Gabe Vicente is 6-1. He is an excellent defender against players in his average size range, but there is only so much he can do against players significantly taller than him. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t want to reduce him just on the court to, say, a 7-foot Hall of Famer who can score from all over the place. This is not a disease for the maximum number of fighters because, frankly, there are only a few such players. The Phoenix Suns have one in Kevin Durant.
In the final minutes of JJ Redick’s first coaching job loss on Monday, that was too much. With the rating set at 101 and just over three minutes on the clock, Durant landed on an all-too-common and all-too-successful strategy: hunting down the miniature man.
This is the most run-of-the-mill switch search I’ve ever seen. Durant is preserved through Rui Hachimura. Bradley Beal, who was preserved through Vincent, comes up and shows. The Lakers are forced to change. Durant hits a jumper over the smaller defender. Once a property looms, it’s very similar, and the week Durant wants to score in visitors adds two more to Phoenix’s tally.
Even if the way did not immediately address problems, it created benefits that ultimately generated them. Durant found Vincent again, and although he swung the ball and Devin Booker missed the shot, the Suns got the offensive rebound, and with everyone out of position, Royce O’Neale scored on a simple floater.
That extreme basket gave Phoenix the three-point control it ultimately needed to win the game, and Redick took on the closest responsibility for the game.
“If there’s anything to criticize, it’s probably me,” Redick said, noting that he could have beaten Durant in the fourth quarter. It may have, but let’s not pretend it was ever a truly perfect choice. There were none given the equipment he had at his disposal.
Attacking Phoenix is a tremendously dangerous way. The Suns have three megastar perimeter players, a high-time 3-point percentage leader and a group of position players more than capable of knocking down noticeable looks. They don’t seem to be a group that would like to have 4v3 teams on hand. In a truly perfect world, you want to have it so you can protect them instantly.
The question, next, is who Redick could have done that with. Max Christie, a 6-5 wing, was once destined to be that Lakers player, but he has struggled mightily so far this season. The Lakers have lost their minutes in four games this season by a combined 55 points. Even the closest two years on the bench, he’s still too raw for high-leverage minutes, especially on offense.
Jarred Vanderbilt is the most efficient perimeter defender on the Lakers roster, although he is injured. Even if he wasn’t, well, he’s not even raw on offense. It’s simply sinister. As the Lakers learned in the 2023 Western Conference Finals against Denver, relying on him in tough moments is equivalent to playing 4-on-5 offensively.
D’Angelo Russell probably would have made it easier if he had taken his photographs. If not a fit for Durant, he is at least taller than Vincent and would have opened the door for the Lakers to win on offense instead of protection. Instead, he shot 2 of 9 from 3 and missed badly on his last two attempts, both clearly noticeable in the fourth quarter. Redick couldn’t believe he was getting close to the game, especially when he had put the offense in the hands of Austin Reaves.
Dalton Knecht is an offense-first rookie. Jaxson Hayes is an in-betweener, and while he’s more cellular than most heavyweights, the Lakers didn’t commit to going near-heavy against a Suns team with so much perimeter firepower. And now we’ve covered the entire rotation.
That’s the illness Redick suffered down the stretch in Phoenix, and it’s the only one he’s committed to continuing to deal with as the season progresses. The Lakers have four normally important players: LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Hachimura and Reaves. Barring a surprise or an end to the variation in play, these will be the Lakers’ most extreme games and they will be widely relied upon to explode at both ends of the field. But basketball teams are good for five players on a date, not four, and as we have mentioned, every other player on the team has some major defect.
On Monday, Redick determined that Vincent’s flaw (his length) was once the lesser of all those evils. That decision may have cost the Lakers the game, and from that standpoint, he was right to take some blame for the loss. But there wasn’t a good option for him either, and as reductive as it is to reduce each Lakers season to the industry market, there are actually different recovery options for the Lakers here.
Redick takes the Lakers beyond the ability they have, but that ability has a definite limit. On Monday night, that ceiling was exactly as high as Durant’s. If the Lakers want to break away across that boundary, they will have to provide Redick with the equipment to do so.
