Optimism Discussion: The Laker's Sky Is Not Falling

Mediocre early season play yet Number 1

 

January is when we usually have the Grammy roadtrip and this is right around the time when our team gels and we really know what our team is made up. 10 out of the next 12 games are on the road. Good time to evaluate and see what our team can do. Hope everyone stays healthy.


@ HOU
@HOU
@OKC
vs NOLA
vs GSW
@ MIL
@CHI
@CLE
@PHI
@DET
@BOS
@ATL

 

definitely dropping at least one in houston. have games with mil, phil, and boston, too. oh, and if we sleepwalk like we have been, we'll definitely randomly drop one to okc or det.

 

It's too tough to predict how we'll do on that roadie with the covid outbreak spreading league wide. Will some of those teams only have 8 players? Will any of them be the stars like Tatum?

At full strength Hou, GS, Mil, 6ers, Bos, and ATL could be troubling. Hawks are down a few bodies currently, but with our recent D they have enough shooters to give us fits.

 

Last year, Lakers were 11th in offensive rating and 5th in defensive rating.
This year, Lakers are 5th in offensive rating, 6th in defensive rating, and 2nd in net rating.
I don't think the Lakers lost much defensively other than losing Dwight's rim protection. Javale wasn't a very good defender and just chased blocks. I would go as far as saying that Montrezl is the better overall defender because he can at least hustle whereas Javale would let players blow past him so he can hunt the block numbers. Plus, this is with an AD who doesn't seem to be 100% or is just preserving his health. There were so many opportunities for AD to block or contest a shot and he'd let them go. I think a large part of this has to do with AD feeling he was robbed of DPOY and just not trying as hard even though he would have had a great chance of winning it considering people aren't buying into Giannis's overrated hype anymore.


Lakers can be a much better team than what we have seen and yet, they are still the best team in the league (at least in my opinion). We're focusing too much on the bad things the Lakers have done thus far rather than appreciate that out of 30 teams, the Lakers are the likely favorites to win again. I'm not even worried. I know by the playoffs, no one will beat this team 4/7 times... This regular season nonsense is literally a testing phase.

 

Female dog of a trip. Yowza.

 

i agree with bangboom regarding the regular season, but i'll be really annoyed when they lose one or both to houston. i'd like to help send harden out the door.

 

3 great quarters of basketball, but sure what happened in that 3rd quarter.

We saw what this team is capable of defensively.

Thought we raised our intensity level a lot. After playing some much weaker teams I was glad to see us bring playoff level play for this one.

Best of all Bron and AD only had to log 30 minutes each.

 

The swat sequence. Great multiple efforts.

 

The switch flip exists !

Staying healthy remains the biggest challenge of the season

 

Vogel's lineups 11 games in has been great. The guy can freakin coach.

 

It's pretty clear we are load managing in regular season. LeBron is not at full force and that translates to the team.
Regardless, we are still dominating the league in cruise control and switching on when we want.

I agree with the strategy in this tight schedule but would like to see a full game engagement here and there. It would be easier in the playoffs if we test ourselves before

Would also appreciate a rotation-DNP with each player taking turns. Not sure if we haven't started that with Wes yesterday

We are by far the strongest overall team in the league. But that doesn't win games, so we need to make it count coming playoff time

 

we let up a couple times, but that was a good performance. did a better job punishing folks playing us small (though we could have targeted wood more, he's weak), made a concerted effort to get in transition against a notoriously lazy team. did a pretty good job contesting the right threes (but got lucky a few times).

it was good to see AD put up a strong performance on both ends in this one.

 

Example of what our small ball defense can do (when Kief isn't getting tossed)