The Los Angeles Lakers went into the second night of a back-to-back — a matchup with the young and scrappy Portland Trail Blazers — significantly shorthanded. Head coach JJ Redick had to formulate a 48-minute game plan without Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Marcus Smart, Gabe Vincent, Jaxson Hayes, Maxi Kleber or rookie Adou Thiero.
The result was Austin Reaves scoring 41 points in 39 minutes and a bench of only Bronny James, Nick Smith Jr. and Dalton Knecht in a 14-point loss to move L.A. to 2-2. Of the eight players the Lakers played for more than five minutes on Monday night, only one — Reaves — has ever been asked to run an NBA offense.
Bronny is more of a combo guard that plays a secondary creator role offensively, while Smith and Knecht are more pure shooters than initiators and everybody else was either a forward or center. And that’s the main takeaway that Redick had from the Lakers’ loss.
“It’s hard to run offense without ball handlers,” he admitted after the game.
However, Redick did not give up entirely on analyzing his team’s performance and coming away with positives and negatives to reinforce.
“No, I took a lot away,” Redick said. “Again, our half-court defense was excellent, first-shot defense was excellent. And saw, for the most part, that’s out of a couple guys, just a highly competitive spirit, connected group, you can build on that.”
Reaves being the only true primary creator for the Lakers should have made it easy for the Trail Blazers to key in on him and slow him down. He scored 41 anyways, and Redick spoke about what he saw from Portland that allowed Reaves to still have success.
“Well, first half, they played the five on our five. We, to start that third quarter, we had said, whoever the five is guarding, be a pressure release, and just didn’t do a good job of that during the first quarter. They basically were cross-matching Jrue [Holiday], did a good job. … There wasn’t another guy to bring the ball up, so it’s just circumstantial.”
The Lakers need some reinforcements back in the lineup soon. Redick knows that the team will not be able to win games with any consistency if no one can handle the ball except for one player. The Lakers play the Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies in their next two games, and running the same rotation against those two teams would almost certainly result in two losses.
JJ Redick hopeful to get Marcus Smart & Jaxson Hayes back
The only two players that missed Monday’s game that have a chance of returning on Wednesday against the Timberwolves are Marcus Smart and Jaxson Hayes. JJ Redick said that he is hopeful to get both players back, which would give L.A. their backup center and an important defensive piece back.
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