Locked On Lakers - Daily Podcast On The Los Angeles Lakers - JJ Redick: The Lakers Offense Will Run Through Luka Dončić. Any Issues for LeBron, Reaves?
Episode Date: February 24, 2025The Lakers need to figure out how the offense is going to operate now that Luka Doncic is in purple and gold. With LeBron James and Austin Reaves, too, the Lakers definitely have multiple guys who can... handle the ball and distribute. And obviously LeBron is... LeBron. But JJ Redick has basically eliminated any mystery, saying that the offense is going to run through Doncic. Obviously there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to this sort of thing, but importantly, any question about what the flow chart looks like has been addressed. This is important, because the Lakers don't have a ton of time to reach whatever their ceiling is for this season. And having quietly moved up to fourth in the West following this weekend's games—and only two games behind Memphis and Denver, who are basically tied for the second and third seeds—the league is certainly giving a lot more thought to what LA's ceiling might be. It's easy enough to be a prisoner of the moment, following Saturday's big win in Denver, and maybe forget how bad the Lakers looked against Utah going into the break, and Charlotte coming out. But it's also easy enough to just kinda run with the early season narrative (true at the time, no question) that the Lakers simply aren't good enough to contend, and not adjust that evaluation even with the introduction of new evidence. Because for those paying attention, a few things have become clear. Most importantly, the team has shown it can play high level defense. And critically, they showed it was possible before Anthony Davis was traded in games where Davis didn't play. Even including the Charlotte game and choppy execution against the Blazers, the Lakers have allowed about 300 points in their last three games. That is very, very good work in today's NBA. Overall, the defense over their last 25 has been near the top of the league. That's a big enough sample size to decide the Lakers are capable of being good enough on that end to contend. It's easy to forget that personnel has changed. Swapping D'Angelo Russell for Dorian Finney-Smith has made a big impact, as Jarred Vanderbilt's return from injury and Gabe Vincent's return to form. Or that LeBron has put out significantly more effort on that side of the ball. It was already a different team, and then they got Luka. There's still a lot to figure out, but it does seem like that win on Saturday changed the perception of the team around the league. Now it's time to solidify it win a few more good wins. HOSTS: Andy and Brian KamenetzkySEGMENT 1: The offense belongs to Luka. SEGMENT 2: Any issues gonna pop up because of that? SEGMENT 3: LA's defense feels sustainable. Your favorite podcast now has a newsletter! In One-stop for ultimate team and league coverage delivered right to your in box. Sign up for free now, at lockedondaily.com.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!RobinhoodWith Robinhood Gold, you can now enjoy the VIP treatment. The new Gold Standard is here with Robinhood Gold. To receive 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold. Door DashThey Swoosh, You Save: when any player scores 50 or more points in a game during the 24/25 NBA regular season, DashPass members save 50% on an order, up to $10 off with promo code NBA50. 50% Off 1 Order (Up to $10 Off)Offer valid from 9:00 AM PT through 11:59 PM PT after a 50 point performance in any game during the NBA season on orders placed at participating merchant locations. Valid only in the United States. Maximum value of discount is $10.00. Discount applies to subtotal only; does not apply to fees, taxes, and gratuity. Not valid for pickup. Limit one per person. Not valid for the purchase of alcohol. Fees, taxes, and gratuity still apply. Must have an active DashPass account. Use promo code NBA50 to redeem. See further terms and conditions at https://drd.sh/8ONpZP/.FanDuelRight now, new FanDuel customers can get ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS in Bonus Bets if your first FIVE DOLLAR bet wins!Download the app or head to FANDUEL.COM to get started. Bet with FanDuel—Official Partner of the NBA. FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Hey, everyone, welcome to Lockdown Lakers for Monday. Brian Kvinetsky, Andy Komeneski.
J.J. Redick says Luca Donchich is going to be the primary guy. The offense is running through him, Andy.
Any problems with that potentially? We'll talk about it next.
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Of course, Andy locked on Lakers on YouTube is where over 32,000 subscribers are going and all talking
about the embarrassment of riches that JJ Reddick has in front of him as he figures out how the
Lakers offense is going to operate. We'll get that into that in just a second. After we tell you
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imagine Andy being JJ Reddick and saying, you're looking at your roster and you say,
we need to run the offense through someone, you know, the common thing you talk about in the NBA.
And you look at Austin Reeves, you're like, that's a pretty good option.
He's really grown into that role this year.
I think, though, we can do better.
And you look at LeBron James and you say to yourself, well, we've got LeBron.
Let's run the offense through LeBron.
And then you stop and you say to yourself, no, we've actually still got.
a potentially a better option available to us than LeBron James.
And that, Andy, is Luca Donchich.
And that is where the offense is going to go.
After last night's win over Denver, which featured the first night of Luca
Donchich, really looking like Luca Donchich, looking like, as a few guys referred to him,
a quote-unquote killer out on the court.
Jay-J said afterwards, quote,
I think Luca needs to be the guy that controls the offense and Braun and AR because we're going to stagger everybody.
They're going to have their times to be on the ball.
But all three of those guys are very intelligent basketball players.
We can create mismatches.
We can get teams in the blunder.
And first of all, in terms of the usage from last night's game, Lucas was very small sample size.
I only played four games with the Lakers.
but at 36 the highest mark for him as a Laker.
LeBron came in at 28, Austin Reeves, 23.
And for all three of them, those are higher numbers
than what it's been in the previous three games
with LeBron, Luca, and Reeves.
But in terms of the separation,
that's more or less in line with how it's been given
a point here or there.
It's largely been
Luca about anywhere
five to eight percentage points higher than
LeBron, who's five to eight
percentage points higher than Reeves.
And if you are
looking to both establish
what Luca can do
for this team here and
for the future and
also set up a hierarchy
that quite frankly makes sense
given where everyone is in their
respective careers and
talent levels, this sounds about right.
Like this feels like the logical conclusion between the two, especially between the three,
but especially when you really think about with LeBron, it's not like he's going to get reduced
into some type of, you know, shotgun riding spectator.
It's just you have to both come up with these designations.
and come up with an order to things.
And given that the Lakers only have, I believe, 27 games left this season,
you don't have time for it to organically turn into the thing that it will.
You have to declare what it will be.
And therefore, JJ is just cutting to the chase of, frankly,
what everybody expected anyway.
Well, I look at it this way.
I mean, the biggest difference between Denver on Saturday and the other games is,
A, Luca played really well, like you say, it looked like Luca.
And then the minutes go up.
And so, you know, you are less on a minute's restriction.
He's looking far more comfortable.
The energy was there.
The, you know, the fluidity in his movement was much better.
All of that stuff.
But really quick, even then, he still had the highest usage rate by a pretty significant mark playing fewer minutes than LeBron and Reeves.
I understand.
I understand.
But just so people understand.
talking about, but I'm not talking about usage rate.
I'm just talking about like, you know, the, the sort of orchestrating and the influence
he's going to have on the offense and that sort of order of things is going to, you know,
you would expect him to have a larger role and do more stuff and be more comfortable, all
that stuff when the restrictions are gone and he's feeling more comfortable.
It, you can't have it both ways.
I don't know anybody who's sitting there arguing that, like, you know, Luca, it shouldn't be Luca as the primary, you know, the primary orchestrator, your primary point guard, the offense running, however you want to phrase it.
He is, by all accounts, one of the five best players on the planet, and he's 25, as opposed to 40, like the other option that they have.
And, you know, LeBron has at times, certainly over the last season, deferred more.
to try to make things run more through AD,
to try to have things run more through Austin Reeves
over the course of this year, especially.
And so you're not going to do those things
and then be like, I'm sorry, Luca, that, no,
I am not going to give up the ball to Luca.
And what I think is exciting about this is
when Reddick talks about being able to put the, you know,
teams in a blender,
there's a great possession in Saturday's game
where you can see
Luca has tremendous gravity
just based on what he can do with the ball.
He gets a ton of attention,
a ton of eyeballs on him,
and understands how to manipulate defenses because of that.
So he's in the right corner
as the Lakers are near the right corner,
goes on the wing,
dribbles down across,
and draws like two and a half players,
makes a skip pass to LeBron in the corner.
who had, I think, in a similar situation,
kind of shot a three that they close out.
He's attacking the rim basically
before the ball even gets to him.
Gets an easy blow, you know,
it's a blow by the defender,
I forget who it was,
and he goes in for the dunk.
This sort of thing,
it's not going to look exactly like that
every time defense was coming,
but LeBron and Luca,
and to, I think, a lesser extent,
but still an impressive extent,
Reeves are like supercomputers,
the first two especially.
and they will be able to see the weakness and whatever it is that defenses are doing.
And so as long as they're all engaged with each other,
somebody is going to have to have to have the ball.
And the argument for it to not be Luca Donchich to me doesn't make much sense.
The elephant in the room, if you were trying to figure out what would be a problem,
is obviously LeBron.
And like I said before,
LeBron is going to have his fingerprints
on everything that happens with this team moving forward
for as long as he's on this team
because he's LeBron James
and forget just the status,
the talent alone says that's what makes sense.
But the idea that for those who were looking
for the inevitable clash between these two
and for the record that has never included,
you or I, Brian, we've been saying,
over and over, it's going to be fine. But like, when the Lakers traded for Luca, they kept this
thing quiet. I mean, to the point where LeBron and Rich Paul, Anthony Davis, Luca, nobody knew about
it. And the unspoken but obvious part of that was you are messaging that it is Luca's franchise
moving forward. He is priority number one, even if that means ruffling LeBron's feathers in the process.
And while I'm sure on some level, LeBron didn't like this just because he can understand what it means.
And nobody likes the idea of moving down a rug in the importance ladder.
There's been no signs whatsoever that this is actually upsetting him.
There's a difference.
Like Rich Paul was recently on Gilbert Arenas's podcast.
And he said in so many words, had this deal, had we been aware of it, it likely would have fallen apart.
We understand why it happened this way.
We're fine with it happening this way.
And one assumes that Rich Paul speaks for LeBron in here.
Like the data and the eye test show he has been yielding the usage.
LeBron has also agitated over the last couple of years for more help this season, saying the margin for error
for this team was largely non-existent. He is now working with a better player than Anthony Davis.
Like, LeBron deservedly has an ego, but unless his ego was just steeped in massive insecurity,
there's nothing to complain about here. Yeah, I'll be honest with Andy. I'm not even sure,
I know you said like he may not like it, you know, but like he accept it. I'm not even sure
he doesn't like it. Like, I think. I just, I just mean what the idea.
of everybody there's really nothing not to like i i just mean that the symbolism like that part
the oh i seriously specifically the symbolism piece of it like it is i am no longer the most
important person in this franchise like the symbolism of that is something i wouldn't let's
let's talk a little bit more about that because it's it's an interesting concept but also too like
what exactly does that mean like not
the most important person. What does that mean if you're already, LeBron James? We'll get to that
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So one of the interesting, we get back to this, this Luca LeBron thing here in a second,
but I do want to note as the Mavericks come into town on Tuesday,
a highly anticipated game for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
But, you know, the Lakers with the win in Denver moved into fourth in the Western Conference.
They're, you know, statistically tied with Houston, but currently are fourth.
So there are only two games behind Memphis who lost on Sunday and the Nuggets.
And, you know, the rockets are in a bit of a slide.
The Clippers lost on Sunday.
The Timberwolps lost on Sunday.
The Oklahoma City beat them.
So now you're looking at it.
And the Lakers are actually statistically much closer to the two seed in the West.
The grizzlies and the nuggets tied Lakers.
are two games behind both of those teams,
then they are the Timberwolves at seven.
They are four and a half games now,
clear of Minnesota for the seven
and three and a half clear of the Clippers.
And they play the Clippers a couple times coming up soon.
So, you know, that was,
we talked about it for the special,
you know, the post-game bonus episode.
Like that was a huge game from a standing standpoint.
And then you get a little bit of help on Sunday
and things like even.
better. Things have been really good for the Lakers of late. It's, it's funny. There's like
one, I believe. It's funny because there's so much to kind of reconfigure your brain around with
this team, just in the sense that they went from a team that profiled as all offense to then
profiling as all defense and then shifting back and forth. And that's before you end up
up swapping out Anthony Davis for Luca Donchich, which will just by definition completely change
the face of your team and the identity of your team. They have become a better defensive team,
like more consistently during periods where they didn't even have Anthony Davis, the best
defensive player on this team. They've been doing it often in very unconventional ways. As I like to say,
small but they're not traditionally big either and there's just a lot of
right in this sense they play a lot of minutes without a without a normal five right and
some of their forwards are pretty big and some of their guards playing with those
forwards like you don't end up a small team in the aggregate aggregate but you end up
smaller than the lakers had been like at their most successful version and just we
entered this season thinking that they could be good but not necessarily
great and trying to think about them as a great team while working off, admittedly, small
sample sizes before you even start thinking about the Luca piece of this, there's just a lot of,
I don't know, reconfiguring going on and you have to be, you have to be both very open-minded
about what you're seeing without being a prisoner of the moment either.
It's a really interesting time just to be evaluating this team.
It helps, you know, obviously we watch every game.
We're following every practice.
We see like, so we've seen this arc take place.
One of my favorite examples of how an evaluation can be made of a team or a player
and it takes time for everybody to catch up, go back to when DeAngelo Russell was drafted
instead of Emanuel Moodye.
And, you know, it seems like a silly argument now.
But like at the time, this was like, you know, Moodye came out and just destroyed people for
like two weeks.
Delo got off to a really slow start.
For the rest of the season,
Delo was kind of a bust.
Moodye was like this kind of like,
oh, well, okay, Moodye is really good.
Dela's stuff.
The rest of the season, Russell completely outplayed
Emmanuel Moodye.
Took a while for things to catch up.
You look at where they are now,
and it's really hard, like you say,
because so much of the change,
like they were best,
better than people had decided they were very ordinary and they weren't going anywhere.
They started to play better before the lake, you know, before the, the, the trade.
But the evaluation of the team didn't really catch up.
It's like people almost forget that when the Lakers traded for Powell, they were in first
place in the Western Conference.
But because Andrew Bynum had just got hurt, it seemed like.
like, oh my God, they're headed for disaster.
Well, they weren't.
They'd actually shown they were really good to that point.
The Lakers started to fix things.
And then they got this other moment of upheaval where people weren't quite sure.
And so it seemed to me just kind of casually checking social media, looking at the post-game evaluations.
It does seem like that Denver game, given how Luca played, kind of clicked something in to where you can't.
They're fourth in the conference right now, two games out a second.
Like, you kind of can't ignore the Lakers anymore.
I mean, I think some of it has to do with beating Denver in particular.
A lot of it has to do with beating Denver.
Because Denver has, Denver's beaten the Lakers in the playoffs, two seasons in a row.
Denver is seen as a championship team.
They're only one season removed from actually winning a championship.
So it created this image of the Lakers not being as good as that champion.
championship measuring stick, Anthony Davis, not being as good as Luca Donchich, then you start
getting into LeBron's age. You also, I mean, you can let people behind the curtain a little bit.
You and I have worked in media for a long time. We've worked in different organization.
We've worked at ESPN, still with ESPN, the athletic, you know, all sorts of different places.
A lot of pundits get very self-aware about not wanting to look like they are hyping the Lakers.
I'm just being completely honest about it.
Absolutely.
They do not want to look like the team that's glazing the Lakers because then they hear
from a lot of people, oh, you're just part of that hype machine with the Lakers.
So I think they are often, I don't want to say reluctant to ever give them credit
because it would make it sound like this team has been playing championship level ball all year
and nobody's been acknowledging it because that's not accurate either.
I just think there can be a reticence to acknowledge.
knowledge when the Lakers are even just playing well, especially given that they haven't made
any other than that Western Conference run. Their playoff, since winning the championship,
their playoff runs have been largely uneventful and they miss the playoffs one year.
So I think that can be a factor in it. And again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves either.
I don't want to be prisoner of the moment. And like I said earlier, there's a lot of re-evaluation going on
in real time.
I just think, you know, similar, you hear now still national media talking a lot
about how the Lakers defense, which has been phenomenal for like a month and change,
you know, there's only so much you can trust it because like LeBron is in there and
LeBron's not playing defense.
Like, LeBron's been playing defense.
Right.
But that's the thing.
It's like, and I don't, I don't, we don't do, you know, let's attack the media.
Let's like take down people's opinions and like there.
It is, admittedly, I have opinions about the rest of the league, other teams, whatever.
I may or may not be really well formed because I don't watch every game even like I don't see every Rockets game.
I don't see as much as I can.
I try to keep up.
I do watch every Lakers game.
I see every Lakers game sometimes more than once.
And so, you know, it's you sometimes don't see these things unless you're looking at them every day.
And I just, it can take a high profile win like that one because it changes the context too,
like you said, about this team, this one team that has just killed the Lakers.
And they just couldn't seem to solve.
And what the difference is isn't just Luca.
It's the fact that you've got Dorian Finney Smith and replacing DeAngela Russell was admittedly
a catastrophically bad matchup in those Denver series.
It's like you just, it is a different team.
And those old paradigms just may not apply nearly as well.
And then you look at another one like,
well the Lakers did really well with Oklahoma City.
Like last year, you know,
the AD LeBron Lakers really did well with that team.
Well, with Chet and Hartnstein and all these things,
it may be different now.
The Lakers may be a terrible matchup for those guys.
We'll find out.
But there is a lot to think that is really sustainable about what they're doing.
So we'll get to that and kind of go back and button up that LeBron-Luca conversation as well.
We'll do that next.
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So one of the things,
Andy, I think is going to be fascinating to watch
because we talked about the
you know, the, the, the, the redic comment about where the offense is going to be centered around.
It's going to start with Luca Dantzich and work its way out from there.
But he said, look, we're going to be staggering these guys throughout a game.
And that means Reeves, LeBron, everybody's going to have stretches of game where they are the, the guy that it's running through.
And one of the things that I think, obviously, they need to, you know, it's still going to take a little while.
I work great on Saturday, but it's going to look different.
Other games, teams are going to throw stuff at them.
They're still going to struggle with zone, whatever it might be.
The thing that I think is really, that Russ, I think can really panic other teams is that if you're staggering those three guys throughout a game, that means LeBron.
It means Luca.
It means Austin Reeves.
It means those guys are going to get significant time against second units of other teams.
teams. You're going to see a lot of times where you're going to
like LeBron and Reeves out there together or Luca and LeBron or
Luca and Reeves or whatever or just one of the things at times
when they're going to be able to kind of feast on lesser
talent. And I think that is one of the things. When you have
LeBron and Luca, usually you have like Denver has Nicola
Yokic who is as he's the best player on the planet. But he can't play 48
minutes. And when he's not on the floor, it's real different. When Luca isn't on the floor,
you're going to have a lot of times, LeBron, when both of those guys aren't on the floor,
you are certainly going to have Austin Reeves. There's never going to be a time when all three
are healthy and not one of them is on the floor. And so just from a matchup game management standpoint,
that creates tremendous leverage for the Lakers and is going to put LeBron, it's going to put
Reeves, you can put these guys in situations where they're going to get to be aggressive
against kind of groups of players they haven't been seeing over the course of their career.
It's interesting, like just getting back to the Saturdays game against Denver and how
the matchups now just become different. And it's one game. Obviously, Michael Malone is going
to be strategizing for the next one's coming up relatively soon. So we'll see how much
of a carryover there is, but just this team being so different now.
Like Denver used to have the natural cover for Anthony Davis and Yokic and a pretty natural one for LeBron and Aaron Gordon.
And then you could figure out everything else from there, particularly when Contagius Caldwell Pope,
was around as a perimeter stopper.
He's obviously now in Orlando.
But now this incarnation of the Lakers, they don't have defensive answers for Louisville.
Luca and LeBron.
Like, Aaron Gordon cannot guard both of those guys.
You know, Michael Porter Jr. can't really guard either one of them.
Christian Brown is too small for any of the Lakers scores other than Austin Reeves.
Like, Rui now becomes much easier to work offensively into mismatches.
Like, there's no natural or significant assignment defensively for Yokic anymore.
and to sort of anchor whatever Denver's doing defensively there.
Like, again, Michael Malone is a really good coach,
and he was working off very little game tape
in terms of how the Lakers look with Luca,
particularly when Luca actually looks good and looks like himself
and how this is all going to work.
But a lot of what was going on before against Denver no longer applies.
and a lot of what was going on with the Lakers against multiple teams no longer applies.
100%.
And like it's not a question of is Anthony Davis better or worse than Lucas?
Set that aside.
I mean, he's not as good as Luca Dantzic, but he is better at some things than Luke is.
There's no question.
It's just you're so different.
And I think it is.
really important in the Denver matchup
just to like, they can look
at it and be like, none of that old stuff applies.
And I think
that'll help them mentally with that matchup.
How it affects the other ones?
I don't know.
But it's...
We touched on this briefly
in Saturday's reaction show, but
Denver is such a pivotal
matchup for the Lakers just because
they've been knocked out twice by
them. And there's also,
there's the psychology of not just losing to this team a lot, but losing when it's been really
close. Like the two playoff series, the eight losses they had in two playoff series were by
like a combined 50 points in all eight teams. I mean, all eight games, which means it's been
legitimately close. So on one hand, all you keep hearing is you're not championship material
because you can't beat this one team.
And this one team has been the thing you can't overcome.
But on one hand, you know it's been legitimately close.
So it can feel like it's within arms reach.
But then it's like, okay, if it's been this close this many times,
maybe the truth is we just can't reach the extra 5%.
And it's just, you can't tell me that the Denver thing has not been.
in their head. And we know this also because JJ said after the game, like, we prepped our asses off
for this game. Like this game was important. And like I saw, you know, predictably whether in
our comments section or like in the Locked on Nuggets or on social or whatever, like Denver fans
crowing about the idea that, you know, like the Lakers treated this like game seven or whatever.
And, you know, it's not the same thing where Denver, it's like, you know what? You're right.
Like, you are correct.
Like, the Lakers did treat this with playoff importance.
And guess what?
They won by 23.
I was not to say they did, but they won by 23.
Right.
Like, if you, it's not even about like 16 banners versus one or anything like that.
It's like what, with what's been going on now, the Lakers have needed tangible proof that they can beat Denver decisively,
control a game against them.
And they got it.
Where it goes from there?
I don't know, but it matters.
Like, it really does matter.
And there's nothing for the Lakers to be ashamed about the idea of they treated this game
super important.
Good.
Good.
I referred to the problem with Denver as a last mile problem.
You know, like, you know, people know that as like, you know, in logistics, you can get the thing.
You get the thing built and you get it to.
But then like that.
How do you get it?
from the warehouse to the customer.
Like, you know, that kind of thing.
Like it's that last mile to getting your product delivered.
And then the Lakers couldn't figure out that last mile.
Some of it was in those last miles, Denver's execution was always better than L.A.'s.
Always.
But part of it was, ultimately, you could just tell that the Lakers, that Denver believed that the Lakers,
were going to make mistakes that they were going to,
they weren't going to be able to raise their level.
And ultimately, you could, you could also see the Lakers kind of maybe believe that too.
And so that part of the last mile problem is gone.
It could reappear in other ways.
The matchup, you know, I've seen people in the chat saying, like, you know,
Denver is going to adjust.
Of course they're going to, like the Lakers aren't going to be able to do this
over what they did to Yokic or,
or Carl Anthony Towns.
Teams are going to see that
and they're going to adjust to it
and there will be nights
where it won't work.
But that doesn't mean that the Lakers
can't win a series.
The Lakers will have their own adjustments
that they try to make.
But fundamentally,
you've got to first and foremost,
you've got to believe that you can win.
And that's the thing that I think
the Lakers got back to
insofar as Denver is concerned.
And then from there,
I don't think there were a lot of other
team so they didn't think they could beat.
And they might find out they're wrong.
But like I said, I think Oklahoma City is a completely different matchup now with
Hartnstein available to them and playing quite well than they were last year.
And so I don't know what that looks like.
I don't know what the clippers look like in a seven-game series.
I don't know.
But all I know is that the team is playing very well.
They were playing very well before Anthony Davis was traded.
They've played very well in games that Anthony Davis wasn't available for, pre-trade and post.
They've sustained their defense against a variety of teams.
And while they bleep the bed against Charlotte coming out of the break and those Utah games didn't exactly inspire,
when they needed a game to lock in, they did and it looked really cool.
So I'm excited.
Yeah, a few things, too.
First of all, as Krasu pointed out in the chat, when I was going through the banner count,
I was subtracting the Lakers and Denver, 17 and 1.
That's how I land on the Lakers having 16 banners.
They clearly have 17.
I was doing too much in real time.
But obviously, 17 banners total 16 banner difference between them in Denver.
Thank you.
It obviously matters.
the defense too, like the question of sustainability.
It's interesting, you know, they've made changes in terms of their approach.
It helps to have personnel that is new this year, whether you're talking about the presence of Dorian Finney Smith,
the healthy availability of Vando and Gabe Vincent, even a guy like Jordan Goodwin,
who he has clearly cemented himself a place in the rotation.
Yeah, we'll talk about that Tuesday, maybe.
He's really been good.
He got a lot of minutes, including second half, fourth quarter minutes against Denver.
But he is a defense first player.
LeBron, we talked about it for the commitment that LeBron has demonstrated over like the last four to six weeks defensively.
It removes the permission structure for everyone else not to be attentive.
It also raises the onus of everybody else to match.
what the geysers doing out there.
I think it also, there's, I'm sure, some degree of AD is no longer there to erase mistakes.
So we all need to be better because, you know, when we covered the, you know, Kobe Powell teams,
we heard from plenty of guys saying, yeah, you know, it helps having Powell and then Anderbine them back there.
Like, even guys like Kobe and Fisher and Artest, you know, Trevor Riza, these were very good defenders.
like dogged defenders, they would acknowledge like, yeah, we know Drew is back there.
That makes a difference.
It's always a combination of personnel, you know, DFS, Vanderbilt Healthy, Gabe Vincent,
much better than he was before.
Like all it's, it's personal.
And some schematic things that J-D has been doing different as well.
And its attitude and its commitment, it's all that stuff.
Tuesday's obviously huge night.
I think, you know, people are setting the over-under on Luca points in Tuesday's game at
50, 55. He's certainly going to be highly motivated.
Well, we'll get you ready for that game.
Break down a few more things that are happening in the Lakers rotation.
All of it tomorrow.
But anyway, in the meantime, Locked on Lakers on YouTube is where you can hang out with over
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