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I’m not crying over the Lakers losing out on the chance to win their 2nd NBA Cup and some cash, I am annoyed over how it happened. True to form in the 2025-26 season, the Lakers lost in blowout fashion. Almost every single one of our loss has been by 10+ points (the first loss against the Warriors was by 10, all the others are more than that by a wide margin). This trend continued against the Spurs where they jumped out early and we could never really, truly threaten them throughout the rest of the game. There’s a lot of reasons whey we lost and they’re getting repetitive.

1. Stop getting beat off the dribble. Some of this is skill, some of this is we trend towards playing older players against younger, a lot of is not communicating on screens or having a chemistry on defense. If we weren’t getting shellacked from the outside, the Spurs were driving past us into the paint for easy buckets, especially when we went small. 45 points in the paint isn’t awful (not great, either…) but add in the free throw differential and overall shooting efficiency and you can see how this was a long night for the Lakers defense.
2. No real defensive leader. This is where missing both LeBron and Smart for all of training camp coupled with Vando’s inability to elevate his game in a meaningful way on offense hurts us a lot. We know LeBron can captain a defense very well, he did so for a month and change last season until injuries slowed him down for the rest of the year. We know Smart can from his days back in Boston but he was out almost all of training camp and nearly half the games we’ve played this season. We know Vando can be a defensive force for disruption when he was a key piece that helped us storm our way back to the Western Conference Finals under Darvin Ham. From all of that on the roster already, the team has no true leader or identity on that end of the floor and the player’s post game comments seem to back my theory up. Someone needs to consistently be available and able to lead the defense through words or actions, ideally both.
3. Wasted Smart’s best game to date. All I can say is: finally. It’s a shame his best game came in a loss but if he can keep this up…and be available to play (especially in the playoffs) I’ll be happy to think about calling myself wrong regarding choosing Marcus Smart over Jordan Goodwin. But not yet. One good shooting game does not erase the 2 months of bad shooting we’ve all watched as Marcus Smart seemed to be building his own LA mansion brick by brick. If that changes, and he can play in 80% of the remaining games or so, we might see a more cohesive team identity than we have, especially on D.
4. Jake LaRavia struggling. I don’t know if there’s been a more up and down player for us this season than Jake LaRavia. He’s been in every game, started 7, and he’s either ‘the small forward of the future’ or ‘uh…maybe we should be playing Thiero, Bronny or Vando?’. Last night was the second version. Last night he got burned on D and missed his 1 shot. In 9 minutes he was a team high -25 and that takes some doing. That’s on the 4ish other dudes Jake shared the floor with, as well, but LaRavia’s play is often a benchmark for how the Lakers are doing: positive impact = Lakers win, negative impact = Lakers loss. In losses Jake averages fewer minutes and higher negative rating (usually between -15 and -30) according to basic +/- (a shaky tool, at best) so it behooves both player and coaching staff to figure out a way to get his impact as consistently positive as possible.
5. Not enough DominAyton. Same could be said, again, for Rui. Ayton went 5-9 and Rui went 3-4 (2-3 from three). Honestly, this feels like it’s harder for the Lakers than it really needs to be. Run more plays for your most efficient players ought not be rocket science and yet…here we are. Out of 87 shots, 4 guys took 70 of them (80.4%) I’ll excuse Marcus Smart (9-16) because he was legit on fire, especially in the 4th, but all 4 are the primary ball handlers for the team and need to do a better job of involving said team. This kind of imbalance will definitely result in an early playoff exit, we need to have a more balanced inside/out offensive attack. In a game where we were getting killed by pace and speed it’s amazing that exactly zero people on the Lakers, one of them being the All Time leading Scorer with a Pass First mentality, seemed able to figure this out. I’m not talking about assists, either, because that really just indicates that somebody else made a shot after you passed them the ball. It doesn’t mean they’re involved or a focal point. Ayton in particular feels like he could have 3-5 post up plays run for him a game. Not a half…per game. Slow the ball down, put your shooters on the strong side and clear out the weak and force the defense to choose. With no Wemby last night it felt we had the recipe for a big game from DeAndre and instead it became the “it’s my shot!” contest from our 4 primary distributors. That’s just dumb basketball and, even though we shot three pointers at volume, we still got our asses handed to us. Big time.

I’m not flushing anymore blowouts because that’s seemingly how we lose. We don’t just lose, we get our asses handed to us through 4 quarters. Such as the case may be, I think we need to look more diligently in what went catastrophically wrong in these games so as to look at ways we can hope the team can self-correct or address via unlikely trade. Just my two bits. Carry on.