The Los Angeles Lakers find themselves in a tight race for playoff positioning in the Western Conference. JJ Redick’s squad is battling with the Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets and Memphis Grizzlies for that second seed behind the Oklahoma City Thunder, who have locked up the top spot.
In the stacked West, the playoffs will very much be matchup dependent and every team will be extremely dangerous regardless of seed. Having home-court advantage could be especially important, particularly for the Lakers who have the third-best home record in the NBA.
Redick understands that as well and would love for the Lakers to lock in home-court, but also knows that his team has to be ready to play every night whether at home or not, and can’t look to try and manipulate certain matchups come the postseason.
“We would all love to have home-court advantage; it would be nice,” Redick said following the Lakers recent victory over the Denver Nuggets. “Our group has been awesome at home so far, but you gotta play the next game and you gotta win the game in front of you. I’ve just seen it too many times — the basketball gods start messing around with things. The basketball gods — they will punish you.”
Going into the playoffs last year, many felt the Lakers should purposely lose their Play-In contest in order to avoid facing the Denver Nuggets. Of course, they would go on to lose to Denver in five games in the first round leading some to feel vindicated in that thought process. But like Redick said, it is simply about winning the game that is in front of them.
The Lakers have shown that they can beat any team on any given night and that is the mindset that Redick and this squad will have. While they can’t catch the Thunder, securing home-court for as many rounds as they can should be the goal as this team, when healthy, has been outstanding inside the Crypto.com Arena.
JJ Redick told Lakers to stop complaining about schedule
The Lakers have finally gotten through their extremely challenging stretch of six games in eight days with three consecutive back-to-backs. It was indeed a tough couple weeks, but one that JJ Redick didn’t want to hear his players complaining about as no one will feel sorry for the Lakers.
“Back-to-backs, it’s just part of the NBA,” Redick said. “Every team goes through it at different points. So no one is gonna feel sorry for us and we can’t feel sorry for ourselves. You gotta play the game in front of you and then move on to the next thing and try to get better. I think as we start getting everybody back, they will be a lot of tough parts of the schedule still to go, but we knew this two weeks, last week starting with the Boston game through this homestand, was gonna be a huge challenge.”
