Alex Len Discussion: Welcome The Big Ukranian

What really irritates me is the lack of Lakers foresight or planning for their playoff matchup. If I remember correctly towards the very end of the season the Lakers kinda knew they had a good chance of playing Minny and perhaps Memphis I can't remember exactly. But it was solidified the Lakers would avoid the play-in tournament and we had additional regular season games and we decided to win all of them except the 2nd one against OKC I believe.Then we purposely dropped the last one against Portland. In hindsight that was total tunnel vision. You would think they might consider, idk matchups? It seemed like other teams were blowing games or winning games for matchup purposes. But even if not, the Lakers certainly should have with that undersized roster. How hard is to maybe have a thought like "Minny might not be the best matchup for our small a** roster huh?" It just adds to the series of small but consequential blunders the organization has been making in the LeBron era. Getting Luka forgives pretty much everything but I'm not kidding myself that this is a smoothly run organization by any means.

 

there was a lot of uncertainty heading down the stretch. we basically could have ended up anywhere 3-7 for a while. once we locked up 3, there were still at least three possbilities, really none of them great.

as for matchup hunting, tbh, if you'd asked me ahead of the series, i'd have said minny is ok bc we could theoretically play gobert off the floor like most other teams do in the playoffs. but we didn't make enough shots to do that, so we got pounded.

what i didn't consider strongly enough was how much us not having anyone to defend the paint would let randle and mcdaniels feast. a decent shot blocker really cuts down on those guys' effectiveness, and we didn't have it.

and no, len wasn't it. mark williams may have been enough...