The Los Angeles Lakers have been among the better teams in the league at taking care of the basketball this season. On the year, they rank No. 8 in the NBA in turnovers per game and No. 8 in turnover percentage. Anthony Davis has been the spearheads of that, as he does not rank in the top 50 in turnovers per game despite being 15th in usage percentage among players with at least 15 games played.
But as of late, the Lakers have fallen victim to carelessness with the ball in their hands. They’ve lost a few games due to high turnover numbers, including Monday night against the Detroit Pistons. L.A. couldn’t handle the physicality of Detroit’s roster, coughing up the ball 20 times leading to 29 Pistons points.
Davis spoke about the turnovers, saying that he knows that it’s not a winning formula for the Lakers to turn the ball over as often as they have been recently.
“We were just loose with the ball,” Davis said, “I had I think four and we were trying to make the right play. They do a good job of creating turnovers and it’s hard to win a game with 20. We just gotta be better with the basketball, everybody. That’s kind of what the difference in the game was. When we were in the halfcourt, we were pretty good defensively. But the turnovers were a big part of why they won.”
While physicality is important and being able to not get outworked is a major thing, Davis wants the focus to be more on physicality when they have the ball as he expects teams to look to exploit that moving forward.
“Be strong with the ball. Teams are going to watch film and look at this game. The gameplan coming into the game is to be physical, and we will not turn the ball over, so we just got to be physical with the basketball. We have to set guys up and not play so loosely, and how we counteract that is to be physical back.”
By playing loose with the ball, the Pistons were able to take advantage and use strength to force turnovers and create easy buckets for themselves. Detroit had 60 points in the paint and 24 fastbreak points.
Given that the Lakers only lost by three, this very easily could have gone a different way if L.A. had just been a hair more careful on the offensive end.
Anthony Davis discusses Lakers’ defensive improvement
Defense is something that the Lakers have typically taken pride in, but that script completely flipped to start the 2024-25 season. That came as a bit of a surprise considering Anthony Davis is manning the middle, but head coach JJ Redick has been trying to find answers to improve on that end of the floor.
Through this early part of the season, the Lakers relied heavily on their offense to keep them in games. Quite simply, the purple and gold could not get enough stops when it mattered most, but that also points out a personnel issue.
However, things have changed recently as the Lakers have improved defensively while struggling offensively. The Lakers held the Memphis Grizzlies to 110 points and then Sacramento Kings to 99 and 100 points.
Davis was asked about what he likes most about the team’s defense recently and he pointed out a lot of things that have caught his eye.
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