Before the 2021-22 season started, the Los Angeles Lakers were expected to be a contender with LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and Russell Westbrook.
Instead, they are looking like a team that is off to a slow start.
Granted, knowing LeBron-led teams, they would get off to slow starts when they have a new core. But it was hard to see things going this poorly this fast.
They were originally in the mix for being in the running to represent the Western Conference in the 2022 NBA Finals, but the 16-13 start has critics questioning whether or not this Lakers roster, as it is currently constructed, is even a top tier basketball team this season.
The Lakers currently rank 23rd in offensive rating (107.2) despite barely missing out in the top 10 in defensive rating (107.6; good for 11th). They currently tied for 16th in AST% with the Trail Blazers (58.4) but to be fair, that is to be expected from LeBron-led teams. To dig deeper, there is very little they excel at.
Lakers fans often criticize Frank Vogel for how he uses his lineups. And that is fair. But that is also a reflection of Anthony Davis’ reluctance on playing center. DeAndre Jordan also cannot play in today’s NBA, and it was the right decision for Vogel to relegate Jordan to a bench role and start Dwight Howard. Injuries have not helped either.
There was the significant downside risk to the season the moment they got Russell Westbrook. It was going to be hard for Vogel to merge Westbrook’s style of offense with LeBron’s ball-dominant style.
The number of aging veterans on the roster could make it difficult to construct another top tier defense. Key players might be susceptible to regression, injury, or both. This was always a possibility, but despite that, the Lakers managed to run into every obstacle through the first 28 games of the season.
Their record might not be the cause of panic, but for a team in pursuit of their NBA-record 18th title, this is concerning.
Most concerning is LeBron’s health, who has missed 12 of the Lakers’ 28 games and, nearing his 37th birthday, has dealt with nagging injuries that hampered his effectiveness and availability in each of his last three seasons.
Without a dominant LeBron, none of the other Lakers’ strengths or weaknesses will be relevant to their title chase.
But even according to the inevitable step back caused by his absence, the season has been filled with red flags. They struggled against some of the league’s worst teams and, save for an overtime win over the shorthanded Heat, have been consistently outclassed by the league’s best teams.
It’s fair to say that the Lakers are still on the pre-planning stage, figuring out which players are doing which job. The season has not gotten off without obstacles for them. The injuries have smacked them hard, which led to them using 252 different five-man lineup rotations, the 3rd-most in the league.
In those games where the multitude of lineups have played, they gave up big leads to mediocre teams, lost many games they should have won and approached their on-court work until this point where Vogel described it as “casualness.”
“We feel like it’s going to happen, we keep getting disappointed when we think it’s there (or when) we think we’ve had that moment,” Vogel said after the Lakers’ 108-95 loss to the Ja Morant-less Grizzlies. “Our biggest battle, our biggest problem this year is consistency. Once we take one step forward, we fall back and have a disappointing performance. We got to find a way to catch ourselves from that.”
And its consistency that Davis mentioned to the media after that game that is one of the things the Lakers are struggling at.
“That’s our biggest problem right now: consistency,” Davis revealed. “We come out certain games and don’t play how we’re supposed to play. Then, games like Boston, we come out and play great. We gotta be a more consistent team if we want to truly compete for a championship. It’s a mindset thing.”
While it’s hard to quantify casualness or consistency in a catch-all metric, anyone who watches basketball will know what both look like, and can point to some areas where effort and attention shows. It’s easy to scapegoat someone when things are going awry, but that does nothing to try and find the sole cause of the problem.
An area where the Lakers are continuously struggling at is in the paint.
Despite having no shortage of center options, they’re allowing 28.2% of their opponents’ misses to turn into offensive rebounds. They even gave up 33 offensive rebounds in a two-game span, including 19 to the Thunder, who are tied for 24th in offensive rebound percentage with the Nuggets (25.0).
To add on, they were outscored 17-1 in second-chance points in that frustrating loss to the Grizzlies.
In those seven games preceding the loss, the Lakers averaged just 14 turnovers per game, and allowed just 10.1 offensive rebounds per game. Their win over the Celtics showed neither of the aspects they had in the loss to the Grizzlies.
When the win looked like they found their footing, the loss didn’t.
Rebounding, and the reasons why the team is not ending possessions on defense, are twofold. It takes effort and technique to secure misses, aspects the Lakers are struggling at. Here, there has been a trend to how their opponents were able to constantly steal away second chances. There have been breakdowns in terms of focus, whether it be players losing track of their man, going too far away from the play, or a lack of effort. The lack of a second, third, or even just one jump has been huge.
And from a technique perspective, the Lakers are woeful at boxing out. Their 5.5 defensive box-outs per game is tied with the 76ers and the Trail Blazers for the worst in the league. They are also dead last in the league at box-outs on the defensive end, at 70.0%.
More often than not, Lakers players are getting sidestepped when going after the ball, not making contact at the correct time and wanting to get out of transition instead of securing the miss that they’ll run first. The rebounding struggles are also coming from the small lineups in the backcourt and the wing.
The lack of size on the perimeter is emphasized further when Anthony Davis is moved to center, as it has put more of a burden on the team’s non-bigs to crash in, box-out, and battle with players with height advantages. But that’s a trade-off the team has accepted given the current roster, given the disadvantages shown playing with two traditional bigs, even if this is putting players in unfamiliar positions.
One facet of the game where the team is rearing its ugly head is their multitude of turnovers. They have turned over the ball 15.9 times per game, 3rd-worst in the league, just ahead of the Warriors (16.0) and Rockets (17.5).
“You just have to play the game with a little of ball security to win a basketball game,” said Vogel after the Lakers turned over the ball 22 times against the Grizzlies, which led to 27 Grizzlies points. “So we’re going to continue to have disappointing losses if we turn over the ball like that.”
Although turnovers in and of themselves are never good, they are all different, and it has been the kinds of turnovers that have been frustrating for the team. There have been too many times where passes have been either lazy, went past their intended target, or showed a lack of ball security overall.
Westbrook, in particular, has never been one for restraint on the basketball court. But since his athleticism is declining and his skill has peaked, the inability to mix his playstyle has tanked his value.
He is averaging less than a point per scoring while taking up one-third of the team’s possessions with a shot, free throw, or turnover, turning the ball over on nearly one fifth of those possessions. He isn’t as quick or as explosive as he once was, which severely reduced his effectiveness around the rim.
This kind of efficiency from a high-usage player makes it mathematically impossible for him to lead an efficient team offense.
That’s not to say he is a bad player. But moving him to a less central role is not functionally available because of his off-ball limitations.
He is making 32.4% of his threes and remains one of the least engaged off-ball players in the league, which makes opposing defenses to not fear him when he doesn’t have the ball.
Moving him into an auxiliary role would only get his defender to help him and take up the action elsewhere.
Even if he can provide some value off-ball, the Lakers lack another primary ballhandler outside of LeBron to pick up pace.
A somewhat resurgent Carmelo Anthony took up a lot of the shots with LeBron out, but his subpar passing and unsustainable three-point shooting prevent him from being a reliable player. Even so, giving him a lot of minutes comes at the cost of defense.
Davis is better as a play finisher than a creator, and LeBron’s absence exposed the big man’s limitations as a primary source of offense.
He has struggled to create scoring opportunities for others with his opponents focusing more on their efforts to slow him down. The fact that he lacks a reliable jump shot or is not a playmaker who can set up plays at the rim has reduced his offense more to the midrange, where he too often settles for long twos instead of attacking the basket.
For a team trying to solidify the defense (they are 11th in defensive rating, at 107.2), the amount of easy chances they are handing the opposition in the form of breakaways continues to stunt their growth on that side. They are tied at 19th in the league on opposing points off turnovers per game, with 16.9.
And when it comes to allowing second chances, or giving the ball away, there is going to be a degree of focus that is necessary to stop both from happening, which, in theory, is an attribute that a veteran-heavy team should have down pat. However, the focus, hustle, and hunger, fades.
Speaking of the defense, to Davis’ credit, he has at least added value on his defense, which is more than most of his teammates claim to have. They are barely outside the top 10 in defensive rating, which is not close to the level they need to reach to get to the NBA Finals. More than half of the players on the roster are defensive liabilities, and the Lakers have very seldom shown urgency or discipline on that side of the court.
The only guard who can apply pressure on the ball or get over screens consistently is Avery Bradley. Westbrook frequently loses focus on the weak side or leaves his assignment to take terrible gambles. Save for LeBron and AD, the frontcourt was frequently targeted on the pick-and-roll, and even Davis hasn’t consistently been at his best defensively.
Playing so many ineffective defenders at once leaves the Lakers vulnerable in at least one area on the court. Scheming to avoid a bad defender being exposed often requires moving an equally bad defender to action. Sparing a slow-footed veteran from guarding an opposing star player only gets more of the burden on another limited teammate. Having LeBron and AD doing all the work is not plausible.
At many points throughout this season, the Lakers are repeatedly looking like a team in need of a spark in order to wake them up and get them towards playing at their fullest potential. The ultimate authority on these changes lies with team owner and governor Jeanie Buss.
However, Buss told Mark Medina of NBA.com that neither Vogel’s job nor any aspect of the team would be reevaluated until the Lakers are “100% healthy,” and reiterated on her stance on the “Uncut with Jay Cutler” podcast.
“It’s [our record] not what we anticipated or planned for, but then again, we haven’t been 100% healthy,” said Buss. “And that was kind of a risk going into a season with a team that’s on the older side, or I like to say ‘less young than the other teams,’ instead of older. But we haven’t had our complete roster healthy and playing together. So once we see that, then we really do know what we have. But for right now, it’s just kind of like an up-and-down ride.”
She’s not wrong.
The Lakers have had LeBron, Davis, Trevor Ariza, Kendrick Nunn, Wayne Ellington, Malik Monk, and Talen Horton-Tucker miss time because of injury this season. But save for Ariza and Nunn, who have missed the whole season to this point so far, they are all healthy enough to play significant minutes.
Ariza is a huge loss, and he is a steady wing defender and formerly won a championship with the Lakers in 2009, and was a rumored early frontrunner for the team’s starting lineup before needing ankle surgery at the start of training camp.
Nunn first missed the tail end of the preseason with an ankle strain injury and then a “bone bruise” to the knee, which was originally given a two-to-three-week reevaluation period, but per reports, he is “still a ways away” from returning, and is likely going to make his season debut some time in 2022.
Plus, both LeBron and AD are playing through injuries, LeBron with an abdominal strain and Davis with a knee injury. But the Lakers are generally healthy. Outside from Ariza, it’s not clear how much closer the Lakers will be to the point where Buss describes as “100% healthy” anytime soon.
There are enough glimmers of hope to think that the Lakers could turn a corner. Being in possession of the 6th-best net rating during the month of December, and beating the exact inferior Thunder team they blew two separate leads of at least 18 points and lost to twice this season, despite being without Davis in the lineup.
But like most things in life, a team might not be able to build in an upward trend or go towards their desired outcome without having the stable footing to get things started, whether it be boxing out their assigned man or the extra pass, which it all comes down to respecting the opponent and executing the fundamentals of basketball consistently, while learning from your mistakes. And doing so every night, not just after an embarrassing loss.
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