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LeBron James #23 of the Los Angeles Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers entered Tuesday’s game against the Hawks at 23-14, but on a three-game losing streak that started with a loss to the Spurs, among the best teams in the league, continued with a four-point decision against the middling Bucks and stretched to Loss No. 3 Straight with Monday’s 124-112 loss to the lowly Kings. This could be sloughed off as a natural downturn that typically comes in the season’s post-holiday dog days, but around the league, teams have been waiting for the Lakers’ weak spots to show up.
“They were 10 games over .500, 10, 11, 12 games, and they’ve done that for quite a few weeks now but I think you could always see them as a paper tiger, where they’re just not nearly as good as their record might suggest,” one assistant coach told Heavy Sports. “They can’t shoot. They turn it over too much. Transition, they don’t run. They can’t defend. They’ve won a lot of close games, but over an 82-game season, all that stuff evens out.
“I’d tell them that they’re probably a first-round exit kind of team.”
In other words, the Lakers have been lucky. It is very, very difficult to have been outscored by 24 points over the course of 37 games and still be significantly over .500. In fact, depending on which metric you use, the Lakers’ expected record at this point would 19-18 or 18-19. Not 23-14.
JJ Redick Seems to Know Lakers Reality
If there’s one guy who seems to know this as well as anybody, it’s Lakers coach JJ Redick, who will probably be the one who takes the blame as L.A.’s record slips back down to the level at which they’ve played. Redick has been hard on his team even when they win, certainly because he knows they’re not playing like a 50-win team, or even a 46-win team.
The numbers are all there. The Lakers are shooting 33.8% from the 3-point line, which is last in the league. Their turnover rate is 15.4%, which is 22nd in the NBA. They score just 18.5 points per game on the fast break, which is 29th. Defensively, they have a 117.1 rating, which is 26th. These are not the numbers of a contender, and are barely the numbers of a .500 team in the Western Conference.
JJ Redick
GettyLakers’ JJ Redick during a timeout in a game against the Sacramento Kings
Still Some Hope … Eventually
That’s not to say all is lost for the Lakers. They’ve dealt with injuries, and have only had their trio of stars–Luka Doncic, LeBron James and Austin Reaves–healthy and playing in the same starting five for seven games this year. There is a killer eight-game annual “awards show” road trip coming up from January 20 through February 3, and while many expect the Lakers to crash out on that trip, the fact is they went 9-3 over that same junket in the past two seasons.
Still, there are a lot of flaws here, and the Lakers appear to know it. The trade deadline is looming, but the team is near the first apron of the luxury tax and is putting more emphasis on protecting cap space over the next two summers and holding onto future draft capital than on chasing quick fixes that could screw up future financial flexibility.
“They’re not going to rebuild but it look like they want a soft rebuild, a retooling,” one NBA executive said. “They don’t want big future financial commitments. Cap space and draft picks–they want to reset things and they can’t do that without cap space and draft picks. That’s where a lot of teams are heading now, and the Lakers are right there with the rest of them.”