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| This has been the whole Lakers' team mentality during this run, save for Nash. |
The Lakers have been seemingly cursed this season as they have lost 40
games of injury to their starters alone, but it was usually in balanced
fashion, as in one perimeter player and one post player is out. Not for this
stretch, as everybody over 6’10’’ not named Robert Sacre is injured right now
(Pau Gasol with a concussion, Dwight Howard with a torn labrum, Steve Blake with a torn abdomen
and Jordan Hill with loose fragments in his hip which will require season ending
surgery). The Lakers are going with the smallest ball possible, as they have
had stretches where Metta World Peace and Earl Clark/Antawn Jamison are playing
center and power forward and this is a bigger problem than turnovers and bad
shots combined. The positive news here is Clark’s and Hill’s Per 36
numbers are nearly identical, the only difference really being how physical
Hill is compared to Clark, though Clark is far more versatile, as he can slide
to the outside and defense perimeter players (like he did on Wednesday vs. the
Spurs, as he took on Manu Ginobili).
Let’s get one thing straight: Defense wins championships. No team has a
chance of winning it all if they allow 105+ points per game. It’s the reason
why the D’Antoni-Steve Nash led Phoenix Suns never made it past the Western
Conference Finals. The Lakers have some excellent man to man defenders with
World Peace, Kobe Bryant and Howard but the team’s lack of defensive
fundamentals is seriously disturbing; nobody on the team rotates to help the
help defender, and on occasions, nobody rotates to help the initial defender.
This is the cause of the uncontested shots most opposing teams have in or
around the paint. The Lakers lack of trust in each other this late into the
season is something to seriously be concerned about and it makes me question
whether this team can ever make a deep post season run. D’Antoni may have fixed
the offense, or better said, D’Antoni made it easier for Nash to fix the
offense (103.2 PPG, good for 4th in the league) as the Princeton
wasn’t a system apt for Nash but D’Antoni hasn’t been preaching defense at all
this season, save for the rare occasions when an opposing team makes an early
run, only to have D’Antoni call a time out to get everybody organized. The
Lakers defense is among the bottom of the league, as they surprisingly don’t
allow more points than they score despite their 15-21 record. The Lakers allow
101.7 points per game, good for 26th in the league, and that’s
something that’s not even close to cutting it in this league. The one constant
though out NBA history has been: the team that plays defense usually ends up
winning it all. It doesn’t matter how offensively oriented the league has become;
defense is still the most important aspect of the game.
I am hopefully Howard’s injury won’t keep him out for long, and Los
Angeles can get back to having somebody back there to protect the rim, as
having World Peace and Jamison back there made for a lot of easy layups and in
the paint, uncontested jumpers. Howard’s presence alone is a huge difference
maker (reference the last time LA played OKC), as guys generally change their
shots as to try not to get swatted into the 10th row. And while
Gasol may be softer than marshmallows, he still provides some defensive value as
his length is still there to help contest shots (though I still insist on
trading him while he has value, especially now that Earl Clark as made a name
for himself and Artest is reverting to last year’s horrid form). The Lakers are
very fixable because of the talent the team has, but it won’t get done until
the team itself does some serious soul searching and starts to work hard on the
defensive end.
As an end note, kudos to Howard about a month ago for calling Kobe on
his free safety style defense. Bryant told him not to do it again; Howard said
he would do it again if Kobe didn’t rotate. It takes some serious guts to tell
Kobe what to do on his own team, definitely the make of a Franchise Player.
