So then what do the Lakers have to do? Aside from taking their home game on the road, Brown has to make adjustments, and make them work before the playoffs.
In Cleveland, Brown had a drive-and-kick offense built around driving to the basket, something LeBron James was great at doing (and still is), something that Bryant has done in the past (but hardly ever does now), and there’s just no one on the Lakers who can realistically do that. His offense would also rely heavily on pick-and-rolls, floor spacing, and freeing up shooters with screens. More things the Lakers don’t do because they lack the personnel to do it.
If murmurs were being heard that the players wanted to revert back to the triangle offense, it’s probably because this particular group was built to excel in that offense, and they’d like to get back to the days when they’d score more than 95 points per game.
Under Brown, that’s not going to be so easy. To start the season, Brown did say he would try to incorporate facets of the triangle in his offense, but I’m not sure how true he stayed to that statement. Here’s what I know. It may be worth his time to start integrating, and here’s why.
The Lakers are 18-2 at home. Their road record, 7-14. There’s a correlation and it begins and ends with role players. Options 1-3 on the Lakers (Bryant, Gasol, and Bynum) play well no matter where they are, but the role players (AKA 4-12) play well at home, and on the road they’re sometimes non-existent. An advantage of the Triangle is that the off-the-ball movement allows shooters to be productive within their own skill set. Without having to worry about creating their own shot off the dribble, they simply just need to get to their preferred spots on the floor and shoot.
So long as the Lakers keep the same core intact, they can have a revolving door of role players and still be effective offensively. This is after all the same core that won two titles with Sasha Vujacic and Jordan Farmar.
When the Lakers offense stalls, it’s usually because they’re not doing a good job in getting the ball to the players in the post. Having two seven-footers, an interior game is going to be key for the Lakers want to win, they definitely don’t want to turn their offense into three-pointer ball or whatever. Bryant and Gasol both operate well in the post, Metta World Peace (when mismatched) is a good post player, and this just in courtesy of ESPN Stats and Info: Bynum ranks third in the NBA with 498 post-up points this season. This considering he hardly gets touches, imagine if they actually got him the ball?
They’d win more.
Brown has to be the catalyst in getting the team to run a fluid offense, but he’s got to work with the team’s strengths instead of trying to get them to develop new skills, without any stable practice time. He also has to get the players to buy into whatever he’s trying to sell. I get that Bryant will always be inclined to do his own thing, but Bryant doesn’t choose not to defer to Bynum because he doesn’t trust him, he just trusts himself more. Nobody is a bigger Kobe fan than Kobe. Clearly, Bynum has proved himself an All-Star and if last Sunday was any indication, Bryant is aware of his existence. The issue is how often Bryant chooses to run plays for his young center.
That falls on Mike Brown.
There’s this Spanish proverb that, translated, goes like this, “It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.” It’s about being a leader, and in Brown’s case, it’s time to stop talking and start doing. What the Lakers need is someone to lead them, Bryant can do it to an extent, but he’s not the one with the clipboard in hand. He’s got to override Bryant in a sense, and if Bryant really just wants to win a sixth ring, he’ll do whatever it takes, and others will follow suit. In order to be a good leader sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone, understand that the decisions you make have to benefit the group as a whole and not just one individual.
Maybe you don’t make a trade, maybe you don’t revert back to the triangle offense, but the Lakers can have success if Brown takes a little initiative, gets these guys to work smarter and not harder, and at the very least take advantage of the talent he currently has.