Game Debrief: What Went Right And What Went Wrong?

Bring back AD please

 

Ugly loss.

Lakers clearly were the better team that looked like were trying to figure out how to play together till AR got tossed.
Really no idea how you give a double tech in that situation - b******* with all the crap guys like Draymond get away with.

Once AR got tossed, all hell seemed to break loose.
Hornets offense became hunt down Luka every possession and I don't think the Lakers handled it very well. Did switch to a double but the defense was way too predictable there. Once they decided to double, it was the same double every time.

Luka rimmed out on a huge number of shots
Ball movement was almost too good: guys need to take good open shots instead of trying to get the perfect shot (rui/dfs/etc/)
Gabe Vincent just annoys me for some reason: takes a lot of bad shots and he was way too slow on the rotation when he brought in for defensive reasons

 

Maddening loss to a crap team, at home, after a long layoff when we were all gettin' worked up over how much better we might be.

Booting AR was the worst, but Luka's bad shooting didn't help. I'm still not clear how AR got booted for what looked like maybe five words.

We lost this game when we came out flat in the 3rd Q and CHA outscored us by 14.

Rui missed 2 FTs in extreme crunch - 37 secs left - if he makes 'em both it ties the game. Flashbacks to AD.

Did we really need to hoist 51 3s? (We made 15. Not good. Rui and Luka 2 for 17 from deep.) Bron hitting one of those as time expired would've prolly saved bacon and got us an OT win and a better mental disposition from me, but we shouldda never been in that position in the first place.

Now: we had better win in POR, 'cuz we have to go into DEN two days later.

Whatta drag. Whatta bringdown.

 

Rescind trade #2!!!

 

NGL: if we lose to POR and DEN (for a 4-game losing streak incl Utah/CHA/POR) and Luka shoots this poorly, he'll be "FatAzz Luka" until he starts scoring like we all thought he would. 33 mins: 14/9/8 isn't bad, but it's not Luka Freakin' Doncic, to me. 5 for 18 shooting ain't Luka. 1 for 9 from deep certainly ain't him.

Get it together ASAP, Doncic!

 

He did set a trend of missing a lot of the season record 50 plus three point attempts

 

Today it looks great that it’s not possible to offer the Supermax

 

Worst loss of the year.

 

i thought we might be flat, but not lose at home to charlotte. not much to say other than if luka's not ready, he just needs to sit. no sense in having him shoot 30% from the floor and be a problem defensively.

i'm sure he wants to play, and we want him to play, but that's not him.

otherwise, we've been pretty bad when reaves hasn't been available all year, right? still, no excuses. charlotte is terrible.

 

I’ll admit, I didn’t see the full game since I had to result to using streaming links (for the love of everything, get rid of that Bally Sports / FanDuel contract Silver).

But I felt like Luka actually wasn’t in there when the Hornets made most of their run. Reaves ejection also hurt.

We definitely still should have won that one though and it is another loss that will haunt us st the end of the season.

 

We gave them momentum after AR got ejected, they went on a 23-1 run. When you give this kind of confidence to these G-league players they start hustling more and shooting better. They got all swaggy and stuff, it pisses me off, worst team in the league for years and they feel like they're all-stars.
Just a bad day at the office overall.

 

We played pretty poorly the whole game so it was surprising we ever had a 13 point lead. Charlotte sucks, but LaMelo did shine a light on our issues with POA defense. He blew by Vando on that game-sealing layup. Vando is a very good defender, but he's still a 6'8" guy trying to defend a primary ballhandler 35 feet from the basket.

We won a few games a wasn't expecting at home against Boston and then on the road @Knicks and @Clippers without AD. That's starting to even out now with these losses @Utah and now at home against Charlotte. Not only is Luka in poor game shape, but he's struggling to adjust to a situation where he's not initiating offense every single possession. They'll figure it out eventually, but we might have to suffer through a few more bad losses like this.

If he's not injured, and just in bad shape and rusty, he needs to play through it. There's always a difference between being in decent cardio shape and basketball game shape. You could sit him out for three weeks and have him run 10 miles a day, but he'd still be winded at his first substitution the first game he comes back. This team also needs to develop some chemistry on both ends of the floor if they want to do anything in the playoffs, I don't think sitting Luka out if he's not injured and just in bad shape helps that.

 

Yep and they clearly were still figuring things out in terms of where Luka like to be and where he like to pass. This wasn't all bad before Reaves went out I actually thought the Lakers just looked way more talented but were trying to figure things out. A lot of over-passing, quizzical looks about where peoople were supposed to be etc. So it wasn't all bad.

To get the better Luka the ones whose shots don't rim and out and knows where his teammates are you have to play him IMO if he's not hurt

 

There were definitely some flashes of how good the offense could be. I noticed that in the Jazz games Luka was starting a lot of possessions out in the corner and then getting a screen to come up and then run a P&R. Last night he seemed to be starting out the possessions above the free throw line more, so he probably told JJ that's how he prefers to operate. The ridiculous number of turnovers at the start, and then consistently throughout the game, tell me that they tried to come out loose and freelance but they just don't have the chemistry for that right now.

I'm still in the start Gabe and DFS, bring Austin and Rui off the bench camp, but we don't have anywhere close to enough lineup data to judge lineup combinations yet. There was a Gabe/Austin/DFS/Vando/Len lineup that was really struggling to get good looks, I would have liked to see Rui in that one instead of Vando. As a general matter, I think Vando and Len together is going to be tough. Both guys just get completely ignored by the defense. We had Len spacing to the corner a lot, and the one time he actually got a kick-out pass there he didn't consider shooting the three for one second lol. He immediately just tried to run a hand-off with Austin. I'd like to see Rui as the PF next to Len whenever possible.

 

Completely agree: I can go along with experimentation but you know off the bat that lineup was going to struggle to score. I don't know maybe it's just me but probably best to experiment first with lineups you know have a higher chance working first to check those off the list before going hogwild

 

I understand the counterargument of wanting to play Lebron, Luka and Austin together as much as possible to fast-track their chemistry. Ultimately they are the three best players on the team and will be closing games together, so maybe it is more important to start them together as well even if it does make for sub-optimal lineups elsewhere. Its a tough thing to sort through. I'm just glad JJ, who seems to have solid buy-in up and down the roster, is making the decisions instead of Ham lol.

 

Austin MF Reaves defensive player of the year

 

Bunch of TOs otherwise solid game and solid win

Lebron awesome except the aforementioned TOs
AR great
Hayes was again really good IMO
DFS excellent
Rui kind of no showed but like that he is playing more physical
JJ went back to physicalityly with Jamison and Godwin which helped

 

I loved JJ playing Jemison over Len today made a huge difference tonight. They’re going to have a tough decision as far as which one they want to convert between the two way guys (Goodwin or Jemison) for the postseason.

 

Great win, really made up for the Charlotte loss. This game was an easy L last year.

Bron is amazing. Doing this in a B2B is absolutely insane.
AR is very comfortable in this role. Hope we find ways to make him comfortable with Luka too.

We shot much less 3s. We are chucking them with Luka, hope we find a balance