After a thrilling win against the Toronto Raptors, the Los Angeles Lakers were blown out by the Boston Celtics on the second night of their back-to-back.
The Lakers were down from the jump as the Celtics raced out to a huge lead and never looked back. Despite Los Angeles generating quality offensive looks, nothing seemed to go down while their defense was a disaster.
The team was able to mount a comeback in the second half, but the deficit was too large for them to overcome in the end.
Head coach JJ Redick may not have liked the result, but he appreciated the fight he saw from his players after their rough start, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Look, expected score we were down two at halftime, expected score we won by two. The first half we had the highest paint touch rate we’ve had in a half, or one of the highest paint touch rates we’ve had. We’ve been one of the best non-rim paint two teams in the league and we shot 5-for-13 there. They blitzed us from 3 in that first half. We outscored them by one the last three quarters, unfortunately that’s not how basketball works and you end up losing the game by 21. So I thought our fight was good. There were a lot of moments where we certainly could’ve broken and we didn’t. That’s a credit to our guys.”
Boston managed to shoot over 50 percent from beyond the arc, but Redick still stood by the defensive game plan:
“Jaylen Brown is a low-30% off-the-dribble 3-point shooter and he hits three 3s in a row in the third quarter. Jordan Walsh, we were willing to live with his 3s, we gotta give up something, and he hits four of them. We ended up getting a contest on three of them. So you gotta be willing to live with certain things and they made us pay. You can talk about a game-plan all you want, but you gotta be able to figure out what you’re willing to live with. We’ve obviously done that many times and they made us pay tonight.”
Redick went on to explain the expected score metric the team uses internally and how it can be useful to evaluate performances like their loss to Boston as the final score looked worse than it actually was:
“You can find that anywhere. That’s our internal metric, most teams have that, some of the analytics stuff has that. But it’s based on shot quality, that sort of thing. We know what it is at halftime every game. Some of that is we talk about scoring opportunity battle, we talk about expected score, yeah.”
Redick looked visibly upset during the game, but it seems as though he understood that it would be an uphill battle to beat a team like the Celtics so shorthanded.
Redick has done well to keep the team even-keeled during the early portion of the regular season, but he and his staff have to find a way to bounce back on Sunday against the Philadelphia 76ers.
JJ Redick embracing Lakers’ tough stretch coming up on schedule
Up to this point, the Lakers have played a relatively soft schedule though things ramp up in the coming weeks against several projected playoff teams. JJ Redick is embracing the tough stretch as it’ll give him and the team a chance to measure themselves up against better competition.
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