Turnovers have been an issue in many of the Los Angeles Lakers’ losses this season. JJ Redick’s team is actually in the top-10 in taking care of the ball this season, but when they have had their worst showings it is often accompanied by too many turnovers, allowing for easy buckets for the opposition.
After 18 turnovers in their loss to the Detroit Pistons, the Lakers bounced back with just nine in their Christmas Day victory over the Golden State Warriors. In fact, Austin Reaves was the only player with more than one on the night.
When asked what the Lakers did to to limit their turnover issues against the Warriors, Redick pointed to a couple of simple, but effective things saying that the team was just better prepared to handle situational traps, and did a great job of making good passes, via NBA.com:
“More prepared for some of the after free throw random traps, after timeout random traps, more prepared for that. Our guys, the awareness level with all that stuff was really good. I know this sounds simple, but we passed to each other well tonight. There was a lot of on-time, on-target passes and sometimes you get the ball and its low and you knock it. And the defender closes and it’s not that that’s the turnover, but then you get sped up and so I think the rhythm of our offense was really good because we passed well to each other.”
Redick is right in that something like making good passes sounds very simple, but it is so important. A pass being a little low or slightly behind can impact a player’s ability to attack or shoot. An opening that was there can be closed because of a bad pass and the Lakers being on point with that allows for a much better offensive rhythm overall.
The key for the Lakers going forward, as has been the case all year long is their consistency with these things. They have shown the ability to be excellent in these areas at different points, but Redick must figure out a way to get this team to keep it up on a nightly basis in order to really make a run.
JJ Redick believes Lakers must shoot more 3-pointers
JJ Redick is always focused on ways for the Lakers to improve across the board and one area where he wants to see a bump from his team is in their 3-point shooting, namely taking more good threes.
“In some ways, we need to shoot more threes and we need to make more threes,” Redick said recently. “That doesn’t mean we come down and just no pass, one dribble shot. We gotta take the right ones and we gotta do it with the right process.
“We’ve shown the guys a bunch of clips over the last week or so of us doing that. Make or miss, we gotta live with the result and we’ve gotta do more of that. We need to launch. We do. That doesn’t mean we’re not trying to get to the rim every single time. But it’s those two things. We wanna live in the paint and we wanna shoots threes. And we haven’t shot enough threes.”
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