5 Things: That Sinking Feeling…

Do not adjust your TV set, this is exactly how the Lakers look right now: disjointed, dispirited and disappearing from the western conference playoff picture one game at a time. Despite having most of the core that went to the WCF’s on the floor for the vast majority of the season the coach continues to list injuries/health as the main culprit in these losses. Digging further down gives us a different picture, though.

1. AD and LBJ showing up, mostly. You can see Davis is playing maybe his best regular season basketball as a Laker, ever, right now. He’s manning the paint, altering shots, rebounding as well as can be expected and he’s not slouching on offense either as he leads the team in PPG. This is what passing the torch should look like on AD’s end. James, since the IST, has looked like he’s in some kind of cruise control mode and is still managing to post a respectable line every night. So, while the days of leBron putting s team on his shoulders and willing them to a decent seeding in the playoffs are well and done it’s hard to ask for much more from the Lakers’ super star duo.
2. Coach keeps talking about injuries, most of the guys are back, are we that banged up?! In a word: no. While D’Angelo Russell was certainly considered a major piece in the offseason his minutes have been steadily declining for weeks now and he rarely played int he 4th quarter all season long. The two way dream for him, while vastly optimistic, is indeed DOA. Russell himself has labeled his skill set as “scorer” with his “I know how to do one thing well” quote. Gabe Vincent has barely played at any point and Rui was out last night with another injury. Still, if Reaves, Cam, Wood and vando aren’t enough to help AD and LBJ get a W when the heat were without Jimmy-B and a host of their own quality role-players then the Lakers are cooked already when it comes to hope in the playoffs. It’s sadm sorry, busted-ass excuse and Coach Ham needs to suck it up and admit the team isn’t playing hard or for one another right now and that starts with him. Keep trotting out “health and innuries” and you’ll be hearing “thoughts’ and prayers” in regards to your coaching career.
3. Why haven’t we seen the neat-O starting five that got us to the playoffs in the first place? Good question, one I ask myself fairly regularly, and the answer is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In this instance the availability of that particular has, admittedly, been spotty. Still, when the chance has arisen for them to play as a unit that has not really happened and that, again, is on the coach. That lineup has the chemistry, defense, scoring and playmaking in balance. It allows for Rui, Cam and Wood to feast on bench guys while playing with one of Lebron and AD and one of Reaves and DLo. Yet we’ve seen just about every other lineup other than that one, some mystifying in nature.
4. Wood’s best game in weeks. I like Wood as a post-passer in set plays, it gives the defense a hard choice when he gets the ball on the block and it allows for AD and others to cut to the rim for an easy bucket. C-Dub put up a nice line while also managing to join the brick parade from three. He, along with every laker not named ‘Reaves’ or ‘Christie’ missed every three pointer they took which led to some easy offense for Miami and that, in a nutshell, was the game.
5. When it comes to the three ball let success be your guide. We’re not a good three point shooting team and the volume we’re taking them out after the IST is putting us in a massive hole from which no amount of defensive adjustments can dig us out of. Consider that in 2023 we shot 34.9%, this after adding shooters and empowering the ones we had to let it fly and that’s up from last season by .5%. So now that we can’t blame Russell Westbrook for our terrible awful shooting, since we added the legendary offense creating five-out sets and since we have a healthy LBJ and AD actually shooting a decent clip from three…what the heck is going on? My answer is too many threes, especially when you’re clanging shot after shot after shot after shot. I get that the only way to make one is to take one but that’s also how you score the basketball from literally any and every other spot on the floor. Floater/ Can’t make ’em unless you take ’em! 12 foot pick and pop from the spot you’ve been shooting from since you were 12? Can’t make ’em if you don’t take ’em! And so on. We basically scored off of every single turnover we created (10 TOs, 22 points), out scored them at the free throw line by 10, killed them in the paint 60-42 and outrebounded them by 11. All of it was for nothing because our half court sets basically ended up in three pointers and not drives to the rim. Think about this: out of the 35 made FGs 10 of those were in transition off of turnovers or rebounds, we took 83 total shots, 30 of those were threes accounting for 36% of our attempts. The 22 turnovers (which Miami only scored 6 points off of) didn’t help either but had we kept that number in the low twenties not only does the efficiency improve but so, too, does the quality of shot taken…for this particular team. Again, if someone is hot let it fly. please and by all means. But just consider, give it a thought, attacking the paint when that three ball is clanging and banging.

With the “disconnect” report coming out and the Lakers clinging to the final playn spot over the equally pathetic Warriors there is increasingly little room for error. Someone needs to rally the troops, somebody needs to galvanize the locker room, so far nobody has.