A few reasons why

Aloha,

There were a lot of reasons for the loss today. Here are a few.

The Suns had 14 offensive rebounds to our 3. A lot of those were long rebounds that the Suns beat us to the ball. They just out hustled us. No excuse for that.

The Suns made 18 free throws to our 4. Yes there was a lot of missed calls but part of the problem was we didn’t attack the rim like we generally do. We shot more jumpers and we didn’t even try to get AD the ball in the first half. He didn’t shoot of free throw. Part of that was on the ref’s but part of that was on the Lakers. And in the 1st quarter we let the bad calls get in our head. If there is one thing drives me crazy about LeBron is is argues with ref after a missed call and doesn’t always get back on defense. The ref’s never change their minds.

We won’t win enough games to matter when AD has 4 points on 4 shots in a half.

Our defensive rotations were slow. Booker had 22 points and KD had 21. I will take that all day long but you have to be quicker on your rotations. Allen shoots 49% from 3 and he got way too many wide open looks. Royce O’Neil made 6 3’s. He has always been a good 3 point shooter but even in my advanced age could have knocked down a few with the time he was given to line up the shot.

Rui had 11 points in the first half on 5-7 and 2-2 on 3’s. He had 2 points on 2 shots in the 2nd. It was like they completely forgot about him. They didn’t have a defender strong enough on him but we didn’t try much to post him up.

Spencer has not been good the last couple of games. He needs to contribute much more on offense.

It’s games like this that is very frustrating for me because it was very winnable. The more games like these the more I miss Vando with his defense and rebounding. Unfortunately he is still in a walking boot and if he does return it could be too late by then. We can be better than this. But time is running out.