The Los Angeles Lakers are a weird bunch as despite having a veteran roster, they have been much better at home than on the road this season. They have one of the best home records in the league at 29-10, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
On the other hand, they are just 17-20 on the road this season and have largely struggled against quality competition away from Crypto.come Arena.
That, combined with their recent crazy schedule, has led head coach JJ Redick to acknowledge that they would prefer to have home-court advantage in as many rounds as possible this postseason.
“Yeah, we would like to be in the top four,” Redick said before Thursday’s game against the Golden State Warriors. “We would like to have home-court. I think beyond just playing well at home, it would be nice for our guys to finish in Portland and then be able to be home for nine or 10 days. I’ve played in Philly, I’ve played in Orlando, I’ve played for the Clippers. That was 13 of my 15 years in the NBA, every year we had two East Coast trips or two West Coast trips. [The Lakers] have had five (this season). We’ve had three in the month of March.
“So I think just the travel and just being home, that to me is super important. And we play well at home, so it would be nice to have home-court.”
The second through eighth seeds in the Western Conference are only separated by a handful of games with around two weeks to go in the regular season, so where the Lakers will end up is definitely not set in stone.
They have put themselves in a good position and could potentially get a top-four seed, or they could also fall into the Play-In Tournament. In all of his years in the league, Redick hasn’t quite seen anything like this.
“You sense it and feel it every single day,” Redick said of the close standings. “It feels like you kind of don’t take a lot of stock in the first eight games, 10 games, 15 games and then all of a sudden you get to mid-December or Christmas and you start looking every day. The fluctuations, if one team gets hot, one team has a cold streak, you can drop pretty quickly.
“We knew coming into this year it would be a challenge to make the playoffs in the West. We were picked 11th in the West, so it’s not a surprise to see how many competitive teams there are. Frankly, Wemby and the Spurs were very competitive for a while, Portland has been awesome, they play super hard. So there’s teams even outside of that top 10 that you have to be really dialed in for and play a good basketball game to win.”
If Redick and the Lakers finish the regular season strong, they could be in a position to make a deep postseason run with teams needing to beat them in L.A. to win a series, which has proven very difficult this season.
JJ Redick: Lakers have to build ‘playoff mentality’
JJ Redick understands how important these last few games are as he recently stressed the need for his team to build a ‘playoff mentality’ before they actually get to the postseason.
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