slipping past the King “defense” for pretty easy buckets along with earning a couple trips to the line, as well.
- Malik Monk earning his next big payday…wherever that may end up being. If I’m Rob I’m penciling in whatever amount we can off Malik via the MLE come the offseason. It’s highly likely he could earn more elsewhere but, seeing as we gave him a shot at PT, he may be open to a one season deal and then re-upping long term once we have his early Bird rights. Regardless to what goes down after this season Monk is straight hooping right now. His defense is a lot better than advertised, he’s able to get his own shot, create for others and he can get white hot form three. His game is already expanded beyond my expectations this season. Love me some Monk and I hope we figure out a way to keep for a good long while.
- THT plays up to his hype. Talen ended his long, multi-game 0-fer streak from three, looked a lot more confident in everything he was doing and in general played like the player we all hope he can become more consistently. He created a lot of shots for others, scored efficiently, and played solid defense. I’ll forever want THT to rebound better, I think, but all in all hard to find fault in such a positive game for the young man who is still going through his NBA growing pains.
- Dwight Howard’s season high night. Dwight hadn’t yet scored 14 points this season as last night was his season high. Not sure why that surprised me so much but it did. Dwight was the force on the glass that we so desperately needed grabbing a game high 14 rebounds with a 50/50 split between offensive and defensive rebounds. We may or may not start Dwight ever again and it doesn’t matter. The dude puts on his yellow hard hat and goes to work when called upon. We only need one, though, and between DAJ and himself Dwight is, by far, the superior player. Time to let DeAndre loose into the wild and see where his true home is.
- Alvin was right to be so pissed off. That rule is insane and how it hasn’t been abused by some random clock keeper to OH MY GOSH DID I JUST FORCE A JUMP BALL?!?!?! an NBA game is kind of astounding. I read it as “If the clock starts before a player has touched the ball off of a missed free throw the teams must jump center” which, in theory, makes sense. The thing was, in this case, everyone had left Fox to grab the rebound on his own. He was, basically, the only one going for the board for whatever reason. So it REALLY set the Kings back a possession late in the game when they had already secured the rebound, clock being right or not. Odd rule that certainly needs some revisiting.
For a hot minute I thought we had poo-poohed this game away and the Lakers came back and took it from the Kings, odd rule or no. We did a great job maximizing our possessions by valuing the ball and getting way more FGAs than the Kings did. We need to keep that mentality and score better and we’ll hold the fort until AD gets back just fine.
Aloha Jaime, nice post. One thing that caught my eye was the amount of play making that THT and Monk were doing. THT had 6 assists and Monk had 4 but to be fair he should have had 6, with Dwight missing a dunk and a bobbled lob. Moving forward I would like to see this continue. It take the pressure off of both LeBron and Russ.
Good post as always, Jamie. Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to respond to your previous 5er. It’s always good to see one after every game, especially after a win, which to me is going to be the trend going forward.
To me, the one thing that stood out was the five turnovers the Lakers had for the game. Don’t know if that is a record for the team but I don’t recall the team having that low number of turnovers. It sounds unbelievable and I hope we can keep that trend going. Turnovers are the reasons we lost some games, if not many.
Westbrook with zero turnovers is just unbelievable though that might cost us assists. The fact that we have balanced assists from other players made the game so fundamentally sound and different. Great to see that many players chip in some assists. I am going to keep an eye on Westbrook’s assists versus turnover ratios. In other words, does he commit more turnovers the more assists he has? Is there a direct correlation between the two? Does reducing the number of turnovers at the expense of assists make him a good point guard? That would be interesting to see going forward. In as much as I have been complaining about our lack of ball security, this is a much welcome situation.
I also want to say that the coaching staff did a good job of strategically deploying Dwight to help neutralize the kings on the boards. 7 offensive rebounds were huge for a team that lacks size around the rim starving for reinforcement while AD is out. Overall, we had good contributions from just about everyone except Ariza who seems to be still finding his way back. I am not worried about him yet as he is a veteran you can count on. The missed free throws at the end of the game were just horrible to watch though they did not cost us the game.