The Los Angeles Lakers fought hard in Game 1 of their second-round series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, but ultimately it wasn’t enough. The Lakers hung around for much of the contest despite being huge underdogs, but eventually fell 108-90 to go down 1-0 in the series.
The Lakers stuck with the Thunder for much of the first three quarters before the Oklahoma City finally pulled away in the fourth. Head coach JJ Redick didn’t feel like there was one moment where things shifted for his team, but rather that they just made too many mistakes overall.
“I don’t think there was a turning point,” Redick said after the loss. “I think it was a general theme throughout the night of when we made game plan mistakes, they hurt us. I thought the Houston Game 5 was the most game plan mistakes we made in a playoff game so far, we obviously lost that game.
“You’re playing the World Champs, your margin for error in terms of mistakes is not that high. You can make mistakes, basketball is a game full of mistakes, there was just too many tonight. We gotta clean that up.
“But there was some good things. We won expected score, held Shai under 20, he ended up with seven turnovers. Guys played hard, we just gotta do a better job with execution. It comes down to just the attention to detail on that and I know we’ll clean things up and be better.”
As Redick noted, the Lakers just don’t have any margin for error against this Thunder team that are favored to repeat as NBA Champions. There were certainly some good things the Lakers did, but Redick felt that every time the Lakers made a mistake, particularly on defense, the Thunder made them pay.
“Primarily defensive,” Redick added. “There were some things we did offensively that weren’t necessarily what we talked about and sometimes ran a set and didn’t do what we were supposed to do, but that always is gonna happen. I think the gameplan defensively, whether it was a coverage thing or Shai coverage, it just seemed like every time we didn’t execute, they hurt us.
“They other part of that was when they did get an offensive rebound, they absolutely killed us. We didn’t do a good job of building back out on the offensive rebound.”
Making sure his team locks in defensively will be a focus for Redick prior to Game 2 as, even though the Lakers scored just 90 points on 42% shooting, Redick believes his team generated good looks.
“We won expected score, so it was good enough to win.”
Now the key will be converting that expected score over to the actual one, but against this elite Thunder defense that will be no easy feat.
Lakers forward Jarred Vanderbilt suffers dislocated right pinky finger
The Lakers also suffered a loss on the injury front as forward Jarred Vanderbilt suffered a gruesome full dislocation of his right pinky finger in Game 1.
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