A familiar issue reared its ugly head in the Los Angeles Lakers’ preseason loss to the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night as a disappointing third quarter helped push the game out of reach. The Lakers were an awful third quarter team last season and Rui Hachimura knows that can’t be the case once again this year.
In the 111-97 loss to the Warriors, the Lakers mustered just 19 points in the third quarter with Golden State ending the period on a 10-2 run to enter the fourth ahead by 13. This was something the Lakers struggled with greatly last year, coming out of the locker room sluggish and not executing leading to many big deficits or blown leads.
Hachimura had a solid night for the Lakers with 15 points and nine rebounds, but afterwards was focused on where the Lakers have to improve.
“I think it was the third quarter, we kind of started doing whatever,” Hachimura said. “No whatever, but had a couple possessions that I didn’t know what we were doing. Even last year too, we were a pretty bad third quarter team so we kind of have to watch the film and have to tell ourselves like OK, third quarter is time for us to be more focused and get us back in the game. Especially today when we were losing, so I think there’s another level with have to get to. To get to the next level, I think we have to fix the third quarters.”
Head coach JJ Redick also mentioned how he wasn’t happy with how the Lakers played in the third quarter and the fact that this was an issue last season really emphasizes how important fixing this is. As Hachimura noted, he wasn’t sure what the Lakers were doing on some of those possessions and with the league so competitive, these are mistakes that will doom them on most nights.
Putting together four quarters of good basketball was a struggle most nights and Hachimura and the rest of the Lakers know that if it continues to be a problem, this season can potentially spiral out of control.
Rui Hachimura: Lakers focused on details to avoid slow start to season
This season the Western Conference is shaping up to be extremely competitive as basically every team has plenty of talent and playoff aspirations. As such, Rui Hachimura knows the Lakers can’t afford to have a bad start to the season.
Hachimura said that this season is about the details and being locked in on every possession. The Lakers forward said that the Lakers were ‘messing around’ for much of the first half of the season, but can’t afford to do that this year and have to set the tone from the beginning.
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