If the Los Angeles Lakers were a movie character, they would have to be Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame. Just as the hockey mask-wearing killer has overcome being shot, hanged, drowned and dismembered in order to terrorize the visitors of Camp Crystal Lake, the Lakers have seemed dead and buried numerous times, only to rise again.
NBA fans would be forgiven for believing that a team led by a player that’s just over a week away from his 40th birthday would be able to hang tough in the crucible of the Western Conference, but that’s exactly what the Lakers have done.
Though Father Time may win out in the end, if the fight between he and LeBron James went to the cards right now, it would be King James that would win by decision. LeBron doesn’t have either the motor or the durability that he had in his younger days, but what he lacks in explosiveness and invincibility, he makes up for with one of the highest basketball IQ’s we’ve ever seen.
Lakers fans got a scare when LeBron recently missed a couple of games with a foot injury, but his 19-6-7 and 18-8-8 statlines that he’s put up since returning show that even if he’s not the world-killer he once was, he still has a lot left in the tank.
Having LeBron healthy is an imperative if the Lakers hope to make a run this year, but there are other concerns, as well. Thankfully, it appears that the team is answering them and then some. Here are three reasons to believe that the Lakers are heating up after they beat the Kings Thursday night to move to 15-12.
LeBron only missed two games with his sore foot, but Austin Reaves was out for five with a pelvic contusion. That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to experience, yet Reaves has looked no worse for wear since returning to the rotation.
Though LeBron and Anthony Davis are the engine of the Lakers offense, the whole thing just doesn’t work very well when Reaves isn’t involved. Take the Lakers’ back-to-back losses to the Timberwolves and Heat in Reaves’ absence, as the team managed a piddly 80 and 93 points.
Reaves is second only to LeBron for the Lakers lead in assists. With the ball in his hands, he’s able to open things up for the two big dogs, but the Lakers are really at their best when Reaves is not only distributing the ball, but shooting it with confidence.
Before his injury, Reaves hadn’t shot the ball more than 12 times for five games in a row. Since coming back, though, he’s attempted 45 shots in three games, and his aggressiveness against the Kings helped him get to the line nine times, the second-highest total of the season.
Reaves is averaging over 20 points per game in those three games, and he led L.A. with 25 on Thursday night. LeBron and AD can’t do it all themselves, but if Reaves can keep this up, they won’t have to.
Anthony Davis began the season scorching hot. He scored 31 points or more in six of his first eight games while averaging over 11 rebounds per, and looked for all the world like he might actually make a run at MVP.
As Davis went, so did the Lakers, which meant that the team also looked great early on. At one point L.A. was 10-4 and right up there near the top of the Western Conference standings. This team looked like they could hang with almost anyone, but as fans have seen by now, things haven’t been going quite so swimmingly in the past month.
The Lakers have issues with depth, period, but especially behind Davis, as Jaxson Hayes has missed more games than he’s played with a sprained ankle and Christian Koloko hasn’t shown enough to earn any real minutes.
For the Lakers to win, Davis needs to be Supeman, and I apologize in advance if that made anybody have to think about Dwight Howard. It’s true though, because there just aren’t enough pieces on this roster to get into an 82-game battle of attrition with some of the younger and more stacked rosters in the West.
Davis showed some signs of being unable to handle this tremendous burden, most notably when he was outscored by Nikola Jokic 34-14 in a loss to the Nuggets nearly a month ago, and when he combined to shoot a brutal 7-28 for a combined 20 points in the aforementioned offensive no-shows against the Heat and Wolves.
Since those two defeats, Davis is back to his dominant ways, as he’s registered a double-double every night while averaging over 30 points per game. He had a poor shooting night against the Kings, going only 7-20, but he showed how he can affect the game in other ways by grabbing 20 rebounds, swatting six shots, and swiping three steals.
It’s a tall order, but the Lakers need this from Davis on a nightly basis. It’s looking once again like he’s up to the challenge.
AD is still a defensive weapon, but if the Lakers defense was a gun case, he’d be locked and loaded in there by himself.
The Lakers are not a good defensive team, and in fact, that’s being far too kind. The Lakers have been very bad at defense, like, languishing-with-the-Pelicans-and-Wizards bad when it comes to defensive rating.
Things have been ugly on the defensive end, and with LeBron, Reaves, D’Angelo Russell and Dalton Knecht playing so many minutes, there didn’t seem to be a chance of improvement without a major move at the deadline. A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, though (oops, I mean Crypto.com Arena): very quietly, the Lakers are inching up the team defensive rating leaderboard.
L.A. is actually getting some stops now, and in their last two games, they’ve done it against teams ranked sixth and eighth in offensive rating in the Grizzlies and Kings. Even though they lost the game before that to the Wolves, it wasn’t the D’s fault, as they held Minnesota under 100 points in a 97-87 rock fight.
In their last three games, the Lakers are actually second in the NBA in defensive rating, behind only the NBA Cup champ Bucks and just ahead of the runner-up Thunder. That’s a credit to JJ Redick for making adjustments and to the players for giving a better effort.
The Lakers aren’t going to be a defensive juggernaut like OKC, but if they can just be around the middle of the pack, the offense, especially if Reaves and Davis keep doing what they’re doing, will be enough to get them a lot of wins.
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