Game Debrief: What Went Right And What Went Wrong?

Those long 3's from Luka in the 1st were just daggers

He was shooting those with ease and draining them

Amazing that he's on our team

Wow, just wow

 

same denver team beat the surging warriors the other night, and ol' mikey thought he was going to play some head games. well, the find out phase started early, courtesy of his new adopted father.

amazing how he's so much less chirpy now. where's the bravado, mike?

you're done.

 

Luka killed all that. They knew what it was as soon as that trade was announced. I expect Denver to trade someone this summer.

 

Porter was Kevin Durant last year and now he's a pumpkin against the Lakers. He was basically the reason they won last year as he couldn't miss

Combination of the Banshees on defense and maybe the constant hunting him down on offense is making things more difficult for him?

 

I was never really worried about Porter jr.To me our biggest issue against Denver, was that we couldn't score down the stretch, consistently in crunch time. They would make their 2nd half run, and our guys stopped making shots.

AD didn't always get the ball, so his offense was spotty, and Lebron was running on fumes a lot of the time. Austin and Rui weren't able to pick up the slack.

Luka changes the whole equation, not knocking AD here, but having another high end scorer/facilitator that can handle the rock, that's going to be a problem for everyone, especially Denver.

Luka doesn't need Lebron or Austin, or anybody to set up his offense. He's a scoring machine all by himself. We are a bad matchup for them now. I think OKC is a much bigger problem than the Nuggets.

 

it's murray and jokic, imo. mpj would be an anchor at his price in other situations. he needs to get some clean looks in order to get going and start hitting those shots with people in his shirt, and we gave him basically none last night.

 

The timidness against the Nuggets is finally gone. Naturally, Luka has been unreal and is taking these games seriously but also DFS and Goodwin are giving us the toughness we've been lacking. As stated, Malone's mind games aren't working and we're handling them with ease.

 

IMO, with AD, the Nuggets still played amazing offensive basketball so AD's defense wasn't really giving the Lakers the boost they needed. He couldn't replicate Jokic offensively so he wasn't giving you equal value there. At best, you were just hoping AD could match 75% of Jokic's impact but then you'd have to also hope Murray, MPJ, and Gordon weren't going off.

Luka gives you at least equal offense or at the very least, an offensive threat at all times.

Because Jokic is going to get his anyways, Luka gives the Lakers a higher ceiling to beat the Nuggets.

The Lakers defense was also pretty basic with AD whereas now, it's far more versatile overall. Lakers IMO were lazy and relied too much on AD defensively to where they would try and flush the opponent's offense into AD whereas now, they are far more active in switching and team defense. Everyone seems more involved out there - including LeBron.

As good as AD is, he's not the constant offensive threat Luka is. You're not doubling AD unless you have to. You have to double or triple Luka out of necessity. How many times with LeBron on the bench are you giving the ball to AD and telling him to go carry the offense? Usually it was stagnant or 50/50 at best. In today's game, you take the far superior offensive player over the better defensive player every time. Just look at the DPOY candidates this year... these aren't the top 30 players in the league.

 

to me, this is the story on defense. AD left, and it's like everyone realized that they, too, can play defense!

 

I have to feel like AD is sitting somewhere watching this, shaking his head and muttering "you motherf@#$ers" to himself...

 

LOL ^^^ YEP

 

Yep, they are buying into JJs system and playing team defense

This will be the difference in how far we go in the playoffs

 

G L. Doncic OUT
F D. Finney-Smith OUT
F R. Hachimura OUT
F L. James OUT
C M. Kleber OUT
G A. Reaves OUT
F J. Vanderbilt OUT
And for Bucks Lillard is out too

Damn,I just finished watching Running point yesterday.
So either. ..Hub or just read some taxes news .

 

Lakers down 29 to MIL as I write this,on a BTB w/o Luka, AR, Vando, DF-S, everyone...it was a throwaway game. And thoroughly a drag.

The game plan shouldda been for DK to attempt at least 15 3s. Check the box...down 35 now with 3:21 left. DK has only attempted 6 3s, made 3.

What went Right: tumbleweeds blowing down the one-horse street in a ghost town with a stiff breeze loud in your ears.
What went Wrong: the people who scheduled the games.

Bronny is 6 for 9 from the field.
Len hit a 3 this game.

I'm out.
Pfffffffffft!

 

I hate we lost, but so glad JJ sat the majority of our key contributors. Adam Silver may be the worst professional sports commissioner in the modern era.The scheduling around the league is brutal, and an easy way to get your superstars hurt.

 

The scheduling is a result of the fires in LA. We should have had 4 games in 8 days and not 6. We’re making up 2 of the games we missed now. The schedule isn’t normally this bad.

 

It’s the “let’s not injure our team more” game and we came out very successful without any new injuries

 

Yeah, the wildfires probably cost us 2 to 3 games. A small price to pay in the grand scheme of things, considering that many lost their homes.

 

AD was absolutely phenomenal on defense, when healthy. The problem was, after the Bubble run, the other guys around him, besides Vando(intermittently) were just awful on that side of the ball. LeBron didn’t care about playing any because he had to conserve all of his energy on offense. Now, with Luka, he can give plenty of effort there. I’m not going to go down the list of players, but we never had a great POA defender after we stupidly let Caruso walk.
There was also the attitude of “AD is back there, so I’m not going to try as hard as I could on defense.”
We also had one of the dumbest coaches of all time in Ham who had absolutely no idea how to build a proper defensive scheme.

 

Defense wasn't the problem though. Denver didn't go 1-8 against that team because their defense was soo great.

They won because Murray and Jokic, got buckets down the stretch, and Lebron and AD did not. You can try and say that Denver took the other guys out defensively. However that's not what actually happened. We had great looks late in every game, the same looks, that guys were knocking down with ease, in the first 3 quarters in almost every game.


We pretty much choked on offense late in every single game. No worries, Luka to the rescue on that part. Once we get into the playoffs, we aren't going to be shutting anybody down on defense.

However we will scrap and make the other team work. We gotta make shots!!!