There was never a time when Wednesday’s game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat was especially close.
The last lead the Lakers had was 6-3. Miami had its first double-digit lead less than halfway through the first quarter. They went into halftime with a lead of 17 and led by 41 when the final horn sounded. It was an annihilation from start to finish, an effort the Lakers were deeply dissatisfied with.
“I’m embarrassed, we’re embarrassed,” coach JJ Redick said after the 134-93 loss that dropped his team to 12-10. “It’s not a game where I thought we had the right fight, the right professionalism. I’m not sure what got lost in translation. There has to be some ownership on the court.”
LeBron James echoed the sentiment and said it was “Definitely embarrassed” too and that he agreed with everything his coach said.
“There’s no X or O scheme to get you through that,” James said. “If you don’t want to come compete, then it’s other problems. We have to solve it.”
That lack of competitiveness was especially brutal on defense. A quick look at social media during the game offered many demoralizing clips.
They didn’t even wait until the fourth quarter to seemingly wave the white flag.
Blowout losses become common for the Lakers
Wednesday night’s performance is the kind of loss a team expects to experience, at most, once a season. The reality for the Lakers is that losses like these are becoming more common.
They have lost four games by 25 or more points in the last 12 days: a 127-102 loss to the Nuggets, a 127-100 loss to the Suns and a 109-80 loss to the Timberwolves on the Monday before this game. They have all followed a similar pattern, with shaky starts leading to the dam breaking in the second half. They lost all four third quarters of those games by a combined 59 points.
You can blame anyone for that string of losses if you try hard enough. Redick has received praise for almost everything he’s done as Lakers coach, but his team ranks 26th in second-half net rating at -9.3, suggesting that whatever adjustments he’s making at halftime simply aren’t there. working. James is in visible decreasevacillating between his former, legendary self and a shell of him every game.
Anthony Davis entered the season on an MVP trajectory, but is averaging just 18 points in his last seven games while dealing with plantar fasciitis. Role players are injured across the board. Even with all his strength, It’s a flawed group. full of overlapping skill sets and glaring deficiencies. Almost everyone involved has some fault in this case.
Fact: The Lakers just aren’t very good.
How surprised should we be by a game or even a stretch like this from the Lakers? The simplest solution, for about a quarter of the season, is that the Lakers simply raised expectations too high with their 10-4 start when the reality is that this is simply not a very good team.
You don’t have to look hard to find evidence of this. Despite being two games above .500, they are tied for the NBA Net rating at 23rd with the Toronto Raptors 7-15 at -4.7. It’s true that they’ve played a relatively difficult schedule so far, but they’ve mostly gotten fat with bad teams. They are 7-1 against teams below .500, but 5-9 against teams above .500.
The schedule doesn’t look to get much easier in a loaded Western Conference, and the Lakers had some pretty unsustainable shooting luck from their opponents during their 10-4 start. Their opponents hit 34% of their open 3-pointers in those first 14 games, one of the lowest numbers in the league, but they rose again to 42.6% in the 2-6 stretch that followed. That stretch likely would have been a 1-7 disaster if Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy hadn’t called an ill-advised timeout before Collin Sexton’s potential game-winning layup on Sunday.
The samples are still small enough that the team won’t overreact. Maybe the team will be better when it’s healthier. Maybe there are adjustments that can make players try harder, especially later in games. But the evidence right now points to the Lakers being a lottery-level team hiding behind a rapidly fading position cushion. There are no easy solutions here other than trading picks (picks the Lakers barely have) for role players who may or may not help.
This all sounds daunting, but it was always a possibility for a team built around a soon-to-be 40-year-old man.
A younger James and a healthier Davis covered up a lot of problems for an otherwise questionable roster, and now that they can’t, all of those existing problems are getting worse and worse with the game.
