Did you see the lineup chang they made right after they pushed the lead to 6? They went big for stupid reasom with AD at the 4 and Danny Green. Go look at the he chat: I stated that this was stupid along with several others before we lost the lead The modern NBA is space and pace league and playing maybe the ideal 5 for this game who can play inside outside on both defense and offense and to go back to 80s bully paint ball is stupid. The Lakers turned around the deficit and then got the lead when they ran small ball. Theyw ere up 6 with Dwight at the 5 then Morris Kuzma LeBron and AC playing suffocating defense and having an open court to attack
I'm not Leftymo, Barnstable. I'm saying I was right about being concerned. I'm not doing that kind of nonsense where I'm declaring we're going to lose this series to prop myself up. I'm rooting for us, not them. I've felt that we could beat them but it might go to 6 or 7. I think that is entirely the case. However, they may upset us. And that's why 96% of us voted that we wanted to play any of the other teams than Portland. They are not your typical 8 seed by any stretch. But again, how are we going to solve this problem of their backcourt vs. ours? I am not seeing a solution. Except maybe start Kuz instead of Green or at least continue to use him down the stretch as we should have.
Maybe I was a bit optimistic or had heavily fogged tunnel vision. What was I thinking that we'd survive with KCP and Danny green being the main role players on our team. Regardless if we had Bradley/Do, we have no closers. AD was a never a closer, at this point I'd start giving Dion some burn. I mean Vogel has to have some intuition to realize Caruso isn't made to be a key role player in the playoffs. Carushow is all fun and good but his height is being a starter in place of a 6th man in his position. 2nd string player at best in reality.
I'm sorry but I don't believe in Rondo as the savior. But I will say this, as much as he's been terrible this year, I will look forward to him at least because our backcourt is giving us nothing and maybe he can do something positive.
2003 Spurs had Duncan who was a bricklayer at the free throw line that year. They also lost game 1 to 8th seeded Suns but on a buzzer beater. Went on to win a championship. Time for Lakers to accept the adversity and push through and build some resiliency. Need some moments of perseverance and this is one of them.
I expect more out of Davis and I partially blame Vogel for not managing Caruso's shifts in the 2nd half. Caruso was doing well shadowing Dame during the 2nd half, but somewhere around the 5-6 min mark Vogel thought he could end the game with Green and KCP?? Who got torched in the opening minutes? Then signals for Caruso to go in around 3-4 min mark, he doesn't get in until 2:00 left. Not saying Caruso will stop him, but after the 3rd qtr, it was clear he needed to finish the damn game guarding Lillard. The only thing that can drastically improve in the next game is the defense. Stagnant offense w/o LeBron and bad shooting are just 2 weaknesses we have to live with for now. I expect it at this point. We can win games shooting a low 3 pt %. We need to do everything else very well. I hate to sound like Shaq here but he is right, with the teams current circumstances, our current path to victory is Davis scoring more than 30 points, while fouling 1 of Whiteside or Nurkic out of the game. Davis is sitting there while Hassan Whiteside is making plays in the crunch. Come on man. AND LBJ/DAVIS MISSED 4 CONSECUTIVE FREE THROWS in the 4th
Well the good news is outside of Kuzma I don't think anyone played all that well. Lebron was average (not bad but not a good game either by his standards) and everyone else was ok to worse. With that, they basically were a couple of shots of still winning which is pretty remarkable. Kuzma and Lebron allow you a lot of flexibility as Kuzma growth on defense allows the Lakers to run "big" small ball lineups. A lot more Morris/Kuzma means less minutes for DG. Don't see why Morris can't be pushed to the 30 mpg and then Kuzma to 35 mpg: those minutes should be taken away from McGee and Green and this team would like a lot better IMO You also have Waiters who should be seeing minutes when Lebron is off the floor
I did think we could have used Waiters scoring at times there. I get that Vogel doesn't trust him on D, but I still think he should have gotten minutes when we couldn't buy a bucket. Passive AD though continues to really bug me. A lot. I don't think we are winning anything unless he plays aggressively. This isn't acceptable.
I agree but you have to create a situation where he can be aggressive. NO with him crushed Portland a few years ago when he was the 5. Play him at the 5 with Morris and Kuzma at the forwards and let him face up and attack nurkic and Whiteside with space in the half court. Instead, we have him either as the roll man which again is more difficult if you have a space-eater like McGee in there or he is a spot-up shooter. He's not Shaq who's going to bully Nurkic and Whiteside but I just don't see how they handle him if he is attacking them off the dribble. This honestly was one of the worst coached playoff games I've seen in a long time
@Pioneer10 totally agree with you, I think Morris should be playing more. Before covid I was most excited about Morris playing 4 and Kuzma sliding to his natural 3 in the 2nd unit. We left the break thinking Vogel had figured out this rotation, you might even find receipts on this board of us saying this at the time. Going into the bubble we though we just needed to solidify a new guard rotation. Hard to gauge anything in the seeding games- but after game 1 of the playoffs, Vogel is still "experimenting" with lineups/pairings entirely. If Davis' approach to the game has him avoiding the center position, then yeah I'm specifically referring to that. Unless he's injured, I think he needs to take on any challenge that he's asked of in the next month.
just as i expected backcourt couldn't handle dame and mccollum, portland's size proved to be a big problem, and they still can't shoot for sh** then throw in AD sucking a** and vogel's braindead coaching at the end, and you have a perfect formula for a loss
Lol, let's just hope it's not a sweep. I kind of knew we would lose but tried to play it cool, hurts less. Can't win a game shooting like that. Yikes
The only thing that I hope can help the Lakers moving forward in this series is for Dame and CJ to get gassed. They've been playing heavy minutes since the restart.
Vogel needs to ride with whoever is playing well and not give a crap about minutes. I'm sorry, but AD and Lebron need to be playing 40 minutes. The rotations need to be shortened and/or the leash on certain players needs to be shortened. For example, if Danny Green lays an egg and goes 0/2, park his *** on the bench.
I still think we should win this. The worst this ting about this loss is that it had nothing to do with the Blazers "being a bad matchup" etc. Green and KCP did absolutely nothing for us. Nothing. Our #1 KCP literally had a 1/1/1 stat line in 30 minutes on the floor. He shot 0-9 from 3. We had a bad start, but despite horrific shooting, we still had them in the fourth. Kuzma was doing well and we had a 6 point lead. Lillard was good, but not amazing. McCollum was alright, Nurkic was good and Melo contributed, but none of that was unusual in any way. We would have won the game if the coach recognized the early struggles of our guards and tried inserting Dion early, and then again in the 4th. But he doesn't and then he inexplicably pulls Kuzma out and plays two coldest players on the team to finish the game, which we then promptly lost. On top of that, he did not see that we should have gone small with AD at the 5, opening up more space for the other players. More Kuz, more Morris, less MCG. It's very frustrating, because - as I said before - if we could just hit our average from long range, we'd be winning this easily by double digits regardless of "Portland being a bad matchup" and "not a real 8th seed". Basically, this is all on us. Bron and AD missing 4 (!) FTs late certainly did not help either. So much for star power. AD has to be able to carry us better, Bron has to be more in attack mode - although he did well overall. As Cookie pointed out earlier, 35% from the field, 16% from three, and 64% from the stripe is a loss. And we did not do that because the Blazers defend well - they are the 2nd worst defensive team in the bubble. We had the shots we needed, we keep missing them. The Los Angeles Lakers - the team where old shooters go to "die".
It's very simple: it's a make or miss league, and when you shoot like they have in this bubble (more often than not), you will lose games.
^ Yes. So many people here already suggested that. We're stuck in the old ways, instead of looking at the matchup and seeing what we're missing on the floor. You go down by 16 first... it might be hard to get out of that hole. With a better start - just a decent start, mind you, we'd be leading 1-0 right now.
