The Los Angeles Lakers consistently find ways to prove that their 2021-22 season can always get worse. Their recent loss to the Portland Trail Blazers has the best case as their worst defeat of the season considering their opponents are looking to rebuild.
The loss dropped the Lakers to 26-30, their worst mark of the season as they struggle to remain in the playoff picture.
For fans and analysts of the Lakers, the campaign has been hard to watch and franchise legend James Worthy did not mince words when discussing how things have been going, via Spectrum SportsNet:
"There's a really tough virus going on with this team right now and I don't know what the medicine is." Our 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀𝗡𝗲𝘁 crew react to tonight's loss against the Blazers. pic.twitter.com/ucAzrRFaxB
— Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) February 10, 2022
“This is the lowest point of just about any season I’ve ever seen as a Laker over the years,” Worthy said. “I don’t have any words for it because we’ve used all our words. We saw Milwaukee and come in and we thought maybe, ‘OK, this will be a measuring game against a good team’ and we saw what happened. And then against Portland, a team of professional players, but it was almost like they were playing against a local YMCA pickup group of guys and I think it just goes to show you how deeply mentally disconnected… and the inability to fire your brain up for a game that you know you should win or for any game for that matter shows that there is a really tough virus going on with this team right now and I don’t know what the medicine is.
“But this was really bad. To get outplayed, for Portland to have more points in the paint, more fastbreak points. All the categories that are effort stuff lets me know that this team has a serious problem. I don’t know what they’re gonna do to get out of it, but tonight’s game really denotes a really bad thing with this team right now. I don’t know what it is.”
Like Worthy said, there are not many things left to say about the poor season the Lakers are having. Even with deals likely on the horizon, it is hard to see them getting anywhere close to winning a championship.
Vogel believes Lakers need to build better habits
When discussing the loss to the Trail Blazers, Frank Vogel says the Lakers need to focus on building better habits in order to start stringing together some wins.
“We just got to play with better habits,” Vogel said. “That’s what we talked about, we watched film on it this morning from the Milwaukee game, the habits of this team haven’t been executed at a high enough level to win at the level that we want to win it. We’ll keep hitting them on it, we’ll keep working, watch the tape again and try to learn from this one and continue to have that growth mindset.”
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