Ugly

Aloha,

A win is a win is a win but man, that was ugly. Two things happened that we haven’t seen for a while. Our offense had been humming along nicely until last night. 21 turnovers led by LeBron with 8, guys missing shots they normally make and a lot of missed free throws made it appear like we were trying to lose.

Fortunately the other thing we haven’t seen for awhile showed up. Defense. We held the 76ers under a 100 points. The Lakers hadn’t done that since December. Maxie had 27 points but on 26 shots. I’ll take that every day of the week. Spencer and Cam were great on the perimeter and there wasn’t a 76er that had a good shooting night.

The 76ers are without Embid but they have been a tough out for everyone without him. They would not have won as many games with him if they didn’t have a lot of talent on that team. So I’m happy that no matter how hard we tried to lose, we didn’t fold and took over in the 4th.

Now the question becomes, can we play the kind of offense we had been playing along with the defense that we saw last night. That will be key. We went 9 and 2 down the stretch last year, with LeBron missing some of those games. Our schedule has us set up for a similar run if we can get it together. With 12 games left we really need to go 10-2 to have a chance to move up. Some of the teams above us have tougher schedules then the Lakers. Moving up in the standings will be tough but not impossible but there is zero room for error.