The world champion Los Angeles Lakers have a habit of failing to get up for games against lessor opponents as clearly demonstrated by their lucky double overtime win Saturday night against the lowly Detroit Pistons.
That this happened just a week after the Lakers played poorly and lost to the same Pistons by 15 points and just two days after playing their best half of the season to crush the Denver Nuggets only adds to the frustration. While Frank Vogel is not going to lose sleep over the Lakers’ disturbing tendency to play down to the level of lessor opponents, it’s still a bad habit for a team seeking to repeat as NBA champions and needs to be addressed.
Here are three simple ideas Frank Vogel could easily implement to cure the Lakers’ obvious motivational problems against lessor opponents: (1) Make the Game Fun, (2) Respect the Opponent, and (3) Practice Good Habits.
1. MAKE THE GAME FUN
It’s easy for NBA coaches and players to forget the game of basketball is fun, especially during a long and trying regular season without cheering and adoring fans in the stands exulting every play and celebrating every basket. Lakers players seem to have the most fun when the team is wildly flying around trapping, doubling, and rotating on defense and relentlessly pushing the pace and fast breaking on offense. So let them play that way.
Stop the vanilla one-on-one defense that allows other teams to stay close and the boring repetitive isolation offense with everybody standing around and free the players to attack on defense, run on offense, and just have fun.
2. RESPECT THE OPPONENT
Nothing is more disrespectful of an opponent than to treat a game with them as a trap game and that’s exactly what the Lakers’ coaching staff has done too often, sitting star players and forgetting every team can beat you. Game plan for the Pistons like you did for the Nuggets, give Grant and Jackson the same respect you gave Jokic and Murray, and come out and play like the Lakers instead of watering down your offense and defense.
The ‘trap’ in trap games refers to doing things differently due to disrespect, which starts with the coaching staff deciding how to approach the game and ends up with the team playing down to the level of their opponent.
3. PRACTICE GOOD HABITS
NBA teams complain about never having time to practice and how games often become substitutes for practice but the reality is games against lessor opponents usually end up ignoring good habits and practicing bad habits. That’s actually the biggest concern with playing down to the level of your opponent, which is why it’s important for the Lakers to play the same style of basketball against lessor opponents that they play against top teams.
The most important game is always the next game and the most important opponent the next opponent, which is why it’s necessary to play the schedule one game at a time and use every game to practice good habits.
The Lakers are trying build an identity as a team that’s committed to defense first and the aggressive defensive formula they’re deploying is to attack the top stars on each opponent with traps and doubles whether bigs or smalls. While there may be tweaks depending on whom they’re playing, the style the Lakers want to play shouldn’t vary greatly. Attack on defense and run on offense. That’s the championship blueprint they should bring every game.
The Lakers need to to make the game fun, respect the opponent, and practice good habits, which means treating each game and opponent as the most important. If they do that, they won’t have to worry about ‘trap’ games.
Jamie and I have a major difference of opinion (or maybe semantics) regarding the Lakers identity. Jamie believes we play each opponent differently because the matchups require that and points to how played the Rockets and Nuggets differently.
While I see the point Jamie is trying to make, I think the Lakers are seeking an identity that focuses on playing the same type of defense against every opponent, whether their stars are guards or centers. The idea is to force the ball out of their best players’ hands and into the hands of less capable or dangerous players. That’s the philosophy.
Now the tactics might change because of the matchups but those are just tweaks in my opinion. What I think the Lakers are shooting for is a style of basketball at both ends of the court that they can play against every opponent. They want to get where John Wooden got the UCLA Bruins where they imposed their style of play on every opponent at both ends of the court.
Part of doing that is how the Lakers solve the problem of playing down to their opponents. Watching the way we attacked the Nuggets compared to how we played against the Pistons clearly showed a completely different approach to the game both on offense and defense. Lakers players were not having fun, Pistons were disrespected, and we were not practicing good habits.
When you go back to the great Lakers teams and dynasties, they always played the same game regardless of the style or quality of the opponent. That’s the key to consistency for this Lakers team. Attack every team on defense and run against every team on offense. Make them adjust to how we’re playing rather than vice versa. That’s the key to eliminating ‘trap’ games and winning championships.
I imagine every coach would like to see their respective team impose their will on either end of the court. I also am of the opinion that no amount of ‘making the game fun’ is going to cure the slog of this season. The point is that it’s not as fun, for anyone. Not the players, not the refs, not the fans. The coaches probably don’t mind because they don’t have to shout as loud to be heard. No fans, the compressed schedule, now the All Star break, and all of it while still living in a pandemic makes for one drudgery of a season. Don’t see a way around that one except for we band together as a nation and start doing the right things to lessen the impact of COVID-19.
The fact is that the current Laker defense sieves points in the paint at an incredibly alarming rate and it’s trending in the wrong direction. Against the teams that want to get to the rim we overplay on the perimeter. Little issues like that crop up every game. This could be due to players still adjusting to one another (feels unlikely, it’s been months of playing with each other and not many games or anything missed due to COVID or injury, certainly not when compared to other teams). Part of the problem, ironically, is the 9 man rotation which is better suited for down the stretch and the playoffs. The 9 are getting run down too early. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 10-11 man rotation creep back into the picture for a few weeks but we’ll see.
Markieff Morris looks nothing like the guy we saw in the playoffs, same for KCP. Wes has been extremely up and down in his play. THT is learning every game and is prone to some coverage/communication issues every game. Trezz is often under-sized and more focused on boxing out than challenging with verticality. I do like how well we draw charges and we’re blocking shots at a decent clip. I don’t think we need a mobile center who can run all over the court, that just leaves us open to another communication or coverage breakdown. In the regular season I think the better and more reliable style of defense is to have a solid perimeter funnel into the center scheme like we had last season. A hustling, trapping, run all over the place defense during the regular season makes sense for the last 2 minutes of the half or if you’re down big.
The issues with happiness are the same that are hampering the ‘practice good habits’ point. There isn’t time to practice. The games are practices this season and there’s no good way around it. The only way it can be fun is if the team is mentally present, in order for that to happen they have to be healthy humans which means taking care of themselves mentally and physically. Spending time with family, things like that. One of the big reasons I wanted to roll it back was specifically because if the structure of the season: we only saw half of the sched and that in and of itself was highly compressed . That’s an issue for every team but an issue nevertheless.
I think the best point you raised is to respect the game, respect your opponent and don’t take whole quarters (or sometimes halves) off from playing with intensity and focus. It’s basically a testament to how good LeBron can be that we can d**k around for 2/3 – 3/4s of an NBA game and still find ourselves in striking distance. But it’s bad habit to form and rely on, as it would appear this team has done.
In the end it’s not that I disagree rather that I don’t see an easy way to deploy or instill the points you raise during this COVID impacted season. The good thing for us is the same issues plague the Association. What we really need to is to get past whatever the ASB ends up being, get into the unannounced portion of the schedule and have the playoffs just over the next hill as opposed to several mountain roads away. That and getting/staying healthy will do wonders for all of our team issues.
I like your 3 ideas, but I only think you have to pick your spots to fly around and trap being ultra aggressive on defense (point #1). I don’t know if you want Lebron and AD to exert that much energy regularly. But yes they definitely should do it more often to change the tempo in games…similar to how Riley had the Showtime Lakers use their trapping defense.
I agree, Lee. It’s like full court presses. You can’t do it all the time but we should have done it to start the 3rd or 4th quarters to get everybody energized. It’s like a change of pace when things get stale and should be done every game. It can also be used sporadicaly during the game to throw the other team off guard. That can be even more effective than long doses of it. Surprise traps and doubles. Get the team’s adreniline going.