For all the intricate sets that earned rookie coach JJ Redick tumescent praise, the confident protestations that this would be a different Los Angeles Lakers team, the relatively well-managed Bronny James circus, and another year of clean health from LeBron James Sr. and Anthony Davis, the Lakers are 22 games into the season currently looking, overall, like a slightly worse version of their derelict 2023-24 squad. Well, that whole-season view may even be slightly generous: On a narrower timeframe, they have looked like one of the worst teams in basketball for two weeks. In the eight games since L.A. has had to play real teams again after crafting a six-game win streak against the league's dross, the Lakers are 2-6 and lost those six games by an average of 21.8 points. Congrats, JJ Redick: You're only one game off the 13-9 pace set by the dearly departed Darvin Ham.
Wednesday night's 134-93 loss to the Miami Heat was the Lakers' most embarrassing effort yet, though the team found it in them to author my favorite defensive possession of the season. Basketball wisdom dictates that defense is a collective endeavor, a postulate typically proven true by good units whose five players respond to each other and move in concert, or by bad individual defenders who can be singled out and, by their individual weakness, compromise the team's solidity. What distinguishes this Lakers possession, from early in the second half, from the familiar genera of blown rotation-style errors is that its failures are genuinely collective. It takes five individuals each making a series of incorrect decisions in rapid succession to produce such an unintentional masterwork.
It starts with D'Angelo Russell for some reason allowing Duncan Robinson to walk into the middle of the lane and under the basket for free, and with Rui Hachimura dutifully letting Russell, whose public stance on defense is Not my problem!, handle both Robinson and Jimmy Butler while he, uh, joined Anthony Davis and Dalton Knecht in triple-teaming the otherwise empty elbow area. Neither Robinson nor Butler expected to be gifted a wide-open dunk; in Robinson's moment of surprised hesitation after receiving a pass from Butler, Lakers defenders either collapsed for no reason (Hachimura, Davis) or stood there mutely looking around at each other (James, Knecht) while the play continued. Tyler Herro, who had just canned a three, then got a wide-open triple.
Diagnosing the causes of L.A.'s horrid skid is actually quite simple, though the answer is so banal that it's ultimately sort of unsatisfying: The Lakers just don't play hard. They spend ludicrous amounts of time, both with and without the ball, standing in place. In a league where movement, specifically coordinated movement, is the precursor to success on either side of the ball, that's a death sentence.
The degree to which this is Redick's fault is up for debate, though the roster is just as misshapen as it was last year and the Lakers are bad in mostly the same areas. Watching them lose to the Wolves was like watching two teams play a different sport. Where Minnesota was actively trying to win every possession, L.A. seemed indifferent to the entire idea of competition.
"We just stopped playing," said Redick on Nov. 23, after the Nuggets smoked L.A. with a 50-17 run. He called it an aberration. After the Suns beat his team by 27 three days later, Redick credited the winners, saying, "They got whatever they wanted." When the Wolves held L.A. to 80 points a week later, Redick corrected his earlier remark: "It's looking more and more like it's not an aberration," he said, while James put it more bluntly, saying, "Our offense is nasty right now."
Despite every alarm bell ringing for weeks, the Lakers laid a big turd in Miami, which then prompted the coach to truly unload. "I'm embarrassed," Redick said. "We're all embarrassed. It's not a game that I thought we had the right fight, the right professionalism. Not sure what was lost in translation. There has to be some ownership on the court and I'll take all the ownership in the world. This is my team and I lead it and I'm embarrassed."
In all these quotes, and earlier ones about Redick being a tape-addled masochist whose passion for watching film is only outstripped by his passion for talking about watching film, I see the limits of coaching. The Lakers showed at the start of the season how great they could be if everyone was fresh and motivated and they were hitting their threes, but 22 games in, the sprightly start is clearly the outlier from an otherwise sludgy 100 or so games of deeply average Lakers basketball.
They drive, they kick, and they play pretty average offense with pretty average results, but there's not much that's special about L.A. Theoretically, Davis should be a two-way crusher, finishing plays on one end and preventing the opponent from doing so on the other, yet when defenses load up to stop him, as they've done to great effect in the last two games (over the pair of which he scored 20 total points), the Lakers don't have the zip to punish that commitment. Jaxson Hayes, a drain both on and off the court, is the team's only other semi-functional big, and he's hurt. LeBron James is probably having his worst season since his rookie year two decades ago; he doesn't get to the line or the rim anymore and he doesn't have the legs to be a transformative defender on anything other than a sporadic basis. Austin Reaves has been good, but overextended. The Lakers only hit their highest level when James can do everything and be everywhere, and while he still has that highest gear, he can get into it less frequently and less easily than ever before, and can't stay in it for nearly as long.
There's not a lot to like here, unless your heart is pure and you regard the Lakers as an organization in regular need of discipline and embarrassment, in which case you should go watch that defensive clip again. Enjoy it on its own merits, or as a preview of many more such fuckups to come.
