5 THINGS

He’s back!!! At least for a half. Anthony Davis was on a minutes restriction (15? 20? didn’t really matter) and only saw some first half action. The second half was left to the Laker Remainders who couldn’t get the stops or hit the shots to beat the Mavs who also saw Porzingis limp off the floor after rolling an ankle. Lakers are putting themselves in a tough sport seeding wise and The King is still a couple weeks away.

1. The return of Anthony Davis. The man looked, expectedly, rusty. Coming off the longest injury lay-off of his career Davis struggled to hit shots form everywhere. That’s expected as I’m sure he got practice in and got plenty of shots up but this was his first NBA action since leaving with the scariest calf strain in Laker history since the hamstring debacle versus the Bad Boy Pistons over 30 years ago. Where Davis did make his impact felt was on defense where he showed he might be able to recapture last season’s defensive impact. That’s where we need AD the most. If he can bring that kind of effort and impact for more and more minutes or playoff chances improve a lot, regardless of seeding.
2. Kentavious rounding back into playoff form? This has been a pretty decent stretch for KCP. He’s being more aggressive with the ball, diversifying his attack and still playing solid D. While it wasn’t enough last night the month of April has revealed that the forks we were all sticking in Caldwell-Pope for a good chunk of the year might be ready to be washed and put away. the man didn’t look done last night at any rate. The bigger question is can he sustain and even improve on efforts like this? If AD isn’t able to recapture his shooting mojo like he did in last season’s playoffs it’ll fall to guys like KCP to bolster the offense and release the pressure created by our drive and dish offense.
3. Talen’s defensive learning process. Last night was a bit of a down game for THT. It’s hard for any player to se their minutes fluctuate like they have for a lot of the guys on the team, harder still for younger players still trying to find their way. Give the Mavs credit, they were ready for his patented drives and forced him into some bad passes. It’s a rare thing these days when THT has more turnovers than assists. Still, despite his atrocious +/- 12 minutes is just too few for Horton-Tucker. The kid needs to play and it’s on the coaching staff to find minutes for him.
4. Three point shooting woes. It’s no secret the Lakers a re not an elite shooting team from beyond the arc. Morris off the bench had a donut to the tune of 0-5, only Schroder and KCP made more than 1 (KCP was on fire hitting 6-12) and neither Kuzma or AD hit one to help open the paint up. Off the bench only Caruso and McLemore (both 1-3) were able to connect. We need to do better, although we kept finding KCP which is line with out team ID. When LeBron returns the paint will be well-packed if we can’t hit threes.
5. Defending without fouling. Too many free throws for the Mavs, who whine enough to get them… Some of that is superstar Luka treatment which i wouldn’t mind quite so much if LBJ and AD got the same. They don’t. Anyhow, some of that is on us over-reaching and not just playing solid D without trying for impossible steals. Just man up, keep your feet active and hands up. if they make shots over you, that’s OK.

This was a game we could have won if we clean up some issues. For me the big thing is we’re keeping our turnovers low. That’s a huge key to playoff success and something that is a fixable issue. Lakers need to get this one back in the next game against Dallas or we’re going to be putting ourselves in a sticky situation.

“Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you”, Big Lebowski. The Utah Jazz, with a healthier roster than in the previous game, easily handled the Lakers last night in a fairly one-sided affair. The Lakers never led, the same starters who shone a couple days ago couldn’t replicate that effort and the Jazz shot the lights out. One to forget because sometimes you just get you ass handed to you.

1. Starters get whupped. The same group that all had heady +/- stats in the previous game all had equally abysmal +/- ratings last night. Not surprising really as it was our hodgepodge collection of “starters” competing against the true Utah Jazz starting five, minus Donovan Mitchell of course. As we’ve said several times this collection of guys was not meant to carry the Lakers for a stretch like this. They’re above-average players, a step or two above role-player, journeyman status, but they’re not All Stars. Maybe Drummond has AS potential, not sure about anyone else. Asking them to beat the #1 Jazz is a tall order considering the Jazz had all but one of their players.
2. The Gobert Effect. Much has been made of the diminishing role of the true big man in today’s game but Rudy Gobert completely flipped the game for the Jazz. With Rudy patrolling the paint on defense and offering an easy scoring release valve for the guards the Jazz dominated the glass, dominated the points in the paint and that opened up their three point game like it has all season long. Most people point to the French Rejection’s defense as the main game-altering ability he has but his ability to finish in the paint and control the glass is huge, as well.
3. The diminishing Montrezl Harrell. Trezz has seen his minutes dwindle as Drummond has asserted himself into the line up. It feels like it’s affecting his game and the staff needs to figure out how to unleash him, again. When Trezz is going we are scoring in the paint, putting a lot more pressure on the defense. That was not the case last night as Harrell only got 4 FGA and no FTA. We’re going to need a lot more from him if we want to pick up a couple more wins.
4. THT’s monster game. I give this kid a ton of credit, he’s taken a lot of the adjustments the NBA has made in regards to his ability to get to the rim and added some moves and wrinkles to keep his flow going. By far the best Laker on the court last night, Horton-Tucker is making a case to be in the starting line up now and the starting PG next season. Worse things could happen, given our cap situation.
5. Time to give Wes Matthews minutes to Ben McLemore. No more reasons, it’s just time. Make the move, Frank.

Not going to read too much into this or overly bemoan the lack of energy and fight, the Jazz are the better team right now. We’ll see how this looks if we meet in the playoffs and we have James and Davis. This was no playoff preview. Time to prepare for the Mavs on Thursday.

The Lakers will take all the wins they can get while AD and LeBron get closer to returning. This is a quantity not quality state of affairs. In terms of how the team fared I would say they acquitted themselves well enough. It took a little luck, a lot of hard work and some clutch play but they got the job done. Still have some mountain left to climb, though.

1. Dennis Schroder doing a little bit of everything. There have been some real forgettable games from the Laker starting point guard since the superstar duo went out with injuries. This wasn’t one of them. Schroder scored, defended, assisted and pretty much made all the right plays in this gritty win. He was aggressive in terms of looking for his shot (24 attempts, 6 from three) if not incredibly accurate (only 11 made shots, 1 from three). But the fact that he was aggressive made it harder for Utah to set their defense to guard the team. Schroder applied that much pressure. The key for him is keeping his turnovers low and if that means a few less extraneous passes, so be it.
2. Andre’ Drummond playing big. It could be argued that we should have found a few more FGA for Dre’. He was a solid 10-15 and made 7-8 from the stripe. With no Gobert there was no Godzilla for Kong to fight and so the one man monster destroyed the interior defense that Utah could muster. He pulled down 8 rebounds, dished 3 assists and nabbed 2 steals with a block. The steals both resulted in highlight plays in which he took the ball the length of the court for easy scores. As LRob noted when we first acquired Drummond the man has extremely quick hands for a big man. The other thing he does well is play to his size, nothing more annoying than a true big man who can’t play big. Don’t think we’ll ever say that about Andre’. The man moves little dudes out of his way with legal moves and the only thing I wish he would do more of is finish strong. Fewer hookity-flip shots and more rim-rattling dunks.
3. Laker front court was aggressive on the offensive glass. Every front court starter had 2+ offensive rebounds and ‘Kieff had a whopping five which helped give us an 11-5 edge in that department. Morris and Drummond were more aggressive on offense than Kuzma was tonight (in the first half Utah did a solid job of forcing Kyle to pass which he did) but they all did solid work rebounding the ball and giving us second chance opportunities or limiting the Jazz to one.
4. Managing the turnovers. While it certainly started with Dennis Schroder the team in general did a solid job keeping the turnovers to a respectable level, especially against a tough, defensive minded team like Utah. 15 for the game is good, not great, but certainly an improvement over the 20+ turnover games we’d been having of late. Turnovers are a part of the game and this Laker team takes risks with downcourt passes and a lot of interior paint passes. Those have a high turnover potentiality but they’re also a part of what makes this team unique. If those passes find the mark they’re often going to result in open shots and easy buckets. The key is lowering the rate of failure.
5. The Standings. None of this would have mattered if we had been able to establish a larger cushion in regards to the play-in tournament. If we were still sitting 5 or 6 games out of a play in spot we could cough up more games down the stretch with nary a worry. As it is we’re still just 4 games up on the Mavs (who lost Friday, thanks Julius Randle and the Knickerbockers) so we need to pull a few more wins along with a rabbit or two out of the magic top hat. Sounds like Donovan Mitchell will be out a couple more games and it’s imperative that we capitalize on this opportunity. No tears are shed for teams with injured players, injuries are a part of sport. Just because a team has injuries doesn’t mean they’re going to lay down for you, the Lakers need to learn this once and for all, now, and seize this moment and beat Utah tomorrow night. If they get Conley, Gobert or Favors back it changes nothing. Play harder, compete better and go get that win.

We needed this game a lot more than the Jazz who, even if they fall behind Phoenix in the standings, are situated very well seeding-wise. One way or another, barring some sort of epic collapse they’re playing one of the tourney teams. Not too sure there will be much difference between who ends up being 7 and 8 after the play-in rounds. Could still be any one of 5 or so teams, hard to even come up with a game plan which is an odd advantage to being 3-6 in the seeding game. You know who you’re gonna play but the 1 and 2 seeds need to plan for several different scenarios. Just another odd thing about the NBA, pay it no mind.

Bit late on this one, work is blowing up as we prep the college to re-open to a small degree. Also, I had a chance to attend the Celtics game in-person but was not quite ready to take that step yet (plus the tickets were $200 bucks each). Anyhow, the under-manned Lakers not surprisingly lost to Boston but the real news is Anthony Davis is returning soon. Hopefully.

1. Alright fine, we’ll talk about the game first. J-Brown went off, the Laker starters not named Marc Gasol pretty much took the night off and the bench led by THT and Ben McLemore led a furious come back that came up short. This Laker team without LBJ and AD tends to play too many games with a nonchalant “we got this” kind of attitude. I assure you, they do not “got this”. The fact they’ve managed to play .500 ball without their two superstars is commendable but one can only imagine that if a greater sense of urgency was present that a couple more wins could have been squeezed out. Also, once again, I didn’t think the coaching staff had adjustments in mind as they never figured out a way to contain Brown in any meaningful way. Tip the cap, begrudgingly, and move on.
2. OK, the real news, AD is returning in roughly two weeks should everything proceed positively between now and then. Let’s assume a couple of things for the time being:
   -He’ll play on a minutes restriction to start and ramp up from there based on performance.
   -He’ll start and close games.
   -He’ll primarily play the 4 in order to save that kind of wear and tear for the playoffs.
   That means one of Gasol, Drummond and Harrell will likely be on the floor at all times. There are of course in-game situations that would put them all on the bench and slide AD to the 5 but that means he’ll be guarding bulky threes or slight fours. That’s fine. But I would imagine that in an effort to have him be as ready as possible for the playoffs they’ll try to conserve his minutes at the 5 to as low as humanly possible. I also am of the opinion that he’ll start out on a minutes restriction and ramp up from there. Probably 20-25 mpg to begin with. That means we’ll still be asking a lot of the trio listed above to fill those minutes. If Vogel does a good job monitoring said minutes we’ll likely see AD to start the game, for a few minutes to close the first half. That leaves a large chunk of time to fill. How those minutes get distributed is going to be interesting.
3. What does this mean for the rest of the team? In my mind it means fewer minutes for Wes Matthews who has been a small ball 4 for us of late and of course Marc Gasol and Harrell. Gasol is already playing in an emergency capacity at this point and Harrell would primarily back him up and absorb some AD minutes along with Kuzma. Morris would be pushed back to the bench again where he struggled for most of the season. One would hope his aggressive and more consistent play wouldn’t take a big hit.
4. The Marc Gasol question. In my mind Drummond is the better athlete and has the potential to be the better defender and interior presence the team has a need for. I am also of the opinion that Gasol is a better fit in our OG starting line up. This notion, of course, is wholly speculative. We haven’t seen Drummond play with either James or Davis for a single minute yet. But the idea that most defenses will pack the paint and be content with us shooting strictly from the outside does not seem farfetched to me. In fact it feels predetermined that exact strategy will be deployed against us on a pretty regular basis. If that’s the case then I can see a role for Gasol akin to what McGee did last season. Start the halves, sit the rest barring foul trouble/incredible game.
5. Regarding Wes Matthews. Watching Wes this season struggle against his own body more than anything else has been hard. Injuries like the one he suffered are, traditionally, extremely difficult to come back 100% from. I wish we could take his defensive chops and gift them to THT or Ben McLemore because he can still compete at a high level on D. he has a solid foundation, stronger than he looks and understands defensive positioning. But his shot has never been what it was prior to the Achilles. On offense, based on accuracy and skillset, there are better options for our team. On defense he has a role but I think it’ll be as a spot-defender in late game situations. Yeah, he’s had a couple of hot games where his shot was falling but by and large those have been the outlier and not the norm. Wes is a proud athlete and has put a lot of work in but watching him this season makes me hesitate to sign guys with grievous injuries who were great in the past to large role type of contracts. That includes one of my favorite players one Boogie Cousins and frequent trade target by LakerTom Victor Oladipo. Is it possible they figure something out nd discover a way to make their game work, again? Sure, it’s happened before. But they don’t need to do it in a Laker uniform.

I realize this will drop during the Utah game but them’s the breaks for a working man such as myself. Enjoy the game today, Lakerholics.

We’ll take ’em any way we can get ’em these days. Every win gives us a little more breathing room and helps us keep pace with the rest of the western conference. So, while in a normal seaon beating Charlotte on the road wouldn’t be celebrated with much fanfare we definitely needed last night’s win in the face of what is to come. Big games from old friends saved the day. Let’s dig in.

1. Kuzma’s Jekyll & Hyde game. It started rough for Kyle. Air-balled a three, hit the side of the backboard shooting a three, and he seemed to be nursing his calf all game long. But he dug down deep and found the grit to start hitting big time shots including a monstrous jam over Bismack Biyombo to help close out the first half strong. While it won’t be remembered as his most efficient outing ((7-18, 4-12 from three) Kyle got the job done on a night we needed someone in the starting line up to lead the way.
2. Alex Caruso’s big game. Caruso has, like most of the players not named James or Davis, had an up and down season. One game solid, then an MIA game and so on. Last night Alex looked like he did for most of last season where he made little plays that contributed to a big night. Leading the team in +/- last season was his modus operandi last season and he’s struggled to replicate that impact all season long, especially without sharing the floor with the Laker superstars. There are things Caruso does regularly that I wish guys like Kuzma, THT and others did, as well. Stunt and recover is big on my list, it won’t ever show up in a metric or a stat box or anywhere people look to prove something is good and necessary to winning but what he does on the perimeter in regards to helping and recovering is one of the things that makes the Laker defense elite. Yeah he has some decent hops and can hit shots but it’s the other end where Alex’s impact is felt. He scored some points, had some assists and grabbed some rebounds in addition to his defense.
3. KCP’s shut down game. One of the reasons this game was so close was one Josh McDaniels. He was going off in the first half, grabbing boards, making buckets and playing at a high level. Then Frank switched KCP onto him and that all stopped. McDaniels did most of his damage against defenders not named Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. I’ve been fairly harsh, some would say deservedly, on KCP this season. When you sign a big deal it comes with expectations, fair or not. In all honesty I don’t think I would argue that Kentavious has lived up to his deal this season but his defense has been pretty solid despite his offensive inconsistencies. In that vein KCP had another mediocre scoring game as he fought through back spasms but it never once deterred him on defense.
4. Managing the turnover issue. Finally, a game where we didn’t cough the ball up 267 times. 11 turnovers, very manageable. Let’s do this more.
5. The next two to three weeks. This is a make or break stretch coming up for the Lakers. The next couple of weeks will determine what playoff seeding we have, whether we have to rock a play-in game and if we make the playoffs at all. The win against the Hornets was crucial as it allowed us to keep pace with the top 3 teams in the western conference (who all won their most recent game/s) and gain ground on the Nuggets (who lost and going to sorely miss Jamaal Murray). We can’t get caught up with what’s happening with the other teams we just need to handle our business. Here’s what is on the docket.
   4/15 – Celtics
   4/17 – Jazz
   4/19 – Jazz
   4/22 – @Mavs
   4/24 – @Mavs
   4/26 – @Magic
   Theoretically AD could potentially return around the Magic game. But since he hasn’t done any on-court scrimmage or five-on-five action yet it’s impossible to say if that timeline is an accurate one or one based on what media pundits are speculating. Let’s just say, for arguments sake, AD comes back after the game against the Magic. That would 4/28 – @Wizards, maybe that gets pushed back to the 4/30 – Kings game at STAPLES.
   
   After that Kings game there are only 9 remaining opponents on the schedule. SO this little 6 or 7 game stretch could define a lot of what the Laker’s postseason challenges will look like. The back-to-back against the Jazz feels like a back-to-back loss in the makings, Celtics have been an on/off team all season but does anyone here expect them to have an ‘off’ game against us with playoff implications in the mix? Ought to beat the Magic but even the Wizards are playing their best basketball of the season right now and are in the mix for a play-in.
   
   We need to win at least 3 of those games up there, four would be better. Can we stun the Mavs and beat them twice? Sure, maybe. Can we eke out a win in the second game after Vogel makes some adjustments to the schemes against the Jazz? I suppose. The key in all of those games is to play like they did last night. Shots might not fall, the zone may clog up the paint, and guys who are hoping to make a lot of money (or already do) might not shine as brightly as hoped for. You have to defend hard and compete at the highest level, regardless of how ugly the offense might be. It’s the only way we come out respectable.

Anyhow, decent road trip, all things considered. Kuzma’s calf, KCP’s back and the issues that have plagued us all season are certainly worrisome but there’s nothing to do but show up and play hard. Let’s get to doing it.