5 Things: Sluggish Start, Poor Effort Doom Lakers

Watching the game against Orlando for the second time and it was even more astounding at how completely lackadaisical the Lakers looked as a whole. Fundamental basketball evidently didn’t make the road trip’s opening flight so one can only hope it arrives at the next stop in Miami. All in all, while a couple lakers turned in some solid showings, the overall tenor of the loss was a complete and total lack of consistent effort.

1. Faceplant to kick it off. Another craptastic first quarter makes one think a change of some kind is imminent. Can’t pin it on Cam reddish, we’ve been slow out of the gate all season long as our first quarter point differential (210-139) is astounding to see over just 5 games. Slow starts mean uphill climbs for the rest of the game. This is where you miss a guy who starts the game with hustle and energy like Vanderbilt the most. Setting a tone out of the gate is as important as getting off to a good start in the 3rd. Can’t play catch up all game, every game all season. Hard to ask LeBron to lead the team out of the gate, dude’s 4 billion years old in NBA years. We need younger guys to match the energy and intensity the opponent brings against the Lakers on a nightly basis.
2. Fundamental were utterly MIA. Needed to put a body on multiple Magic players and just didn’t do it. They out-worked us to the tune of 19 offensive rebounds and clobbered us in second chance points (another disturbing season-long theme that’s emerged) and our turnovers led to an unbeatable edge in transition points. These are effort stats that lost us the game. these are the lunch pail stats and we didn’t bring our hard hat. That better change against the fundamentally sound and hard-playing Heat tonight. This happened all game long, Tree Trio or no, so that means it’s coming down to a lack of executing the fundamental of boxing out. Everyone needed to do better, nobody did.
3. Couldn’t hit a three to save our lives. D’Angelo Russell was 1-10, LeBron and Wood each shot 2-5 and Reaves looked good (more on that later) but after that the well ran very, very dry. These misses generated great scoring opportunities for Orlando more often that which is causing me to revise my internal guide for the lakers to play by. I was an advocate for 30 3 PT FGAs/game and now I’m looking at lowering that to 20, maybe 25 if they’re going in. AD didn’t shoot one and he’s shooting 42.9% (on an anemic 1.2 attempts/game) so maybe he needs to move out more as a floor spacer? I dunno…frustrating trend thus far.
4. Reaves rounding back into form. Of the five starters he was the only who had a positive impact on the game. he made his kind of shots, hit his threes, and generally looked like the dude we’d all been hoping to see consistently this season. While it came in a losing effort hopefully it means Reaves has put his early season struggles squarely in the rear view mirror.
5. Tree Trio adjustment. LakerTom and I did a show where I theorized this would be a good test for the three bigs line up that got so much attention since we deployed it against the Clippers. This was the first time a team that had seen it had time to make an adjustment and it turned out to be a pretty simple one: play faster and harder. Everything about this (both the effectiveness of a three big line up and it’s counter) is a small sample size at this point but it makes sense. The only way we force teams to go big to match up is by beating them on the scoreboard so when that didn’t happen against Orlando (seeing it for the second time) the experiment looked like a flop. This will be a season-long topic for debate, in theory I like the idea of either starting Christian Wood and strategically deploying the three big line up but the fact is they have to use that height to counter speed and effort. The Tree Trio didn’t box out, hustle for loose balls, or score all that much as they basically got ru off the floor by a smaller Orlando team (that still features length, just better speed). The deciding factor is match ups and who wins them. Start Wood against a faster guy or a team that screens for shots like Golden State and I don’t see the point or the sense in it. He’s not a guy who fights through screens and we don’t deploy a switch everything defense very well, at least not yet. That takes a lot of time to implement because everyone on the court has to be on the same page and in sync. We’re not close to that by a country mile. Maybe if we’d had Vando for camp but we didn’t and even then I doubt it. At any rate I’m not giving up on the idea but Coach Ham needs to be more strategic and the Tree trio needs to execute the fundamentals a lot better than they did.

Miami tonight, this will be a tough one. Everybody always wants to count Miami out, yet of all the teams with hype they’ve been to the NBA Finals more in the last 5 years than any other team so they’re doing something right. It starts with Jimmy Butler but the whole team buys in, even the not-supposed-to-be-here Tyler Herro, so if we show up with another half-assed effort i expect this to be an L.