The Los Angeles Lakers could have easily run away with Friday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors. Toronto was without a few major pieces and the Lakers led 43-19 after the first quarter and 76-51 at halftime. Had they kept their foot on the gas pedal, head coach JJ Redick could have breezed his way to his first ever road win.
Instead, the Lakers let the Raptors right back into the game with a 37-point third quarter and a repeat effort in the fourth. Allowing 74 points in the second half to a Raptors team missing Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley led to just a six-point win after leading by as much as 26.
The Lakers ultimately secured the win anyways, but it’s not how they would have liked. Redick spoke about what went right for L.A. in the first half and how the Raptors were able to climb back into it, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“I’ll say, our team in that first half probably played our best half of basketball and it wasn’t mistake-free. You can make a legitimate case we should’ve had 83 (points). We had two outlet passes, one that was at Dalton’s ankles and another one that went over LeBron’s head. That’s four points and then Dalton’s charge there were two guys wide open, we talked about that at halftime. So it was as good as we can play offensively. You watch the Charlotte game the other night and [the Raptors] got down big on the road and they kept playing and turned that into a 138-133 game and I think in the NBA, when you get a big lead, your focus can wane on the defensive end and I thought that’s what happened tonight. But you also have to give them a lot of credit, they play really hard. They just keep playing and I think for our team, all of that movement and driving and movement and driving, it was tough for us to guard the other day in Cleveland and it was tough for us to guard tonight. We’ll certainly get better and clean some things up. We also have to start the third quarter better. That was probably the biggest thing, you can try to put your opponent away there in the first five or six minutes of the third quarter when you have a big lead like that and we just allowed them to have life.”
This is not a Lakers-centric issue. Plenty of teams will build a huge lead just to watch it melt away in a hurry. It’s easy to take their foot off the gas pedal when they have such a big lead. But the best teams are able to get the big lead and quickly put their opponents away from there.
That’s the Lakers next step after a strong 4-2 start to the season with a few more winnable games coming up.
Anthony Davis not using excuses for Lakers struggles
Considering the Lakers are still in the beginning stages of learning this new system under JJ Redick, some growing pains should be expected. But Anthony Davis was not willing to use that as an excuse for their poor performance against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Davis refusing to offer up excuses is more of the accountability that has been seen from this entire Lakers team over the past few days as they’ve dropped their first two games of the season. Davis has high expectations for this team and expects a certain level of performance that wasn’t met in Cleveland.
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