The Bad
Technical fouls
The Lakers combined have committed 19 technical fouls over the course of 14 games. Bryant leads the way with seven technical’s called, next would be Matt Barnes with four, though we can safely assume won’t get another for at least 7-8 weeks and slightly behind, but compiling T’s at a high-rate are Andrew Bynum, Ron Artest and Odom.
With the new league rules on what merits a technical foul, the Lakers must improve on making the necessary adjustments to be able to walk away from bad calls. Accepting calls is just another obstacle they’ll have to overcome before the team becomes affected by it.
After a player is called for a 16th technical, it results in a one game suspension and then a suspension after every other technical foul called. While this hasn’t happened to the Lakers in a while, with the new rules and low levels of tolerance demonstrated by the referees, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Complacency
Tired of reading the statement, “Lakers simply got outworked?” Me too. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough that we as fans get tired of having to hear people harp on the Lakers’ lack of consistently sustaining their focus from start to finish, the players who actually put on their purple and gold uniforms have to get tired of hearing it too. To their credit, the Lakers had been getting better at showing up, preventing themselves from being out-worked by their opponents, but complacency started slowly creeping during their win over the Nets and was the main culprit during Sunday’s loss against the Clippers.
Look, I get it. The Lakers are coming off their third consecutive run at the finals, they’re getting older and maybe they don’t need home court advantage to make it to the finals. Even so, giving up leads for getting a little lazy is unacceptable.
The Lakers have little margin for error this time around, teams are getting to know their strengths and weaknesses and have no reservations when it comes to bringing down the champs. Regression is currently not in the Lakers’ best interest.