Austin Reaves and the Los Angeles Lakers got off to a poor start against the Detroit Pistons on Monday night and were never able to recover. They went down by as many as 20 in the first half and while they fought back to cut the deficit to five, the result was a 115-103 los to fall to 4-3 on the season.
If the Lakers are gonna compete in a loaded Western Conference this season, then they can’t take any game for granted, especially against inferior opponents.
With that being the case, Reaves called his team out for their lack of effort in the first half while also praising the Pistons for their play, as seen on Spectrum SportsNet:
“I just don’t think we competed hard enough in the first half. Anytime you go down around 20 at any point in the game, it’s tough to fight your way back. They got a lot of guys over there that can really play too so it’s not like you’re playing against a bad team. Everybody thinks that with their past lack of success, but they got guys that are really good at basketball and like I said, it’s hard to climb your way back when you’re in a hole and not playing with energy and nothing is going your way because of that.”
The Lakers are now 1-3 on their current road trip, washing away the taste of a 3-0 start to the season at home. Reaves knows that everything wasn’t gonna be perfect this season, but a loss like the Pistons one was particularly hard to swallow:
“There’s ups and downs throughout the whole year. Obviously wish it was all rainbows and butterflies, but that’s literally almost impossible. The way you started the year, you wish you could continue that and even when you do lose, you never want to lose, but you can go through games that you lose and be like ‘We did the right stuff.’ This, this or this didn’t go our way, or we didn’t make a shot here, didn’t make a shot there. And then there’s games that you lose where you look back at it like ‘Wish I could have that one back.’ I feel like we’ve had some on this trip so far where the energy and effort out of the gate wasn’t what it needed to be to beat two good teams.”
The Lakers are heavily reliant on their starting lineup to carry them, but that wasn’t the case in Detroit and Reaves knows it needs to change:
“Honestly, we’re just getting our ass kicked in the first quarter, second quarter. Like I said, it’s hard to battle back from that. Sometimes you can do it because we have so much talent on the team, but you never want to rely on that. You want to be the one to come out and throw the first punch and maintain that, kind of like they did to us tonight. But we’ll watch the film and get better from it.”
The Lakers will finish their road trip on Wednesday night against the Grizzlies, and it will be interesting to see what type of energy they come out with to start the game with everyone seemingly addressing that as the biggest issue in the Pistons loss.
Austin Reaves planning on playing all 82 games for Lakers
Austin Reaves has been dealing with an ankle issue over the last week but has played through it and revealed his plan is to play all 82 games for the Lakers for the second straight season.
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