ADJUSTMENT TIME
After a Game 1 loss to Suns, Lakers feeling time crunch to fix chemistry issues
PHOENIX » From the language the Lakers have used the last two days, the feeling around the team’s most-used lineups is still ... improvisational.
Point guard Dennis Schröder said the team has still been using games as a form of practice. Center Andre Drummond said the bigger lineups have been “something we’re just kind of throwing out there with little
time and little experience.” Guard Kentavious CaldwellPope said it’s been difficult “still trying to figure guys out.”
And yet Game 2 against the Phoenix Suns, a team with less experience but much more continuity this season, is still tonight. And while the Lakers were able to squeeze in an actual practice at Arizona State on Monday afternoon, the time for excuses is getting short after starting the first-round series in an 0-1 hole.
Even though they’re the lower-seeded team, they were widely viewed as the favorite to advance — and the defending champions see themselves that way, too. But while the Lakers have been through these challenges before, losing series openers against Portland and Houston last season, they didn’t call it business as usual. In fact, Caldwell-Pope in particular thought it was a bit of a mystery why the team didn’t show up to start these playoffs with more fire.
“I feel like we wasn’t ready for what (Phoenix) had for us,” he said. “I don’t know if it was just a feel-out game. This was an early noon game, guys were just waking up maybe. The energy just wasn’t there to start the game. We kind of picked it
up, end of second, going into halftime. I just feel like we’ve got to come prepared.”
Adjustments, including possible lineup changes, seem inevitable for a team that struggled to score Sunday afternoon, a common problem lately for the Lakers as players have labored to find their playing style together. The starting lineup with LeBron James, Anthony Davis, CaldwellPope, Schröder and Drummond only played 46 minutes together during the regular season (plus-3.1 net rating), and played 13 minutes of Game 1 (minus-3.4). It’s been clear from certain plays and miscues during the play-in game against the Golden State Warriors and the opener against the Suns
that the fit is certainly not seamless — at least not yet.
It manifests in unanticipated passes that become turnovers; defensive rotations that lose sight of an open shooter; slow-moving possessions that threaten shot-clock violations. The Lakers are on the clock to fix a lot of issues in a tight window of time.
“We don’t know how they want the ball, where they want it,” Caldwell-Pope said of the groups. “And how important, like, having two bigs on the floor. Finding that spacing between A.D. and Drum, um, we just, we’re learning on the fly, like I said, and it’s gonna get better. We take our film sessions real seriously and we apply it.”
Some of the Lakers’ ingame adjustments have been to shorten Drummond’s second-half stints. He didn’t play in the fourth quarter of either the play-in game or Game 1. And Drummond himself seemed to show a little frustration with that state of affairs. “With the minutes I’m playing, obviously I’m doing what I can with the amount of time I’m on the floor, just trying to do the best I can to help the team as much as I can.”
Drummond is feeling some of the pressure brought on by frustrated fans, who know that the Lakers’ lineups with Davis playing center were the ace in the hole during their championship run in the bubble. While it has been a limited look this season, stat site Cleaning the Glass says the Lakers have outscored opponents by nearly 17 points per 100 possessions when they’ve gone to Davis at center.
The shuffling has put coach Frank Vogel under scrutiny, trying to find the right groupings with three competent centers and Davis. Veteran reserve Marc Gasol, who was the starter early in the season, did not play at all in Game 1. Vogel did not disclose whether he would make lineup or rotation adjustments tonight.
“I’m hesitant to really dive into everything that drives my decision-making on that because I don’t want to tip my hand with what lineups we’re going to play tomorrow night,” he said. “But there’s times when our size makes more sense on both sides of the ball and there’s times when being more agile and mobile defensively and having more space offensively makes more sense.”
Davis also is not coming off a terribly flattering game. Of all the Lakers’ starters, Davis might be the one with the most pressure to perform after finishing with more shot attempts (16) than points (13).
In the immediate aftermath of the loss, Davis took responsibility, promising to be better in Game 2 which he has done before, notably countering last season’s Game 1 losses with 31 points against Portland and 34 against Houston. Just two weeks ago, Davis had 42 points against Phoenix in a home win. While Suns coach Monty Williams, who coached Davis in New Orleans, said he was proud of his defense, he stopped short of taking credit for how Davis played.
“We did our best defensively to try to make it tough on him, but sometimes guys miss shots,” Williams said. “And you don’t expect a guy like that to continue to miss shots. There’s really nothing you can say. We just gotta go out there and play great team defense again, force them to take tough shots, which is hard when you’re
playing against a great player.”
The Lakers and Suns are both nursing at least mild health concerns about their star veterans: After suffering a reported stinger in his right shoulder on Sunday, Suns point guard Chris Paul participated in practice and Williams said he was “progressing in a good way.” For the Lakers, James is still lacking some of his characteristic explosion — he has not dunked in the play-in game or Game 1 — but Vogel said he’s treating the 36-year-old as if he’s healthy.
“In an ideal situation he has another few weeks to fully put it behind him,” Vogel said. “But he’s moving pretty well in most situations and I approach the game like he’s a healthy player and just understand that there’s going to be a handful of plays where it looks like it limits him.”