Much of the talk for the Los Angeles Lakers following their loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves centered on the team’s offensive struggles. Anthony Davis and LeBron James combined for just 22 points, and the Lakers managed just 80 points total, a season-low, on 40.5% shooting from the field.
This has been the case more often than not lately as the Lakers, who are averaging 114 points per game this season, have scored 105 or fewer in five of their last six games. And in assessing what is going wrong for the team, Davis pointed to a couple of issues, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“A lot of randomness. Anytime that we’re not at our best defensively, we kind of let that dictate our offense. The things that we have put in place to kind of get us to move the basketball and body movement, we haven’t been doing. Over the last six or seven games, we’ve been one of the worst offensive teams in the league. S***, we scored 80 points tonight. That’s the thing, I don’t think it was anything they did special defensively. We just were very bad offensively and it hurt us.”
In addition to the poor shooting, the Lakers also committed 20 turnovers which led to 26 Timberwolves points, contributing to an all-around awful night offensively. As for what the team needs to fix to help turn things back around, Davis pointed to their spacing:
“Just get back into our spacing. We’re kind of on top of each other when guys are trying to drive. Guys are shooting and there’s a guy right under them, so the spacing is bad. I think if we just get back to our spacing, it kind of just opens up the floor for everybody to make plays for themselves or others. But right now our spacing is bad and I don’t think no one is intentionally trying to not do the right thing but we got to do the right thing the right way. That’s the one thing that we got to get back to in order to finish this trip off with a winning record.”
Perhaps most annoying is the Lakers seem to have made strides defensively, allowing fewer than 110 points in four consecutive games. Davis echoed this thought, but maintained his belief in this team to figure it out:
“Yeah, it’s very frustrating. We were really good offensively and our defense was a problem and then we kind of just started focusing on defense and now our offense has kind of shifted. So we gotta get back to how we were earlier in the year when we were playing very well on both sides of the ball. The good thing about it is offensively it doesn’t take much to get back going. Defense is a little bit tougher so I think with the guys we have in this locker room, we’ll be fine and figure it out.”
The Lakers have the pieces to be a very good offense as they have shown for much of this early season. Davis must get back to his dominant form, but the team as a whole must not fall back into the stagnant habits they had in prior seasons.
Anthony Davis feels Lakers are too inconsistent
The Los Angeles Lakers have had some excellent nights this season, but also some very bad ones and that inconsistency is really plaguing this team.
Anthony Davis agreed, saying that sometimes the Lakers look like they can compete with anyone while other nights they look ‘disgusting.’ The big man added that they must figure out what team they want to be for the rest of the season.
