DALLAS — Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick said he was encouraged by his group. Anthony Davis said the team’s potential was crystallizing. LeBron James said the Lakers held each other accountable and immediately applied their film work on the floor.
Those were the talking points as the Lakers, then winners of eight of their past 11 games, entered their two-game Texas road trip to Houston and Dallas on a high note. The team had just traded for Dorian Finney-Smith and Shake Milton in a shrewd move that upgraded their size, 3-point shooting and defense without costing a first-round pick. Finney-Smith was acclimating well. Jaxson Hayes had just returned. Gabe Vincent was next.
Los Angeles was rounding into proper form roughly a month before the trade deadline.
But the Lakers return to Los Angeles early Wednesday morning with that momentum snapped. They lost 119-115 to the Rockets after one of their worst first halves of the season. They lost 118-97 to the Mavericks — playing without Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving and Daniel Gafford — on Tuesday after one of their worst second halves of the season.
The Lakers are just 2-3 since their Dec. 29 trade. They dropped from No. 4 in the Western Conference entering their trip — the highest they had been seeded since Thanksgiving — to tied for No. 6 (20-16) in the conference. They wasted a valuable opportunity to pass Dallas (21-16) in the West standings and create distance from them with Dončić and Irving sidelined.
“I mean, it sucks, obviously, especially knowing where we were and how well we’ve been playing,” James said.
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The Lakers were at physical and athletic disadvantages in both games — a theme in many of their losses. Houston ran them off the floor and pushed them around in the paint (or simply jumped over them). Dallas did the same to a lesser extent, instead targeting less athletic defenders like Austin Reaves and Dalton Knecht and attacking them in isolation ruthlessly.
Redick said there were moments his players ran a defensive scheme he had “never seen before” — a defensive disconnect among the group, at least for the night.
“I’m not sure what our rotations were,” Redick said. “I’d never seen us try to execute what we were doing. I haven’t watched the film yet. Just watching it live and talking to the assistants who did watch it on film, we’re not sure what was going on with the shift positioning and the rotations. … Never seen it before.”
To compound matters, Hayes has struggled defensively since returning to the lineup, leaving an already decimated frontline even thinner. The Lakers are banking on Jarred Vanderbilt, who has begun on-court contact activities and will be re-evaluated in one week, and Christian Wood returning soon and shoring up their frontcourt. It’s unclear how long that will take — Redick cautioned on Tuesday that Vanderbilt, who hasn’t played since last February, will be eased back into the rotation, likely starting around 10 minutes per game — and if the Lakers can survive in the meantime.
Moreover, there was a level of unseriousness in the first half of the Houston loss and the second half of the Dallas loss that has been a hallmark of this season’s Lakers squad — and really, Lakers teams of the past few seasons. There are stretches, quarters, halves and games in which they mentally disengage in a way that’s rare even while acknowledging teams go through ebbs and flows during the season.
Less than 48 hours before the Dallas loss, Davis labeled the game a “must-win.” The Lakers responded by being outscored 74-47 over the final 26:43. Davis declined to speak to reporters after the game.
“They was waiting on us,” Finney-Smith said of the Mavericks, his former team. “It seemed like they was licking their chops.”
Nearly halfway through the season, the Lakers’ greatest consistency this season has been their inconsistency. They have won three or more games in a row three times (and more than three just once). They have lost three or more games in a row twice. The next upswing is inevitability followed by a downswing, and the cycle seemingly never ends.
The short-term upside for the Lakers, who are just 8-11 on the road, is that they return to Los Angeles for their next eight games — seven at Crypto.com Arena and one at Intuit Dome against the LA Clippers — beginning with the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday.
“We got another game in, s—, less than 48 hours,” James said. “So, we can’t really dwell on it too much. That’s the name of the game of the NBA. You see what you could’ve done better, but you got to get ready for the next opponent and we got another game coming on Thursday in our home building.”
For a group that wants to be great and compete for a championship, the Lakers don’t always play with the requisite focus and seriousness required to be such a team.
There are nights they look great, like their six-game win streak earlier in the season or their recent 8-3 stretch. Davis has played like a top-five player at times. James rebounded from one of the worst shooting stretches of his career with one of his best. Reaves has taken the leap the Lakers hoped he would last season. Max Christie has made the Lakers’ four-year, $32 million contract look like a bargain with his play over the past few weeks. They’ve been a top-10 offense and defense for almost three weeks.
But then there are other nights in which they look mediocre. Statistically, they profile more like a below-.500 team than an above-.500 one. They are just 7-14 against teams above .500 (and 13-2 against teams below .500). They’ve been outscored by 77 points on the season — the 20th-best mark in the league and worse than the 16-19 Phoenix Suns (minus-76). They have a minus-2.4 net rating — also the 20th-best mark. Those are typically harbingers for how a team is going to fare in the big picture of the season.
There will inevitably be more ups and downs for the Lakers, as tends to happen throughout an 82-game season. But at some point this season, they need to decide which team they want to be.
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(Photo of LeBron James: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
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