Game Debrief: What Went Right And What Went Wrong?

Just watched the game again, the thing is, they had 4 guys have career games, they played out of their minds and had over 20 points each. Their dang shooting guard had 17 rebounds!!! That GG Jackson looked pretty danged legit. This dude is gonna be a good player in this league, he has some hops. This time without the other players is going to pay dividends for this team in the long haul. In the end they just did not know how to make smart timely decisions. There was minimum defense played in this game. Unfortunately this seems to be the case with an awful lot of NBA games, not just the Lakers.

 

Good: Lebron absolutely dominate two way performance
AD, Rui, Hayes, AR all excellent
Ham did a good job
Dinwiddie as a jack of all trades clean up guy continues to give this team 5 man units that they haven't had since the Bubble year. Nobody for a team to slack off on or headhunt.

Bad
AD getting hurt
No f***ing reason for him to be in the game when he got hurt. Hayes had been playing well

 

Right: Lakers beating that Pelicans team like a red-headed stepchild.

Wrong: AD injury - worst possible timing.

 

Good: LeBron with a magic Johnson type game, Ludabrow dominant, great backcourt play from Dlo and Austin, Rui did his thing. Encouraging seeing Dlo engaged, he needs to be engaged for us to compete.

Bad: Please stop rolling the ball inbounds. That disrupts our offense and allows the defense to set. There were some sloppy ball handling from several players. Lakers flirted with back court violations multiple times. Also I don't understand why we overhelp. We do it consistently which is why I think teams shoot so well from 3 against us. The better teams will kill us for that in the playoffs.

Ugly: Ludabrow hurt, I'm not super concerned but he hopefully he's ok. We only have 2 reliable bench players.

 

If the Lakers against MEM was a Mr. Hyde performance, they showed up in a HUGE game as Dr. Jekyll, which means they were the very good team we saw this year. The defense in the first 16 minutes was fantastic. Made me think how awesome we could've been with Vando, and a healthy Cam.

Still: like everyone has said: Lebron with a Magic Johnson big game performance 28/11/17 with 5 steals and he didn't even make a 3, trying only 2), everyone else pretty good. AD 30/11 on 13 of 17 from the field: great. His D: even better. After we were up 32 we predictably got lax and NO pushed the lead down with swarming, desperate defense. But they never got their deficit below 15, if I recall. Too lazy to look.

I wonder what you guys think about Willie Green's move to not really play Valanciunas. It seemed like a mistake to me. I'm guessing Jonas gets more than 7 mins on Tue, that's for damned sure.

The only bad was AD's lower back spasming. It's concerning. But there's something at least as concerning:

In a playoff situation, when one team embarrasses another, very frequently the embarrassed team comes back strong. We'll see if that plays out on TUE.

Overall: extremely impressive showing by the Lakers, the MBT team in the NBA: Most Bipolar Team.

Clearly: a healthy AD is everything for us. If he's hobbled in the play-in/play-offs, we ain't goin' nowhere.

 

positives: ball movement and offense with purpose, defense that was paying attention, lebron locked in

negatives: we played like, 6 games at this level all season long, when it was just sitting right there every night.

 

No one can ever convince me this team doesn’t give different amounts of effort from game to game.
Just look at the disparity between the last two games.
Sorry, had to edit from last night.

 

If Zion doesn't get hurt, this is a loss.

The good: came away with the win, can rest up for Saturday's game.

The Bad: Bron (except for a 5-6 minute run in the 3rd) was awful offensively. AD's back injury made resulted in a rough offensive night for him. Ham is a fool. We play Denver in 4 days.

 

The offense down the stretch of the 4th quarter was awful, if we bring that to a gun fight against Denver we’re getting swept again. We’d been on a really nice streak of organized offense the last 15 games too. The non-LeBron minutes continue to be awful and I’m not sure there’s much we can do about it. I’d like to see us try to mismatch hunt with Rui in those lineups more.

On the positive side, I thought the back and forth between DLo and Alvarado was going to take him out of the game but DLo hit some huge shots down the stretch. We’re going to need a lot more of that.

 

if we play like today against the Nuggets we're getting swept again.

 

Willie, that ain't it. Milk the Zion injury story. You win if he doesn't get hurt. You picked the wrong storyline

 

i mean, nance could have fouled out in the first four minutes he played, man. zion went to the line despite initiating the contact on every trip. and i agreed with most of those calls, but he shot 9 FTs. our big dogs shot 10 each. who else from NO goes to the basket and gets contact? zero players.

which calls did willie want, specifically? or did he just want to get away with hatchet jobs on AD all night instead of just most of it?

 

Lost 3 quarters, including the 3rd and 4th.

good thing we won the 2nd by 18.

Bron missing 3 layups and hero shots. Hit 1 jumper. Made his FTs.

Gabe good defense. Rui good defense.

Bad bad bad, getting out-rebounded again.

Good - low turnovers.

 

We won back to back road games, against a team that had been playing pretty well, in a must win scenario. Salute!

If D'Angelo shows up in Denver, that's going to be a great series.

Let's go Lakers!!!

 

so it was the refs fault that no one on his team showed up aside from zion and alvarado?

is he impying that the fouls called against his team weren't actually fouls? i'd like to see evidence of that

 

Maybe he felt that Zion running through our players Julius Randle style weren't fouls I guess.

 

Meh. That guy is somewhere clicking his heels, knowing that they have to beat Golden State or Sac, to get to OKC. Two teams they won the season series against.

 

Bad: Ham not calling a timeout as he gave our lead away. He ain't Phil Jackson and we needed a timeout badly in the 4th quarter. This dude does not know how to calm this team down and get them on track. I pray they fire him this off season.