Gap year, huh? Who cares! No one is turning down the volume on the Lakers. No one is turning down the heat.
The scrutinizing and psychoanalyzing continues like Luka Doncic screaming at the refs — incessantly, and with impressive stamina. About as loudly too. “Our losses,” Lakers coach JJ Redick recently said, “are louder than other teams’ because we’re the Lakers.”
Every other team in the NBA gets graded on a curve; bad breaks and reasonable expectations are accounted for in the score at season’s end.
The Lakers are a pass-fail upper-level course; they either win a championship or they fail.
They’re 37-24 but still would consider dropping the class if they could — but they can’t. So they’re forging on, trying to figure it out, their window closing and their fans’ frustration growing.
“I think it’s awesome,” guard Austin Reaves said of the bright — no, blinding — lights trained constantly on the team.
“I think it’s one of the best — if not the best organization — in all of sports. With that comes …”
Great responsibility? Golden opportunity?
“… honestly, chaos.”
By which Reaves meant: “If it’s good, it’s great. And if it’s bad, it’s miserable. They expect to win games, the fans do. And that’s what we’re here to do, we’re here to win and win at a high level. We know that.”
That’s why Redick signed up to come coach them, he said. “My own personal psychosis,” he called it. He swears he wants the smoke.
“The reality is everybody is going to always have an opinion,” Redick said Tuesday before his team toughed out a 110-101 victory against the New Orleans Pelicans, who are healthier than they have been but still are 19-44. “Since pro sports have existed, everybody has always had an opinion. There’s been sports talk, there’s been barber shops, chat rooms. Everybody’s had an opinion. Now, everybody’s opinion is more easily accessible. It’s just more amplified now, but it’s normal.”
And then he interrupted a question to return to a previous query about his play calling, needing to rebut the strangers on the internet picking apart his work. “I’m always fascinated by that, by the way,” Redick said. “How do you know we’re calling plays or not calling plays? … That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting.”
That’s the Lakers. Interesting, even when they aren’t necessarily, basketball-wise. The front office chose to protect future cap space and draft capital rather than substantively improve the team now around Doncic and LeBron James. And the players play like they realize most of them likely are not part of long-term plans.
And who else but the Lakers to provide some spice during the drab stretch of the season between the trade deadline and the playoffs?
There’s no team with a greater ratio of molehills turned into mountains, so of course it was national news when Redick and Doncic had a disagreement on the bench during Saturday’s win at the Golden State Warriors. It was no big deal, and they laughed about it later, Redick insisted Tuesday.
“I didn’t feel any tension. He was like, ‘Nah, I didn’t care about it,’” Redick said of Doncic. “You do it and you move on.”
Move on, knowing every interaction and play call and result will be dissected and debated.
So Doncic can lead the league in scoring (32.4 points per game) and average the third-most assists (8.6) but have his defensive limitations and incessant and unproductive banter with officials get the most attention from some critics.
And so the Lakers, 1½ games out of third place, are impressing no one. Not when they’re 14-18 against teams that are .500 or better. Not when they’re 1-8 against the league’s top four teams, those losses against the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics coming by an average of 20 points.
A bummer for the Lakers that they’ll have to face good teams in the playoffs.
Competent teams with heart and want-to, like the Denver Nuggets, who are next on the docket Thursday.
At 38-24 and a half-game ahead of the Lakers, star center Nikola Jokic’s squad is always formidable — and looking to avenge a loss to Redick’s team in their first matchup, 115-107 in a game Jokic didn’t play.
An ‘A’ game from the Lakers in Denver? Now, that would be worth talking about. That would be pretty interesting — though we’ll be digging in and discussing it, either way. With the volume cranked all the way up.
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