Make no mistake, LeBron James is enjoying another truly outstanding season for the Los Angeles Lakers, especially for a player in his 22nd NBA season. He is averaging 23.3 points, 8.1 rebounds and 9.2 assists and has yet to miss a game this year.
Recently, however, there has been an uptick in turnovers for LeBron. In the Lakers’ loss to the Phoenix Suns, James committed five of the Lakers’ 12 turnovers, his seventh consecutive game with at least four giveaways. He currently ranks fifth in the league in turnovers per game at 3.9, trailing only Cade Cunningham, James Harden, Trae Young and LaMelo Ball.
LeBron is certainly aware of the miscues and understands that he does need to be more careful with some of his reads and passes, but overall feels they aren’t too big of a deal, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Trying to make the right play. Some of them are just not good reads, some of them are. Some of them I can be a little bit more careful but at the end of the day, I’m trying to make winning plays so I don’t… it’s not a big deal for me.”
In fairness to James, the players who tend to be near the top of the league in turnovers are usually those who are the primary playmakers for their team and have the ball in their hands a lot. There are times when LeBron makes a lazy pass or misreads things, but he is still the Lakers’ best creator overall.
The issue is that one of the Lakers’ biggest issues is transition defense and these turnovers allow the opposition to get out on the break for easy baskets. And considering the Lakers actually rank in the top five in fewest turnovers, it is easy to link that back to James as he is usually the player committing a large chunk of those miscues.
To be clear, LeBron still provides far more positives than negatives when he is on the court and there is no doubt he is studying the film to figure out what is contributing to these recent turnover problems and fix it. But being the caliber of playmaker LeBron is will come with some turnovers, they just need to be limited a bit more as it feeds into one of the Lakers’ biggest weaknesses.
LeBron James stresses importance of Lakers remaining process-oriented
This has been an up-and-down season for the Lakers with win streaks being followed by losing streaks. But through everything, LeBron James feels the team must remember to stay even-keeled.
LeBron spoke on this recently, saying that the Lakers are a process-oriented team and these big changes aren’t going to happen overnight so they must remain even-keeled throughout everything.
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